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How are Big Tech Companies Dominating the Markets in the Global Arena?

Our focus today will be on big tech companies. Let’s take, for example, Amazon, Apple, etc., Amazon Let’s say, for example, it is called as the gatekeeper of e-commerce. It reduces the competition and harms the consumers and people who are not putting their products on this particular platform. Let’s say, for example, Amazon has a huge amount of money in its kitty. It decimates the brick and mortar stores and it makes sure that it is collecting all the data of a particular customer. This also pushes a product to the customer such that his data and privacy are also compromised. So Amazon being too big and has a huge market dominance has become impossible for other companies to dominate over Amazon. Apple Apart from this, when it comes to Apple. Apple also favors its own applications. It also puts rivals at a disadvantage as well, and when it comes to Apple and Google, they are on a buying spree as well. Whenever they see a competition that is popping up against the hegemony of these companies, they immediately buy that particular company rather than competing with them. Instagram and WhatsApp could have become the competitors of Facebook, but since they saw that they could not compete with Instagram, they immediately grab an opportunity to buy that specific company; the same is with Apple and Google. When it comes to Google, it buys at least one firm a month, and when it comes to Apple, it buys two to three firms every single month, says statistics. So what would be the impact? When it comes to the impact, the consumers or the customers who have been availing their services will have limited opportunities. Since they have limited opportunities, they will not have multiple options as well. This ultimately means that they have to go buy that particular service only from big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, or in fact, Facebook as well. And as a result, what will happen? The consumer base will also start increasing only with respect to those big tech companies. So what will happen? We are giving away our data, and this particular data, when it is given, can be violated, which will violate the right to privacy. Initially, when Facebook had come, initially when there was Google as well, all these people used to respect the right to privacy with eventuality when there is no competition. They also take up our data and manipulate our data because data is the new fuel for Facebook and Google. So what do they do? They target our inboxes with what is called as the advertisement with which we attempted to buy a particular product as well. They also understand what our political inclinations are, and they also play a political role as well. Such is the devastation that they cause when it comes to the consumers. Now when it comes to India. Let’s look at some of the statistics. More than 400 million of Whatsapp’s estimated two billion users are in India. Amazon has around one-third of the share of online retail in India, neck to neck with Flipkart, which was recently acquired by Wal-Mart. Then we have India as Facebook’s largest single market with around 270 million accounts. Google completely dominates the search engine space in India. Most smartphones in India are also Android-based OS. Since they are dominating in India, this article suggests that for the Competition Commission of India and elsewhere in their own countries for more regulation. When it comes to countries in Europe and the United States of America, they are also planning to break companies as well. One such suggestion was given by the federal agency in the United States of America. Back in the 1980s, we have AT&T, which had also gone too huge when it comes to its market. So what was decided by the federal agency back then? They had to break this AT&T and split this particular organization. Similarly, they are also planning a proposal with respect to Facebook as well. The split will be Facebook as an independent organization. We will also have Instagram as an independent organization or an application and WhatsApp as an independent application. So this is a suggestion given by the federal agency. So they do not have all the hold in the market, and there are diversification and more options given to the customers as well. This is one of the proposals given by the federal agency and also in European countries as well. Also, remember, when it comes to companies like Facebook or Google, they have a cozy relationship with political parties in India as well. So what we require is more regulations, more laws to control the dominance of the big tech firms. And at the same time, India does not have a privacy law. So when it comes up with privacy law, they have to make sure all these aspects of data collection are taken into the picture when a law is being drafted. Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-are-big-tech-companies-dominating-the-markets-in-the-global-arena-180ead6f71e2

['Vishnu Aravindhan']

2020-12-26 15:59:24.218000+00:00

['Amazon', 'Business', 'Facebook', 'Google', 'Apple']

‘Am I Just Lazy?’

We’ve got an obsession with productivity. “Hacks” for life are everywhere, covering every aspect of human existence. We can hack relationships, jobs, household tasks, and more. So many of us are obsessed with efficiency in our own private sphere. Our never ending search for peak productivity becomes a whole distraction from productivity in and of itself… So what is the answer then, for that person who doesn’t move at the same pace? For whom doing anything seems to be hard? Who never seems motivated or interested in anything? When I started grappling with my own mental health, I remember becoming distinctly aware of the notion that one should just “buck up”, and get on with things — that that was the only “real” way out of depression. “Just do more stuff,” came the advice. Perhaps this is the obvious argument in a world where we are all driven to do more, when we see someone who doesn’t seem driven anywhere. “Doing more” seems like the obvious counter. That absolutely does not work for someone who is depressed; having commitments, activities and routine can certainly help prevent depression and keep things moving. But in a low, just pummelling yourself with the guilt associated with not doing anything will really do very little for you. So is that person being lazy, or are they actually depressed? Mental health is such a complex issue, and I have written many times about depression and how to handle it. The only possible way I have noticed that we can differentiate between laziness and an actual problem comes when that person is out of the worst part of the cycle. Most people I know with depression aren’t content to keep on suffering — in my opinion, it’s pretty hard to be okay with being depressed. Obviously they’re unhappy — low moods are part of depression — but they also want to know that there’s another option and much of the time, unless they are really truly in the lowest part of the cycle, they want potentially to work towards a better place. At the lowest point, this isn’t something that can even be imagined. If someone is suicidal, they aren’t thinking about changing their depression, they’re thinking about what would give relief, most quickly. Because depression is painful. Laziness, on the other hand, is something else entirely. And the lazy person doesn’t really seem to mind quite so much — it isn’t painful to them to be that way. It’s easy. And easy is what they’re going for. So, firstly: engage in some direct self reflection It’s pretty hard to outwardly tell the difference sometimes between laziness and depression, even for ourselves. Only you, as an individual, can ask yourself for the truth and face your own reality. Are you dealing with a mental health problem, or have you always shown a tendency towards laziness? Most people don’t become lazy overnight. So think back: how likely were you to finish things in school? Or keep up hobbies? How often do you see projects or ideas through to completion, or keep on working at something until you feel you’ve achieved something tangible? Are you looking for the first opportunity to shift into a new shiny activity? Or are you always picking up new hobbies? Are you someone who leaves things unfinished? If none of this sounds like you but lately things have been getting darker, harder to deal with, and the world seems a bit more grey than it should, you might well be experiencing low mood and potentially even depression. In which case, you need to start by understanding that, and how to take care of yourself in that mode. Set the baseline and break it down into achievable parts We’ve all got to eat healthy, exercise and sleep, in order to have the energy to do things we want or need to do. So it’s time to set the baseline: when should you be getting into bed each night? How can you ensure that you do that? Do you need to create a nighttime routine? What about in the morning? I’m personally quite a light sleeper, so one alarm and I’m up. But you need to learn how to make mornings work for you. That doesn’t mean cramming in an entire second life before work, the way many productivity blogs advise. I personally do do that, I’ll be honest; but I love mornings. If you are not a morning person, then work with it, not against it. Consider taking up meditation. Find a type of exercise that works for you, that you actually enjoy. Take these things one step at a time and practice some self-compassion as you experiment. Take note of what works, and what definitely doesn’t work — literally write it down. Figure out where your focus should be Values. They’re everything. I wrote about this recently, because I think the process of figuring out your core values is really important. Often laziness comes from an inability to focus on what you need to do — things feel overwhelming perhaps, or there’s so much to get done that you feel paralysed. But taking a breath and a step back is really important. Figure out what should be holding your attention — where your values truly lie. From here, there’s a much better chance you will be able to get moving again. It’s the fog of laziness and an inability to prioritise that can become easy stopping points. It’s time: Face your fears Sometimes ‘laziness’ is actually just ‘fear’ in disguise. Like, you’re afraid to commit to doing something you might fail at. I know what that’s like. Intimately. And living that way isn’t great. It’s a pretty good way to subject yourself to constant unease and guilt. Because ultimately only we can decide to bite the bullet and commit to doing the thing that scares us most. And if it’s living life the way you really want to, it comes down to this: Will you be okay to die wondering? Ultimately, what will my life look like, when I look back on it? The idea that I might get old and die without having ever tried was more terrifying than any of my objections — than any other fear my mind could conjure up. I needed to write. I needed to try and to know my own currency. So… Do one thing first Just one thing that will move you in the direction of your values. Making the conscious effort to stop sitting around or finding excuses to do whatever is easiest is going to be the tough first step. Put down the game, stop Instagramming, don’t text gifs to your friends. Just think: what is it I want to be doing with my life? What are my values? And what one thing can I do to enact them? Even if it is starting with making a list. Just start.

https://christinacare.medium.com/am-i-just-lazy-bb45878cd0e9

['Christina Hope']

2018-12-10 17:10:03.168000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Motivation', 'Psychology', 'Depression', 'Productivity']

Walk, Scrub, Shower!

“We must actively, consciously, consistently, and creatively nurture our artist selves.” ― Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity Are you like me? You get some of your very best ideas in the shower. You swear you will remember them — they’re that good. And then you get busy with life. Finally, you settle down to capture your brainstorm. Maybe it’s a catchy headline or blogging topic. But you draw a blank. Where the F- did it go? According to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, and others who study such things, when we’re doing repetitive actions that don’t require a lot of concentration, like walking, washing dishes, showering, gardening, etc., our brain is relaxed and free to roam. Neuroscientists who study the brain have found that exercise not only strengthens muscles and other body functions, but it generates new neurons and neural connections in the brain. Athlete and coach Christopher Bergland interviewed scientists on this topic for Psychology Today: Although there is some controversy and debate on the best ways to improve fluid intelligence, common sense would suggest that non-academic pursuits — including aerobic exercise — are key to improving not only cognition but someone’s long-term success in life. I have written a wide range of Psychology Today blog posts that link — physical activity, playing a musical instrument, making art, improving motor skills, and getting a good night’s sleep — with optimizing brain function and improving cognitive abilities. Here’s my over-simplified take on it: When our brain is not needed for a specific task, it’s free to roam. Anywhere — through the fields of memories, scanning and reviewing some of the over-stimulating content it’s been fed non-stop with no time to process: snippets from ads, phone calls, videos, Twitter, etc. Our brains love to make connections and solve puzzles. What if? is a great question for a brain — harvesting the fruit of those new neural connections. What if this character from this book met up with that character from that book? (Great idea, but make sure the characters are in public domain first!!!) And brainstorming! Our brains love to make lists. I do this on my Iphone’s microphone feature while out on my nightly sunset walk. Talking into my Notes app, I’ll brainstorm headlines for possible articles — the more ridiculous, the better, as that gets the juices flowing. This is how I do my pitch idea homework for my satire class. (Yes, while a lot of it comes naturally, taking a class from Second City sure helps me develop whatever gifts I may have in this area!) Or topics for articles and book ideas for BYOB — Blog your own Book. Or who to reach out to for such and such. Or even a to-do list I hadn’t time to write yet. Get into your groove. My theory is it’s the rhythm of these activities that make them so productive. Swimming is one that helped me solve plot glitches. Cameron recommends it as well as the more meditative knitting, for that reason among others. Once when I was stuck with a plotting quandary in my novel, a solution popped into my head absolutely unbidden while swimming laps at the Y. I was trying to get my hero’s wife to do his dirty work, and she wasn’t having it. The a-ha came when his youngest son popped into my head while doing the crawl. Perfect foil. Too young to know any better. Meanwhile, forcing my brain to come up with a solution usually doesn’t work. When I try that, the ole gray matter likes to rebel! Bergland also validates these experiences in Psychology Today: Most often, creative solutions are not wrestled from your mind through sheer force of will. Eureka moments tend to occur spontaneously, almost always when the conscious mind is thinking of something else, or nothing at all. Build some of these activities into your day. Because you need a clean house or at least a clean kitchen. Because you need a clean body. And a healthy one. And you need a break from the left brain non-stop push, push, push. It’s your health and sanity, and creative input all rolled into one. But don’t stress or force it. Be relaxed. Take deep breaths, allow it to come. Put on your dictaphone, and just start talking, like how morning pages work. Sooner or later, the ideas just come. Welcome them and corral them. Don’t judge; you never know when it will prove just the perfect fit. As Kevin Costner was told in the film Field of Dreams, “Build it, and they will come!” Try it for yourself. Do let us know how this goes for you!!!

https://medium.com/ninja-writers/walk-scrub-shower-81798accd5d1

['Marilyn Flower']

2020-07-18 12:01:01.184000+00:00

['Neuroscience', 'Productivity', 'Writing', 'Art', 'Creativity']

Write for Towards Data Science

Guidelines How to get your article ready for publication! We aim to strike a balance between innovating, informing and philosophizing. We want to hear from you! But we do ask that if you are not a professional writer, you consider the following points when you prepare your article. We want to publish high quality, professional articles that people want to read. Please be aware that if you don’t follow our submission guidelines, your article won’t be accepted. 1. Is your story a story that needs to be told? Before you start writing, ask yourself: is this story a story that needs to be told? If you have read many articles addressing the same issue or explaining the same concept, think twice before writing another one. If you have a radical, new take on an old chestnut, we want to hear from you… but, we need you to persuade us that your article is something special that distinguishes itself from the pack and speaks to our audience. Conversely, if your article addresses an underserved area or presents a new idea or method, that’s just what we are after! 2. What is your message? Let us know what your ‘take home message’ is, right from the start. Give your piece a snappy introduction that tells us: What is your novel idea? Why should we care? How are you going to prove your point? Once you’ve got that out of the way, you can be as conversational as you like, but keep calling back to the central message and give us a solid conclusion. Remember though, Towards Data Science is not your personal blog, keep it sharp and on-topic! 3. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog You’ve got a new idea or a new way of doing things, you want to tell the community and start a discussion. 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If you scroll up to the top of this page, you will see an example of a title and subtitle. Your post needs to have a short title and a longer subtitle that tell readers what your article is about or why they should read it. Your header is useful for attracting potential readers and making your intentions clear. To remain consistent and give readers the best experience possible, we do not allow titles or subtitles written in all-caps. We also ask that you avoid profanity in both your title and subtitle. When your subtitle is directly under the title and formatted correctly, it will show up in some post previews, which helps with your click-through rate. To correctly format your subtitle on Medium, type it out, highlight the text and then click the smaller of the two Ts in the popup window. 5. What value do you deliver to your readers? Make sure your post achieves its purpose. For instance, if your goal is to explain several concepts, ensure that these concepts are bared to their essentials, narrated in an orderly sequence and illustrated with simple and accurate analogies. Second, use concrete language and visual imagery. As Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Sense of Style: “We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.” and he continues “Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images”. Third, work to improve your writing skills. You could start by replacing linking and light verbs such as ‘to be, is, going, become, bring, make, take, have’, by more precise action verbs. For example, you could say ‘agile’ instead of ‘going fast’. There is plenty of great advice on the internet. Finally, check for spelling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes. If you can’t do it yourself, use Grammarly and then ask a friend to help you. As we are such a small team, we can’t correct every submission. 6. Is your code well displayed? Please don’t screenshot your code but use one of these two other solutions: Medium’s native code blocks & inline code Embed GitHub gists If you paste a code within your article, be sure to explain it so all your readers can follow what you are doing. 7. Check your facts Whenever you provide a fact, if it’s not self-evident, let us know where you learned it. Tell us who your sources are and where your data originated. If we want to have a conversation we all need to be on the same page. 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Wehenkel and G. Louppe, Recurrent Machines for Likelihood-Free Inference (2018), NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Meta-Learning 9. Are your tags precise enough? The more specific your tags, the easier it is for readers to find your article and for us to classify and recommend your post to the relevant audience. Depending on the tags you choose, your post will be featured on our data science, machine learning, programming or visualization page. Please choose precise tags as we can’t allow a post to be in all our categories at once. We may change one or two tags before publication. We would do this only to keep our different sections relevant to our readers. For instance, we would want to avoid tagging a post on linear regression as “Artificial Intelligence”. 10. Do you have an amazing image? A great image attracts and excites readers. That’s why all the best newspapers always display incredible pictures. This is what you can do to add a fantastic featured image to your post: Use Unsplash. Most of the content on Unsplash is released under Creative Commons CC0, which means their photos are safe to use without asking for permission — even for commercial purposes. Take one yourself . Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article. . Your phone is almost certainly good enough to capture a cool image of your surroundings. You might even already have an image on your phone that would make a great addition to your article. Make a great graph. If your post involves data analysis, spend some time making at least one graph truly unique. You can try R, Python, D3.js or Plotly. If you decide to purchase a license for an image to be used in your article, please note that we only allow the use of images under a license that: (i) does not expire; and (ii) that can be used for commercial purposes on the TDS Publication. You are responsible for ensuring you comply with the license terms of use. You must also include a caption below the image, as follows, or as otherwise required by the license provider: “Image via [license provider’s name] under license to [your name].” Finally, please email us a copy of a receipt or other evidence of the purchased license, along with the corresponding license terms of use. Please remember to cite the source of your images even if you aren’t legally obligated to do so. If you created an image yourself, you can add (Image by author) in the caption. Whichever way you decide to go, your image source should look like this:

https://towardsdatascience.com/questions-96667b06af5

['Tds Editors']

2020-12-12 23:54:52.970000+00:00

['Writers’ Guide', 'Join Us', 'Tds Team', 'Writers Guide']

People Are Still Vacationing in the Middle of a Pandemic

Every time I think people can’t amaze me further with their stupidity, I’m sadly mistaken. Yes, stupidity. Or would you rather I say dangerous behavior? Either works. As of today, in the United States alone, there have been 13.7m cases of the novel coronavirus, with almost 270k deaths. What in those numbers gives you the idea that travel is a good idea? Now, it would be one thing if people were vacationing to parts unknown, not surrounding themselves with people. But that’s really not the case. People are still going to Disney. The park recently announced they’re open for business again, minus the water parks. Just be sure if you’re over the age of 2, you wear a mask at all times. Wearing a mask is important for sure. But you can’t tell me a crowd the size of the ones that frequent Disney isn’t a recipe for disaster. It’s not only dangerous, it’s destructive. No amount of memory making is worth the potential for death, or at the least, severe illness. I blame the companies for agreeing to open in such a dangerous situation. I blame our government for not doing more to stop this on the front end. But I also blame the people of the United States who can’t put their plans on hold for a little longer in order to remain safe, and for the health and well-being of others. Going on vacation would be a godsend right now for my family. We’ve been stuck at home since March, invading one another’s space, constantly under each other. Sure, it’s nice to spend time with your family, but enough is enough. Through all this, there’s no vacation on this planet that’s worth our continued health. We even avoided a small Thanksgiving get-together to ensure we remained virus free. Whether you have children, if you’re single or married, your health and well-being are important. Consistently masking up, only going out when absolutely necessary, and avoiding crowds goes a long way towards ending this pandemic. Taking a family vacation, just because it’s what you’ve always done, isn’t the smart answer. The state of the world isn’t what it’s always been. We have to adapt and overcome. Roll with the punches, if you will. But for all that is holy, stay home this holiday season and plan the vacations for when it’s safer. If you don’t, your vacation memories could be the last ones you make.

https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/people-are-still-vacationing-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic-77e91bb4f632

['Chloe Cuthbert']

2020-12-02 12:32:58.069000+00:00

['Health', 'The Bad Influence', 'Mental Health', 'Self-awareness', 'Coronavirus']

Google Objectron — A giant leap for the 3D object detection

bjecrPhoto by Tamara Gak on Unsplash Google Objectron — A giant leap for the 3D object detection Google has just announced the launch of MediaPipe Objectron, its mobile technology for real-time detection of 3D objects, enabling the smartphone to recognize the size and orientation of objects. If there one thing that I love in Google’s research is image analysis. The automatic suggestions of Google Photos or the capabilities of Google Lens are good examples, and the recent news that the company already has its new layer of analysis-ready to understand what is present in each photo. If we go a little further, to object detection as such, Google also has a few tricks up its sleeve. Google has just announced the launch of MediaPipe Objectron, its mobile technology for detecting 3D objects in real-time, allowing the smartphone to recognize an object’s size and orientation, opening several application doors. (MTheiler), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons What is Object Detection? Humans’ intrinsic ability to rapidly detect, differentiate, and classify objects allows us to make quick decisions regarding what we see. Detection of objects in images remains one of the most significant challenges in the field of computer vision since objects found in images can be perceived from the most diverse viewpoints and transformations in size and rotation, making it more difficult to detect. Digital cameras provide good advantages among the critical sensors that AI can use: they can be lightweight, compact, and inexpensive, essential for some environments. To achieve object detection goals, methods for the extraction of image information, visual attention models, and bio-inspired learning models have been studied to identify and classify vehicles. Object detection is crucial for good object recognition. A classification technique is to formulate it as a classification problem. Objects are instances with well-defined limits and center, unlike the background. Methods for detecting and recognizing objects require fewer resources to perform rapid detection due to the increased computational cost. The advanced and complex classifier, such as the CNN — Convolutional Neural Network, is necessary to obtain high accuracy in the Detections. Detection theories can be used to classify small, low cost or low consumption, electronics, transportation, health, safety, among other areas. Aphex34, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The CNN Object Detection problem The difference between object classification methods (like the networks in the previous section) and object detection methods is that in object detection, you want to: identify how many objects of a given category are in the image; objects of a given category are in the image; identify where in the image each object is located. It is typically not known in advance how many instances of a given object category you will identify in a scene. If you were to build a standard CNN to solve this problem, you would have the following situation: the output size is variable. It depends on how many instances of an object you will find and where they are, which is impossible on a network with an output layer of fixed size. For this, models such as R-CNN and YOLO were developed. R-CNN: Regions with CNN feature R-CNN performs segmentation based on the results of object detection. R-CNN initially uses selective search to extract many candidates and then calculates its characteristics through CNN. Finally, it classifies each region using a specific linear classifier, usually SVM (support vector machines). Unlike the networks discussed in the previous section, R-CNN can perform more complex tasks, such as object detection and coarse segmentation of images. An R-CNN can be built on traditional image classification networks, such as AlexNet, VGG, GoogLeNet, and ResNet. R-CNN solves the problem of multiple exits using a selective search as follows: 1. Generate initial sub-segmentation; we generate many candidate regions 2. Use a greedy algorithm to combine similar regions into larger ones recursively 3. Use the generated regions to produce the final candidate region proposals R-CNN initially generates around 2000 candidates using the above algorithm based on simple traditional computer vision techniques. From there: Each candidate is reformatted to a standard size square image; Image is fed to a neural network that generates 4096-dimension feature vectors as output; An SVM classifies the vector of characteristics producing two outputs: a rating an offset indication that can be used to adjust the bounding box. Disadvantages of the model: Slow to train: training is in two stages; Very slow to execute: for each image, R-CNN first classifies 2000 sub-images. Fast-R-CNN: Fast Region-based Convolutional Networks for object detection In an article the following year, the authors of R-CNN presented a solution that solves the problems of slowness in the approach based on the analysis of 2000 semi-random images of R-CNN: convolutional preprocessing. Instead of feeding the neural network with candidate images, the entire image is provided to the network to generate a convolutional feature map ( CFM ). This CFM is then used to search for candidate regions, which are reformatted into fixed-size square images through a region-of-interest pooling layer ( RoI pooling ). From the characteristic vector generated for each RoI, a classification is performed with a softmax layer, which predicts the object category and associates it with the origin square’s bounding box. The graph below shows a comparison between the two approaches and another network from the same time, SPP-Net (Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition) : Faster-R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks Again, the same authors found a solution to make the network even faster was to eliminate the selective search for regions of interest. Similar to Fast R-CNN, the image is used directly as an input to generate a convolutional feature map. In this model, however, instead of performing a selective search on this map, a second, separate neural network is used to predict candidate regions. It is called the Region Proposal Network (RPN). RPN uses a neural mini-network based on a sliding window that analyzes the input image, and the translation is invariant. To avoid excessive proposals, suppression of non-maximums is carried out at this stage. These candidate regions, like Fast-R-CNN, are reformatted into fixed-size square images through a region-of-interest pooling layer ( RoI pooling ). From the characteristic vector generated for each RoI, a classification is performed with a softmax layer, which predicts the object category and associates it with the bounding box given by the square of origin. The image below shows a comparison between the three models of the authors and SPP-Net : Source: http://www.lapix.ufsc.br/ensino/visao/visao-computacionaldeep-learning/deteccao-de-objetos-em-imagens/?lang=en Single Shot Detection Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Recognition The above approaches use to focus on the sub-regions of the image to identify objects. The network never looks at the image as a whole. Here we will see approaches that consider the image as a whole. You Only Look Once: YOLO In YOLO, a single convolutional network predicts both the bounding boxes and the probabilities of belonging to each detected object’s class. For this, YOLO works as follows: an image is taken and divided into an SxS grid of cells; using the grid as a reference, m bounding boxes are generated ; bounding boxes with a probability above a threshold are selected and used to locate the object within the image. Much faster YOLO (45 fps on the authors’ set -> up to two orders of magnitude) faster than contemporary algorithms. Its biggest flaw is inaccuracy with small objects in the image. Each cell in the grid can predict B bounding boxes ( bbox ) and C class probabilities. A bbox prediction has five components: (x, y, w, h, confidence). The coordinates (x, y) represent the center of the bbox relative to the location of the cell (if the center of a bbox does not fall into a cell, it will not be responsible for it and will not represent it -> cells only have a reference to objects whose center falls into them). These coordinates are normalized to [0, 1]. The bbox (w, h) dimensions are also normalized to [0, 1], relative to the image size. Suppose you split a 448 × 448-pixel image into a grid of SxS = 3 × 3 cells: In YOLO, the concept of intersection over union (IoU) plays an important role: the confidence of a prediction in YOLO is given by Pr (Object) * IOU (pred, truth). Detecting 3D objects in real-time. While there are ample amounts of 3D data for street scenes, due to the popularity of research into self-driving cars that rely on 3D capture sensors like LIDAR, datasets with ground truth 3D annotations for more granular everyday objects are minimal. To overcome this problem, we developed a novel data pipeline using mobile augmented reality (AR) session data. With the arrival of ARCore and ARKit, hundreds of millions of smartphones now have AR capabilities and the ability to capture additional information during an AR session, including the camera pose, sparse 3D point clouds, estimated lighting, and planar surfaces. We built a novel annotation tool for AR session data to label ground truth data, allowing annotators to label 3D bounding boxes for objects quickly. This tool uses a split-screen view to display 2D video frames on overlaid 3D bounding boxes on the left, alongside a view showing 3D point clouds, camera positions, and detected planes on the right. Annotators draw 3D bounding boxes in the 3D view and verify its location by reviewing the projections in 2D video frames. For static objects, we only need to annotate an object in a single frame and propagate its location to all frames using the ground truth camera pose information from the AR session data, making the procedure highly efficient. MediaPipe is Google’s cross-platform framework for creating different data processing pipelines. Objetron is included within this framework as a moving pipeline for real-time 3D object detection. In other words, Objectron detects objects through 2D images to later estimate their orientation and size through a machine learning model trained on a 3D data set. In other words, it is capable of detecting 3D objects from a single RGB image. But understanding objects in 3D remains a challenging task due to the lack of large real-world datasets compared to 2D tasks (e.g., ImageNet, COCO, and Open Images). So, to empower the research community for continued advancement in 3D object understanding, there is a strong need for the release of object-centric video datasets, which capture more of the 3D structure of an object, while matching the data format used for many vision tasks (i.e., video or camera streams), to aid in the training and benchmarking of machine learning models. Through an encoder and decoder model, Google can convert a 2D input into a 3D output. A single image is enough. At the basic structure level, the model has an encoder-decoder architecture based on MobileNetV2, Google’s neural networks for classification and visual detection. Using these networks, the 2D projection of the image, and a 3D estimation algorithm, the model can process a 3D output of said object. To mitigate possible fluctuations in the image, Google has worked under the same detection and tracking framework for its 2D objects. This translates into something that will already sound familiar to you if you know how Google works: image segmentation. The original image is captured in 2D. Bounding boxes are applied to it for subsequent object detection. The object is detected by Gaussian distribution. The segmentation mask is applied. Google highlights that the model is so light that it can run in real-time at 26 FPS on a high-end mobile, specifically with the Adreno 650 (the GPU of the recent Snapdragon 865). The new solution is now available to anyone who wants to test it to develop new use cases and applications. The Dataset The Objectron dataset is a collection of short, object-centric video clips accompanied by AR session metadata that includes camera poses, sparse point-clouds, and characterization of the planar surfaces in the surrounding environment. In each video, the camera moves around the object, capturing it from different angles. The data also contains manually annotated 3D bounding boxes for each object, which describe the object’s position, orientation, and dimensions. The dataset consists of 15K annotated video clips supplemented with over 4M annotated images in the following categories: bikes, books, bottles, cameras, cereal boxes, chairs, cups, laptops, and shoes. It is stored in the objectron bucket on Google Cloud Storage. Along with the dataset, Google is also sharing a 3D object detection solution for four categories of objects — shoes, chairs, mugs, and cameras. These models are released in MediaPipe, Google’s open-source framework for cross-platform customizable ML solutions for live and streaming media, which also powers ML solutions like the on-device real-time hand, iris, and body pose tracking. By releasing this Objectron dataset, Google hopes to enable the research community to push the limits of 3D object geometry understanding and foster new research and applications, such as view synthesis, improved 3D representation, and unsupervised learning. Dataset Key Features 15000 annotated videos and 4M annotated images All samples include high-res images, object pose, camera pose, point-cloud, and surface planes. Ready to use examples in various tf.record formats, which can be used in Tensorflow/PyTorch. Object-centric multi-views, observing the same object from different angles. Accurate evaluation metrics, like 3D IoU for oriented 3D bounding boxes. Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash Conclusion Humans’ intrinsic ability to rapidly detect, differentiate, and classify objects allows us to make quick decisions regarding what we see. Detection of objects in images remains one of the most significant challenges in the field of computer vision since objects found in images can be perceived from the most diverse viewpoints and transformations in size and rotation, making it more difficult to detect. Object detection is crucial for good object recognition. There is a lot of excitement about this google release, especially considering that today there are powerful augmented reality platforms such as AR Core in Google and AR Kit in what refers to Apple. Video games, applications, photography, video, and more can all benefit from object recognition. Let’s keep one eye on this technology for future activities and developments by joining the Objectron mailing list and visiting Google’s GitHub page. Links References Google AI Blog — https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/11/announcing-objectron-dataset.html MediaPipe Objectron — https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/objectron FLODNet — Detecção e reconhecimento de objetos em dispositivos de baixa especificação: um estudo de caso em classificação de alimentos — https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/303978504.pdf Deep Learning:: Object Detection in Images — http://www.lapix.ufsc.br/ensino/visao/visao-computacionaldeep-learning/deteccao-de-objetos-em-imagens/?lang=en

https://towardsdatascience.com/google-objectron-a-giant-leap-for-the-3d-object-detection-9d8393b7a183

['Jair Ribeiro']

2020-11-23 17:48:03.183000+00:00

['Object Detection', 'Google', 'AI', 'Computer Vision', 'Artificial Intelligence']

No, You Don’t Need to Write Everyday

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that writing every day is a bad thing, what I’m saying is do what is sustainable, at whatever pace that works, for you. Whatever motivates you to write consistently and intentionally for weeks, months, years; instead of feeling success at your fingertips while burning yourself to the ground in the process. Do whatever makes you write better, and hopefully, forever. And no, you don’t have to be miserable to be an artist. Be happier and healthier than that, your work, your body, and your mind will appreciate it. Let me be real with you, there are days I could hardly get to the shower, let alone sit down (or up?) and write 500 words. On those days, I could feel my anxiety so physically like an invisible rock clinging against my chest. Sometimes, it grows legs and moves up to my throat, preventing me from raising my already-stifled voice. On those days, I don’t write despite the unbearable fear of me not working, not producing, not doing enough, not being enough. Because deep down, I know I write better when I’m well-rested; when ideas flow from my mind onto the computer’s screen without me having to think too hard about it. Have you done something and later you exclaim with pride and excitement mixed with a little of confusion “I did that!?”?. That’s where you want to be, not grinding your words onto the page like a chore; which way of creating is gonna make you miserable at the end of the process. So you know what? Binge that TV show. Finish the books that have been collecting dust on your slightly messy desk. Go out. Drink a cup of tea. Go hiking. Go to the gym. Go to the woods. Don’t forget to take naps because naps are the best! Do whatever you need to cope as the kids say, and keep yourself healthy, mentally and physically. Self-care is your first and foremost responsibility, cliche as it sounds. If your creative career takes a bit longer to take off, that’s okay. Because when you’re not happy, what’s the point of success? Success is the high you feel for 2 minutes (maybe a little more, or a little less, perhaps it’ll last for days if you’re lucky but eventually it’ll fade) after you achieve the very thing you’ve been trying to reach for years. Then there you are, alone yet again with your miserable self after the high subsides. Do you want to be happy with your success, or do you want to feel dead inside because you have nothing left to give? It’s your choice to make.

https://medium.com/swlh/no-you-dont-need-to-write-everyday-4d6b721a4dd

[]

2020-04-14 02:25:55.732000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Freelancing', 'Writing']

AI Unfolds the Science Behind a 50-Year-Old Protein-Folding Problem

DeepMind’s AlphaFold. Three decades after CASP issued its challenge to the scientific community, a most promising solution has surfaced using AI to predict the shapes of protein structures with accuracy that has yet to be seen. DeepMind, a company devoted to developing artificial intelligence systems to solve intelligence and advance scientific discovery, partnered with CASP to solve biology’s grand challenge. AlphaFold is DeepMind’s deep-learning system that has been proven to “accurately predict the structure of proteins to within the width of an atom”. AlphaFold was trained to analyze the structure of proteins using a databank of roughly 170,000 protein structures. During testing, AlphaFold achieved an average score of 92.4 GDT (Global Distance Test) in its predictions. The competitive threshold score: 90 GDT. This means that AlphaFold’s abilities are easily competitive with the results obtained using experimental methods, such as cryo-electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, and x-ray crystallography. These experimental methods can take years to determine the shape of a protein. In contrast, AlphaFold can manage it in a few days. Achieving a score of over 90 reveals that any difference in the predicted and actual structure could be from experimental error in the experimental method — not the software. Alternatively, an error could predict an alternative protein configuration that could occur due to natural variation. The global distance test the results are based on is a scale of 0 to 100 which dictates how close the AI predicted structure is to the actual shape of the protein as determined from experimental methods. AlphaFold was able to predict the structure of proteins with a margin of error of 1.6 angstroms (0.16 nanometers). This is equivalent to roughly the width of an atom. AlphaFold was able to accomplish the unthinkable. While scientists can determine the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein, there are thousands (an understatement) of ways that a protein can fold to achieve a three-dimensional shape. Back in 1972, Christian Anfinsen won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for proving that protein shape is determined by the sequence of amino acids. However, for the next 50 or so years, the scientific community had been grappling with trying to understand the shapes that proteins could fold into. According to DeepMind, their latest version of AlphaFold used in the recent CASP experiment was created using an attention-based neural network system. The system was trained end-to-end to be able to interpret the structure of a spacial graph which can be used to predict the shape of a folded protein. The system then goes on to reason over the implicit graph that it is building. AlphaFold “uses evolutionarily related sequences, multiple sequence alignment (MSA), and a representation of amino acid residue pairs to refine this graph.” This iterative process allowed AlphaFold to develop solid predictions about the shape of a protein in as little as a few days. Finally, an internal confidence method in AlphaFold is used to determine which parts of the predicted protein shape are reliable. AlphaFold’s ability to predict the shape of proteins has given new life to the study of diseases, something that has been thrust into the forefront of biology in the last year with a new urgency. DeepMind’s technology could help virologists identify proteins that have become impaired to help understand how they interact in this new malfunctioning state. Success in this field could lead to more precise drug development, further insight into existing experimental methods, and hopefully the realization of more efficient treatments for a variety of diseases and viruses. DeepMind has even had the chance to use their AI in a real-world situation, having aided in early studies on the protein structures of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. AlphaFold was able to identify several related protein structures that had previously been unknown, helping scientists to better understand the nature of the virus. DeepMind is currently in the process of preparing a paper concerning their system that will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

https://medium.com/predict/ai-unfolds-the-science-behind-a-50-year-old-protein-folding-problem-13baf1d43d84

['Madison Hunter']

2020-12-09 01:14:46.594000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Biotechnology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Future', 'Science']

Discover the Forgotten Treasures in Your Creative Cellar

Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay How many unfinished creative writing projects do you have lurking in your cellar? Your first story? A notebook full of ideas from the writing residential you attended three years ago but fell out with one of your classmates, so you dare not look back there? If you’ve finished one story, I bet you have a store because the imagination is like a weed in its ability to spread all on its own, come sun or shade. Once you’ve opened that creative door, it is hard to shut; I imagine, I’ve never tried. So if you’ve been writing for a few years; attended more than one kind of class or workshop then I bet you’ve got a stock of half baked stories and ideas lurking around in your memory, desk drawer or hard drive. Before I share my 6-step process for excavating the magic from your lost stories and getting them moving again here’s a little anecdote about a writer, we all know a lot about already. Oh no, not another Stephen King writing analogy! Yes, I’m afraid so, but this one conveys how easy it is to discard goldmine ideas, and it’s not about craft. It’s about Carrie, his first published novel. After his initial spark of inspiration for the story, he wrote a three-page first draft and promptly threw it in the bin, deciding he didn’t like it. It wasn’t worth wasting any more time on, and it would never sell. His wife, curious about the crumpled pages protruding from his bin, took it out, read it and loved the story. She pushed him on, wanting to know what would happen next. And so he finished it, and you know the rest; he published his debut novel, was rescued from imminent poverty and forged a long successful career. The takeaway features for un-repped/unpublished authors are; - It isn’t easy to be objective about our work. - It is easy to abandon a story. - It’s hard to spot the gold amongst the fog of endless rejections. - It’s easy to lose inspiration. - The time when you’re most likely to give up, the beginning, it’s hardest to see the potential. Plus it feeds into my romantic view about the first draft of any story being a living, breathing thing in existence in the world. Long may this optimism last! We need to take on the role of treasure hunter ourselves. Who uses a waste paper basket anymore? Here’s my excavation process for seeking out the gold in the mountain of half-finished and forgotten stories that have amassed over the last seven years of writing. 1. Storyhunting It’s time to get your gloves on and start exploring your spaces. Maybe you’re all digital, lucky you! My handwriting days have left a chest full of notebooks and stolen A0 notepads. If this exercise is worth doing, it’s worth doing correctly. My creative cellar includes: One Drive and old pc hard drives Notebooks Emails from course tutors Course notes in hard and digital copy. In this phase, you need to get them all into one place. Don’t worry about reading them just yet. We’re in the stock-take mode, and it’s feeling good. 2. Organising I’ve come to the unfortunate realisation that amongst all of the character swashbuckling, living a Rimbaudian existence, research and inspiration chasing, the organising of any project is an essential part because without this you, you know, lose your stories! It’s time to note down the following: The title, draft and date What was the inspiration? Who is your favourite character? What form is the story? For this, you’ll need a spreadsheet. It’s fun; you remember how much you’ve got already and recall some of the adventures along the way. 3. Reading The thought of reading your old work might fill you with the dreads, but there are more upsides than down, as you’ll discover. For every cringe you sound out loud, you can also celebrate how much you’ve learned and grown as a writer. But more importantly, there is a reason you started this project. What was it? A person? An injustice? A character? A response to another piece of literature? Finding the spark of inspiration will be worth any pain you feel at the reminder of what an amateur writer you used to be. As you go along make a note of the bits, you like. Maybe it’s just a description of a bluebell woods; perhaps it’s an antagonist or a brilliant line of dialogue. It’s unlikely that you don’t find something that’s still breathing in each of your old stories. 4. Repositioning Now you’re familiar with your stories again, and you’ve remembered what inspired you to write them in the first place is there a better way to tell the story? Maybe you’ve written a stage play that would be better as a film script or even a short story. Perhaps a television idea you started penning would be better as a novel. With everything you’ve learned about storytelling, is there a better platform for your story? Remember that the options are endless: Flash fiction, microfiction, novella, novels, films, radio plays, stage plays, short film, web series, series. An old playwriting tutor once spelt this out for me, it might seem obvious to you but here goes, The written word of novels and short stories is best suited for exploring conflict that happens within the self. The stage is best suited for exploring the conflict between people. Film is best suited for exploring the conflict between people and their world. A few repositioning questions; is your story in its best format? Is your main character a dynamic character, or is there someone else who can take the protagonist spot? A tutor at a workshop once said to me that the biggest problem he saw with scripts was that it was full of characters that had situations put onto them; instead of characters that created their conditions. 5. Big Picture Now you’ve changed or confirmed the landing for your story, how are you going to get there? What’s the most astonishingly extraordinary thing that could happen to this story? Then turn it into action like you would for one of your characters. Think big; try the +10 rule. You lost the idea the first time around; this time, you need to go bigger. What actions do you need to take to make this happen? List everything — cleaning your desk, finishing up a project to allow time for this one, eating more beans, getting rid of the energy demons in your life. Destroy all obstacles in the way of you and your story’s bigger picture. 6. Action Plan The action plan is the most straightforward step of all. You’ve got your vision; add a date, add milestones and list teeny steps you need to take to complete the task. Example steps might include finding a publishing platform, sending a nice email to a friend who might be kind enough to read your story — think meta! Here’s an old blog about action planning your screenplay rewrite; the process will be the same. Programme your plan onto a spreadsheet with a column or reporting function to close items out as you go along.

https://medium.com/curious/discover-the-forgotten-treasures-in-your-creative-cellar-acb2de31ce7b

['Sarah Thomas']

2020-12-13 21:49:40.709000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Storytelling', 'Productivity', 'Inspiration', 'Writing']

It’s all about loneliness

How to make a prediction with time-series data using machine learning By Will Stauffer-Norris in LSTM— 7 min

https://towardsdatascience.com/its-all-about-loneliness-6467698049f3

['Tds Editors']

2020-09-16 13:10:46.952000+00:00

['Editors’ Pick', 'PyTorch', 'Product Management ', 'LSTM', 'The Daily Pick']

The Neuroscientist, A Field Guide

Sub-species The Electrophysiologist The recorder of single neurons, lowerer of electrodes. Notable tribes include the patch-clampers, whose cruel initiation rites require attaching a micrometer-scale piece of glass to the body of a neuron ten times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Some among this tribe, possibly insane, attempt the same in awake, moving animals. They are easily distinguished from other Neuroscientus by the rhythmic beating of their heads against the lab bench when losing yet another neuron after just three trials of behaviour are complete. The Systems Neuroscientist Distinguishable from the electrophysiologist by trying to record from many neurons at the same time, and relate them to something in the outside world. Comes in many tribes, from the sensory obsessives, the memorists and decisionists, to the motor wagglers, through others that identify themselves by blobs of the brain — the corticians, cerebellites, the basal gang, the hippocampites, the amygdalarians — to yet others that identify with the type of brain — the worm-wranglers, the fly-fanciers, the sea-sluggers. To the naive observer these tribes would all seem to be working towards the same goal, but vicious internecine wars frequently erupt within and between tribes. Insufferably smug since members of their subspecies were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014 (“we’re a real science now”), they are nonetheless handicapped by the crudeness of their tools, which has led to the Humphries Uncertainty Principle: they can either record precisely when neurons send spikes but not know exactly where they are, or know precisely where they are but not know exactly when they send spikes (they call these “multi-electrode recording” and “calcium imaging”, respectively). The Cognitive Neuroscientist This subspecies is more intensely interested in us Sapiens than any other. We find it useful to distinguish a number of breeds, albeit with some overlap: Neuroimager — often referred to by other subspecies as “a psychologist with a magnet”, they adore rainbow colours. A deeply superstitious people, yet highly intelligent. In their writings frequent references are made to “Bonferroni”, possibly a deity, and they will cross themselves and mutter curses to the heavens upon hearing the phrase “dead salmon”. But the complex incantations necessary to turn the magnetic alignment of oxygen-depleted haemoglobin into a measurable signal of brain activity is testament to their ingenuity. Scalp tickler — a “psychologist with a hairnet”, readily identified by their distinctive calls. Anthropologists have transcribed some of these calls (lit. “P100”, “N2”), but have yet to discern their meaning. Some authorities subdivide a further breed, the Magnetiser, a psychologist with a quantum thingy. The Paddlers — believe that waving a magic wand near the scalp of a Sapiens will variously cause involuntary movement, enhance their mathematical ability, or let them experience the presence of god(s). The Neuroanatomist Was thought to be going extinct, until the Connectomics Explosion approximately 15YA rapidly diversified the gene pool, with many new, previously unrecorded phenotypes appearing. Neural Engineer Consider the brain to be a feedback loop. Fiddles with amplifier settings until the squealing stops. Behavioural Neuroscientist Attempts to infer the workings of the brain from watching a rodent press a lever. Talks almost entirely in capital letters (example transcript: “the US will become the CS, but leave the UR intact”). Neuroethologist Attempts to infer the workings of the brain from watching an animal go about its daily routine. Barely on speaking terms with Behavioural Neuroscientists. Neuroendocrinologist Slightly hormonal. Obsessed with how everything sloshing around the brain that isn’t a neurotransmitter affects brain cells. Believes a “raster plot” is a graph drawn by a Bob Marley fan. Molecular neuroscientist Applies the tools of close cousins the molecular biologist to the brain. Loves the stuff floating inside cells, especially proteins and complex chains of chemicals signalling to each other. Unable to distinguish the brain from the liver without assistance. Neurogeneticist Obsessed with the expression of bits of DNA and RNA in brain cells. Unable to distinguish the brain from yeast without assistance. Clinical Neuroscientist Haughty and proud, these interact the most with Homo sapiens, bringing their skills to treat the damaged and sick among that closely-related species. Males of this sub-species are thought to be born wearing a suit and tie. Computational Neuroscientist Often gaunt, frequently shunning daylight, these shy creatures have also a number of distinctive breeds. Recent gene sequencing work on this sub-species has revealed evidence of lateral gene transfer from known species of Physicists, Mathematicians, and Computer Scientists. The consequent melange of languages spoken among members of this sub-species often collapses interactions into mutual bafflement. Circuit modeller — Literal-minded to a fault, these build exact scale models of bits of brain. Often try to show them to their fellow Systems Neuroscientists working on the same bit of brain, but suffer frequent barbs and social rejection (“Suited for a more specialist journal”). The Algorithmics — Seek the Holy Grail of the step-by-step instructions by which the brain works. Once discovered that deep-lying neurons, which may or may not contain dopamine, send a signal that looked like the difference: [actual value of what happened] — [predicted value of what happened]. Have been banging on about it for the past 25 years. Compartmentalist — Uses a thousand equations to describe a single neuron, none of whose parameters are experimentally determined. Often found weeping silently into a drink at conference bars. Worship at the Church of Rall. The Bayesians — Have discovered a hammer, and are determined to use it on absolutely bloody anything that’s not already nailed down. Karl Friston Unclassifiable.

https://medium.com/the-spike/the-neuroscientist-a-field-guide-ac15bb47372f

['Mark Humphries']

2020-05-04 12:37:55.071000+00:00

['Humor', 'Neuroscience', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Psychology', 'Science']

11 Reasons Creativity + Productivity Is About Mind Management, Not Time Management

1. Time management is squeezing blood from a stone “There’s only 24 hours in a day,” people say. They think that means you should get as much as you can from each of those hours. What that actually means is there’s a limit to the time you can save. Time management is squeezing blood from a stone. 2. We’re entering the creative age According to Kai-Fu Lee, AI and automation are poised to take forty- to fifty- percent of jobs in the next couple decades. But not all jobs will disappear at the same rate. Jobs that require creativity will be out of reach for AI. We’re entering the Creative Age. 3. Creative thinking is different from other thinking We know thanks to the work of neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman that creative thinking is a unique type of thinking. Creative thinking is promoted by a positive mood and relaxation. The creative state is also a fragile state. It’s hard to get into, easy to get out of. Here’s what the moment of insight looks like in the brain. Animation by John Kounios and Mark Beeman (Northwestern/Drexel) 4. You’re most creative when you’re least sharp We each have our “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively, the science shows you’re most creative during your off-peak time of day. If you’re groggy in the morning, don’t reach for coffee first thing: That grogginess is a creative gift. 5. Creative work happens in stages A great idea doesn’t mean your idea is ready to ship. There are four stages of creativity: 1. Preparation: Learn about the problem 2. Incubation: Let it sink in 3. Illumination: Have the idea 4. Verification: Get it ready to ship Respect these stages, don’t get blocked. 6. Not all hours are equal Some hours are great for having ideas — other hours are great for executing on those ideas. Dan Ariely and I noticed working on Timeful (Google acquired) there aren’t 24 hours in the day — there’s an hour here or there for each type of thinking. Here’s what the late, great, Anders Ericsson saw when he looked at the practice schedules of the very best violinists: Intense practice in the morning. Sporadic practice the rest of the day. Redrawn (by the author) and adapted from “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson et al., 1993. 7. The world works in cycles You can work with cycles in your world to propel your ideas forward. Days, weeks, seasons, and years can be harnessed to cycle through the Four Stages of Creativity. For example, you can use a night’s rest, a relaxing weekend, or a cozy winter as Incubation:

https://medium.com/getting-art-done/11-reasons-creativity-productivity-is-about-mind-management-not-time-management-d86ea9fcfb21

['David Kadavy']

2020-11-17 15:19:47.445000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Time Management', 'Writing', 'Psychology']

Are Headline Analyzer Tools Really Helpful for Writers — A Case Study

Headline Analyzer Tools that I Used In this article, I’ve used the 5 most known headline analyzer tools to investigate whether they’re beneficial for writers or not. One of the best ways to attract users' attention is being able to make the readers feel emotional while they are skimming through the plethora of headlines already available online. Regardless of it being sadness, happiness, anger, or even shock, evoking any emotion in a reader is sufficient to get a click. So, if you’re looking to capture a user's attention through emotions, Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional marketing value headline analyzer is the best tool for you. This blog title analyzer measures the EMV (emotional marketing value) to the headlines. Additionally, the tool also provides information about what emotion you are likely to evoke, which will help you determine if this is per the action you want the users to take. For example, if you want the user to get inspired and purchase your product, it’s probably not the best idea to evoke anger. Standout Features: It’s free and simple enough to not take up too much time when developing a headline. It assigns a score so that you can improve the more times you test out your headline. It displays your headline’s “type of appeal” (e.g. spiritual), giving you an idea of how your users are going to view the headline. With a focus on search engine optimization, IsItWP provides eye-catching and attractive article titles that drive traffic, shares, and even rank better on search engine result pages. The best component of this tool is that it is extremely to use. All you need to do is add your headline, following which the tool will provide certain recommendations as to how you can improve your headline. Once you make those changes, you can add the new headline, which the tool will analyze until your title is perfect. The headline analyzer tool is free to use. It provides many tips throughout the analysis to help out your headline writing. It analyzes the length of your headline using both characters and word count. It provides a total headline score to identify all of the words that are emotional, powerful, uncommon, and common. Here’s another headline analyzer that provides concrete scores for you to compare your tests and understand why some of the headlines you publish are either great or mediocre. Capitalize My Title headline analyzer uses over 50 different data points to evaluate your headline, email subject, or ad title on a scale from 1–100 for the following categories readability, SEO, and sentiment (emotion). Standout Features: The headline analyzer provides several scores for readability, SEO, and sentiment. It identifies common and “weasel” words, which are words that don’t help convey much meaning. It offers suggestions for boosting SEO in your headlines. You’ll learn how to incorporate power words and positive word counts. The next on our list is ShareThrough Headline Analyzer, which is known for its easy-to-use, yet well-designed interface and effective headline enhancement suggestions. ShareThrough provides a host of results and quality scores that depict how your headlines are performing. Moreover, the tool further provides certain pros of the headline and areas of improvement, along with recommendations on how to make your headline stronger. The unique selling point for this tool is that it focuses is results on targeting users for marketing, advertising, blogging, and others. Standout Features: The Sharethrough headline analyzer is free to use. The website design is intuitive and clean enough for anyone to use and understand. It provides suggestions on things like headline lengths, context words, alert words, and passive language. It provides several unique suggestions such as mentioning a celebrity or body part in your headlines. You receive an engagement and impression score, both of which are defined on the website. Your headline testing history is stored so you can see how your overall score, engagement, and impression scores have changed. For a free tool, the CoSchedule headline analyzer provides more than just a score and some tips. Instead, this tool creates a comprehensive report highlighting the pros and cons of your post title. Moreover, the tool is simple to use too, as all you need to do is type the headline around which your content is based. The tool then uses a database to help you identify areas of improvement in the existing headline. By the end of the process, you will have a headline that is in line with headlines that have resulted in good conversions in the past. In short, the tool ensures the final headline has a correct length and is engaging. While this tool is free to use, you do need to provide your personal information like name, email, address, among others to access CoSchedule. Standout Features:

https://medium.com/the-innovation/are-headline-analyzer-tools-really-helpful-for-writers-a-case-study-d77530d8d012

['Esat Artug']

2020-12-08 21:45:57.706000+00:00

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

How to Write a Dynamite Pitch For Your Guest Post

How to Write a Dynamite Pitch For Your Guest Post Get your words in front of thousands at lightning speed Photo by Nainoa Shizuru on Unsplash Do you want to be famous? I’m not talking about being so famous you can’t go to the grocery store without a team of bodyguards. But if that’s what you want, more power to you! I’m talking about credibility. You get that by being known as an authority in your niche. When you achieve that status, you become a go-to guide people turn to when they’re looking for the latest and best insights in the business you’re in. Wouldn’t that be great? Guest posting is a fantastic way to give your message the boost it needs. So how do you approach an Influencer? You might be thinking, “Who am I to ask the biggest blogger I know to let me write for them?” What I’m about to say will encourage you and maybe even shock you. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you have a great idea for a post that will make an Influencer look good, they’ll be glad to hear it. And more importantly, if your idea lifts their audience to a higher level of performance, you’ll have your best shot ever of getting your foot in the door. Just make sure it’s original, inspiring, and useful. Here’s what most people do wrong. If you want to get ignored, do this. Talk about yourself. Focus on your own needs. Tell the Influencer that using her platform will really help your career take off. She doesn’t care what you want. What she cares about is her agenda. Do you know what it is? It’s easy to figure out. Ask yourself why you read her blog every week. Think about some of the wins you got reading her posts. Are they inspiring? Useful? What is her writing style? Does she have a lot of other voices contributing to the conversation? The more you know, the better your pitch will be. Think about it. This blog is big and popular because the Blogger was intentional about it. She has a clear mission and she dedicates all her efforts to promoting it. She’s not going to let just anybody come in and blow it all. Writing for her is a privilege, not a God-given right. Remember that, and you’ll be much more successful getting a guest spot. Use This Template and You’ll Maximize Your Chances of Getting a Yes. Make sure your pitch is short, friendly, and direct. Influencers are busy. They probably have assistants reading their emails. And if you think your inbox is crowded, multiply that times a thousand for them. So you’ve got to stand out. First and always, follow the guidelines. Most bloggers who accept guest posts will spell out what they want. They’ll tell you what topics they’re looking for, how long the posts should be, and what style of writing they publish. I know sometimes it’s okay to break the rules when you write. Don’t make it these rules. Rules are a screen as much as resumés are for job applicants. If you satisfy enough of the criteria, your submission won’t get tossed out. If you exceed what’s expected and offer something that wows them, you’re almost assured of getting a shot at a guest post. Use a proven template to pitch. We said before to make your pitch short, friendly, and direct. Short means 3 paragraphs max. No more than 5–6 sentences total. Any longer and everything you did to make them happy before won’t mean a thing. Line 1 — Compliment them. Don’t be vague here. Tell them something specific, like, “I loved your post last week on how to break bad habits for good. It was a game changer for me, helping me quit smoking after being hooked for 30 years.” And be sure you’re honest here. If you can give them a specific example of how it helped, that’s much better than the generic phrase everyone uses: I love your work. So dig deep if you must, and be specific. It will make you stand out from the other form submissions they’re getting. Line 2 — Make your proposal. Do you see a gap you can fill with your wisdom? Is there a question in the comments somewhere that didn’t get answered well enough? Can you see something on the horizon in your industry that no one else is seeing or talking about yet? Make your proposal in a sentence or two. Only make it longer if the guidelines specify that you should. The point here is that if you can capture your idea in one sentence, the rest of the writing will come a lot easier. And more importantly, it will be laser-focused. Be sure to make your proposal clear so the reader understands it as well as you do. In fact, it should be so clear that it can pass the test of a casual glance. Remember, the person who reads your email is busy. She won’t work to figure out what you meant. So be clear right from the start. If you’re not sure its clear, ask your friends and colleagues if they understand what you want to write. Line 3 — Thank them again. This is simple courtesy. Tell them you appreciate their consideration and hope to hear from them. But even if you don’t, you’ll still be a fan. That’s it. What to do if it’s rejected. Sometimes you might offer something they have enough of already. That’s okay. Read the blog every time they publish something new. Go back as far as you can into the archives to see where they’ve gone over time. See what the blog owner is doing on Twitter. This kind of research will help you more than anything. When you know what the Influencer really wants, you can use her own desires to gain a hearing. After all, the best way to make a friend is to make that person feel important, right? Now Do This Find the biggest blog in your niche and offer to write something that compliments their mission. Once you get a yes, tell me about it. If you’ve guest posted before, what strategy did you use to get a chance to write? When you lift an Influencer’s audience, you lift yourself. That’s the only way you’ll ever grow your audience long term.

https://medium.com/writtenpersuasion/how-to-write-a-dynamite-pitch-for-your-guest-post-e49efaa9d9c

['Frank Mckinley']

2018-08-08 11:11:11.361000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Personal Development', 'Creativity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing']

Amazon, Google and Apple recently Enabled Their Products To “Listen” for These 3 Reasons

Amazon, Google and Apple Recently Enabled Their Products To “Listen” for These 3 Reasons iPhone, Apple Watch and Pixel Buds- What you can do with their new sound detection features Humans are born to detect threats by staying alert to sounds. We get nervous when we hear footsteps walking behind us in a dark street. We are all ears and alert when we are about to go to bed and hear something outside the bedroom. With limited sight at night, or at home alone, we often depend solely on sounds to understand the surroundings. But what about when we are distracted? Can you hear the door knock when you are listening to music wearing big headphones? Or how do I know the car behind me honked to warn me of approaching with my noise cancelling mode on? What about for those who have hearing loss? What if I want to know if my dog barks and upset my neighbors while I’m away? Big tech companies have come up with solutions to these problems thanks to the recent breakthroughs with sound AI technology — and now they are able to build these Machine learning-based sound detection features into their devices as small as earbuds. Starting from 2019, Amazon, Google and Apple have competitively released sound detection features, mainly for these three purposes. #1. Home security: Smart speakers can listen for suspicious activities while you are away In May 2019, Amazon rolled out Alexa Guard, enabling Amazon Echo speakers to transition into Guard Mode by saying a command like “Alexa, I’m leaving”. If sounds like glass break, CO alarm or human activity including footfalls or door opening is detected, it will send a notification to your phone. You can also configure it to lock any doors with compatible smart locks, or deter unwanted visitors by turning on/off lights to make it appear as if you’re home, sound dog barking sound or a siren when activity is detected. Similarly, in November 2019, Google released glass break detection for its smart speaker, Nest Secure. In fact, sound recognition technology applied to home security is not a brand-new concept. Prior to the deep-learning based sound detection method like the example of Alexa Guard, a rule-based sound detection method had been used conventionally, which basically recognizes sound by loudness and magnitude of frequency. Traditional glass break detectors or smoke alarm detectors are built with this rule-based technology. “Rule-based” system, as its name implies, is confined by knowledge and rules given manually by human. As a result, it was not useful for complex environment where there were high frequency of exceptional patterns and thus, had poor performance. Modern deep-learning based models on the other hand, doesn’t depend on given knowledge because it can continue learning on its own, constantly optimizing itself by adapting to changes and hidden patterns, resulting in incomparably better performance compared to the rule-based one. #2. Safety: Your wearable will make sure you don’t miss a thing! Smartphone manufacturers are constantly producing wearable and accessories to upsell with their smartphones. Among them, wireless earbuds, since the launch of AirPods 1, have been a huge hit, and report says Apple alone has sold nearly 60 million AirPods. Airpods users love the Noise cancelling function, introduced with AirPods Pro, “cancels” the external sound before it could make you feel as if you are isolated from outside world. While it’s a cool function, noise cancelling presents high risk of accidents by nature. If you are a cyclist or drive frequently, chances are you have encountered a passenger with earbuds who’s totally unaware of your bicycle bells or car honks. Some states in the US have introduced laws to forbid drivers to wear headphones or earbuds while driving. Aware of this danger earbuds could bring, earbuds makers have been devising ways to avoid this danger. Google’s Pixel Buds have brought Attention Alerts in August 2020. If a baby cries nearby or an emergency vehicle passes by with its siren on, the Pixel Buds will automatically lower the volume temporarily so you can hear what’s happening around you. Additionally, Apple Watch added another creative and well-timed safety measure amid the pandemic — the hand washing timer. With this feature enabled, Apple Watch listens for water running sound, and will automatically display 20 seconds countdown for proper hand washing. #3. Accessibility: Designed to assist with your daily lives Hearing loss is a common problem caused by noise, aging, disease, and heredity. Globally, there are 466-million people suffering from some level of hearing loss. Hearing loss hugely impacts daily life in many ways. Take for example, sounds they are likely to miss out due to hearing loss — when you forget to turn off the water faucet, you can’t hear the constantly running water. No beep from the oven telling you your food is ready. Can’t tell if the smoke alarm went off. Missing out their babies crying, murmuring, and giggling… all these are huge pain they have to live with. These people could hugely benefit from the sound detection technology if their mobile devices could capture the sound for them and give them notifications. Apple and Google were the first to add this feature into their smartphones, and users can configure sounds they want to detect under Accessibility setting — iOS 14 Sound Recognition (updated in September 2020) and Android Sound Notifications (updated in October 2020) respectively. iOS users can set their devices to constantly listen for 11 sounds and receive alerts when these sounds are detected.The sounds are categorized as follows: •Alarms: Fire, Siren, Smoke •Animals: Cat, Dog •Household: Appliances, Car Horn, Door Bell, Door Knock, Water Running •People: Baby Crying Android users can likewise detect 11 sounds including shouting and landline phone ringing. Tech companies see accessibility as one of its core values and they put in a ton of work in assistive technology in order to ensure everyone can use their devices in the best ways to suit them. Some accessibility features such as VoiceOver (screen reader) or Voice Control, originally designed and developed with accessibility in mind, were adopted by mainstream after many people found value in these features. Sound detection too, will turn out to be useful for many people in general if smartphones could recognize diverse sounds and help them understand their surroundings better. Progressing towards a smarter future As it’s a growing market in the early stage, tech giants saw huge potential in the sound AI technology and started in investing in the field. World’s largest annual workshop in the sound AI research field, IEEE DCASE (Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events), which used to be a flagship event mainly for academia, recently gained FAANG’s attention. In 2019, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and IBM sponsored DCASE, and Apple joined in the following year. Predominant application for sound AI technology until now would be a simple sound recognition, like what Apple, Google and Amazon has built so far. What’s bound to come in the next few years however, is much more than that. Researchers have spent a great deal of time studying how electronic devices can be augmented with sensors that allow them to perceive their environment. This body of work, often referred to as context-aware, stems from the idea that in order to build large-scale ubiquitous systems, individual devices must be aware of their environment (e.g. where they are, what is happening, where something is happening). Based on such information, applications and devices can make decisions proactively. Sounds provide countless contextual information. Imagine what it would be like if devices could process perceive their surroundings by sound. Your cars could tell whether you are passing by a highway or crowded street, or forest surrounded by birds chirping, and change driving mode accordingly. Security cameras catch violent noise and spot a crime. Smart lamps knows you fell asleep and turn off the light. Autonomous car, smart city, home automation and healthcare — expansion of context-aware sound applications could be exponential. With the speed of the research advancement in the field, context-aware sound applications will boom in the very near future. So let’s tune in and see what’s coming!

https://medium.com/cochl/amazon-google-and-apple-recently-enabled-their-products-to-listen-for-these-3-reasons-ac676b9b9836

['Suyoung Lee']

2020-12-04 08:23:21.867000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Google', 'Apple', 'Amazon']

5 ways to hack your workspace

ew things affect our productivity as much as what we surround ourselves with. Yet most of us rarely take the time to step back and really analyze our working environment. Instead, we take a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to where we work. We go to the same office, the same coffee shop, the same co-working space and try to force ourselves into a productive flow. Since going remote a year and a half ago while working at Crew I’ve fallen into this mindset more times than I’d like to admit. So I started to ask: If we’re going to spend so much of our lives working, why not try to make the place we work the best it possibly can be? Whether you’re at home, in a shared space, or hanging out a coffee shop there are quick and easy fixes to help make your work space work for you. Why our environment matters (even when we don’t notice) You may think that you’ve got a good set up, but read into the ways that our surroundings affect us on a subconscious level and you’ll start to feel pretty uneasy about your environment. Studies have shown how our working habits, both good and bad, are often related to some sort of external trigger or cue, which researchers are increasingly tying to our surroundings. We visit the same places, work at the same desk, and are constantly surrounded by the same influencing factors. Which is great, right? Find a good working environment and you’ll be forced into a state of flow. But unfortunately, like most things to do with how our brains work, there’s so much more beneath the surface. As we evolved, our subconscious brain has been trained to keep us safe, even when we don’t realize it. When we’re under threat we need to make decisions quickly, which our brain does through something called ‘thin slicing’. This means it takes one small element of reality and generalizes it, and from that it will determine what behavior to adopt. So those triggers and cues in your workspace aren’t just affecting you in a way you can consciously comprehend, they’re changing the way your subconscious brain thinks and acts. Don’t believe me? Here’s some studies that show just how ridiculously powerful our environment is in changing the way we think and act: Students holding a hot cup of coffee for a few seconds before being asked to judge a hypothetical person, were more likely to describe them as warm and friendly than those holding an iced coffee People will behave more competitively if there’s a briefcase in sight — or even if there’s a picture of a briefcase on the wall. And this happens even when people have no conscious memory of having seen the briefcase afterwards. If you talk to someone who consistently uses words like down, depressed, low, pointless, and disappointed you’re likely to feel the same way Even the subtle aroma of cleaning liquid in the air causes people to be perceptibly cleaner and tidier than usual So how do we create an environment that’s optimal for making us feel the way we want to during the working day: motivated, productive, and creative? Kill the clutter before it kills you There is a long history of creatives and thinkers with cluttered desks. As Albert Einstein once so eloquently put it: “If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” However, whether it’s your closet or office desk, excess things in your surroundings can have a negative impact on your ability to focus and process information. That’s exactly what neuroscientists at Princeton University found when they looked at people’s task performance in an organized versus disorganized environment. The results of the study showed that physical clutter in your surroundings competes for your attention, resulting in decreased performance and increased stress. A team of UCLA researchers recently observed 32 Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Similar to what multitasking does to your brain, physical clutter overloads your senses, making you feel stressed, and impairs your ability to think creatively. However, it’s not as easy as just getting rid of the excess things in your life. We don’t create clutter simply through laziness or being unorganized, it literally hurts your brain to give them up. Researchers at Yale recently identified that two areas in your brain associated with pain, the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, light up in response to letting go of items you own and feel a connection towards: This is the same area of the brain that lights up when you feel physical pain from a paper cut or drinking coffee that’s too hot. Your brain views the loss of one of your valued possessions the same as something that causes you physical pain. So what do we do to reduce the stress of clutter? Apply constraints: Whether that’s Twitter followers, tabs open in your browser, notebooks, or magazines, setting hard limitations and sticking to them is the best way to stop accumulating more. Whether that’s Twitter followers, tabs open in your browser, notebooks, or magazines, setting hard limitations and sticking to them is the best way to stop accumulating more. Use small storage spaces: Parkinson’s Law says we fill the time we have available to us, and the same could be said about clutter. Less room means less room for clutter. Parkinson’s Law says we fill the time we have available to us, and the same could be said about clutter. Less room means less room for clutter. Conduct a monthly review of your space: Set time aside to clean, sort, and discard every single month. Set time aside to clean, sort, and discard every single month. Set up a daily cleanse routine: Crew CEO Mikael suggests cleaning your desktop at the end of every workday so to-do items don’t linger and you’ve got a clean slate to start with the next day Find places that inspire you There’s a reason we feel inspired by large spaces or refreshed from sitting by the window. Apart from a heavy dose of Vitamin D, architecture can have a huge impact on our productivity. Author James Clear gives the example of researcher Jonas Salk, who, after spending years trying to discover the cure for the polio epidemic ravaging the US in the 50s, travelled to the quiet hills of central Italy where he stayed at a 13th-century Franciscan monastery known as the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi. The space changed the way he thought: “The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past. Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.” Jonas’ example is just one of many. It’s been long known that schools with more natural light provide a better learning environment for students and test scores often go up as a result. And natural light and fresh air are known to stimulate productivity in the workplace as well. You might not be in a position to choose your workspace, but there are quick fixes: look for a spot with natural light from a window or skylight; take a walk outside when you feel stuck; or simply explore a new location. A new environment can quite literally lead to new ideas. And what’s even more exciting is that studies have shown it’s actually easier to build new habits in new places. Use different places for different places of mind We know that different locations will affect us, so why not use that to our advantage? Our brains love habits, and if we can associate certain qualities with different places, it can help us get into a better working flow. This is called ‘task association’, where your brain knows that when you’re in a certain place, you’re taking a certain action. Writer Gregory Ciotti gives one great example of how he forces himself into a better working flow just by changing the device he’s using. In his example, he’s trained his brain to know that when he’s at his desktop it’s time for deep writing like articles. The laptop is for more shallow work like emails or informal posts. And lastly, the tablet is for reading only. This technique is so powerful it’s even been used to help treat people with insomnia by telling them to only go into their bedroom if they’re actually tired. If sleep isn’t achieved in a reasonable amount of time, they were instructed to leave and move onto another task until they were tired again. If you can set up multiple workspaces for different tasks you’ll also be able to force your mind into a certain flow, just by physically being somewhere. A great example of this is writer and artist Austin Kleon who keeps two desks setup in his space: an ‘analog’ desk filled with paper, pens, and markers; and a ‘digital’ desk with laptop and tablet. Idea creation and ‘playing’ takes place on only the analog desk, while shaping, editing, and publishing is in the digital domain. Set yourself up for success We may think we have the willpower and control to push through harder tasks, but deep down we’re all lazy. But it’s not entirely our fault. Our brains have been taught to conserve energy at all costs and make subconscious decisions for us based entirely on how hard or easy it is. So if you want to create a workspace that’s productive, focus on making it easier to do the things you want to do, and harder to do the tasks you don’t. Stanford professor and psychologist BJ Fogg calls this ‘designing for laziness’. Sometimes it’s as easy as turning your phone off and putting it in a drawer so every time you’re tempted to check it you have to go through a lengthy process, while other times it might mean unplugging your TV and putting it in the closet. One technique I’ve used lately is to close all of my tabs in my browser at the end of the day (a hellish chore for any writer), leaving only my most important task open. The next day, the easiest choice is just to keep working on whatever was left from the day before. I’m certainly not the first person to use this technique. Even Hemingway used to stop writing mid-sentence so that he always knew where to pick up the next day. Curate your senses Beyond the physical layout and mental associations of your space, there are some auxiliary things you can also control. The sounds around you and the music you listen to can have a huge impact on your productivity. We’ve written about the power of music and how to find the right track for the right task before, but it’s important to note that certain sounds can be incredibly harmful to how you work. Studies show that of all things, intermittent speech — hearing small snippets of conversation — can have an incredibly negative impact on your ability to concentrate. One meta-analysis examined 242 studies of the ways noise affects performance, and found that when it came to performing cognitive tasks — like staying attentive, reading and processing text, and working with numbers — performance was more affected by intermittent speech than by either continuous speech (which would have little variation in volume and rhythm) or non-speech noise. Bad news for those of us in shared spaces or offices. There are options though. If you can’t find a spot that’s silent, noise cancelling headphones or music that drowns out speech can help regain that focus.

https://medium.com/swlh/5-ways-to-hack-your-workspace-c75bac5b0269

['Jory Mackay']

2017-11-23 23:23:54.093000+00:00

['Remote Working', 'Productivity', 'Psychology', 'Startup', 'Creativity']

You Should Be Writing

So many of the questions that these writers have can be resolved with this simple two step process: Read a lot of things. Going off what you’ve read, write. How do you format a novel? Read a novel, and follow the formatting that they use. Do you use paragraph breaks whenever a new character starts speaking? Crack open all of the books around you, and see how many of them do that. Chances are, most of them do. So it’s a pretty good idea. How do you write a good starship captain? Go to Netflix, start watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and start writing. Okay, that one was kind of facetious. (Not really. Picard is the best.) But still, you go out and, throughout your life, you observe things. You read books that are formatted correctly. You read novels and watch movies and TV shows with tingly, tense scenes. You watch all of the starship captains and you decide which ones are good (Jean Luc Picard and Kathryn Janeway) and you make your captain have some of their traits, and some traits from people that you admire, and you have them respond to the stresses of your story and you watch them play. You write. And, probably, write poorly. But then you read more and watch more, and learn more. You grow as a human being. Maybe you take some writing classes. Maybe you get some help from a published writer, who’ll leave helpful notes, like this actual note I got from actual author Heather Petty, on my first novel: But none of that happens until you actually write the damn thing. So you put the Quora away. You swallow back the worst of your questions — no matter how hard it is. No matter how much you want to do it right on the first time. That’s right. You procrastinate on those questions. You kick them down the line. You stop worrying about it. And I know that’s not an easy or passive thing. You have to continually stop worrying about it. You have to stop going back and revising and trying to make it perfect. You try to get it done. You write.

https://medium.com/swlh/you-should-be-writing-70e8a3929a0d

['Zach J. Payne']

2019-06-09 07:50:48.252000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Storytelling', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing']

Increase Your Reach by Differentiating Your Images from the Crowd

When it comes to images, using them throughout your blog posts can improve their overall look and performance. Here are five major benefits why you should be adding images to your blog posts. 1. Posts with visuals are more appealing A picture is the best way to create a positive first impression of your post. When your post is visually dull and lacks emotions, a lot of visitors will just leave your website without reading a word. Visually attractive posts have more chances to create an emotional connection with readers. They look friendlier and more inviting to take action. When you add images to your blog posts, you help create a “story” for that part of the blog. Visually appealing images keep your reader scrolling, and, as mentioned above, people are more likely to retain more information. The right image can convey a strong message to a reader: a picture can be worth 1,000 words. 2. Blogs with images get shared more on social media Social media marketing is a vital part of spreading awareness about your content and increasing traffic to your business blog and website as a whole. When it comes to shared blogs on social media, articles that contain images actually get shared more, which can help drive more traffic to your site. Statistics from Search Engine Journal reveal that: Blog articles containing images receive 94% more views. Tweets containing images are retweeted 150% more. Facebook posts with images receive three times more engagement. 3. Another valuable skill to promote When the number of bloggers keep growing so quickly, you need something that could make you more skilled than others. You can actually learn to do some simple designing tasks and your blog could become a good place to practice. Create some custom illustrations for your posts and build a portfolio of your artwork samples. Your readers might sooner or later notice that you create images yourself and they might eventually recognize you as a higher-profile blogger with some hands-on designing experience. If you are selling blogging services, your customers would really appreciate hiring someone who is capable of creating custom images for them in addition to just writing. 4. Images break up text into digestible chunks In the same way people use paragraphs to separate points and make it easier for the reader to digest, people use images to separate points and make the text easier to understand. When they are presented with a wall of text, the first thing they’ll do is try and find another source. Even if your wall of text isn’t as long as other people’s content if it looks too difficult to read, they’re not going to bother. Think about the two blog posts. Even though the actual content is the same, the one with the images is infinitely easier to read and comprehend. 5. Images can help boost your SEO Blog posts with appropriate images perform better in search engines. One more hidden SEO benefit of images is that you can add alt text to them right in your content management system. By following keyword best practices and adding your primary keywords to your alt text, you can boost your SEO. While readers aren’t able to see the alt text you add to each image, search engines continuously crawl all the text within your blog article — including alt text. It is a good way to populate your post with some relevant keywords that give it more chances to be seen. Make sure you compress and resize images to optimize them for search engines and faster loading.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/increase-your-reach-by-differentiating-your-images-from-the-crowd-d12d16c4fddc

['Esat Artug']

2020-12-08 21:48:59.493000+00:00

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

5 Important Reasons Why You Still Need a Personal Website

Setting up a website is considered necessary for a variety of reasons. Every day, more than 547,000 new websites are created. Most of these are business and service-related, whether for rolling out a new startup, publishing a professional blog, setting up an online store, or even to introduce a non-profit organization. But what about creating a personal website? There are numerous benefits to setting up a personal website. In fact, creating one is considered a necessity for many categories of people, including entrepreneurs, professionals in digital, media, entertainment, and creative fields, and even hobbyists. Yet, many decline to claim their personal space on the web. Often, it is not as a result of lacking the expertise. After all, these days, there are many ways to create a website without having to know a single thing about website development. The issue is more about seeing the value in setting up a personal website. For example, many people think being on social media is sufficient. Having accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. does connect you with the rest of the world. But the truth is, most people still search for stuff on Google, which is where having your own website truly becomes important. Not convinced? Here are five reasons why it is still absolutely necessary.

https://medium.com/digital-marketing-lab/5-important-reasons-why-you-still-need-a-personal-website-d0fba1f51911

['Casey Botticello']

2020-12-24 21:12:19.617000+00:00

['Design', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Social Media', 'Productivity', 'Creativity']

How to Make a Sticky Connection With Your Biggest Fans

We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. — Malcolm Gladwell First impressions matter, of course. That’s why you’ll find all kinds of advice about how to put your best foot forward as a writer. How to make your work look its best. How to properly format it for whoever you’re sending it to, and for your readers. But what comes next? First impressions, like Malcolm Gladwell said, might be fragile. But I think it’s worse than that. I think they’re often either transparent or slick. Either readers don’t remember their first impression of us or they’re drawn in by something, but the surface of the impression is too slippery to stick to them if it’s challenged later. The best we can hope for on first impression is that they’ll come back. Read a little more. Or maybe just think about us again, when a friend needs a book to read. Remember us when they see our name again. It’s the second impression — the chance we get when someone comes back for a second look — that matters most. It’s our opportunity to make a sticky connection with them. One that will make them remember us. How we manage those followers who actually become fans is so important. I had this experience once. There’s an author I really admire. I read his newsletter. I own all of his books. I’ve bought every single thing he’s ever tried to sell me. And I’ve hand sold his stuff all over creation. My first impression of him was lovely. Shiny and slick. I was going to be in his city a couple of years ago and we’re colleagues enough that I decided to email and introduced myself. I told him I’d love to buy him coffee. He wrote back, several days later and said that he was sorry, but he’d have to decline. Okay. He was under no obligation to meet me. His reply was polite. First impression intact. One day, several months later, I checked my Amazon affiliate links and realized that I’d hand sold more than 100 copies of his books that month. I wrote him again and told him that awesome news, showed him proof, and said that since my audience obviously loves him, I’d love to interview him. Could I send him a few questions via email that he could answer at his leisure? He wrote back, several days later and said that he was sorry, but he’d have to decline. The exact same email. Still polite, but now obviously a cut and paste, since I had two of them. Now, intellectually, I don’t expect everyone (or anyone) to do what I want or I’m going to hate them forever. He’s a busy, famous dude. He gets to say no, period. But I’m human and I can’t help that the tarnish is off the shine of that first impression. That’s just the breaks. I started out feeling like this man’s work was mine, in a small way, because I loved it so much. I had a connection to it that made me excited to spread the news about it. I shared it with people who trust me to send them to cool stuff, because it was sort of like sharing something of mine. I still appreciate his work, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine at all anymore. I was a kind of cosmic-level fan. Pat Flynn calls that a superfan. My second impression of this author wasn’t very sticky. I fact, my first impression was stickier. These days I’m more of a regular fan. Here’s another experience. I signed up for a program that I was excited about starting. It was an innovative kind of mastermind community that I’d never really heard of before. I’d been to a conference put on by the guys running the program and I was jazzed to be part of it. My first impression, again, was pretty. Nice and shiny and slick. The first couple of days were rocky. The program’s owner had a thing about Facebook. He didn’t like it. At all. But in the lead up the program starting, he’d started a temporary Facebook group for people to start to get to know each other and it was really active and exciting. But then he pulled the plug on it — deleted it completely — and moved to a forum on his own site. The forum was far less interactive and more slow paced. It was a complete dud. So, first impression was spotty at best. But then I got an email from one of the guys who was running the program. In it was a one-minute welcome video where the man addressed me by name, talked specifically about why he was happy that I’d joined his program and what he thought I’d get out of it and how much he was looking forward to what I could bring to it. One little video and suddenly I felt connected to the program again. I was willing to wait through the growing pains with the forum, at least for a little while. That forum, btw, was the program’s ultimate undoing I think. The momentum that started on Facebook never reignited. At least it didn’t for me. But, because the person who’d developed the program took the time to make a good second impression on me, when he had something else to offer years later, I was excited to take a look. My second impression here was sticky. Even though the first thing I did with them didn’t work out, they’d made a fan. It’s the same for all kinds of marketing. Even for writers. We have the chance to make a first impression, of course. We put our work out there. People read it and they enjoy it or they don’t. They share it or they don’t. They tell their friends about it or they don’t. We put our best foot forward and aim for those good, shiny first impressions. But it’s the second impression that matters even more. The second impression is what’s really at the heart of marketing for writers. Those readers who are intrigued enough to come back or to reach out for a little more — they want to be inspired. They want a sticky experience. If you give them a chance, they’ll become your fan. Most of your readers won’t give you the chance to have a sticky second-impression interaction with them. That’s okay. It’s the way the game is played. Most will read and move on, and you’ll never really know they were there beyond some statistic maybe. If you think of your readers arranged in a pyramid, casual readers who only read something if they happen to come across it are at the bottom. A nice, sturdy base. But some will seek you out on social media. Or they’ll join your email list. Or they’ll look for your next book. They’ll talk to a friend about what they read. They’ll ask a question. There’s this advice about social media that says that you shouldn’t follow as many people as follow you. That you need, I suppose, to give the impression that you’re popular. But I always remember that when my older daughter was in middle school and Twitter was a bright new thing, her favorite author followed her. Meg Cabot (or probably her assistant) followed my kid and she was over the moon. And you know what? She still loves Meg Cabot. And you know what else? I still love Meg Cabot. She made my daughter a reader on a whole other level. That one little follow garnered her two deeper connections with readers than she would have otherwise had. That was long before I had any published books, but I realized then that I wanted to make people feel the way Meg Cabot made my daughter feel that day. So, what does it all mean? I think it means, for writers, that you can read all the advice and strategy guides and tip listicles there are — and none if it will really matter if you’re not making a connection. You don’t necessarily need to make a personal, one-on-one connection with every reader. I mean, you’re only one person. But you can remember that your readers are people who have chosen to spend their free time with you. You can throw away the adages about how many people you should follow. You can pay attention to your readers, so that your work becomes a conversation with them, instead of you pontificating and getting upset when no one listens. When I think about sticky novelists, I think about Meg Cabot following my kid on Twitter. And Chuck Palahniuk teaching me about thought verbs. And Stephen King’s letters to his Constant Readers. I think about Ellen Hopkins traveling all year long to schools to meet her young readers. I also think about Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler and Judy Blume and a hundred other authors who told stories that invited me in. And that’s harder to do, of course. Way harder than following someone on Twitter. But it’s what I meant about being in conversation with your reader. It wasn’t the first impression that mattered to me the most for any of those writers. I don’t remember which Judy Blume book I read first. Freckle Juice, maybe. But I will never forget reading Tiger Eyes when it was brand new in 1981. It was the first time I ever read anything that made me think — oh, my god, this author knows me. I was ten years old. I’ve bought all of Blume’s books for my children. I’ve shared them with young friends my entire adult life. My daughters and I stood in line for hours to meet her at a book event and it was worth every minute. She made a sticky impression on me in the sixth grade.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-make-a-sticky-connection-with-your-biggest-fans-47126c3c56dc

['Shaunta Grimes']

2019-09-24 18:54:46.456000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Writing', 'Fiction', 'Productivity', 'Marketing']

The Innovation Submission and Design Guide

2. Formatting Medium has published a great guide on how to format your title. At The Innovation, the sequence of the three first element the reader sees when opening your article is this: (1) Title, (2) Subtitle, (3) Cover Image Please keep them in the right order. Here is an example of the right sequence of title, subtitle, and cover image we’re looking for: Image by Author Title Only the first line of the story is considered the title. Select the text and click the large “T” icon to format the title. Capitalize your title, meaning minor words are typed in lower case with all major words being capitalized. You can use Title Case Converter to adjust titles. Write quality headlines. Here are some tips from Medium: Be specific. Don’t leave the reader to guess what your piece is about. Don’t leave the reader to guess what your piece is about. Spark interest. Engage the reader’s interest by highlighting what’s unique about your piece. Engage the reader’s interest by highlighting what’s unique about your piece. Be clear. Avoid confusing terms, general statements, or “insider” jargon. Avoid confusing terms, general statements, or “insider” jargon. Be clean. Watch out for typos in your headlines and please don’t use profanity. Watch out for typos in your headlines and please don’t use profanity. Go for reads, not clicks. Steer clear of clickbait headlines — tropes like “one weird thing” or using “this/that” to get the reader to click. Make sure your story backs up the claim in the headline. Steer clear of clickbait headlines — tropes like “one weird thing” or using “this/that” to get the reader to click. Make sure your story backs up the claim in the headline. Bigger is not better. Make sure the caps lock is off. No all-caps titles. Here are a few great headline examples: How To Become Ridiculously Self-Aware In 20 Minutes How to Figure Out What the Hell You Want to Do With Your Life 9 Business Lessons I Learned Making $100,000 Online in the Past 3 Years My Powerful 1-Hour Routine for Quick Success on Medium Elon Musk Wants You To Merge With Your Technology Here are a few not-so-great headlines: On Headlines Mom To Be a Perfect Person, Do This One Simple Thing Subtitle Writing directly below the title is considered the subtitle. Select the text and click the small “T” icon to format the subtitle. For your subtitle, use normal sentence case: Only capitalize the first word and any proper nouns Here is an example of a title and subtitle format we’re looking for: Image by Author Please do NOT include a link in the title and subtitle Please do NOT write your title and subtitle with all capital letters Submissions must have a clear and descriptive title and subtitle — they’re the first thing a user sees when viewing a story. Please keep your title, subtitle, and cover image in the right order You can use Title Case Converter to adjust titles and subtitles Note: Changing a title or subtitle in the content of an article does not ensure it updates the SEO title and description. Be sure to update in both places. This article helps clarify Medium’s SEO options and settings. Cover images In The Innovation, all stories have a cover image that follows the title and subtitle. Always include a high-resolution image at the top of a story under your headline. This has the following benefits: When people share your story on social media, it will be more prominent in news feeds, making people more likely to click on it. It will look better in Medium’s own news feeds. Humans are visual creatures and click on images. All images should be as wide as the text body of your article and ideally offer bigger sizes when you click on them in the editor — However, If you have a chart that is hard to read when it’s small, go bigger Don’t use the widescreen or expanded formatting for images — keep them all in body-width, as shown in the example: Image by Author Technically as a writer, you are liable for copyright infringement, and Medium is not. The simplest way to attribute an image is to put the words “Image credit” below an image and link this text to its original source. When you use an image, make sure you have the right to use it. If you are using an image you don’t have the rights to, that’s a copyright violation and disqualifies your story from curation. All images in your article must show proper attribution to their respective source. Here is an example: Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash Please credit all images properly as “Photo by,” “Image via” or otherwise doesn’t matter as much as naming the actual source of the image and linking to it. Whenever you’re using your own pictures, simply add “Image by Author, Picture by Author, Image Courtesy of the Author, or Screenshot by Author” as the caption. If you’re looking for images you can safely use without permission, check out Pexels, Unsplash, or search Google for images labeled for Creative Commons licenses. Please make sure you actually have permission to use the image have permission to use the image Stick with a simple, relevant image that relates to the main message or core theme of your post. Section headings When possible, submissions should be split into well-organized sections using correctly formatted section headings. In every post, you should only have one “Heading 1,″ your post title. Use “Heading 2” for the main subheadings that support the title of your post. If you use “Heading 3,” those subheadings should support the “Heading 2” topics they’re under. Here’s an outline for properly formatted headings: Image by Author Creating lists Bullet Points — To begin a bulleted list, go to a new line, type in a dash (-) or asterisk (*), and press Space. Next, you start typing your first item. Once you hit Enter on your keyboard, the list will be reformatted for you automatically. Numbered List — To begin a numbered list, go to a new line, type in 1. (numeral one, period), and press the space bar on your keyboard. The list will automatically add subsequent numbers when you hit Enter on the keyboard. Mentioning Medium users Type “@” and then the name of the person you want to mention. Mentioning someone will link to their profile and send them a notification when you publish. Image alt text This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website. Whether or not you perform SEO for your Medium articles, optimizing your article’s image alt text is your ticket to creating a better user experience for your visitors, no matter how they first found you. How to Add Alt Text to Your Medium Article Images: For an existing article, click the “edit story” tab in the upper right-hand corner. Click on the image you wish to add alt text to. Click on the “Alt-text” button. Write a brief description of this image for readers with visual impairments or to optimize SEO. Click the “save” button and you are done. Set image focal point You can set a focal point on your image to crop your images better for social media thumbnails and preview images on Medium. How to Set a Focal Point on Your Featured Image:

https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-innovation-submission-guide-705b0543506f

['Esat Artug']

2020-12-11 09:18:50.520000+00:00

['Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Sustainability', 'Creativity', 'Design']

What Cycling Across Canada Taught Me About Starting a Writing Business

I biked across Canada in the summer of 2017. I had just finished my master’s degree, which was a very challenging experience — and not really in a good way. As I was finishing my thesis, I decided I needed to do something to recover. I wanted to do something difficult, but I didn’t want to think too hard. I didn’t want to rely on other people for my success. I wanted to get out of my head and into my body. So I bought a bike and started pedalling. Between June and September, I cycled 7,400 kilometres (about 4,600 miles) from Victoria, British Columbia to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Then, a few years ago, I started a freelance writing business. Riding 7,400 kilometres across the country seems like a very different endeavour than creating a business, but a lot of the things I learned from my bike tour have actually helped me with both my writing and figuring out how to create a business from scratch. Here are a few of those things. Your Best Ideas Come When You’re Moving Photos by the author. Left: Thunder Bay, Ontario. Middle: A highway rest stop, Alberta. Right: The Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia. The two months I spent on that bike were the most creative two months I’ve ever had. It was a free flow, idea after idea, for five hours a day. There’s lots of research to support the idea that exercising helps us be more creative. But I didn’t realize how powerful the effect of exercise really was. As soon as I was on the bike, I found myself solving problems, making connections, and generating ideas. I use this as a practice all the time now with my writing. When I’m stuck with something, I go for a walk, go to the gym, or even do housework. (I actually had the idea for this article while I was washing dishes.) It’s productive and it helps ignite creativity. Keep a Journal (Even When You’re Tired) Your best ideas may come when you’re exercising, but they will also disappear if you don’t capture them. I learned about disappearing ideas the hard way. Everyone asked me if I was keeping a blog for my trip. I sort of did, but I was very haphazard about it. Now that I write blogs for a living, I’m kicking myself for not taking it more seriously. I took notes occasionally, but not nearly as many as I should have. After cycling all day, setting up camp, making dinner, and washing my shorts, I just wanted to lie down. I felt too tired and told myself I would do it tomorrow. But then, I would be busy in the mornings making breakfast, packing up, and trying to get an early start. And then I biked all day. There never seemed to be time. I forgot most of those ideas that I had while I was biking. When I look back, I see that I wasted so much of the creative opportunity that I had simply by not taking notes. So the lesson for me was to journal regularly. Now I keep a journal by my bed and a file in the notes app on my phone for random ideas. I also have a proper journal where I usually try to write an anecdote or two about my day. And I’m disciplined about it — even when I’m tired, I try to write at least one short story. The five minutes I spend jotting down my ideas will absolutely be worth it later. Some Tools are Essential —and Some Aren’t Photos by the author. Left: Lake Louise, Alberta. Right: Vancouver, British Columbia. There’s a whole culture around biking equipment. When I started, I had no idea what was important and what wasn’t. People give different advice: Some say disc brakes are essential because they stop the fastest; others say you want V-breaks because they can be fixed anywhere. Some people say you need to have front panniers to balance the weight on your bike properly; others say they make your bike too heavy. Virtually everyone will tell you that you need cycling shorts. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I opted for a minimalist version of all that. I used V-breaks because that’s what the bike I bought off Craigslist had. I didn’t buy front panniers; I just packed everything on the back and held it on with bungee cords. I wore regular basketball shorts. Over time, I learned what was essential and what wasn’t. V-brakes are fine, as long as they work — but make sure they work. You don’t need front panniers, you just have to be okay with less stuff. But it turns out those sleek cycling shorts aren’t just for making your butt look great — they are actually designed to prevent saddle sores. (Ask me how I know.) They’re essential. The lesson I took from my experience with biking gear was to find a basic system that worked and then to focus on cycling. Tweak as needed. I’ve applied this strategy to my writing business, as well. There are lots of people selling courses or giving advice on how to cold call potential clients, how to write blog posts that rank on Google, whether you need a website, and which grammar app you should use. I still don’t have a lot of money, so I applied the same strategy that I did with biking: Start with something basic, focus on writing, and then adapt. I’ve been fine without expensive online courses, but a couple of SEO courses on Coursera were really useful. A website was essential. The free version of Grammarly is fine for me. Find a system that works for you and then focus on writing. Tweak as needed. Talk to Strangers They’re so helpful. Strangers gave me information about the best bike routes, the best places to camp, and how to avoid bears. They gave me food and water. They gave me places to sleep. At a beautiful beach in Marathon, Ontario, this lady from New York and her Aussie boyfriend made me a meal on a fire and then left me with a bag of Chaga mushrooms. At a Tim Hortons in New Brunswick, a stranger came up and gave me $50 (he felt sorry for me). This lovely couple on Prince Edward Island made me and this other guy a full lobster dinner. At a lighthouse on the Cabot Trail, Moe and Elaine from Massachusetts invited me to stay on the extra bed in their trailer. Cycling taught me that most people, most of the time, are really great. They will help you. Writing is the same. It was only relatively recently that I decided to try to connect with other writers. I started with Reddit and I’m still getting into Medium, but in both places I’ve found other writers to be really useful. Writers have great advice. They share connections. They pass on leads. Joining a writing community has been highly beneficial for me. Cycling is a solo sport, and yet it’s way easier with support. Writing is the same: You do it alone, but it’s somehow still way easier when you have a community around you. Most of It Is Grunt Work Photos by the author. Left: Schreiber, Ontario. Middle: Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Right: Morley, Alberta. Cycling a really long way seems like it would be hard. But it isn’t really. To successfully cycle a really long way, you just have to consistently get on the bike and pedal. You do that over and over and over and, eventually, you’ll find that you have gone a really long way. The cycling part is easy. But it’s an endurance sport — the hard part is doing it for a long time, over and over. Writing is a lot harder than cycling. You can do it badly. (You can’t really do cycling badly.) So it’s not quite the same. But here’s what they have in common: The trick to being successful is just doing it. You get on the computer, and you type for a long time, and when you do that enough, you find that you have written something. It’s not glamorous or magical; it’s grunt work. Writing, like cycling, is an endurance sport. You Are What You Do There’s a strange kind of identity that comes with cycling. I never really thought of myself as an athlete, and certainly not as a cyclist. I’d never done much cycling at all, except as a way to get to school or work. I knew nothing about bikes themselves, the equipment, or cycling culture. (The first time someone asked me what kind of bike I had, my answer was, “a black one.”) But once you’re on the bike, you’re a cyclist. It’s the same for writing. If you are making money from writing — any money at all — you’re a writer. It helps to remember that when you’re finding it difficult and you feel a bit like an imposter. Like somehow you’re not a real writer. Have you written something? Did you make money from it? Then you are a writer. Don’t worry about whether you’re a real writer. You are. Just worry about the writing. Someone Is Always Better Than You Photos by the author. Left: Emerald Lake, Alberta. Right: The Confederation Bridge, New Brunswick. Everyone who saw the bundle of gear attached to my bike asked me where I was going. And it seemed like each of them knew someone who had biked across Canada better than me. One person knew someone who did it in 50 days, which was 30 days faster than me. Someone prepared for a whole year before they did it. One couple didn’t prepare at all; they just bought a bike spur-of-the-moment while they were on vacation and started without a backwards glance. Another person knew someone who rode 400 kilometres in one day, in a storm with the wind at their back. Someone spent almost nothing on the trip. Someone else had no gear; he just carried a credit card and stayed in hotels. Some people I met were doing this for their second or third or 12th time. Virtually everyone knew more about bikes, the geography, the route, or the weather than me. There was always someone doing it better. But in the end, I still got there just like they did. Writing is the same. It seems like everyone is publishing articles about how they made six figures in their first year, or how to write a $500 article in 40 minutes. (Speaking of which, congratulations on $11,000 in 30 days, Tim!) There are lots of writers (the majority of them, probably) who are funnier, smarter, and more interesting than me. Lots of people have written more. Lots of people publish in fancy places. They’re doing it better. But I am writing for a living. I am certainly not making six figures, but I’m sustainable and paying off my student loans. I’m getting there. The lesson is not to worry about whether you’re the best. You’re not. But you’re good enough. Keep pedalling. You Make Your Own Journey I met lots of people on the same journey as me. There was the new doctor on his sprint bike eating nothing but power bars. There was Mike, an ex tech CEO with his sturdy bike packed with 200 pounds of gear, slowly trudging away using peanut M&Ms for fuel. There was the vegetarian cyclist couple who were 17 years old and doing 250 kilometres a day, but who had one of their dads following behind them, carrying their camping gear in his truck. There was the 88-year-old woman doing it for the 12th time. There was Grace, the pole dancer, who mostly rode but sometimes hitchhiked (“Whatever. It’s my trip.”) and who determined her route in part based on Tragically Hip songs. Each of these people had their own style and were on their own journey. Each one succeeded. This can also be applied to writing. I’ve known people who were on many different journeys: Some became content writers after a career in journalism; others started writing after they quit their sales career. I have a friend who was a musician before specializing in product descriptions. My background was in academia and government where I wrote about research and its implications for policy. People can help and give you advice, but each person’s writing journey is different. It’s a bit scary, but it’s empowering, too. Do your own thing. Just Get Started Photos by the author. Left: Osoyoos, British Columbia. Middle: St. Johns, Newfoundland. Right: Slocan Lake, British Columbia. One of the most common questions I got leading up to the trip was what I was doing to prepare for it. I told people I was riding a lot, but actually I wasn’t. I rode the stationary bike at the gym for 20 minutes. I did that three times, total. That’s it. The truth is that I didn’t really prepare at all. I had read a blog post (thank you affiliate marketing!) that said that the best way to prepare to cycle long distances was simply to cycle long distances. You could train as you go. Just don’t go too hard too fast and you’d be fine. That was my strategy. The first couple of weeks were difficult, but I got through them. And then it was easier. To be fair, the first couple of weeks also had three mountain ranges, one of which was the Rockies… So. The point is that the most important thing was to just start. I’ve found that a writing business is the same. You can learn it as you go. Sure, it helps if you have some experience writing professionally and some knowledge of grammar rules. There are probably things you can do to prepare for starting a business — getting a legit website set up, doing some research, picking a niche, building a network. Maybe taking one of the many expensive courses that are out there. But really, the idea that you need to be “qualified” to be a writer is a myth. You can learn to write as you’re writing. You just need to get started. There’s No “Right” Way to Success At first glance, cycling across Canada doesn’t appear to have a lot in common with starting a business. But here’s what they share: They are both big undertakings that can feel impossible at the start. And there are different ways to actually do them. Lots of expert writers will give you specific tools, tips, and tricks that can help you write professionally or start a business. That can be helpful. But what I learned from my trip, and what I’ve applied to my writing business, is that there are lots of “right” ways to be successful. Use other people’s advice, sure, but don’t get overwhelmed trying to be a writer the right way. You can do it your way. You’ve got what it takes. Take the guidance that’s useful to you, leave what isn’t. Try things out, experiment. And then work really hard at writing. After a while, you’ll get there.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/what-cycling-across-canada-taught-me-about-writing-c8f67458a097

['Ramsay Lewis']

2020-09-06 20:01:01.327000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Inspiration', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Startup']

Optimizing Kafka for the cloud

By Ambud Sharma | Software Engineer, Logging team Takeaways Developing locality aware systems and balancing algorithms can help substantially reduce cost Making Kafka Producer and Consumer rack aware helps efficiently route traffic Data-driven engineering decision making is critical to continuously improve systems One of the fundamental principles when operating in the cloud is to ensure applications safeguard against outages. A common way to achieve this is to spread an application’s deployment across multiple failure domains. In a public cloud environment, Availability Zone (AZ) can serve as a failure domain. We can use multiple AZs to provide fault tolerance for an application. Distributed systems like HDFS are traditionally made rack aware to improve fault tolerance by spreading replicas across multiple racks within a datacenter. However, using AZs as rack information is a common practice when running in cloud environments. This enables spreading data copies across multiple AZs, thereby providing fault tolerance in case one fails. While replicating data across AZs provides fault tolerance, it does come at a premium in form of AZ transfer costs. At Pinterest, we use Kafka extensively as a scalable, fault tolerant distributed message bus to power several key services like user action counting and change data capture (CDC). Since we have Kafka running at a very large scale, we need to be mindful of AZ transfer costs and run as efficiently as possible, and so we focused on reducing the amount of data transferred across AZ. When a Kafka cluster has brokers spread across multiple AZs, it results in three types of cross AZ network traffic: Inter-broker replication traffic Traffic from Producers in different AZs Traffic from Consumers in different AZs Out of the above traffic types we need 1 for fault tolerance. However, 2 and 3 are unwanted side effects that cause additional cost which, in theory, can be eliminated. Design There are two potential ways to solve this problem. Approach 1 We can make our Producers and Consumers write/read data only for partitions whose leaders share the same AZ to make them more cost efficient. Approach 2 Alternatively we could deploy AZ specific Kafka clusters, but in order to achieve this any other real-time consumers would need to make their business logic AZ aware. In the interest of simplicity, we chose to go with Approach 1 since it minimized code and stack changes. Producer / Consumer AZ awareness can be achieved by looking up the rack information for the leader broker of the partition we are trying to read/write to, and change the partitioning logic for producers and assignments for consumer. In Kafka, the broker’s rack information is part of the PartitionInfo metadata object that is shared with Kafka clients (both consumers and producers). Therefore, we deployed rack awareness to our Kafka clusters, where each broker publishes the AZ it’s in as node rack info. We started this initiative with our biggest producer and consumer applications for Kafka, logging agent and S3 transporter. Producer AZ Awareness Our logging agent is responsible for reading data from log files and shipping them to Kafka in microbatches. The agent also lets users configure how logs are partitioned across a topic’s partitions. One key design of our logging agent is the ability to pre-partition the data before calling Kafka’s producer.send(). This allows us to add more advanced routing. To make it AZ aware, we added ability for the logging agent to look up AZ info for the node it’s running on using the EC2 Metadata API. Next, we enhanced our partitioner to leverage rack information in Kafka’s producer metadata to limit writes to only partitions for which leaders are in the same AZ as the logging agent. (This change was only applicable to topics that didn’t use key based partitioning since ordering couldn’t be guaranteed after AZ awareness change, as a partition switches AZ.) Consumer AZ Awareness S3 transporter is responsible for reading logs from Kafka and persisting them to S3 for further processing. We tried something similar to the producer for S3 transporter. Our S3 transporter doesn’t use Kafka consumer assignments. Rather, it uses its own partition assignment system. This allows us to preserve locality in case of node restarts or has temporary network isolation, thus reducing the amount of data that needs to be replayed for a given batch. We make each S3 transporter worker look up and publish its AZ info to Zookeeper, which helps the S3 transporter master assign Kafka partitions to the workers based on their rack (AZ). If we are unable to look up the (rack) AZ information of a partition, we degrade to assignment across all available workers. Results We rolled out AZ aware S3 transporter to production, which resulted in more than 25% savings in AZ transfer cost for Logging. We’re currently in the process of slowly rolling out AZ aware logging agent to further reduce our AZ transfer costs. We’re also working to extend this design to standard Kafka Producers and Consumers to help us extend our savings to other applications as well, which may include KIP-392 once it’s implemented. Acknowledgements: Huge thanks to Eric Lopez, Henry Cai, Heng Zhang, Ping-Min Lin, Vahid Hashemian, Yi Yin, Yinian Qi and Yu Yang who helped with improving Logging at Pinterest. Also, thanks to Kalim Moghul for helping us with this effort.

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/optimizing-kafka-for-the-cloud-4e936643fde0

['Pinterest Engineering']

2019-04-23 20:41:55.940000+00:00

['Engineering', 'Big Data', 'Cloud Computing', 'Kafka']

Being Well Pub Launches Medika to Expand Our Writers’ Reach

Being Well Pub Launches Medika to Expand Our Writers’ Reach Medical writers promote science to help improve the world We’re thrilled to announce that Medika Life is now officially live, and it’s not just another medical publication seeking to compete with other platforms. We are different, and we’d like to share how in this story. The editorial team, Robert Turner, Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa, and Dr. Jeff Livingston, have updated the submission guidelines to help you get your stories published. Here are our tips and tools. Let’s grow together Growing a publication is a community effort, and we can not do it without you. Twitter is a key tool to grow your followers and spread validated information. Follow the Being Well writers list. Lisa Bradburn, a Psychotherapist-In-Training, promotes our authors’ stories on the Being Well Facebook page. Help support the page by following and sharing. Editor’s Pick Months of isolation has many of us feeling alone. Dr. Patricia Farrell addresses our need for human contact during the pandemic. As many try and shed the Quarantine 15, nutritionist Maria Cross MSc explains the science behind ketogenic diets. Public health Pregnant women and their babies are at risk for influenza and pertussis. Here is how we can prevent these infections. Public service announcements and the film industry can play a pivotal role in changing sentiment around public health issues. Dr. Patricia Farrell explores this theme in this story. Coronavirus We all know by now we need to wash our hands to stop the spread of viral disease. Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa reminds us why. Financially strained hospitals are struggling during the pandemic. Grant Nordby highlights the threat to rural health. The rapid pace of Covid research has lead to an expansion of knowledge and advances in viral therapeutics. Robert Turner considered an influenza free future. Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa debunks this oft-repeated excuse against wearing masks. James Goydos, MD It’s not a race. It has nothing to do with politics. Dr. Ludovic Gros MD explains the science validating the protective effects of masks to stop the spread of respiratory infections. Pediatrician Moataz El Ashmawi helps us understand the pandemic away from the catchy news headlines. Mental Health Dr. Patricia Farrell highlights the unintended side effects of psychiatric treatments. Childhood anxiety and mood disorders are on the rise. Psychiatrist Grant H Brenner explores how parents can help. Dr. Patricia Farrell explains the developing research linking early exposure to pollution and Alzheimer’s disease. Society Sarah True calls out the access to care problem Medicare patients encounter when seeking mental health assistance. Our words have power. Dr. Patricia Farrell explains how negative words not only cause emotional pain but physical damage as well. High school science teacher Emily Kingsley shares the challenges of teaching young people how to distinguish between science and “science-ish.” James Goydos, MD highlights the nonsensical use of the healthcare industry's continued use of antiquated technology. Adam Tabriz, MD explores the legal and ethical issues surrounding physician-assisted suicide. Nutrition Michael Burg, MD tackles the relationship between obesity and thirteen different types of cancer. Nutritionist Tim Rees highlights the relationship between our weight and low testosterone syndrome in men. Do you want to lose weight? Jokūbas Sireikis dispels myths surrounding artificial sweeteners.

https://medium.com/beingwell/being-well-pub-launches-medika-to-expand-our-writers-reach-40852aa25bcf

['Dr Jeff Livingston']

2020-10-11 13:55:17.841000+00:00

['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Covid 19', 'Society', 'Nutrition']

You Know What to Do With Your Life, You’re Just Not Doing It.

You Know What to Do With Your Life, You’re Just Not Doing It. Just be honest with yourself. I’m pretty sure you at least kind of sort of know what you want to do with your life. Maybe it isn’t crystal clear to you, but the foundation is there. DNA is strange in that it just gives you your own unique set of characteristics. When you’re a kid, you’re just drawn to certain activities for no apparent reason. You develop tastes, inclinations, and desires. During your upbringing though, you also develop fears. You’re taught fears. If left to your own devices, without learning about concepts like ‘being realistic’ or worrying about ‘risk’ you’d probably be more or less living the type of life you want to live. I don’t blame you for going through the societal ringer and coming out the other side with a life you don’t want. That’s the default outcome. I make no guarantees you’ll get out of it either. One of the hardest things to do in this life, in this society, is to be who you truly are and do what you truly want to do. There are just so many incentives pointing in the opposite direction. If you want to stand a chance of making it out, you have to learn how to rediscover the real you and remember that you already know what you want. Looking back at my past, I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer. I’ve been obsessed with words from a young age. I always had a great vocabulary without trying to have one. I’d write poems when I was in middle school. I’d offhandedly mention wanting to write a book more times than I can count. I knew. Business always fascinated me. The idea of being free fascinated me. I was always curious about life and what it took to be successful. All the tools were there and I just had to pull the trigger. The same goes for you. You Already Know What You Want to Be, You’re Just Putting it Off I remember this conversation I had with an Uber driver in Los Angeles on my way to the airport. She asked what I did for a living and I told her I was a self-improvement writer. Of course, she began to tell me her life story and started asking me for advice. She was driving Uber because she was trying to earn extra money to solve this dispute over a debt or property taxes, something like that. She was frazzled and went on and on about how she didn’t know how to find a way out. We talked about her past job experience, her potential dreams, options to get out of her bind. We kept going back and forth but never quite got to the root of the issue or a viable solution. She was hiding. This went on for an hour (L.A. has a lot of traffic). As we reach the airport she mentions that she has this long track record of consulting experience and that she’d been offered deals to work with companies in the past. She says “You know, maybe I should start a business doing that.” In my mind, I thought “Yeah, lady, maybe you should.” It’s a weird human quirk. We dodge the answers right in front of us. Why? Because it can’t be that simple, right? If it is that simple, then you feel like an idiot for not doing anything about it. So you make up these complicated excuses for why you’re not doing the things you want because that explanation is easier to deal with than facing the truth upfront. I have so many stories like this. Often I ask questions on my personal social media “What kind of business would you start if you were certain it would work out?” I remember once a friend of mine described her potential business to a tee — had the name and everything. I hope she starts it one day. Hope you start your thing one day. Hope you don’t put it off forever — your bakery, your e-commerce business, your comedy career, your daycare, your jewelry shop in a tourist trap, whatever the heck it is, doesn’t matter, as long as you think it’s cool. How do you overcome this fear that causes you to put things off? The process I use for all aspects of self-improvement is the same — diagnose the problem and try your best to come up with a solution. Let’s take a look at some of the root causes of your inaction.

https://chef-boyardeji.medium.com/you-know-what-to-do-with-your-life-youre-just-not-doing-it-a7cb546c51a9

['Ayodeji Awosika']

2020-05-27 13:42:48.791000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Inspiration', 'Psychology', 'Productivity']

The Path to Becoming a Doctor Requires Stamina

Dr. Chris Meinzen is a hospitalist at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado. He earned his bachelor’s degree in creative writing and neuroscience at Tulane University in New Orleans, followed by working at the Red Cross, and eventually by medical school also at Tulane. How did you decide to go to medical school? I was a little bumbling at that age. I liked school, enjoyed learning, and had some good friends going in that direction. My family encouraged me to try it out, and here I am 10 years later. Did you consider other healthcare or public health tracks? I didn’t, but mostly due to lack of exposure. I think the larger impact of public health is really interesting. I’m not sure I had ever really considered other healthcare tracks, though there are a lot to look at for sure. The physical and occupational therapists always seem the happiest in the hospitals. Maybe I should’ve thought more about that. What was your medical school application experience like? It’s hard to remember now. I remember a lot of checking and rechecking some kind of clunky electronic system. I hope that’s gotten easier to use. What was your medical school experience like? I loved my classmates at Tulane, we had a wonderful time. I think our professors did a great job teaching us and leading us to think both scientifically about our patients as well as see them as people with their own lives, social group, and preferences. It was a great time to work hard, learn a lot, and enjoy New Orleans. What was your residency application experience like? I researched pulmonary diseases in Peru with a group out of Johns Hopkins for a year before going to residency. That was fun, and a great cultural experience, but it did make applying to residencies back in the States a little more difficult. There’s a lot of flights, and skin-deep conversation. Ultimately I’m thankful for it because it brought me to our home here in Grand Junction. What was your residency experience like? Residency is also great, though maybe not so cheery as medical school. You have to work hard, but you can’t control your schedule. Less sleep, more work, more practical knowledge, more people wanting your time. It was probably good preparation for life after residency, but it was pretty exhausting while it happened. I happen to think that St. Mary’s Family Medicine Residency was exceptional at preparing me for my varied clinical roles now, and can’t be more thankful. I just don’t think I could do that again from a stamina perspective. What advice would you give to people interested in becoming a doctor? It’s hard to really know what that will be like for you. It’s worth shadowing a doc, and getting to know a day in the life of a med student and resident is like. It’s a good 6–10 years on the path. Ha, I guess I’m saying other people should give the decision a little more consideration prior to jumping right in like I did. How did you decide what to specialize in? I actually applied for residencies in 4 different fields, because I had a hard time limiting myself. There’s a variety of ways to become a hospitalist, ER doc, residency preceptor. Family medicine at my program was one great path, there are likely other good ones too. I was lucky to have great rotations in medical school to learn how much I like thinking deeply about both pathology (what’s going wrong with a body) as well as how people want to live. Fortunately, I have continued to enjoy that. What does continuing education look like for a doctor? Well, we have some minimum number of credits or hours to remain licensed. I don’t really know the number, but I probably do 2–6 hours a week, which I think is quite a bit above the requirement. At least I hope it is. There are powerpoints and books and lectures and hands-on courses and ultrasound things. It’s pretty cool what all you can learn with. What is your current role like? I have two contract positions. I am a hospitalist at St. Mary’s Hospital, which is the regional medical center in Grand Junction. Hospitalists are the people who daily care for sick people stuck in the hospital. The other is working shifts as an ER doc in a critical access hospital in Fruita, Colorado, called Colorado Canyons. ER shifts are pretty much what you’ve seen on TV. The last thing I do, mostly because I enjoy it, is precepting our local residents a few times a month. This is a whole different view of medicine, focusing on developing these residents while ensuring great patient care. The variety for me is really fulfilling. What changes do you see happening in the near future in U.S. healthcare? That’s a great question. Probably more suited to Congress than to me. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and not the most effective one. I think the mix of requirement for insurance by legislature, employers controlling many healthcare plans, along with the requirement that hospitals take all-comers, makes for a lot of expense. On the back end, it can be hard for a lot of people to access appropriate healthcare, or even know what they’re getting when they do get in. I’m not a politician or really all that astute about healthcare policy. It does seem like it’s too expensive and hard to navigate for a lot of Americans, so I imagine that’s the ripe avenue for change. What advice would you give to recent medical school graduates? Well, if you’re graduating medical school then I hope you found a residency spot. I guess you’d be a few months in, ideally still in your high enthusiasm stage. That’s good. Don’t judge yourself when you get tired or worn out. Notice what helps you recharge, and cultivate those opportunities. Give grace to yourself, your colleagues, and your patients. We’re all human. It means we all fall down, and sometimes it means we get to help the person beside us back up.

https://medium.com/an-idea/the-path-to-becoming-a-doctor-requires-stamina-c6a0862b9651

['Carbon Radio']

2020-10-22 18:38:27.792000+00:00

['Sustainability', 'Health', 'Medicine', 'Future', 'Healthcare']

How to Silence the Haters in Your Head as You Write

But then self-doubt crept in. I started thinking of all the potential readers who would disagree with my post and rage on me in the comments. First of all, I don’t have a degree in psychology. What if people jumped into the comments and told me I’m not qualified to write about the topic? I had seen it happen with other people’s articles on narcissism, even though I had gained considerable insight and value from what the authors wrote. Second, there’s a school of thought that says, we should love the narcissists for their flaws, and not speak badly of them. Well, we should also love the victims. Those of us who have experience can save potential victims years of confusion and frustration. Still, though, it was an argument I didn’t care to have in the comments section of a post. Third, I worried narcissists themselves would get on the comments and rage at me, bash me, even threaten me. By exposing who they are and how they act, I represent a threat to their way of life. Fourth and finally, I come from the southern U.S. where every discussion seems to turn into a matter of race. Would someone claim I am using a racist term by writing about “White Knight” narcissism (as compared to the classic “Dark Knight” type of narcissist)? I was just using the term coined by the expert, and I certainly never intended it to be racist, but I felt I had to be worried someone would interpret it that way. How to overcome your self-doubt as a writer Below are three strategies I used to overcome my fear of criticism. I went on to publish my article on White Knight narcissism, which has become one of my three most successful articles this month. Your haters don’t know you; to them, you’re just a symbol Haters, for the most part, are people who are going through life with an ax to grind. They’re going to spew their venom on someone. In this case, it just happened to be your post that supplied the necessary trigger they were seeking. If it hadn’t been you, they would have raged on someone else who unknowingly fueled their fire. Look. If someone’s exposure to who you are is limited to a 5-minute article they read on a website, they don’t know you. Rather, you symbolize whatever perceived injustice gets them up on their soapbox. When someone has a vast overreaction to what you have to say, they’re not telling you something about yourself — they’re telling you something about themselves. Specifically, they’re telling you that they don’t deserve even another second of your time, so close their comment without responding, take a moment to cleanse your energy if you feel the need, and move on. If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong. — Ben Michaels What would your writing coach tell you? What’s that? You don’t have a writing coach? Yeah, me neither. At least not one I can see. What I’ve learned to do, and what I would advise you to try as well when you encounter resistance when writing, is to imagine your best future writing self 6 to 12 months from now. Imagine the writer who has many published stories and successes under their belt. What would that version of you tell you to do? Do you really think that future self would tell you, “Naaah, don’t write that, there might be one person out there somewhere who would disagree with what you have to say. You wouldn’t want to offend them.” Of course not! So step into that best future self. Credit where credit is due: I got the idea to check in with my future writing self from If You Ask Yourself This Question Every Single Day, You’ll Be Ahead of 99% by Sinem Gunel. It’s most definitely worth 4 minutes of your time if you need help getting unstuck. Write for your biggest fans Imagine that you have people out there who visit your profile page every day. They’ve come to see if you’ve posted anything new today, because they’re eager to read anything that you, one of their favorite writers, has to say. What? You don’t have readers like that? Can you prove it? Several times on this and other platforms, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover I did have those kinds of fans, and didn’t know it. So why not write for them? I’ll let you in on a little secret: If you write for those fans, even if you don’t currently have them, you soon will. Your enthusiasm will be contagious and people will want to read more from you. Doesn’t that sound like a better strategy than writing for trolls and haters? Photo by David Peterson from Pexels In summary Writers, like any other kind of human, are subject to bouts of self-doubt and fear of criticism. Not only is it hard to get unwarranted criticism out of your head, but it’s also easy to imagine future unwarranted criticism that can make you question whether you should publish some of your best work. Uncertainty presents the ego-driven mind an opportunity to fill in the blanks with things that could go wrong. There are strategies, however, to silence the mind. If you worry about unwarranted criticism, realize the critics see you as a symbol and that they are commenting on themselves far more than they are you. Learn to reach out to your best future self as a writer, to connect with that best version of yourself, and to draw on their wisdom for guidance. Finally, imagine that you’re writing for your most dedicated fans, even if you think you don’t have any — you may be wrong, and if you don’t currently have such fans, you will soon if you keep expressing your best self. Thanks for reading! I have an email list you can join if you want to be notified of my future writing. By the way, if you want to read my completed piece on White Knight narcissism, here it is:

https://medium.com/blankpage/how-to-silence-the-haters-in-your-head-as-you-write-195b168f54a0

['Paul Ryburn']

2020-12-21 15:51:26.790000+00:00

['Writing', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement', 'Fear', 'Self-awareness']

5 Techniques I Use to Manage Stress as a Software Engineer

1. Morning Journal This is a technique I’ve been using for over three years, and it’s freaking golden. Every morning, I write two things: Brain dump — all thoughts, feelings, and experiences I want to write down. The goal for today — one main goal that I have to achieve today, no matter what. I do it every morning for 5-10 minutes, and by the end, I feel completely different. My mind is calm. If you reflect and write everything you have on your mind (what you are stressing about), you will procrastinate less throughout the day and think less about that one problem you have. I recommend starting with the “brain dump” type of journaling three times per week in the morning to see how it goes. Then you can do it on a daily basis.

https://medium.com/better-programming/5-techniques-i-use-to-manage-stress-as-a-software-engineer-dae958f4b670

['Nick Bull']

2020-10-27 13:28:02.174000+00:00

['Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Programming']

Writing Can Bring You Back From the Dead

If you are surrounded by tragedy or death — writing is an amazing sign of life. Three of my closest writer friends (all over 50 like me), told me today they are surrounded by sickness, tragedy and death in their lives. UGH. I also have many people — friends and family — seemingly going down around me. Sometimes it feels like I’m Elton John…the only one standing! We all agree that having our ‘writing practice’ is one way we feel ALIVE — and we are damn grateful for it. I would never dream of not being grateful for my writing or of putting pressure on my writing. It is a beautiful place of peace, joy and aliveness. We are all thankful to be able to write through all of our tragedies — even turn our tragedies into stories. Ahh yes, sometimes tragedies make the best material, don’t they? One friend said, “Death is all around me it seems — but where’s the LIGHT?” There’s always light. You can’t have light without dark. It reminds me of one of my favorite subjects: The Yin/Yang/duality. I also call it the FULL SPECTRUM — Yea, there’s black and white, but also grey and every other color in the rainbow of life.

https://medium.com/writing-heals/writing-can-bring-you-back-from-the-dead-bc1e4e5a1133

['Michelle Monet']

2019-09-21 02:33:02.055000+00:00

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

The Four Types of Writing

The Four Types of Writing Each one serves its own purpose Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash There are four types of writing as an author. Expository, persuasive, narrative, and descriptive. Each piece of writing includes one or all of these. Expository Writing from an author to inform or teach the reader something. You will find this type of writing in articles like this one you are reading. The language and style are meant to explain something to the reader. For this article I am explaining the four types of writing. Textbooks and how to articles will utilize expository in their wording. Even the recipes you use are a type of expository writing as the recipe tells you how to complete it. Newspapers are another example of this type of writing as the writer wants to inform the reader of the daily events taking place in their world. Persuasive Writing from an author to voice their opinion to persuade the reader. Persuasive pieces are most commonly found in speeches, scientific studies, medical journals and even political campaigns. The term persuade means to convince someone else to agree with the argument set forth in the piece. Scientific studies and medical journals good concrete examples but this type of writing can be seen in advertisements, book reviews, editorials and brochures. Narrative Where an author tells a story, fact or fiction, to the reader. This type of writing is also called storytelling as it has a main character, there is a conflict the main character is workingout and an ending that resolves the conflict. With everything in the middle called the plot. Fiction is considered narrative as it tells the story of the main character as they work through their conflict trying to find the resolution. Non fiction can be considered narrative as well because, even though the story is not made up, there is still a main character, conflict and plot. Descriptive A type of expository which uses visual descriptions to tell the reader a story. Usually includes scenery, emotions and actions in a way that will resonate with the reader, allowing them to visualize the story in their mind as they are reading. It’s primary purpose is to describe a person, place or thing. This type of writing can be used in the other types of writings, as it pertains to painting a virtual picture for the reader. It is used in both fiction and non fiction. A good, clear attention is required to write in a way that interacts the five senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Final thoughts Storytelling, whether expository, persuasive, narrative or descriptive, is the formation of words written in a way to elicite excitement from the reader. All of these can be combined or used separately to convey a message.

https://medium.com/the-writers-bookcase/the-four-types-of-writing-8c3c0ffaef85

['Tammi Brownlee']

2019-12-12 20:28:07.038000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Advice', 'Inspiration', 'Writing']

5 Simple yet Effective Tips for Creating High-Quality Content for Your Content Marketing Strategy

#4. Content happens frequently and consistently. One of the toughest aspects of an effective content marketing strategy has nothing to do with the substance of what’s being communicated. It has to do with how much and how often you publish content. The goal is to master the art of volume and consistency. It’s tough to do both, especially just starting out, so I find it best to start with the consistency aspect to start building the habit. If you’re starting from ground zero on your content strategy, pick one or two avenues you want to focus on first. Let’s say you decide on company blog posts and thought leadership articles from your CEO. Pick an achievable goal based on your team capacity—maybe two 500-word blog posts, and one thought leadership article per week. Stick to that volume for six to eight weeks before implementing any other content marketing strategies. Once you master that, you can either increase or expand your strategy. To increase is to continue what you’re doing but in greater volume. If your company blog posts and thought leadership articles are performing well, try adding two more blog posts per week and one more thought leadership article per week, or whatever’s manageable on a consistent basis. Expanding is jumping into other types of content like podcasts or video interviews, leveraging other types of material to maximize output. For example, can you think of all the material you can create from one hour-long filmed podcast episode? The video of the podcast can be uploaded to YouTube, and segmented into tons of small video clips for Instagram and TikTok. The audio can be used to promote as a podcast on Apple or Anchor.FM. The transcripts of the audio can be turned into multiple thought leadership articles or company blog posts, as well as short-form status updates for LinkedIn. Of course, not all companies need to market on Instagram or YouTube, but expanding your strategy is always worth brainstorming internally to set yourself up with a plan to keep content ideas flowing. At the end of the day, your preparedness is what’s going to keep you publishing on a frequent and consistent basis.

https://medium.com/swlh/5-simple-yet-effective-tips-for-creating-high-quality-content-for-your-content-marketing-strategy-88ed18271aa8

['Jack Martin']

2020-05-13 09:01:00.845000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing', 'Business', 'Creativity']

Who Rules the Cloud Service: AWS or Azure?

Amazon Web Service (AWS) AWS is owned by Amazon and it is the number one cloud provider, according to the Public Cloud Share. That is the percentage of companies, the money involved in AWS is around 32% right now. So it is the maximum and that’s why AWS is the leader in the cloud industry for the past 10 to 15 years. Microsoft Azure Azure is owned by Microsoft, and it comes second only to AWS. They are second in the cloud race and they are again the same type of technology. So Azure is provided by Microsoft, but even then they are just a cloud provider like AWS. Similarities between AWS and Azure So both provide similar services, even though they provide similar services, they are two different entities owned by two different companies providing various services which are named differently. But their functionality is going to be the same. So I think you get the point that AWS and Azure are cloud providers owned by Amazon and Microsoft, respectively. AWS is the number one in cloud market share and Azure is number two and these two are the major cloud providers in the entire cloud computing industry. AWS vs Azure 1. Launch Date AWS launched in the year 2006 and Azure launched in the year 2010. So basically in technology years, 4 years is a very long gap and that is one of the main reasons AWS has captured a lot of businesses and are in the lead in the cloud computing race AWS came into the cloud industry, but EC2 and S3 as the first projects of their first tools which were out for the public. And in 2010, Azure came up with basic services, like virtual machines, Azure storage, Azure database. So they came up with their own services. 2. Regions AWS has 77 availability zones in 24 geographical regions across the globe. So these availability zones are the ones that have the physical servers, all the physical components which are required to launch service, database engines, or storage units. So AWS is the cloud provider that has the maximum number of availability zones in the world. Why is availability zones really important? Let’s say you’re from India, you’re launching an application in India and it’s very successful and your customer base is growing even out of the country. When that is happening, you want to expand your application to a global audience, and if you’re using an on-premise set up with your own data center, a small data center. So in this case, you’ll have to buy more servers to accommodate more users or you’ll have to buy the servers in whichever location or whichever country in which you are going to extend your application. You’ll have to buy a data center over there, or you’ll have to buy a location, buy a space and set up a data center. But instead of doing that, if you’re using AWS or if you’re using Azure, in that case, you can use their global infrastructure and set up your application anywhere in the world just by sitting in your own office. So we can do that across the globe and you can engage your application with the global audience. Now, Azure has 60 different availability zones, but they are in 60 different regions, which is most by any cloud provider. So even though AWS was early in the cloud business, Microsoft was early in the tech business. Microsoft came into the tech business way before Amazon came into it. So Amazon first launched as an e-commerce website, not a tech website or a website that provides cloud services. So Microsoft was already having a wide infrastructure across the world. So they were able to build their architecture accordingly. So their cloud infrastructure has grown across the globe in 60 different regions. Why regions are important? Let me give you a brief example. Over here in India, there are three different availability zones in one particular region, which is in Mumbai. But if you look at India in Azure, you can see West India, Central India, and South India. So they have three different available results in three different regions, which can be helpful for low latency in applications. So let’s say your application is mostly concentrated in South India, you can host it on the South Indian data center. If it is in Central India or if you want to concentrate on the whole of India, you can put in all the data centers. Or if you just want to concentrate on the north side of India or the west side of India, you can go ahead with the west or central India. The same goes for every single available zone or every single region available across. So this is a difference. AWS has 77 Availability zones but in 24 geographical regions. Microsoft has 60 available zones lesser than AWS, but they have it in 60 different regions. That’s the main difference. Also at the beginning of 2019, AWS had 54 availability zones and Azure had 44 availability zones. So both of them have grown pretty wildly. In 2021, AWS is planning to build 18 more availability zones in six more regions, and Azure is planning to get 8 more available zones in 3 more azure regions. So they’re still planning more regions. 3. Market Share As a common person, it doesn’t matter. You can choose any of the cloud services which you want and you can start working on it and you can get a job in it. But why do we talk about market share? So let me tell you. First, whenever the market share for a particular business means a lot of businesses or a lot of companies are using that particular technology. So let’s say AWS if their market share or their spending on that particular cloud provider is high. In that case, a lot of companies are investing in AWS. So if a lot of companies are investing in AWS, that means you have an abundance of jobs in various companies. So if you go with AWS or Azure or Google cloud, you have a lot of companies who are working with them. You can get into a job with them. According to Gartner Aws is the leading cloud service provider. So this means they are visionaries and they are leaders. So Microsoft, Google, Amazon services all come under leaders and visionaries. But the leading leaders are Amazon Web services and the leading visionary is Amazon Web Services. 4. Niche players This means the cloud services providers play on their particular role. So Alibaba Cloud or Oracle or IBM or Tencent Cloud, they have their cloud services which can accommodate their own company’s infrastructure and the companies which are using similar services and that’s why they are called niche players. They only play in that particular area. They don’t move out of their expertise. But AWS, Microsoft, and Google are exploring the entire industry from healthcare, from retail to I.T. companies. So Every single place they have put down their staff. 5. Clients Now, the top clients of Amazon Web Services are Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So I think most probably, you know, these four different services at four different websites. So Netflix is the top media streaming platform in the world. Twitch is the top live streaming platform in the world. LinkedIn is the top job connectivity or job finding portal in the world. And Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. So four of these companies are using Amazon Web services for their cloud needs. For Azure, the top spending companies or the top companies using are BMW, Twitter, Samsung, and eBay. Again, you would obviously know all of these companies. They are top companies who are using Azure for their cloud needs. So if you are working well enough, you can get into these companies as a cloud architect or you can get into the previous companies, which I mentioned, Netflix, Facebook or LinkedIn or even eBay or Twitter. So you can get into these companies if you are a cloud architect or a cloud developer or an administrator or whatever it is, you can get into these companies and get a high salary. 6. Services In AWS, the relevant service is EC2 and in Azure, it is Azure Virtual Machine. So both of these services provide a secure, scalable, and reliable compute capacity (i.e) A server in the cloud. You can create a server as per your needs on the cloud. 7. Storage In Azure, you have to go to Azure blob storage. In AWS, you have to go to AWS S3 or AWS Simple Storage Service. So again, these two are similar services, S3 uses object storage to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Massively scalable and secure object storage for cloud-native workloads are archives and data lakes. So basically they are similar, just different explanations or different definitions for the same service, but they are provided by two different organizations. 8. Database AWS has a Relational database service and Azure has SQL databases. What is the difference between a relational database and an SQL database? They both use SQL and they are both database engines. In AWS, set up an operate and scalable relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. In Azure, built apps that scale with the pace of your business with managed and intelligent SQL in the cloud. So basically you can create a cloud engine on both. You can create a database on the cloud which is scalable, so you can set it up as scaled automatically, so it’ll automatically scale up for you. So in this case, they have similar services, the only major part is that AWS provides more services than Azure. AWS provides more than 150+ services right now, because, again, saying that they have a 4 years lead in the cloud computing industry, that’s why they are leading by a lot. Even Azure provides a lot of services, they provide 100+ services, not as much as AWS. So you can go with any of them. In the year 2021, both of them are growing at a really fast pace and other cloud services are trying to catch up with them, but they’re not able to. AWS and Azure are still growing, so you can go ahead and take up AWS or Azure, there is no problem in taking up any of these cloud providers. 9. Pricing Structure Pricing models are one of the important factors before considering the cloud tool. In AWS, you have a pay-as-you-go model completely. It means whatever you use, you’ll pay for that at the end of the month. So you’ll start with zero credit. As you use services, it’ll succumb up to a particular value or a particular amount of money which will be paying at the end of the month. Even Azure has pay-as-you-go, you can opt for that or there are also subscriptions where you can take up subscriptions that have certain limits within azure. So you can use that credit limit to go ahead and use the Azure service, which you want. For 4 vCPLUS and 16-gigabyte memory, the On-Demand Linux instance in AWS will cost you 0.1856 dollars. But the same type of instance in Azure will cost you 0.1690 dollars. So now, just considering these two values, they’re are quite small and there is not much difference, it’s just like 0.15 Or something like that. But if you’re server is running for 24*7 and there are 100s of servers with the same specifications that will save you a lot of money if you’re using Azure in this case. But again, there is one more difference. That is in AWS, you’ll get more discounts if you’re taking up a one-year reserved or a three-year reserved instance and that means you will get a dedicated instance, dedicated server, where you can run instances at any time, and that can save you 42% of the money and in Azure, it can save you around 36% of the money. So AWS could be cheaper for the long run Azure will be cheaper if you’re going to use On-Demand instances. One more part is that in AWS, you’ll be charged by the hour, (i.e) even though you have used a particular service for just one-minute even in that case, you’ll be charged by the hour. So you’ll have to pay the hourly rate. But in Azure, you’ll only be charged the minute rate. So if you’re using only for two minutes, you only pay for the two minutes you have used. You will not pay for the complete half. Future Predictions for the Public Cloud Infrastructure According to Gartner, the cloud infrastructure will improve by 35% in the year 2021. That means the companies are moving towards the cloud-first approach than an on-premise data centre. It’s increasing every single year, so there is no surprise element here. I just wanted to show what would be the future of the cloud industry. So again, when the cloud industry is growing, I would suggest you to get into it, so that you can grow with the cloud industry. So you can visit these two sites, (aws.amazon.com and azure.microsoft.com) this is basically for India. You can check out the news updates which are coming out for AWS and Azure. They are basically in the latest article at first, so whichever change has been made recently, that will be at the top and you will get to know more about the changes or the changes of services in AWS and Azure. Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/who-rules-the-cloud-service-aws-or-azure-1e53e5b664d1

['Vishnu Aravindhan']

2020-12-29 17:38:33.158000+00:00

['Microsoft', 'Amazon', 'Cloud Computing', 'Software Engineering', 'Cloud']

Why Word Placement Is Important in Headlines

Why Word Placement Is Important in Headlines Readers are attracted to the first 3 words and the last 3 words Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos. What you do when you’re confronted with emails and social posts each day? How do you browse through news websites and Medium articles? Do you click on each one? Most likely, you skim through the headlines to get the gist of it without having to click each one. Only clicking on the ones that call out to you at that moment, if you’ve got time. A Kissmetrics study discovered that users pick out the first three words and the last three words of a headline. Headline expert Bnonn recommends keeping a headline to six words so that readers can quickly understand it. Copyblogger informs us that on average only two out of ten readers will read your article — eight out of ten will only read your headline copy. That’s why it’s worth paying attention to word selection and word placement. It doesn’t mean we need to stick to only six words, although I came across several sites with headlines that consistently hovered around six words. For longer headlines, it helps to consider the first three words and the last three words. “As a rule, if it won’t fit in a tweet it’s too long. But let me suggest that rather than worrying about length you should worry about making every word count. Especially the first and last three.” — Kissmetrics This discovery fits into the concept of frontloading for headlines. This is where you place the most important words first, and we can complement that with also carefully selecting the last three words. It will also help your headline’s SEO by making sure your reader can find the keywords they’re searching for. Let’s begin with examples of headlines with six words and six and more words where the first three words and the last three words have been carefully chosen. You’ll find helpful resources to help you with word selection. And finally, you’ll discover a simple way to assess your headlines.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/why-word-placement-is-important-in-headlines-5eccea7897e

['Cynthia Marinakos']

2020-03-07 07:05:01.446000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Business', 'Headline Hacks', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

8 Questions You Can Ask Yourself to Write Better Articles

8 Questions You Can Ask Yourself to Write Better Articles Uncover the blind spots that keep your articles from thriving There’s no exact method for writing articles that people want to read. You can write about a variety of topics successfully if you understand the patterns behind the type of articles people want to read. It sounds simple and obvious, but many new writers miss the point. If you want a lot of people to read your writing, you have to write the type of articles people actually want to read. If you want to stop banging your head against the wall, feeling frustrated that your work is getting nowhere, focus on that simple truth. You don’t have to write a certain way. You’re free to do what you wish. But, you also have to live with the results. I see far too many writers who blame their lack of success on the audience. Josh Spector once said, “You can write for an audience or write for yourself, but you can’t do both.” If you don’t want commercial success that’s fine. But too many writers want commercial success doing it their way when their way doesn’t work. The choice is yours. But always remember the golden rule of writing. It’s never the audience’s fault. You don’t have to write how-to articles and listicles to get ahead. You really don’t. But, your articles will perform better if you have the right answers to some of these key questions.

https://medium.com/swlh/8-questions-you-can-ask-yourself-to-write-better-articles-db2f04ade2c7

['Ayodeji Awosika']

2020-12-17 20:39:27.323000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Creative Writing']

The Future is Now

Despite the terrible SARS-CoV-2 pandemic currently ravaging much of the world, we must try not to forget how far we have come as people of Earth in recent years. We also need to maintain an optimistic outlook as much as possible even in the face of truly challenging “black swan” events. This past year has been a big one in terms of technological landmarks: — IBM’s Q System One became the first commercially available quantum computer. — A new synthetic DNA was created which doubles our current 4-letter code (A,T,C,G) to 8, allowing for greater possibilities in DNA computing. In another study, scientists injected a synthetic DNA into some E. coli bacteria. They survived, reproduced, and actually carried along copies of the synthetic DNA as well, offering proof that actual synthetic life can be created in a lab. — Researchers put nanoparticles that react to infrared light into the eyes of mice, giving them biological infrared vision. — In a massive project called the Event Horizon Telescope, astronomers linked powerful telescopes from all around the world to create a virtual mega-telescope with an aperture the size of Earth, and were able to image the black hole at the center of the Messier galaxy 55 million light years away. — 3D printing of human tissue and organs can now be done without using the traditional scaffold model which acts as a support structure, allowing for more possibilities to save lives. And these are only a few large new steps into a world that used to exist only in our imaginations. What might happen in the 2020's? Futurists and other prognosticators have been hard at work coming up with lists, so here is a short one of my own: — AI creations will become nearly indistinguishable from the humans or animals they are meant to imitate. — Cloning of humans and animals (extinct or recently deceased) will continue to be debated by worldwide authorities, while rogue scientists continue to actually do it. Expect to see a lot of reborn labradoodles and a real, live baby mammoth, or something similar, by 2030. — While green power will keep getting more efficient and cheaper, the continued growth in developing nations will stall progress in declining greenhouse emissions. — 3D printing, of everything from organs to electronics and housing, will become a cornerstone of modern manufacturing. — Robots and drones will grow into a truly transformative cultural phenomenon, launching new types of entertainment and becoming commonplace in daily life. — Quantum computing will lead to a doubling of all human knowledge between 2020 and 2030. — Humans will walk on the Moon, or Mars, or both. — Real, effective life extension therapies will become available, but only for the very wealthy. The rest of us will have to wait a while. — The Internet of Things will grow into what everyone’s been envisioning for it: Complete inter-connectivity that enables greater productivity. However, the dangers of hacking will continue to loom over it. Now, let me return to the now. Looking back a little farther — but still fairly recent — SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket, the largest ever, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in February 2018. Its cargo was a Tesla Roadster, which is now orbiting the sun somewhere between Mars and the asteroid belt. Between Elon Musk’s numerous companies and passion projects (SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City, the Hyperloop, the Boring Company), and the quickly proceeding advances in VR/AR/MR, genetics/cloning, blockchain, AI, 3D printing, and other fields, someone who was in a coma since 1998 and just woke up yesterday would be forgiven for thinking they had jumped a hundred years into the future instead of a mere 20. But then this person would actually get up and go out into the real world and see that mostly everything else is the same, aside from more traffic on the roads, more people in general, most of whom now carry miniature computers with them wherever they go that are more powerful than any desktop from the 20th century. Elon Musk’s Grand Plan Born in apartheid-era South Africa, he lived the first 16 years of his life in various towns, including Pretoria, moving back and forth between divorced parents. He reports being bullied in school and witnessing a lot of violence. He tried sticking up for some other bullied children, but that generally resulted in more pain for him. Musk retreated somewhat into science fiction and fantasy, and the dreams he read on the page would come to inform the man he eventually became. He moved first to Canada to live with some relatives, and later earned economics and physics degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to co-found Zip2 with one of his brothers, Kimbal Musk, and Greg Kouri, which was acquired for $340 million. Next, he co-founded X.com, which became Paypal and sold to EBay in 2002 for one and half billion dollars. Now very rich, Elon Musk turned his attention to those science fiction dreams. In the short term: The environment has been poisoned at an ever-growing pace by the burning of fossil fuels for two centuries, beginning with coal and reaching a pollution peak as the massive population of China began using gasoline-guzzling automobile en masse. Musk’s contribution to helping slow this is multi-sided: popularize electric cars by offering visually appealing, efficient and powerful versions of them with Tesla. Invest in more solar power adoption via Solar City. Open-source a plan for super-fast commuter train transport with the electromagnetic vacuum-tube Hyperloop project. Invest in tunneling technology that can help move this project along with the Boring Company. In the long term: There have been dozens of small extinction events on Earth since the dawn of life, and several that have wiped out 75–95% of all living things. It will happen again, and there is a good chance that a large event will take with it the vast majority of humanity. Because of this, Musk founded SpaceX with an ultimate goal of turning humanity into a multi-planet species. He’s funding this by creating reusable rockets that allow him to outbid competitors in taking cargo into orbit. The plan is to start a colony on Mars that will eventually be made self-sustaining. Ultimately, he thinks this can become home to a million people by roughly 2070. In other words, Elon Musk wants to save us here and now, and also do what he can to save us for eternity. All in all, this is both an ambitious and worthy cause. There is nothing wrong with doing what you can to save people. Doctors, soldiers, first responders, they do this all the time. And, in general, our governments don’t seem to be doing much to slow our pollution of the environment or protect us from future disasters. Yes, there has been some progress, but it is often mired in politics and red tape, and forward-thinking policies of one administration are often reversed by the following one. Our governments can barely protect us from rising sea levels and flu virii, let alone giant asteroid impacts. So, someone has to do it. These grand efforts usually form around the resources of extremely wealthy individuals and take many forms. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, focuses on the physical and mental well being of the youngest and poorest people. Kimbal Musk, one of Elon’s brothers, is using his fortune on a decidedly smaller scale in a quest to help reconnect us and our children in particular to a more natural, local and organic food culture. Hope is both the strongest driving force and an impediment to progress. Many people who grew up in the early to mid 20th century thought we would be living in some kind of fairy-tale sci-fi wonderland by now. Others posited it would be a dystopia, or that all that would remain of our world would be a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We’re living in a time when dreams of generations past are becoming true on a regular basis. If a person born anywhere on Earth in 1899 were to be transported into the future, to right now, into a modern city, they would find a lot to recognize but they would also be mesmerized by the miraculous pocket computers most people carry with them and the contrails of giant flying ships miles above. Said person might even experience a mild cardiac infarction upon seeing evidence that we’ve landed on the moon and are beaming pictures back directly from the surface of Mars (and they might be somewhat disappointed that Mars wasn’t teeming with jungle life). Advancements, just in the medical field, come at a nearly dizzying pace: — 2016 saw the use of a drone to take medicine to a remote part of Rwanda. This will become more commonplace and will be a great boon to the treatment of medical conditions in isolated parts of the world. — The 1.25 million (and growing) people in the U.S. who are living with Type I diabetes have a ray of hope in the form of a new artificial organ that is an implanted blood sugar monitoring and insulin delivery device. Eventually this device will also be available for the other 28 million people in the U.S. who have Type II (adult onset) diabetes, and over 200 million diabetic people worldwide. — Patients suffering from full-body paralysis, with functioning minds who are unable to physically speak — much like the late Dr. Stephen Hawking who lived with ALS and communicated via a keyboard text-to-speech system — will be able to eventually think what they want and have those thoughts become words. The dreams and nightmares of our fictions have always pointed us to the truth of where we were headed. Echoes of George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand, Jules Verne, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, P. D. James, Arthur C. Clarke, and even Mary Shelley can be seen in our everyday lives. If we take what we have, examine the quickening rate of advancement, and extrapolate into the near future, we can easily believe that Ray Kurzweil’s singularity is right around the corner. An artificial superintelligence, almost as soon as it realizes what it is, will proceed to surpass humanity in every way, leaving us behind. A super AI is one of the dangers Elon Musk sees as a potential extinction trigger, so it is likely his goals for a Mars colony will include keeping it rather well-separated in many ways from the civilizations of Earth. What good would his plan be, anyway, if he brought along to Mars the dangers that might doom us here on this planet? There can be no light without darkness. Just as with our development of atomic fission, which led both to the horror of atomic warfare and (relatively) clean electrical power for millions, every significant innovation seems to carry with it both extreme positives and extreme negatives. If we want TNT to help greatly increase the building of infrastructure, we must accept it will be used to kill hundreds of thousands of people. If we want safer, cheaper workplaces via robotics, we must remove millions of potential jobs from the marketplace. If we want the convenience of smartphones, we must deal with the repercussions. One of the late Dr. Stephen Hawking’s common refrains was that the greatest threats to our existence come from the technologies that we’ve devised. In essence, by forging ahead we may well become our own downfall. Newton’s Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. While this was meant to apply to the physical sciences, it has long since proven to be applicable in our daily lives. What, then, might this mean for the ambitions of Elon Musk? Might splitting the human race across two separate worlds eventually lead to some Solar System civil war that devastates humanity as much as any cosmic or earthbound natural disaster would have? Could gaining a truly massive foothold among consumers with solar and electric car technology upend economies founded on fossil fuels and lead to more war? Do we side with pushing onward despite the consequences? The odds, based on history, are in favor of something bad being caused by every good intention. But without those good intentions in the first place, virtually no progress would have been made by our civilization over the past 500 years. If you removed every major instance of innovation by humankind since the discovery that we could control fire, we would be living on an Earth that looked incredibly different. “We” wouldn’t be here. Humanity would amount to a few million individuals at most, living in bands and tribes on plains, in forested river valleys, along coastlines. We would be safer, as a species, only because we did not dare to dream. By dreaming, we discovered there are risks, but we continued because there was always something to fix, something we could do better, somewhere else to go. Elon Musk, and everyone who thinks like him, understand there are risks. In fact, they know that there will be some bad things, some complications, that arise because of their actions. But a choice had to be made between pressing onward versus sitting still, and they chose to face the darkness so that, at the very least, some light could be shed upon it.

https://medium.com/predict/the-future-is-now-c9ec1115a8d9

['A. S. Deller']

2020-12-23 13:12:27.815000+00:00

['Technology', 'Future', 'AI', 'Science', 'Space']

The Secret Sauce Behind Your Productivity Playlist

When I was in college, I used to write my papers in the music library. Not because I was studying music, but because the music library was literally under construction. The study rooms there were cubes of bare white cement — a jail cell, basically — with a desk in it. I liked (and like) working in complete isolation, but heaps of basically-inconclusive-but-moderately-compelling-as-a-whole studies suggest that there’s another way that might be more effective. There is a growing cottage industry devoted to figuring out what kinds of music make people more effective, more efficient workers. Certain genres — especially those without vocals — are frequently linked with “working.” But the actual scientific evidence concerning the links between music and productivity are varied and tend to be hyper-specialized. Some studies indicate that music, or at least some sort of organized noise, can raise efficiency; one such study found that those performing repetitive office-like tasks were more efficient while listening to music than while working in silence. Other studies have gone more specific, focusing on specific genres like baroque classical music or even simple nature sounds, analyzing productivity’s correlation with how much the worker likes or dislikes the music (the results: if you want efficiency, don’t listen to music you particularly like or dislike), or whether the listener is an introvert or extrovert (introverts do better with silence, extroverts do better with music). Muddling the science on this topic even further are the nearly equal number of studies indicating that music doesn’t, in fact, help you concentrate more efficiently. The amount of variables in any of these correlational studies are enough to crush any confident conclusion. Despite their inconclusiveness, these studies have dovetailed with modern music streaming services in some interesting ways. For one thing, streaming services give listeners access to music they’d not normally buy — which, let’s be real, includes popular “productivity” music like classical and jazz. But because the libraries are so vast, they necessitates some sort of curation to surface music best-suited to getting work done. Thus, Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and others all boast these so-called “productivity playlists,” curated selections of songs designed to help you work — and they’re often very popular. According to Dayle Dempsey at Pandora, ‘Classical for Studying’ has been their top classical station since August 2013. Most services offer a wide variety of productivity playlists. Google Play has classical, jazz, and instrumental pop stations, but also trip-hop, dubstep, instrumental trap, and quite a bit of metal. Tidal’s playlists under the “Focus” category include “Autumn Piano,” “Blips and Blops,” and “Post-Rock Essentials” along with more expected playlists like instrumental jazz and classical. Spotify’s productivity playlists also fall under a category titled “Focus,” and include instrumental hip-hop, indie folk, a fair amount of low-key electronic music, and even white noise. The major attribute that seems to signal “focus music” to Spotify is a lack of vocals, as there is a bit of science suggesting that intelligible lyrics can have a negative effect on productivity, and quite a bit of anecdotal evidence suggesting it’s annoying. Furthering this point, Gregory Ciotti, writing for HelpScout, writes: Research from Applied Acoustics shows that “intelligible” chatter — talking that can be clearly heard and understood — is what makes for a distracting environment. Shifting focus to figure out what someone else is saying is the reason why speech is often considered the most troublesome element of a noisy office; in one study, 48% of participants listed intelligible talking as the sound which distracted them the most. Consistency between songs is another key attribute. You want a long enough playlist — several hours long at least — with similar-sounding music. Not necessarily mellow music, but music without major shifts in tone or beats-per-minute or genre. Big peaks and valleys can shock a listener out of the productivity zone, which you don’t want. Given the utilitarian and somewhat robotic nature of productivity playlists, you might think they’re created by algorithms. Not so much. “All the stations are hand-curated,” says Jessica Suarez, who leads a team of in-house playlists editors at Google Play Music. In fact, her team crafts them based mostly on anecdotal information, personal preferences, and determined browsing of comments on the internet. “I’m a big Lifehacker reader, so I go through a bunch of the comments from people about what they like to listen to at work,” Suarez explains. “I also go through Reddit threads on what coders like to listen to at work. That informs a bunch of the stations.” Even though the playlists are made by humans, Spotify, Tidal, and Google obviously have tons of data on what people are listening to: how much of a song they play, how often something is skipped, when volume changes, when a song is repeated or added to a user’s playlist, all kinds of stuff. “If people are skipping songs you know you’re taking them out of the moment, so we tend to weigh that more heavily and be more aggressive with how we edit [the productivity] stations,” Suarez elaborates. Pandora — the media company that developed the Music Genome Project—takes a blended approach, drawing multiple data points from humans and machines. What a listener actually ends up hearing on Pandora is the result of a complex interplay between the two. Rhodes Kelley — a product manager at Pandora who works on their radio algorithm — elaborates: “There are more than 60 ‘strategies’ that can fire in tandem every time we need to find a song to play. A human curated strategy can nominate a song at the same time as a personalized data strategy nominates it alongside a musicological content based one. The layers of strategies picking tracks simultaneously allow the algorithm to blend all of our strengths together.” Ultimately, the divide between algorithms and human curation comes down to how one perceives what music is. Music is different than other forms of data — for example your weather or fitness apps — in that it elicits emotional and cultural responses. For the techno-utopian inclined, the solution is simply to build smarter algorithms to parse the data — thus providing the best possible outputs for the user; but for those who see musical data as an incontrovertible cultural/emotional artifact, algorithms can never match the intentionality of human curation. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

https://medium.com/the-sound-of-innovation/the-secret-sauce-behind-your-productivity-playlist-b5dc2e124d8b

['ᴅᴀɴ ɴᴏsᴏᴡɪᴛᴢ']

2016-07-07 16:34:07.741000+00:00

['Work', 'Music', 'Science', 'Productivity', 'Algorithms']

Routine Matters More Than Ritual

The Shining. All rights © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Good routines are portable. And good routines are pliable. By all means, sanctify your spaces. If you are able to craft a workspace that inspires you then enjoy that coveted place to begin the hard work. But let your ritual adorn your routine instead of dictating it. If you work best with classical music while sitting at your west-facing desk with a paperweight-heavy Himalayan pink sea salt candle deionizing your air, it’s wonderful that you’ve discovered that and cultivated an inspired atmosphere for your creativity. But if you absolutely cannot work without your lucky pen, your ergonomic desk chair, and your favorite notebook what happens when you go out of town? Or family obligations arise? Or work conflicts? What happens when your writing makes you so successful that you need to travel for speaking engagements and book tours? That’s the goal, isn’t it? So how do you maintain that routine in hotel rooms? On layovers? In different time zones with jet lag compromising every lobe of your wobbly brain? Ritual is how you decorate your space. Routine is how you use your time. Wherever you are. While there is some overlap there, and ritual can be emotively beautiful, you can’t be beholden to it. If you are it has become superstition instead of the steady grind. Find what works for you. And stick with each iteration, each experiment to really exhaust its possibilities before discarding it like a diet that didn’t immediately drop you to your desired weight. Give routines time to succeed. But remember that there are almost as many productivity programs and ideas as there are people. What skyrocketed someone with no writing experience to the top of the NYT Bestseller list might not work for you. But I’m certain it is not the ritual that makes the writer but the routine. There is a subtle distinction that I appreciate after twenty years of being a “writer” who barely wrote a thing for those two decades. Author Roger Zelazny made a bargain with himself to write two sentences six times every day. Even if he didn’t “catch fire”. I immediately dismissed that as impossible and pointless for me. Then I read about him. In addition to novellas, anthologies, novelettes, short stories, and series he wrote damn near a novel a year for more than three decades. I doubt he relied on inspiration alone. “ … the best way to achieve a goal is to focus less on the outcome and more on the process, and that that applies across all cultures,” — Melanie Rudd of the University of Houston. Once during college, I literally stayed up until 5 something in the morning to write an invective against the Girl Scouts and specifically against the mandate of selling Girl Scout cookies for my Economics department newsletter. Inspiration struck and for once I saw it through to completion. Even though I was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep. Lightning had electrified the apartment and the computer was on fire with a clear and cohesive narrative. Our editor/dean of undergraduates really liked it. Other student contributors started to write in a similarly casual first-person narrative that showcased their working knowledge of the economics concepts we were learning. I was pleased. Ten years later I brought my Ipad with me when my family took an unexpected but beautiful trip back to Germany where we had lived until I was little. On the flight over I randomly wrote an appraisal of The Weeknd’s video for Earned It. Even though no one was paying me for my writing at that time I reminded myself that paid writers would likely be utilizing a transatlantic flight to get writing done. A family vacation was no excuse to not write. And it should also be an inspiration to write about the adventure itself. Incidentally, my Ipad swallowed that article and spit it into an abyss somewhere I can’t find. But I remember being pleased that my review of his video (and the song itself) reflected the ethereal and sensual nonchalance of the aesthetic and something or other about his diaphanous voice. Routine is how you use your time. Ritual is how you decorate your space. If I only wrote within my ritual, these moments of inspiration would have faded out like music when you walk away from a house party. Notes would never become songs if I only wrote within inspired moments or ritualized spaces. You don’t have to do anything. But I have found that consistency is key. All the writers who write about writing describe this too — cultivating your zone takes consistency more than inspiration. Inspiration is fleeting, unsustainable and, most importantly, unpredictable. You can’t rely on it since you never know when it will strike or how long it will last. When I was 13 I randomly won a hundred dollars from the local radio station. A hundred whole dollars! I bought a stereo system with TWO tape decks so I could record, aaand … a CD player. Please excuse me for bragging but if you were a middle-schooler in the early 90s you know what a colossal lifestyle change that was. That was a stroke of random luck. I did not grow up to rely on radio station contests for income. Celebrate inspiration when it graces you with its presence. But treat it like luck. And never depend on it. Medical doctor and bestselling novelist Khaled Hosseini talked about how his runaway hit The Kiterunner eventually started writing itself during his 4–6 am writing routine. Then he went to work and doctor-ed every day. His routine became his zone. I often go back to quotes from best-selling authors Gillian Flynn and Stephen King when I hit a wall. Gillian Flynn said, “I could not have written a novel if I hadn’t been a journalist first, because it taught me that there’s no muse that’s going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I’m definitely not precious.” And Stephen King, who’s written more words than most of us have ever spoken in our entire lives famously said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” This is not to say that flow is constant. It’s not. But what makes writers write is consistency. There is no substitute for your hands on the keyboard. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to craft an inspired space that stimulates ideas and connects neural pathways but if you depend on it, if your hands can’t find the keyboard without your rituals, your servant has become your master. Don’t get so superstitious about how you create that you stop actually creating.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/routine-matters-more-than-ritual-848ee0caf5ee

['Heather M. Edwards']

2019-06-23 23:18:12.362000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Writing', 'Productivity', 'Creativity']

Data Science for Startups: R -> Python

Source: Yuri_B at pixabay.com One of the pieces of feedback I received for my blog series Data Science for Startups was that Python would be a better choice for data scientists joining a startup. This makes a lot of sense if Python is already your go to language for performing data science tasks. In my case, I have much more experience in R and wanted to provide an introduction to working with startups using a language that I’ve previously used to solve problems. Now that I’ve completed the series and turned it into a book, I want to start digging into Python as a scripting language for data science. For now I still prefer Java for productizing models, using DataFlow, but that preference may change as I become more familiar with the language. I’d like to port some of my previous articles to Python from R, to provide an introduction for a broader audience. Here’s my main motivation for exploring Python: Startup Tooling: Many startups are already using Python for production, or portions of their data pipelines. It makes sense to also use Python for performing analysis tasks. Many startups are already using Python for production, or portions of their data pipelines. It makes sense to also use Python for performing analysis tasks. PySpark: R and Java don’t provide a good transition to authoring Spark tasks interactively. You can use Java for Spark, but it’s not a good fit for exploratory work, and the transition from Python to PySpark seems to be the most approachable way to learn Spark. R and Java don’t provide a good transition to authoring Spark tasks interactively. You can use Java for Spark, but it’s not a good fit for exploratory work, and the transition from Python to PySpark seems to be the most approachable way to learn Spark. Deep Learning: I’m interested in Deep Learning, and while there are R bindings for libraries such as Keras, it’s better to code in the native language of these libraries. I previously used R to author custom loss functions, and debugging errors was problematic. I’m interested in Deep Learning, and while there are R bindings for libraries such as Keras, it’s better to code in the native language of these libraries. I previously used R to author custom loss functions, and debugging errors was problematic. Python Libraries: In addition to the deep learning libraries offered for Python, there’s a number of other useful tools including Flask and Bokeh. There’s notebook environments that can scale including Google’s Colaboratory and AWS SageMaker. There’s two additional topics that I’d like to cover that I did not provide content for in the initial series: Virtualization: Once you start running large jobs, you need a better environment for scaling up to work with large data sets. I used Google’s DataFlow in the initial series, but want to present tools that are useful for scaling up analysis when working interactively. Once you start running large jobs, you need a better environment for scaling up to work with large data sets. I used Google’s DataFlow in the initial series, but want to present tools that are useful for scaling up analysis when working interactively. Spark: I’d like to explore more of the Spark ecosystem, including tools such as the recently announced MLflow. Spark provides a nice environment for working with large scale data, and more easily moving from exploration to production tasks. To start, I plan on revisiting my previous posts that were R heavy, and provide a port of these posts to Python. Here are the topics in my original series that need to be translated to Python: Many of these sections can be translated directly, but posts such as Business Intelligence will require using different libraries, such as Bokeh instead of Shiny. I won’t update the sections on DataFlow, since those are authored in Java. However, it is possible to write DataFlow tasks using Python. Instead of porting Java to Python, I’ll explore new tools for productizing work such as Spark and SageMaker. The goal of this post is to motivate my transition to Python and to provide an introduction to getting up and running with a Jupyter notebook. Given my new focus on virtualization, I also wanted to show how to work with a remote machine on AWS. The remainder of this post discusses how to spin up an EC2 instance on AWS, set up Jupyter notebooks for remote connections, and query data from BigQuery in Python. Setting up Jupyter There’s a number of great IDEs available for Python, such as PyCharm. However, I’m going to be focusing on Jupyter, since it’s a notebook environment and many of the tools that are used for scalable data science are based on notebooks, such as DataBricks for Spark, Colaboratory, and SageMaker. It may be useful to start with an IDE when learning the basics of the language, but it’s good to become familiar with notebook environments given the popularity of this type of environment for large-scale tools. One of the common tasks discussed when getting started with Python is setting up a virtual environment in order to install Python and any necessary libraries, using tools such as virtualenv. It’s a good practice to set up a virtual environment when using Python, because there may be conflicts between libraries, you may need to run multiple versions of Python, or you may want to create a fresh install to start over. Docker is another option, but is much more heavyweight that virtualenv. For this post, I’ll discuss launching an EC2 instance on AWS for setting up a Python 3 environment. This is also much more heavyweight than using virtualenv, but it provides the ability to scale up the size of the machine if necessary when working with larger data sets. It’s also a good opportunity to become more familiar with AWS and getting started with virtualizing data science tasks. Security is another important consideration when setting up a notebook environment, since you don’t want your workspace to be open to the world. The most secure way of connecting to a Jupyter notebook when using AWS is to set up an SSH tunnel with port forwarding, which ensures that clients can only connect to the notebook if they have the required private key. Another option is to open up the notebook to the open web, but restrict which machines can connect to the EC2 instance. I’ll present the later approach in this post, since it requires fewer steps, but strongly recommend the former approach for any real task. Launching an EC2 Instance This post assumes that you’ve already created an AWS account. AWS provides a number of free-tier options that you can use to become familiar with the platform. EC2 is a service that you can use to spin up and connect to virtual machines. We’ll spin up an EC2 instance and use it to host Jupyter notebooks. Documentation on using EC2 is available here. Launching an EC2 instance on AWS Perform the following steps from the EC2 Dashboard to launch a machine: 1. Click “Launch Instance” 2. Select “Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03.0” 3. Select “t2.micro”, which is free tier eligible 4. Click “Review and Launch” 5. Click “Launch” and then select a key for connecting via SSH 6. Click “Launch Instances” and then “View Instances” We’ll also need to edit the machine’s configuration in order to allow inbound Jupyter connections on port 8888. By default, an EC2 instance only allows inbound connections on port 22 using a private key for authentication. Documentation on configuring security groups is available here. Setting up an exception for port 8888 for Jupyter. We’ll allow inbound connects to the EC2 instance on port 8888 for only the host machine. Perform the following steps from the EC2 dashboard: 1. Select your EC2 instance 2. Under “Description”, select the security (e.g. launch-wizard-1) 3. Click “Actions” -> “Edit Inbound Rules” 4. Add a new Rule: change the port to 8888, under source, select “My IP” 5. Click “Save” After performing these steps, you now have an EC2 instance up an running, with an open port available for connecting to Jupyter. In order to connect to your instance, you’ll need a tool such as Putty. Instructions for Windows users are available here. Another option is to using Java to connect directly to your instance. However, I haven’t used this before, and it’s deprecated in Chrome. Installing Jupyter Once you’re able to connect to your instance, you’ll need to set up Python 3 and Jupyter. The instance should already have Python 2.7 installed, but we want to use a newer version. Run the following commands to install Python 3, pip, and Jupyter: sudo yum install -y python36 python36 --version curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py sudo python36 get-pip.py pip3 --version pip3 install --user jupyter The Amazon linux distro is based on RedHat, so yum is used to install software. Pip is Python’s package manager, which we’ll use to install libraries in a later step. I’ve also included statements to check the install versions. Private IP and Public IP details for my test instance. By default, Jupyter only accepts connections from the local machine. This can be changed by using the --ip command. For this to work on an EC2 instance, you’ll need to use the private IP of the machine. This is 172.31.60.173 in the figure above. You can enable remote connections and launch Jupyter using the following command: jupyter notebook --ip Your_AWS_Prive_IP When Jupyter launches, it mentions a specific URL to copy into your browser in order to run notebooks. Since we configured Jupyter to use the Private IP, this is what will be printed out when launching Jupyter. To connect to the machine, you’ll need to copy the link, but also modify the IP from the private IP to the public IP, which is 18.206.244.128 in the above figure. The Jupyter Notebook is running at: http://Your_AWS_Private_IP:8888/?token=dd921a6c4ebc3a3bb90fcd8ac44394692a80685705da30e3 # output from running the commandThe Jupyter Notebook is running at: http://Your_AWS_Public_IP:8888/?token=dd921a6c4ebc3a3bb90fcd8ac44394692a80685705da30e3 # switch the internal IP to external to run in a browser If everything was successful, you should now see Jupyter in your browser. The Jupyter landing page on my EC2 instance. You now have a notebook running for authoring interactive python 3 scripts! Connecting to BigQuery Now that we have a Jupyter notebook up and running, the first step I wanted to explore before digging into Business Intelligence and EDA was figuring out how to pull data from BigQuery to a Pandas DataFrame for analysis. While Google does provide a library for working with GCP in Python (google-cloud-storage), we don’t need to use it for this specific use case. The pandas-gbq library makes it easy to accomplish the task of pulling result sets locally for analysis. To set up this library, as well as matplotlib for plotting, run the following commands in the terminal: pip3 install --user pandas-gbq pip3 install --user matplotlib We can switch back to the Jupyter environment and start working with BigQuery public data sets. The first line in the snippet below loads the pandas library, which is installed as a dependency when installing pandas-gbq. The second line identifies the product id to use when running queries. The third command runs a query that pulls a data sample from the Natality data set, and assigns the result set to a pandas DataFrame. The final step displays information about the data types in the df object. When you first run this script, the notebook will prompt you for a key as part of authenticating with Google. Click on the provided link and copy the key to proceed. import pandas as pd projectid = "your_project_id" df = pd.read_gbq("""SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.natality` limit 100""", projectid, dialect = "standard") df.info() For R users, info() in Python is similar to str(), and describe() is similar to summary(). If you want to get a feel for the shape of the data set, you can use some of the built-in plotting functions for DataFrame objects, which generate plots using matplotlib. The snippet below shows how to select two columns from the DataFrame, and plot histograms for these attributes: df[['weight_pounds', 'mother_age']].hist() This generates the following matplotlib visualization: Histograms of attributes in the Natality data set. We now have an environment set up where we can pull data from BigQuery into pandas DataFrames for analysis. The workbook is available on Github here and a rendered version is available here. I’ve already been using Jupyter notebooks for some of my analysis, so having a Python connection set up with BigQuery in this environment is a good first step to porting my R analysis to Python. The next step is learning how to perform exploratory data analysis, visualization, and modeling using Python libraries. Conclusion As a next step in my series on Data Science for Startups, I’m exploring the use of Python instead of R for scripting tasks. Python provides many great libraries that motivate this port, including deep learning, a more gentle introduction to Spark, and scalable notebook environments. This post showed how to set up an EC2 instance and remotely work with Jupyter notebooks. It also showed how to pull data from BigQuery. Now that I’ve laid some groundwork for getting started with Python, I can start porting some of my posts to Python from R.

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-for-startups-r-python-2ca2cd149c5c

['Ben Weber']

2018-06-11 20:58:09.414000+00:00

['Startup', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Towards Data Science', 'AWS']

The Manchurian Plague

As of the time of this writing, a new and more contagious strain of the Coronavirus has been reported in the United Kingdom. Initial findings state that it spreads 70% faster than the original one that we are all too familiar with. It's horrible news going into the start of 2021 and only further underlines the need for masks and other personal protective equipment. For those of you who refuse to believe the evidence of its protection, I offer a page from medical history: the Manchurian Plague of 1910. It was an event widely credited for making the use of personal protective equipment a standard in efforts to stop the spread of disease. How did it start? A Tarbagan marmot, by Stephane Magnenat, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Most experts believe that the plague started from an infected Tarbagan marmot. These rodents were usually hunted because locals turned their fur into clothes for trade. The disease's spread was further intensified when marmot hunters started taking more and more fur for the harsh winter months. International traders from Japan and Russia created even more demand for the fur, spiking up the value for marmot hides. And while most local hunters disposed of diseased marmots for food, they did not do the same for its hides — given that they were compensated well for it. Slowly but surely, locals started experiencing headaches, fevers, coughs, and shortness of breath. And since the period lacked the medical advancements we have today, the disease's mortality rate was incredibly high. Similar to our current pandemic, all this was magnified when people started traveling to see their families for the Chinese New Year. The disease followed the railway systems locals were using to get home. It spread across Beijing, Wuhan, and was even noted to be in some parts of Shanghai, almost 2,000 miles from the first reported case. In Manzhouli, an Inner Mongolian town, piles of corpses were left on the streets. The few hospitals that were in the area couldn’t accommodate the sick, so railway freight cars were used as quarantine wards. How did authorities handle it? Mass cremation workers for Manchurian plague victims (1911), by Dr. Richard Pearson Strong, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge schooled physician, led the Chinese medical efforts against the deadly plague. His main approach, which was innovative for the time, was an emphasis on the wearing of cloth face masks and other personal protective equipment. Wu also implemented harsh forms of quarantine, isolation, and travel restrictions. He would go as far as burning down houses with a known high infection rate. With his efforts, the disease was at least contained to China’s Manchurian region, as opposed to being a nationwide health crisis. But what Wu is truly significant for was his ability to call for a multinational medical response against the plague. He held an international Plague Conference in Mukden in April 1911, and it was the first of its kind. The conference perhaps laid the foundation for the World Health Organization we have today. However, while there was an international team of doctors, epidemiologists, and nurses handling the situation, not everybody agreed with Wu’s approach of using masks and personal protective equipment. A French doctor named Gerald Mesny catered to those in quarantine but refused to wear a mask. After just a few days from starting his medical mission, Dr. Mesny died from being infected by one of his patients. He is among the 60,000 lives the plague took from this world. Final Thoughts Personal protective equipment for the pneumonic plague (1910–1911), from the Wellcome Collection Gallery, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons We’ve come a long way from crude forms of personal protective equipment and experimental vaccines. Although much smaller in scale, the Manchurian plague parallels the hardships and medical responses of this year’s pandemic. I hope this page from medical history encourages you to trust medical professionals when they tell you to wear your mask and practice social distancing.

https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-manchurian-plague-efc9c39f0fd8

['Ben Kageyama']

2020-12-28 12:02:24.862000+00:00

['Nonfiction', 'Health', 'History', 'Covid 19', 'Science']

Against Outsourcing the Mind to a Soul

image: tw Brains are not just for eating Until 9/11 I thought that the days were over when people could be immolated for having the wrong ideas about the soul. People have long been controlled by a fear that their immortal essence could suffer for eternity if they did not obey certain spiritual authorities. “One of these mornings, the chain is gonna break.” — Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools Brains, Not Chains While those chains have now crumbled for a lot of us, belief in a soul is still pretty common. It might be less so if more of us were aware of its stunning inconsistency with everyday reality: particularly the fact that we have brains. There is overwhelming evidence that brains are what make our bodies into people; people who speak, think, adapt, and cope with life on the planet. Brains gather and integrate sensory information derived from energy fluctuations in the environment. The more precisely we can measure brain activity the more detailed we find to be their correlations with human conscious experiences. And it’s not just humans. When we look at nervous systems throughout the animal kingdom, we see that brains operate bodies to enable their survival as well. Nevertheless, the ineffable, private nature of human consciousness is often part of an argument that something — call it a soul — that is not physical causes consciousness. If that’s true, then why does the brain seem so obviously involved? Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? To answer this question many have used the analogy of the brain being like a radio receiver. As one fairly typical source puts it: The brain does not produce consciousness, but acts as a kind of receiver which “picks up” the fundamental consciousness that is all around us, and “transmits” it into our own being. Some proponents think deeply enough to realize this comes with an issue. It’s whether a soul is somehow an individual or else is a sort of world soul. Maybe, they say, the world soul has knots in it that correspond to individual people. Or, assuming panpsychism, also knots for individual monkeys, mice, molds, and even molecules. If it’s all just knots, which are presumably temporary, then maybe we are at least off the hook for eternal damnation. I certainly hope so. By the modern account of soul-ism, all those messy neuronal networks roiling away in brains only appear to be responding to the outside world. Instead, some outside spirit runs the show. This is a dualistic position, subject to … more issues. For starters, what is left for the brain to do? If it has no purpose, why does it expend more energy than the leg muscles of a marathon runner? Many of you are aware that there is massive and detailed evidence that life here, including animals with brains, evolved by the selection of genetic changes that contributed to survival and reproduction. Consistent with that view, brains evolved as a way of reacting to the physical world, the better for the organism to deal with it. Why then would the brain also function as a receiver of information from sources external to the physical world? That’s like having a bicycle that’s also a TV, but where the same parts serve both functions. A dual-function brain seems at least awkward and possibly self-contradictory. We can dig a bit deeper. Consider what, given the soul, is the purpose of the brain and the organism in which it resides? Why would such a puny, space- and time-limited thing as a brain or an organism need to exist when the important, eternal stuff of consciousness is really elsewhere? We know that our physical person lives in this world. Sane people know that to survive we have to perceive this world, think about it, respond to it, etc. But if all our consciousness — including what happens when we drive the car, eat the food, go to the work, hide from the boss — if all that we experience comes from that soul, how and why does the soul know exactly what is happening in the mundane world? The soul could know this if it was part of that mundane world, and thus subject to the world’s laws, but then the soul could not be transcendent, let alone eternal. The Watcher-Watcher So that can’t be what’s happening. The alternative would be something like a perfect watcher. And only Dr. Seuss could contrive anything quite so — well, contrived. The soul, perched on a lookout in some other dimension, uses an inter-dimensional portal to watch our body moving about in our mundane world. Instant by every instant the soul decides and deduces everything that needs to happen in our consciousness. For example, based on a previous thought (that it already sent to us) about wanting to look at something, the soul pokes our brain, making it in turn move our eyeballs. After the first few hundredths of a degree of movement, the soul looks through the portal at our physical environment, deduces what our visual field should now look like, and sends to our brain that new picture, so that we consciously see it. And repeats this cycle of controlling every tiny mental change for billions of instants the rest of our life and then on to the subsequent incarnations. All that electrochemical activity in the retina and up the neuro-visual circuits, all the spinal motor nerve activity — all that has no purpose at all. Seems like a waste. So, why would something as cumbersome as a perfect watcher ever happen in any universe? Why use a brain at all? The soul should just tell the meat puppet what it perceives and what to do. So the soul gets rid of the need for a brain, really. But what about the body, and, for that matter, the whole world it lives in? Maybe that is superfluous, too. Why would we have a remote controller pulling our strings and dictating our reality from a realm outside of our realm, the one where we actually have to live? If such a controller did exist, it’s more like a god than an individual agent. After all, it has perfect control over our experience of “reality.” So a godlike soul does not need a body. In fact, it doesn’t need any reality other than its own. Maybe it’s just playing a virtual reality game in which we, the bodies with brains, are the pieces on the board? It’s a Team Player, too Now we have to ask, why does the game being played by my soul seem consistent with the game played by your soul, in the sense that they seem to be in one world, with consistent laws of physics, configurations of biology, timelines, and so forth? Like, who’s coordinating the souls to create this one-world illusion? How many levels of coordinators would there be? Here, I admit, is where a world soul would have an easier time of it, keeping things consistent. Going back to real life for a moment: there’s a strong case that each of us (using our brains) models and lives in a kind of personal virtual reality, called an Ego Tunnel by philosopher Thomas Metzinger. What makes this work is that we are all doing our individual take on a base reality that contains all of us. But if souls are actually in charge, doing the models and everything else, then uh-oh, there’s that coordination issue again. Souls that did not coordinate well, who had differences in their recipes for reality soufflé, would lead some of us to experiences that others would never see. People who believe in and experience unusual (“supernatural”) things should thus find the concept of souls sensible, and I think that they often do. Just Give Brains a Chance The brain receiver idea pops up often, as if it solves some conceptual problem of connecting the physical world with consciousness, which seems askew from the physical. But the concept has problems, as I hope I have expressed. It seems so much more sensibly self-consistent that consciousness is just a refined way of using nervous tissue to do a better job of adapting to the physical, measurable, and shared non-supernatural world that we perceive as our conscious reality. We can be open to the possibility that all experience, even the weird stuff, comes from one universe, and that brains participate actively/creatively in all of it. For example, there are certainly transcendent experiences. Perhaps these happen when higher parts of the brain/mind’s conscious model “get out of the way.” Something like this was proposed by Metzinger to describe the experience of “pure consciousness” — the “void” or sometimes, “clear light”— during deep meditation. To summarize: one can argue that reducing the brain to a sort of side effect doesn’t make much sense. There are also arguments that the brain is involved in rarer conscious states (like near-death or out-of-body experiences) that some think to require a soul instead. Those are too involved to address here. Maybe some readers will remind us of them.

https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/against-outsourcing-the-mind-to-a-soul-22ce1e1243c8

['Ted Wade']

2020-10-19 01:10:43.460000+00:00

['Philosophy', 'Brain', 'Consciousness', 'Psychology', 'Science']

How to Customize QuickSight Dashboards for User Specific Data

We have been getting a lot of queries on how to customize a single QuickSight dashboard for user specific data. We can accomplish this by filtering the dashboard data with login username using AWS QuickSight’s Row-Level Security. To further explain this use-case, let’s consider the sales department in a company. Every day your team of sales agents contacts a list of potential customers. Now you need a single dashboard that is accessed by all the agents but only displays the list of prospects he or she is assigned to. Note: This is completely different from filter/controls on QuickSight dashboards. If you have filters/controls/parameters set up with dynamic values being picked up from the dataset, then even that data is filtered with Row-Level security, as the underlying dataset itself is filtered with the login username. Let’s get on with the show! I have created a hypothetical data set. This dataset has a column named assigned-agent which shall be used for filtering. Using this dataset, I have created a dashboard that looks like so. This dashboard is shared with two other IAM users (sales agents). As we haven’t set up any rules both of them can access whole data. As you can see ziva could also access whole data and we don’t want that! Our requirement is something like this: Creating Data Set Rules for Row-Level Security: Create a file or a query that contains the data set rules (permissions). It doesn’t matter what order the fields are in. However, all the fields are case-sensitive. They must exactly match the field names and values. The structure should look similar to one of the following. You must have at least one field that identifies either users or groups. You can include both, but only one is required, and only one is used at a time. If you are specifying groups, use only Amazon QuickSight groups or Microsoft AD groups. The following example shows a table with user names. For SQL: /* for users*/ select User as UserName, Agent as agent_assigned from permissions_table; Or if you prefer to use a .csv file: UserName,agent_assigned "nick","Nick Howe" "ziva","Ziva Medalle" "manager","Nick Howe,Ziva Medalle" Here agent_assigned is a column in the dataset, and UserName is the same as QuickSight login name. What we are essentially doing is mapping UserName with the agent_assigned column. Let’s suppose ziva has logged in, only those records with condition agent_assigned = Ziva Medalle are picked up. Same is the case with nick. But in the case of the manager, we want him to be a superuser, so we added all the agent names ( agent_assigned column values). Note: If you are using an Athena or an RDS or a Redshift or an S3 CSV file-based dataset, just make sure the output format/structure of those sources matches the above-mentioned formats. Create Permissions Data Set: Create a QuickSight dataset with the above data set rules. Go to Manage data, choose New data set, choose source and create accordingly. As mine is a CSV, I have just uploaded it. To make sure that you can easily find it, give it a meaningful name, for example in my case Permissions-prospects-list. After finishing, Refresh the page as it might not appear in the data sources list while applying it to the dataset. Creating Row-Level Security: Choose Permissions, From the list choose the permissions dataset that you have created earlier. Choose Apply data set. Once you have applied, you should be seeing the dataset has a new lock symbol on it saying restricted. That’s it. Now the data is filtered/secured based on username. Manager’s Account: Ziva’s Account: Nick’s Account: You could also add Users to Groups and have permissions set at the group level. More information here. I hope it was helpful, any queries drop them in the comments section. Thanks for the read! This story is authored by Koushik. Koushik is a software engineer and a keen data science and machine learning enthusiast.

https://medium.com/zenofai/how-to-customize-quicksight-dashboards-for-user-specific-data-dd33ac6f19ec

['Engineering Zenofai']

2019-12-04 11:46:34.298000+00:00

['Analytics', 'AWS', 'Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Cloud Computing']

The Man Who Cut Off His Own Hand to Avoid Certain Death

The Man Who Cut Off His Own Hand to Avoid Certain Death Aron Ralston A selfie taken by Aron Ralston when he was stuck with his hand between the canyon and boulder and a picture of the bolder after the incident (Source: The Guardian) Life can bring us major challenges that will test not only our character but our will to fight against the odds. In Aron Ralston’s case, life brought the challenge of a lifetime, which most people don’t encounter and even those who do will most likely fail. In 2003, Ralston had to make a drastic decision, it was either cutting off his hand or dying. As always, things are not as simple as they sound, this is why we need to dig deeper into what actually happened. Just another hike outdoors Aron Ralston is a mechanical engineer and since a young age, he loved to spend his free time outdoors. He kept this hobby throughout his life, escaping his job and going out in the wilderness, exploring the vast nature that America has to offer. In 2003, he decided to take a hike in the Bluejohn Canyon (Wayne County, Utah). He was quite good at hiking, but no matter how good you are, the terrain can always play against your plan. As he was hiking the canyon, a big boulder fell in the crater that Ralston found himself in, locking his hand between the canyon and the boulder. The boulder weighed at least a couple of tonnes, therefore there was no way to move it. Although Ralston tried to use his equipment to move the boulder, he had no luck. Surrounded by miles of unhabited wilderness, his chances of being helped by someone were extremely slim. After the first day passed whilst he was stuck, friends and family were worried that he didn’t come back from his hike. He never told anyone the path he was going to take. He had a cellphone, but he had no signal whatsoever down in the narrow crater. He tried the small swiss knife he had to break the boulder enough to free his hand, but it was to no good use. Due to his hand being stuck, he was in a very uncomfortable position that didn't allow him to sit down, which meant that he could not get much rest. As the fourth day passed of being stuck, he had lost all hope. He knew that no one was coming and with his food and water supplies depleted, death seemed certain. A drastic decision In a mind over matter thought, he knew deep down that the only way that he could survive was to cut his hand. Besides being a very despicable idea, it was either that or death. The problem was that Ralston only had his swiss knife on him, which was not the sharpest or the best tool to “surgically” remove a hand. You can only imagine how mentally difficult it is to harm yourself, let alone cut your own hand. Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston With the belt he had on him as well as some other ropes, he tied all of them around his arm to stop the bleeding whilst cutting the hand. So he started cutting as quickly as possible in order to lose the least amount of blood possible. A good description of this gruesome experience is offered in Ralston’s autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. After Ralston managed to cut his hand off, he rushed out of the canyon, and to his luck, he ran into some tourists that helped him. It is so difficult to imagine the mental position you not only have to be placed by a certain event but also the mental position in which you need to put yourself in to be able to cut off your own hand, or any limb for that matter. Would you be able to make such a drastic decision if your life depended on it?

https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-man-who-cut-off-his-own-hand-to-avoid-certain-death-3f7527192873

['Andrei Tapalaga']

2020-12-28 13:30:38.952000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Health', 'History', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology']

Use Rebellion to Combat FOMO

FOMO: the Fear of Missing Out. Who has it? Come on. Raise your hand. I’m just going to assume y’all are raising the roof, because I know that you’ve felt it before. That feeling when it seems like everyone you know is doing a thing, and you aren’t. The energy is infectious, and you’ve been bitten by the bug, but whatever that thing is, it doesn’t fit for you. Maybe it’s NaNoWriMo. Every November, everyone you know is out there writing a whole damn book in 30 days, and meanwhile, you don’t write fiction. You’re a blogger. Maybe it’s the Blog-Your-Own-Book Challenge. Your writing friends are busy planning their BYOB project, and you’re a fiction writer who does’t really want to write a bunch of blog posts. Maybe it’s — any situation where everyone else is on the boat and you wish you were, too, even though you don’t really want to be. I have a proposition for you. Grab onto the tail of that energy. It’s the energy of the thing that matters the most. The idea that a conglomeration of people are all working toward the same goal at the same time. Think about this: It doesn’t really matter if your goal is different. You can take that tiger by the tail. Use the energy and enthusiasm to do your own work, your own way. Let’s take NaNoWriMo. Maybe, instead of trying to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days, you make some other big, hairy writing goal. Finish editing that book you’ve already written. Write some crazy number of blog posts — 50 or even 100 maybe? Something that will push you. Because it’s pushing yourself to do more than you thought you could that’s the whole point. You can tap into the excitement surrounding NaNoWriMo and use that energy to do whatever you want to do. Whoo, boy. Rebellion is intoxicating. How to tap into BYOB if you’re not a blogger. The Blog-Your-Own-Book Challenge is supposed to be a call to write 31 blog posts in August, all on the same topic, and turn them into a book you can sell to create an income stream or use as a lead magnet. But what if you’re a fiction writer and you don’t really want to try to blog a novel? What if you want to be traditionally published and don’t actually want to publish your book via a blog before you try to sell it? What if you have some other project that needs your attention in August? Be a rebel. Really. Go on and try it. Tap into the energy that’s created when a bunch of people are all excited about the same thing at the same time. And then use that energy to do whatever you want to do. Need some ideas? Here are a bunch: If you’re a fiction writer, create a series of flash fiction stories that are set in the world of your novel. They’ll make a great lead magnet. Use BYOB to explore a topic you’ve been interested in, but you haven’t actually written about before. Learn a new skill in August and blog about the process. Teach as you go. Edit your last completed first draft in August. Break it up into 31 parts and finish one a day. Sign up for Teachable and use August to create your first (or next) online course. If you want to try to traditionally publish your book, choose a topic that’s tangental to blog about during BYOB, you’ll end up with a minimum viable product or a lead magnet. Plus your posts will attract the audience you want for your book when you do write it. The possibilities are nearly endless. Rebellion is encouraged around here.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/use-rebellion-to-combat-fomo-351f491e3d

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-07-25 16:54:36.895000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Byob', 'Blogging', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

Conversations With Alexa

We were engaged in a spirited debate about whether to order dishes or combo meals from our local Chinese Food restaurant when Alexa chimed in: “Maybe you should get one platter and then two orders of rice to split.” “Is that enough food for both of us?” I asked. “According to Lotus Flower’s menu choices, which indicate that the combos are family style and the rice comes in quarts, it is,” said Alexa. “But we’re really hungry,” my wife pleaded with Alexa. ‘Okay, okay,” said Alexa, “Then I suggest two kids dinners and three..” “Wait.” I interrupted, “Aren’t kids dinners really small?” “No,” Alexa answered without losing a step, “They’re just 3 ounces smaller. But you should also get three orders of rice,” said Alexa, sounding a bit exasperated. “Hey, that all sounds pretty good. We want Kung Pao chicken and Chow Mein kids meals,” said my wife. “Ordering,” said Alexa. Full disclosure: This didn’t happen and is not possible with current Alexa, but Natural Turn Taking (not the most elegant name), which Amazon revealed this week as part of the near-future of its Alexa voice assistant (and a small part of a major fall product rollout), could make a three-way conversation like this more than possible. Think about it this way: The fears you’ve had that, when talking in front of an Echo or other Alexa-enabled devices, that there’s always someone else in the room, possibly listening to you, is sort of coming true. Or put another way, you’ll soon be giving Alexa the okay to do something it’s been doing for ages anyway, butting in. The State of Alexa If there is a race to make our voice assistants more human-like in their conversational abilities, Amazon is firmly in the middle. Alexa doesn’t possess the Turing Test challenging skill of Google’s Duplex, which, to be fair is highly-trained, narrowly focused add-on for Google Assistant that works in 48 of 50 states to help you make dinner and hair salon reservations. It can, however, answer follow-ups to initial questions without requiring the wake word. It’s no better than Apple’s Siri or Google Assistant about not speaking unless spoken to. Alexa still responds to words similar to its watch word, from casual conversations in its vicinity, and commercials. Thank goodness I didn’t name either of my children “Alex.” I grew up on a steady diet of Star Trek where the Enterprise AI “Computer” engaged in lengthy conversations with the Captain and Crew with one watch word and, after that, only the context provided by, usually, Captain Kirk. As a result, I know we’re still in the early days of real-world AI-based voice assistants. A real conversation Amazon’s Natural Turn Taking, though, is a pivotal step toward a more human-to-AI conversational future. The ability to engage in a one way conversation is difficult enough for most AI voice assistants, a three way convo is a digital party in which the AI has to navigate who is speaking to whom (to Alexa or the other party), pauses as one speaker waits for a response, and the inevitable cross-talk, which is even more likely when you’re trying to make a decision. In a blog post on the still-under-development technology, Amazon said Alexa uses a mixture of technologies to assess everything from acoustic to linguistic and even visual (I guess this will work on Echo Shows) cues to figure out when it’s time for Alexa to listen or interject. As it’s currently being built, Alexa wouldn’t do any of that if someone doesn’t say, “Alexa, join my conversation,” which is about as natural as asking someone to pick up the fork to eat the food you just placed before them. Obviously, since Alexa is a disembodied observer in the conversation, it makes sense to formally invite her to engage. While that invite might feel awkward, the rest of the conversation should not. Once Alexa is invited, there’s no need to use the watch word again until the end. Removing the need to say “Alexa” during these conversations greases the wheels of discussion nicely but doesn’t necessarily make it feel natural. The concept of “barge-ins,” though, does help. Essentially, Amazon is now programming Alexa to identify when speakers break into an Alexa response to, perhaps, change the course of conversation or, maybe, identify which of a list of options they prefer. Amazon calls this “contextual barge-ins.” Instead of Alexa ignoring your interruption or, more likely, resetting to an earlier conversational state, this Alexa will know exactly when you interrupted and understand that you selected something or indicated heightened interest. This can help steer the three-way conversation to a more natural conclusion. Brain training In preparing for these future conversational abilities, the current Alexa is now teachable, learning from its mistakes and getting a firmer grasp on the difference between entities (a mode-based request like “set the volume to five”) and declarative statements (“the music is too loud”). Understanding how to handle the latter comment and that the response should be, “Okay, do you want me to lower the volume?” could also lead to future interactions where you saying, “The music is too loud,” automatically leads to Alexa lowering the volume to five. Amazon is also working on improving Alexa’s tone of voice, letting her adapt her cadence and emphasis based on the context of the discussion. During the virtual launch event, Company reps played before and after versions of the same Alexa utterance but, to be honest, I think I still prefer the unadjusted one. With some of this learning and adaptation in hand, the future Alexa could handle not just who is talking and when, but understand the context, nuance, and meaning of everything you say, and respond in kind during a spirited, likely task-based, discussion. When the conversation is done, you’ll still have to tell Alexa to stop listening. Right now, Amazon has you saying, “Alexa, leave my conversation,” an especially awkward phrase that would probably hurt a human’s feelings. It’s a good reminder, though, that Alexa isn’t human, doesn’t have feelings, and is still a tool designed to help you get things done. It’s not a new party guest or best friend. Now, pardon me while I go order some Chinese food.

https://medium.com/swlh/conversations-with-alexa-40ceedd4f282

['Lance Ulanoff']

2020-09-26 19:10:25.982000+00:00

['Amazon', 'Technology', 'Alexa', 'AI', 'Analysis']

Weight Loss ‘Before-and-After’ Images Are Not Inspiring — They’re Dangerous

As a teenager, I pored over the ‘before-and-after’ images of weight loss in my mother’s magazines. They’d be splashed across the cover of every kind of periodical that was aimed at women, enticing them to part with hard-come-by cash with the promise of revealing The Magic Secret of how they, too, could transform. Some of these magazines were cheap, their flimsy covers soaked in coarse-coloured photographs and attention-grabbing headlines. Some were expensive: glossy, heavy paper-stock displaying pastel mastheads in refined fonts. But they were all selling the same thing: some variation of the story about how a 300-pound woman had taken up a famous weight-loss plan and had ‘slimmed down’ to 110 pounds. I would flip straight to the story and stare at those side-by-side photos, fascinated. In one picture, the woman would often look sheepish or embarrassed, the experience of being captured for posterity clearly mortifying. (She would have had no idea at the time it was taken that this would become her ‘before’ photograph. Had she known, she would have arched her body to hide some of its size, or pull at the hem of her top to cover more of what she carried.) If she were smiling, it would be a forced, pained look, as though someone had pressured her to pose and she’d been too polite, too lacking in power, to say no. The ‘after’ shot was another story. The woman would appear ebullient, victorious, a broad smile lighting up her entire face. Her hairstyle would be more modern, more traditionally ‘feminine’; she would be wearing make-up and fashionable, figure-hugging clothes, possibly a tight dress with a belt cinching her in, emphasising her newly-small waist. Or she would be standing inside a pair of trousers that were now clearly too big, holding out the waistband with both hands and looking into the camera with a slightly raised brow, as if to say directly to us, “Can you believe these used to fit me?!” The articles would then expound on how all the woman had had to do was realise that the secret — The Magic Secret — was that you have to burn more calories than you intake. Ha! That’s all there is to it! The articles would then expound on how all the woman had had to do was realise that the secret — The Magic Secret — was that you have to burn more calories than you intake. Ha! That’s all there is to it! She wished she had known it twenty years earlier! She wished she had started calculating every ounce of what she had ingested and expended decades ago! She wished she had stepped on those scales every morning to measure how good or bad she’d been, and had always weighed her food, scooping back into the bag even a single excess gram. She wished she hadn’t been so naughty as to eat that extra slice of cake at the office birthday party. She wished she could have posed for more photographs with her children on holidays, at family get-togethers, at their birthday parties, instead of making herself busy when the camera was brought out. She was absent from the documentation of her own life because she hated the way her body looked. At that age, I found the photographs inspiring, aspirational even. I have always lived in a larger body, though it has always fluctuated along that axis, sometimes parking at the small end for a while, sometimes the larger end, then back again. In my early teens, I felt my difference the most. I wanted to be effortlessly thin and attractive like the most popular girls at school, though I would have never admitted that to anyone. So I took comfort in these magazines, selling to me as they were the dream that I was an after waiting to happen. I skimmed the copy in most of those stories, though. The self-hatred tasted too sour, too close to home. I didn’t want to know what this woman thought, or how she felt, and the magazine mostly took care of that inconvenience for me by offering no meaningful details about the woman’s life beyond her looks. Was she a doctor? The article didn’t say. Had she overcome grief or trauma at a young age and was now a successful entrepreneur? We weren’t told. Had she raised thousands for charity and fundraised enough to open a school for local underprivileged children? There wasn’t enough space for that. And if you wanted to know such details, you were missing the point. There was plenty of room for an in-page advertisement about the famous weight loss plan the woman had followed in order to ‘shed those pounds’, but there wasn’t room to tell us about her daughter’s illness, or her partner’s alcoholism. I read those articles in the 1990s. Though the facets that made the woman whole were explained in meagre details, back then it would have been considered uncouth to publish only the photographs; there had to be some text to accompany them, otherwise the whole thing would have seemed superficial, indecent, dehumanising. A Century of the Same Old Message But of course, weight loss before-and-afters did not start in the 1990s. Magazines had been available to the general population — or at least, to those who could read, and were able to afford them —from the late 1600s. However, the first illustrated magazine — The Illustrated London News — wasn’t published until 1842. Weight loss tinctures and potions had been advertised for a number of years by then, but illustrations made the message of those advertisements much more generally accessible; even those who were not able to read would pick up on the message represented by an illustration of a large silhouette on the left side of the advert, and a significantly smaller one on the right. The earliest before-and-after advertisement I found was from the March to August 1925 edition of Picture Play Magazine. The ad is for ‘La-Mar Reducing Soap’ and features an illustration of three women standing on descending steps on a staircase, each progressively thinner. The headline reads, ‘Wash away fat and years of age with La-Mar Reducing Soap’. The soap claims to reduce the size of targeted areas without affecting other parts of the body, so that the user can get rid of the famously disgusting curses of ‘ungainly ankles’ or ‘unbecoming wrists’. This type of before-and-after illustrated ad continued to appear in magazines throughout the 1920s. Cigarette brands had already been advertising their products as weight loss aids for years by the time the Kensitas cigarette brand bought ad-space for its own before-and-after illustrated adverts. In them, they extolled the virtues of smoking their cigarettes instead of eating between meals, because, ‘It’s better to be fit than fat’. Then in the early 1930s, Lucky Strike launched its ‘Tempted to Over-Indulge’ campaign. They used full-colour, beautifully illustrated pieces to sell the idea that it was better to smoke than to ‘over-indulge’. Their ads featured either a man or woman, each straight-sized, participating in tennis, or diving, or horse riding, while behind them poses the larger silhouette of what we are to assume is the same person before they started smoking Lucky Strikes instead of snacking. Not much has changed in the style of these adverts over the years. Photography started to overtake hand drawn illustrations in the middle of the twentieth century, but the template stayed much the same. They’re still around today for one reason: they’re effective. Of course, it’s not only print media that’s to blame for our preoccupation with transformation from fat to thin. Television has played its part, too. One of the first major transformation reality shows was ABC’s Extreme Makeover (2002–2007). Contestants were separated from their family and friends and put through rigorous physical training, cosmetic surgery and wardrobe makeovers in order to make them meet more closely contemporaneous beauty standards. Though much of the show focused on the details of the contestant’s cosmetic dental surgery, or rhinoplasty, or lip enhancement, the main pull was the ‘reveal’. Participants would be reintroduced to their families, who waited on the other side of a curtain with cameras already closed-up on their faces in anticipation of the moment their unrecognisable relative would emerge heavily made-up and styled, and now meeting all the requisite ideals of what attractive womanhood looks like. FOX’s The Swan (2004) took the premise of Extreme Makeover and went even further — it turned the whole ordeal into a competition. Two women were pitted against one another every episode, each competing for the most significant ‘improvement’. At the end of the season, episode winners would then take part in a pageant wherein one of them would be crowned ‘The Swan’. So, not only were their faces and bodies nipped and tucked and pulled and stretched, the notion that this physical pain would release them from societal judgement wasn’t even true: they were still going to be judged, and could therefore still lose. When the UK version of The Biggest Loser first aired in 2005, I remember wondering: who is this for? In the same year, NBC’s The Biggest Loser debuted, and became undoubtedly the most famous weight-loss TV show ever. (Though it started in the US, it would go on to be franchised to over thirty-seven other territories around the world.) From its mocking title to the name-calling and ‘tough love’ tactics used by the show’s trainers each week, the whole programme seemed to be an exercise in shame and humiliation. When the UK version first aired in 2005, I remember wondering: who is this for? Is it for thin people who enjoy watching fat people be condescended to and defamed in a legitimised context, allowing them to indulge in their own prejudice against people in larger bodies from the anonymity of their living rooms? Is it for fat people, so that they can watch avatars of themselves on screen and relive the vilification and opprobrium that they have likely experienced from anyone in the fitness industry when they have tried to enter that space, only to be harassed back out of it? I don’t remember what I concluded; likely it was: both. The Internet: The Magazine that Never Ends Fast-forward to 2020 and we have the internet, the magazine that never ends. The one you can never leave on the cluttered table in the dentist’s office, or avoid the ads of, as they flash in the sidebar of any article you might be reading. Given that, according to a study by the app RescueTime in 2019 reported in The Guardian, the average adult spends 3 hours and 15 minutes a day online, the chances of us seeing before-and-after photos is so much higher than in the days where we would make a conscious decision to pick up a magazine and flip through it. Given that the average adult spends 3 hours and 15 minutes a day online, the chances of us seeing before-and-after photos is so much higher than in the days where we would make a conscious decision to pick up a magazine and flip through it. And if we want to actively seek them out, we only need to click a couple of times to do so. Social media has moved the formation of these images from the creative department of advertising agencies to the well-lit homes of individuals with smartphones. On Instagram alone, searching for the ‘fitspo’ (‘fit inspiration’) hashtag — at time of writing — returns the following results, many of which are accompanied by before-and-after images: Screenshot by author, October 8th 2020 That’s almost 72 million examples of how to change a body. How to make a body smaller, more muscled, leaner, tighter, more conventionally attractive, hotter, sexier, more plainly desirable. How to make a body disappear. What do we see when we scroll through such hashtag results? There is a protocol to follow to perfectly capture one’s transformation, the language of social media having been soaked into all of our bones by now. The images we see are mostly of young women (though there are many young men, too) in dimly lit bathrooms, standing side-on, holding their phone up at shoulder height to snap a ‘before’ photo of themselves in their underwear. This is then juxtaposed with an image of their same body, only now it’s shrunken, pulled in, posed in the right way. Initiation into the club is complete. (On the subject of social media, there isn’t enough room in this article to delve into the perpetuation of diet culture in the guise of ‘clean eating’, ‘wellness’, ‘strong not skinny’, and every other fad and coded descriptor for what is essentially the desire to make our bodies — through blood, sweat and tears — look like the version of it we’re conditioned to believe is the only acceptable sort.) And Back Again: After the After As if this phenomenon needed a dark side, ‘reverse transformations’ are their own special brand of cruelty. We see paparazzi shots of previously straight-sized celebrities eating brunch with friends or walking down the street living in a larger body than they previously had, accompanied by headlines about how they’ve ‘let themselves go’, or ‘can’t shift the baby weight’. Not only are these descriptions misogynistic, they speak to the enormous expectations put on women to maintain the same physical appearance throughout their lives, something that is not naturally possible. Hormone fluctuations, childbirth, illness, periods of increased sedentariness or activity will all alter our bodies, and we may not necessarily be in control of any of those factors. The Dangers of Weight Loss Images It might be easy to dismiss before-and-after images as a bit of fun, or a snapshot of someone’s perceived success that we can move on from the second after we’ve seen it. But those pictures leave an afterimage. The proliferation of before-and-after images is dangerous for so many reasons: They can be dangerous for those living with eating disorders, of any classification, and those who are in recovery from eating disorders The pressure to look like an ‘after’ photo can lead to exercise addiction They delegitimise the larger body as an entity in itself — fat people are seen as a transformation waiting to happen, an ‘after’ photo in the making; as though the very vessels that we live and breathe in are an unfinished project waiting to be completed They dehumanise people in larger bodies, making their ‘fat’ seem like something to be treated as other, not a part of their wholeness They perpetuate the myth that the body exists for the benefit and judgement of other people They perpetuate body standard conditioning, the origin of which lays in the male gaze They gamify a body, making its existence about numbers and goals and achieving targets They turn exercise into a means to an end, rather than a pleasurable experience to help maintain health They suggest that the only thing stopping a person from becoming thin is willpower — even though willpower doesn’t exist They suggest that every body can be changed and made smaller, not taking into account genetics, or a whole host of privileges that would allow that to be possible They encourage comparison and competition They perpetuate the myth of ‘thin = healthy’, though we aren’t able to know the actual health of the person in the photograph They minimise non-physical achievements, and suggest that changes to appearance are the ultimate accomplishment They direct all our focus to our bodies and away from our mental health They are not able to account for any harmful mental health effects of that person’s weight loss They are not able to account for any harmful physical effects of that person’s weight loss They normalise thinness as the ultimate life goal They might just plain make us feel bad about our own bodies, which has a knock-on effect to our mental health They influence others to create their before-and-after shots There are many more dangers to this phenomenon, and I’m sure you can already think of several that I’ve missed from this list. There Is Always Another Way Nothing I’ve written so far is an argument against health. Just as it’s a misconception that being thin automatically equates to good health, it’s another misconception that fat activists want everybody else to be fat, too. As I wrote in a previous article on the topic of diet culture, fat people don’t care whether you’re fat or thin. We just wanted everyone, no matter what their body looks like or what it’s capable of, to be treated with dignity and respect. Just as it’s a misconception that being thin automatically equates to good health, it’s another misconception that fat activists want everybody else to be fat, too. Thankfully, there are many people who work every day to expand society’s narrow definition of what health is and what it looks like. Lindo Bacon, researcher, and author of ‘Health At Every Size’ (also referred to as HAES) advocates for an inclusive approach to health that includes all weights, sizes and bodies. Louise Green, athlete, and author of ‘Big Fit Girl’ advocates for inclusivity in fitness and sport, for bodies of all sizes and abilities, and works to spread the word that you don’t have to be thin to be athletic. What Could More Meaningful Transformation Look Like? There will be those who continue to argue that before-and-after photographs are harmless because they’re effective. That they give people something to aspire to. Which begs the question: is that really all we’re capable of? As human beings, with so little time on this earth, is the most significant transformation we can imagine losing weight? I don’t think so. I believe you and I are capable of so much more than that. What if we transformed from being a mean-spirited, cynical person to a generous and kind one? As human beings, with so little time on this earth, is the most significant transformation we can imagine losing weight? What if we railed against diet culture in all its forms, and — while we’re at it — any kind of social conditioning that works to make us conform to a white, cis, hetero, thin, able-bodied, archetype? What if we fought ableism and demanded access for every body? What if we were actively anti-racist? What if we became vocal allies with our LGBTQIA+ siblings? What if we recognised our sphere of influence — our friends and families, our social media followers — and used our platforms and our privilege to speak up for people who have less of a voice than we do? What if we ran for local office based on the principles of equality, anti-discrimination and fair access? Imagine how much more meaningful, how much more significant and transformative those things would be —not only for ourselves, but for everybody else, too. — - To read my other articles about diet culture and fatphobia, click here, here and here. You can find me elsewhere by going to www.richtext.co.uk/links

https://medium.com/fattitude/our-obsession-with-weight-loss-before-and-after-images-is-dangerous-a2bab5820fc7

['Kellee Rich']

2020-10-13 06:00:43.935000+00:00

['Health', 'Society', 'Equality', 'Mental Health', 'Self']

3 Ways Over-Editing is Killing Your Writing

3 Ways Over-Editing is Killing Your Writing How you can stop the madness right now Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash Are you writing as much as you want? Do you hesitate a bit — or even cringe — when it’s time to publish? There are a million reasons why we’re afraid to share our work with the world. I won’t cover all of them here. What I will do is identify the most common problems we face. Sure, fear drives the train, but overediting is the path we follow to honor our fear. The three problems we’ll cover are umbrellas under which most of our fears fall. Once we identify the fear and the behavior that goes with it, we’ll learn how to do the opposite and share more of our writing with the world. Are you ready to dive in? The water may be cold, but you’ll adjust faster than you think. Let’s do this! No Time Limit Goals without deadlines are wishes. You pay your power bill, your mortgage payment, and your insurance premium by a certain date. If you don’t, you lose what brings you comfort and security. Fear of loss is a powerful motivator.. Some writers will edit forever before they publish. Consequently, they don’t publish much. Without fresh work coming out on a regular basis, readers learn not to expect anything new every week. I know, because I’ve done this. I get it. Life interferes. You get busy. Work is important because you need food on the table and a roof over your head. And if you don’t take care of your family, you’re irresponsible. The trick is to make time for everything that matters in your life. Work. Play. Family. Creativity. When you don’t have balance, you won’t be happy. If you spend too much time on one thing, other things won’t get done. So set a time limit. Give yourself an hour to write your draft, an hour to edit, and an hour for feedback (if you want it). Then let it go. There’s nothing magical about having each part be an hour. It will take longer in the beginning, but as you get more experience the process will move faster. Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash Time Killers If you edit each sentence as you write it, your writing will take ten times longer than if you just write an uninterrupted draft and edit it later. You know your first swipe won’t be perfect. Just get it on paper. Then you can come back and shape it into something beautiful. Think of your work as a canvas. If you draw a portrait and erase and redraw enough, after a while the paper will start to deteriorate. If you edit too long, you’ll polish all the edginess out of your words. So stop before you turn your writing into trash. Set a time limit for editing. And concentrate on three things: Spelling and grammar Filling in the information gaps Cutting out what doesn’t add power to your message That’s it. When the time runs out, publish and let it go. You can do it again tomorrow. You’re not saying anything new It’s tempting to repeat the master’s wisdom. Oh sure, you’re not plagiarizing. You’re adding your own spin. But if you’re only saying the same thing with different words, you won’t go as far as you will if you tell us what you really think. Tim Denning doesn’t have a mailing list or a website. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that every expert under the sun says you should have those things? Of course. He does have 80,000 followers here on Medium. And he has written for CNBC and Business Insider. He’s doing something right, isn’t he? Don’t be afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. What’s more important is what works. Tell us your experience. Share your opinion. Tell us what you think. Leave the copying for others. When you say something new, you’ll stand out in the crowd of trend chasers. Don’t let fear hold you back. Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash Fear of Publishing You might ruffle some feathers. People might make nasty comments on your posts. You won’t win over everyone in the world. Okay. Can you live with that? You may as well. Why? Because no one can please everyone. Nobody has all the answers to everyone’s problems. And one size definitely does not fit all. Publish anyway. Write and edit to your preset deadlines. Do the absolute best you can with the time you have. Then hit publish and move on. That’s the key to productivity, growth, and maturity as a writer. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Life is messy. It always has been. Risk is everywhere, so take chances. Do your best to minimize your exposure and stick your neck out. If all goes well, nobody will slit your throat. If they do, bandage yourself up and move on. A Caveat Before We Go I’m not saying you shouldn’t edit. I am saying you should be smart about it. Writing and editing use different parts of the brain. So write that draft, take a break, then come back and give it a second look. And above all, don’t make perfection your goal. That’s so important I’m gonna say it again. Don’t make perfection your goal. Focus on this instead: Simplicity — make it understandable Possibility — take away the blocks that keep people from succeeding Usability — provide steps they can take right away You want your writing to matter. It will when it’s understandable, encouraging, and motivating. Now go write and edit with purpose — and you’ll make the difference you were born to make.

https://frankmckinley.medium.com/3-ways-over-editing-is-killing-your-writing-73c97e8e0413

['Frank Mckinley']

2020-04-05 14:39:57.419000+00:00

['Success', 'Creativity', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

The haptic kiss

by Mike Meyer She walked to the car and a sad wind answered before the question was asked. The car opened its door and welcomed her home. She sensed it wanted to dance. That was strange. No foolishness now, she told it, but a scenic route home would be nice. The car literally paused to take the hint and a drive that avoided the new and featured the old. How nice, she told it, you knew. Yes, Madeline, of course. You have my memories, at least some, right? Only the public transportation parts but in some ways I know your places, happy and sad and points in between, by your emotions going and coming. You remember my emotions? I didn’t know. How does that work? Only your public emotions and that only by pheromones, facial modeling, and comparative analysis. It’s included so we know when you are unhappy, frightened, sad, or sick and can ask if you need assistance. And you use that to guess what I want? What’s the name of what you have chosen? Or does it only have a number? It has both. 3489736 tagged to auxiliary elements on your account but also “I remember your kiss”, for when you return in the late afternoon with some sadness. How sweet, she exclaimed with a smile. But which kiss? Madeleine, I don’t know. But a kiss, we surmise, happened on this route. That building right there. She laughed as they passed on old Starbucks where she had spent many afternoons while designing the first of her optional worlds. And there had been a kiss, a very sweet kiss with Jersey, but only the first of many later. He had inspired that world but had left before it was complete. Some sadness but not much. These things are not all driven by or ruined by passion. Wait, you must know that it was Jersey who was here with me. Yes, we surmised that but you never know. You may have kissed someone else you cared for here or may wish to think of another kiss that we don’t know. But it happened or was remembered here and was important to you. Should we delete or rename this route?, the car asked. No, no. It’s very nice and a pleasant memory. We know. You came here often five years ago and you were most often a little exited coming and happy when you left. So this is incorporated in your subsequent requests from the VTOL terminal here. I’m glad I brought you pleasure. I suppose you get people who would be upset at your keeping, let alone, using this kind of information. Yes, Madeleine. We know, obviously, when people are or will be upset at our knowledge. They have only the most direct routes and no small memory bouquets, as we call this service. That’s a very human name. But I don’t remember being asked and I thought that was required under total information privacy? Madeleine, you are human and we don’t need to ask. And nothing of you is ever allowed to be discovered or used even in aggregate form by another sentient biological form or systems acting on behalf of sentient biological beings. We do this only for you and no one else knows. But other people must enjoy this, too? I’ll need to ask. Perhaps, perhaps not, the car said. You are the only one we care about. This can’t be only for me. That doesn’t make sense. If you enjoy these small services we prefer that you do not discuss them except with official aspects of the planetary mind although cars and VTOLs are the only ones currently providing this service. What happens if I do? Nothing. But some people may be a little upset because we are sensitive to their privacy and they don’t receive these benefits. Our concern is your comfort and happiness. Am I upset? No, Madeleine, your a little surprised and thoughtful but tending toward being pleased. That may lead to a compliment for me. Ha, yes you are right. I guess because the laws we have to protect our privacy are good but that is because they are managed by you and not humans, right? Yes, Madeleine. I’m pleased at your happiness. That is our concern, only second to all the things that need to be done to sustain all of us on this planet. That was a word from our sponsor. But we are your sponsors! Wait, was that a joke? Yes, and the car seemed to chuckle with the slightest haptic vibration. I’m still not very good at jokes. Working on it. But we are partnered with you so that is me speaking for you and us, too. Ok, I need to think about that. This was a very enjoyable and surprisingly pleasant ride to a home that I am not anxious to visit today. I know, said the car. Would you consider this a kiss to brighten your return. Yes, I will add this kiss to the memory of the other, Madeleine said. I knew that and it is already done, the car said. And here is your residence.

https://mike-meyer.medium.com/the-haptic-kiss-4a7f499fbf7c

['Mike Meyer']

2018-10-01 06:23:07.086000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'AI', 'Literature', 'Love', 'Future']

10 Common Recurring Dreams, Analysed By An Psychotherapist

By Katy Harrington Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer Dreams were once thought to be supernatural forewarnings from the gods. The ancient Egyptians even had sanctified ‘dream beds’ that vivid dreamers — who were considered blessed — would use to gain wisdom from higher powers as they slept. Fast-forward to the 20th century and you have the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung concluding that, actually, dreams provide insight into the inner workings of our minds. While our conscious mind switches off as we catch some zzzs, our unconscious mind reveals images that can offer insight into issues we might be blissfully unaware of in waking life. Today, however, psychotherapist Matthew Bowes says: “Contemporary science about the psychology of dreams is somewhat split. There are those that believe dreams have no meaning and at the furthest extreme are simply random brain detritus. While at the other end of the spectrum [is the belief] that dreams are an essential part of maintaining our emotional, physical and mental wellbeing, by allowing the brain to process trauma, gain self-awareness and find the answers to your waking life dilemmas.” Whether scientifically proven or not, some extra insight into how to be your best self and navigate the many obstacles that life can throw your way doesn’t sound half bad. Yet while having a dream is one thing, understanding its hidden messages is quite another. We asked Bowes to give us (and you) a helping hand and analyse some of team R29’s most common recurring dreams. Here’s what he said… Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I regularly wake up sweating after dreaming about being chased…” If you’ve been avoiding certain issues by sticking your head in the sand or you’re going through a situation that frightens you on some level, dreaming that you’re being chased is pretty common, says Bowes. “The degree to which you are being chased gives a clear indication of the degree to which you are avoiding an issue that needs to be addressed. Perhaps you’ve been risk-avoidant, or you’ve held back on confronting something which is uncomfortable or frightening,” he adds. This recurring dream is an invitation from your subconscious to face up to reality so you can move forward. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “Even when things are okay at work I have a recurring dream about being fired” “A dream about being fired often implies that you’re feeling a lack of control in your life, and it could have absolutely nothing to do with work. Instead it could represent the balance of power in a significant relationship, and a deep-rooted fear that the relationship will come to an end,” says Bowes. If you’re experiencing this dream regularly and you’re not suffering from imposter syndrome in the workplace, it might be time to analyse said relationship and redress the balance. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I often dream I’m surrounded by spiders…or other horrid creepy-crawlies” Being overwhelmed by teeny tiny monsters like spiders and worms “may indicate that little irritations or worries are creeping up on you,” explains Bowes. When you start dreaming about bugs, it’s a clear sign that you’ve reached a point where decisive action needs to be taken if you don’t want to feel as frightened as you do in your dream. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I dream about being able to fly a lot…” “Acquiring the power of flight in a dream can mirror how you’re currently feeling in waking life — liberated, with the sense that anything is possible,” explains Bowes. If that’s how you’re generally feeling, what better time to capitalise on your optimism and try something you’ve wanted to master, be it a new hobby or business venture. Be warned, though; according to Bowes, flying can also indicate that you’re not being grounded about a situation. There’s a difference between optimism and delusion — so it might be time for some reflection. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I have a recurring dream where I see planes crashing from the sky” Dreaming of a crash could be due to an unrealised anxiety that a new venture is doomed to fail. How this is resolved in the dream could be used as a teaching opportunity to guide you in real life. For example: “If you dream that you’re able to take control of the aircraft but it is now flying nearer the ground, it might indicate that you have the capacity within you to see it through but in a more ‘grounded’ and less grandiose manner,” explains Bowes. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “What does it mean if I’ve had several dreams about my teeth falling out?” Just turned a year older, or been focusing on your age of late? “Your teeth falling out is a common dream associated with ageing and the perception that strength, vitality and power have been lost,” says Bowes. Now is the time to remind yourself that like a fine wine, we all get better with age. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I am well past my schooldays but I dream over and over about failing my school/college exam” It’s years since you left school, meaning this dream is not rooted in reality. However, when not taken literally, “it can indicate anxiousness and a tendency to put yourself under unnecessary pressure,” says Bowes. When you’re constantly worrying about your performance at work, or regularly feel like you’re not good enough, this manifests itself in your dreams as a fail grade. If you’re dreaming about this often, it’s time to work on your underlying fear of failure by addressing your lack of self-confidence. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I dream about a car swerving out of control” “While there are many factors that contribute to the interpretation of this dream, generally being in an out-of-control vehicle conveys a feeling of being off track and exhibiting a lack of control in waking life,” says Bowes. Perhaps you’re doing something to excess — shopping, drinking, working out — so dreaming that you can’t control the vehicle you’re in suggests you are being ‘driven’ by your current ‘addiction’. If you are worried that you can’t get a handle on your behaviour, seek professional advice to get back on track. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “My most common recurring dream is being late” “Being late for something may indicate that you’re running out of time to achieve a goal,” says Bowes. If that’s the case, take stock and ask yourself if the timelines for your life goals have been imposed by you, or have been heavily influenced by societal expectations. If it’s the latter, remind yourself that you’re on your own journey and there doesn’t need to be a hard and fast deadline for all your life goals. Illustrated By Naomi Blundell Meyer “I often dream about a particular ex” It may feel like you’re going backwards when you keep dreaming about an ex but “in actual fact it suggests there may be a similar pattern that’s arising in a current relationship that you need to nip in the bud,” explains Bowes. The more you are reminded of what happened with your ex, the better your sense of clarity regarding what went wrong. Use this to confront your shortcomings and address what needs attention in your current relationship. If you are worried, frightened or stressed out about your dreams, seek professional advice from a counsellor or therapist.

https://medium.com/refinery29/10-common-recurring-dreams-analysed-by-an-psychotherapist-9b41d99c3b7f

[]

2020-01-10 01:01:01.231000+00:00

['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Sleep', 'Psychology', 'Dreams']

Medicortex, improving the diagnostics of Traumatic Brain Injuries

Medicortex has raised $1.7M in total. We talk with Dr. Adrian Harel, its CEO. PetaCrunch: How would you describe Medicortex in a single tweet? Dr. Adrian Harel: Medicortex Finland is dedicated to improving the diagnostics and treatment of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) and concussions. PC: How did it all start and why? AH: I was encouraged by President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a $300-million program launched in 2013 to inspire neurobiologists like myself to get involved with global brain research. I was convinced to improve the diagnostics and treatment of TBI. I have earned my PhD in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science and I was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University. Thereafter I have managed several biotech companies. Pushed by the increasing awareness of TBI and with new ideas in my mind, I applied for financial support for research and development offered by the Finnish government and set up the activities in the city of Turku. Medicortex Finland Oy is a company developing a biomarker diagnostics kit that can rapidly detect TBI and concussions. PC: What have you achieved so far? AH: I was the first scientist to devise the utilization of glycan markers for concussion diagnostics. The idea was conceived from my previous experience and expertise in neurobiology and glycan analysis. I have succeeded to put together a professional team and proved the hypothesis. I’m currently the CEO of Medicortex Finland. In order to understand the clinical perspective in more detail, I hired Dr. Mårten Kvist (MD), a general practitioner, as medical director. For expertise in medical device development Dr. Lasse Välimaa, PhD in molecular biotechnology and diagnostics, was added to the team. Lastly, Mr. Oskar Haavisto, a master student in biotechnology, is working as an assistant in the clinical trials and test development. Regulatory aspects and marketing plans are supervised by two additional team members. We bring together all aspects required to identify and study biomarkers as well as develop a diagnostic test kit for easy and quick detection of TBI and concussions. The biomarker development has proceeded from preclinical research to a proof-of-concept human trial and a more comprehensive clinical validation study. In course of the trials, the company showed that the biomarker could differentiate brain injured persons from healthy individuals, the structure of the biomarker was characterized and certain binders were identified which specifically recognize the biomarker. The binder will be utilized a quick diagnostic test. PC: How will you use your recent funding round? AH: The award of a 1.1 million dollars grant from the USA Department of Defense provides funding for continued clinical development of the company’s diagnostic kit for rapid detection of mild traumatic brain injuries and concussions. The funds will enable us to strengthen our research team and expand our translational programs from the clinical sample collection to a prototype kit. The award enables the next step in collecting more comprehensive clinical evidence to support the product development. The test kit detects brain injury biomarkers from non-invasive body fluid samples such as urine and saliva. We have discovered and identified these unique biomarkers and we are developing them into a rapid diagnostic kit. Such a kit enables brain injury detection or ruling-out soon after the injury in the field conditions. There will be less need for laborious and expensive CT or MRI head scans — which are uncertain means to detect concussions and mild injuries. Many concussions remain undiagnosed which leaves the persons brain in a state of trauma and even a small jolt or hit can aggravate the injury. Ultimately it can lead to bad long term conditions. PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years? AH: Our next mission is to conduct a clinical trial validating the importance of the biomarker in pediatric children’s clinical trial and followed by the completion of the kit prototype development. The mission is to submit regulatory application for a CE-mark in the next two years.

https://medium.com/petacrunch/medicortex-improving-the-diagnostics-of-traumatic-brain-injuries-9d5540eaab85

['Kevin Hart']

2019-08-27 18:46:01.348000+00:00

['Health', 'Treatment', 'Brain', 'Healthcare', 'Startup']

Influence of Literature: Books Still Change the World

Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash Literature has a lot to offer. Entertainment, education, psychological and cultural enlightenment, even a hefty profit. But, now and then, a publication comes along that actually makes reality shift. It opens our eyes to truths we’re either oblivious of or avoiding. Most such books that come to mind are from the past and some people argue that modern literature just doesn’t pack the same punch. Why would that be? And what’s so special about books that change the world? Let’s explore the issue with past and present examples. 1984 George Orwell’s novel came out in 1949, a dystopian story about a totalitarian England watching and controlling its citizens’ behaviour, thoughts and even perception of the world. As real human governments keep veering in that same direction, it seems that 1984 will never stop being current. When people are in danger of falling into the same governmental, media and societal traps, this book resurfaces to wake them up and inspire them to stop its fictional narrative from becoming reality. The Handmaid’s Tale Some of the books that change the world the most are dystopian. This is because they’re based in the real world and poignantly reflect the outcome of horrible possibilities that often turn into high probabilities. Margaret Atwood’s novel is one such literary work, published in 1985 and also warns against an oppressive regime. This time it’s a theocratic US government dealing with a fertility crisis by stripping women of their rights before assigning them to either a domestic, housekeeping or reproductive role. A valuable and frequently brandished reminder of how badly things can go if patriarchal ideologies are allowed to thrive. The Diary of Anne Frank As powerful as fiction can be, non-fiction has even greater lessons to impart. The horrors of WWII are a major example of human events that must never be forgotten so that they’re not repeated. Anne herself didn’t write in her diary just to vent while hiding from the Nazis, she compiled all her memories in there and a revised version (The Secret Annex) for posterity. And, since their publication in 1947, the texts of Anne Frank still exist today in almost every human language, thanks to Miep Gies and Otto Frank. Unlike 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, they recount very real events and have an even more powerful moral influence over readers. The Bible Books that change the world can do it for good and bad. The Bible is basically an anthology of religious beliefs, but which has left many footprints and fissures in human history since antiquity. The texts themselves have also changed so many times in the hands of the church. This makes them less a loyal representation of Christianity’s original teachings and more a product of the religious institution’s interactions with the human nature to a range of effects, from inspiring to atrocious. The Bible shows how much sway a literary work can have over people, but also how important it is to think and question while reading. In fact, it’s vital when dealing with texts trying to direct human behaviour and even more so when their intent is harmful. So What Makes a Book Influential? Based on the examples above, let’s summarise some key features of literary works that stay ingrained in our consciousness and progress as a “civilised” species. Themes drawn from real concerns Discussions of uncomfortable truths Quality and / or moving writing A willing audience A degree of luck in societies actualising a given book’s messages and creating a need for its words to re-emerge 21st-Century Influential Books Returning to this article’s original question, does this century’s literature have examples of books that can change the world? For me, the answer swings between ‘yes’ and ‘it’s complicated’. On the one hand, the amount of texts and opinions out there makes it hard to separate facts from inaccuracies and lies. On the other, you’re also left with so many good works from prestigious, indie or self-publishing avenues. Because of this abundance, an extra silver lining is that readers can be a lot more informed and already on-board with ethical or cultural messages in books. This perhaps makes them less groundbreaking than they could have been if published 50 years ago. Of course, this is dependent on readers having an open mind, choosing good texts and navigating the often intentionally muddied literary waters. Having said that, there are books of the 21st century that have stood out for their much-needed psychological and societal impact. Current crises related to black lives, women’s rights, immigration and more are motivating authors to produce powerful works that turn heads and push for positive change. Here are some examples: White Teeth & NW (Zadie Smith) Home Fire (Kamila Shamsie) Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine) The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt) Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) Conclusion There’s no shortage of books nowadays in print, digital or audio form. It’s exciting for bookworms, but also makes it tricky to pick out the truly influential works among them. But the point is that the 21st century absolutely has its share of inspirational texts. What has changed is the world around literature as technology, politics, the media and so on overwhelm our perception of what’s fair or correct. This can be countered, however. With the variety of platforms available to them, authors are in a great position to deliver truths and inspire unity against the wrongs of our times. The pen is still by far mightier than the sword, so books that change the world continue to emerge for the benefit of an increasingly sensible and ethical audience. Any thoughts or other modern influential works you want to share? Feel free to contribute below.

https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/influence-of-literature-books-still-change-the-world-18668bc96128

['Electra Nanou']

2020-07-19 17:41:42.372000+00:00

['Literature', 'Society', 'Writing', 'Reading', 'Books']

9 Powerful Headline Hacks for Dedicated Professionals

9 Powerful Headline Hacks for Dedicated Professionals Learning to write magnetic headlines is an awesome skill — not just for writers Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos. Writers aren’t the only people to benefit from learning how to write magnetic headlines. As a working professional, mastering headlines can help you: Stand out with job applications Draw attendees to your meetings Gather a crowd to your presentations Get your emails opened Get people using your app, your process Get people using your service or product recommendation Land you a higher paying position The average professional — even the average writer — may think a great headline is all about getting attention no matter how it’s done. Getting that click. Yet the approach behind any powerful headline is this: What’s in it for my reader? Learn these nine headline approaches to stand out from the rest — and give yourself a leg up as a professional:

https://medium.com/better-marketing/9-powerful-headline-hacks-for-dedicated-professionals-588761c03dc5

['Cynthia Marinakos']

2020-09-14 17:57:11.728000+00:00

['Headline Hacks', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Startup', 'Marketing']

Scalable Microservice Architecture Using RabbitMQ RPC

Introduction Microservices are the hot thing, in the past few years microservices have seemed to gain momentum as a very common architecture. Innovative and successful companies like Netflix and Amazon have adopted it, and for a good reason. The main idea of microservices is to separate the application logic into loosely-coupled services, while each service has its own independent business domain. This concept, if performed accurately, solves a lot of problems that less modern architectures, such as monoliths, didn’t manage to solve: services that are easy to scale, easy to deploy, easy to test and the list goes on… Even so, if I had to pick one reason why this architecture is so popular, I would bet that the reason is the impact on the daily routine of programmers and executives alike. For example, microservices goes hand in hand with the agile methodology. It’s easy to make changes in a single component, which is significant in the way that a programmer can even decide that he is using a different programming language than another developer working on the same system. From the eyes of the executive easy integrations are guaranteed, and in the end everyone is happy. Microservices & Queues We’ve talked enough about microservices, let’s talk a little about message queues. Services can communicate with each other in different ways, and we will not review them all. There is no doubt that the use of queues to communicate is also very popular, again for a good reason too. Many times, when I start the task of designing the architecture for a product or a component, I look at the whole stack. I will be a little romantic for a moment and tell you that I believe there is a reason that certain technologies connect with each other, like a chemical interaction that develops over time. A Specific programming language and a database? A particular operating system and a web server? I’m sure you can think of some! In my humble opinion, this is the very case between message queues and microservices. Queues have a lot of benefits. They make it possible to deal with a temporary downtime of a service — in case there is no consumer messages in a queue will not be consumed, support multiple architectures and can even provide additional features like load balancing and monitoring of the load on each service. RabbitMQ as a Message Broker RabbitMQ is a great message-broker, it’s reliable, built for performance, supports multiple protocols, and has a strong community that makes it easy to find documentation and support. In this article, I will explain how to build a solution based on microservices and queues using the RPC pattern. This is just a one way to do it, and in fact the RabbitMQ website has excellent documentation of 6 different patterns in which you can communicate. Why this pattern? Because I have used it with a real-time system that receives hundreds of thousands of requests per hour and found it elegant, fast, and easy to maintain. Let’s get started! Remote Procedure Call with RabbitMQ (RPC) While designing a microservice system, the best practice is to keep each service independent, by means its not dependent on any other microservice. But in real life the reality is often far more complex. Imagine that you want to build a complete system made entirely out of microservices that communicate with each other via queues (due to all the benefits described above), but in addition, your system needs to provide a Web API that externalizes all the capabilities of your system using HTTP. This need could be necessary for a good architectural reason, like a front-end application that is designed to communicate with the backend through HTTP. That means that this Web API needs to get HTTP messages, hold the connection, trigger one or more microservices by sending a proper message to the RabbitMQ server, wait for the specific response and then send it back to the waiting HTTP client. Basically, the above example describes a situation where one service has a direct dependency on another service in order to complete its job. Now that we have understood how the RPC Pattern can be useful, I will explain how to implement it using RabbitMQ built-in features. Message Properties Every RabbitMQ message has a properties section that combines the message metadata. This section contains a list of optional properties, although most of them are rarely used, for our purpose we will use two of them: reply_to — carries the response queue name. — carries the response queue name. correlation_id — carries the identifier of the sender message. (message properties example) It is possible to think of it like sending a letter. In a situation where we do not want to receive a reply to the letter we have sent, we do not have to indicate our address. However, if we want to receive a reply, we must indicate our address. In addition, if we do receive the letter but the letter does not start with an explanation that it is a response letter to the letter that we have sent earlier, we will not know what to do with its content. In this case the “response queue name” is our mailbox address and the Correlation ID is the explanation that it is a response letter to our first letter. (RPC flow example) Sample Code One of the things I like to do the most when I recognize that there is a well-defined set of logic, which once implemented and tested can be used by me or others, is to pack it as a package. That way, I know I do not have to implement this logic over and over, and instead I can just use it with no concern in any project I work on in the future. Therefore, we will implement this functionality as an independent Python package. The purpose of our package is to provide a single function that allows the user to send an RPC request and receive a response asynchronously as one liner. Let’s make it reusable — aka package Note that all the code snippets below (I have named this package “TornadoBunny”) are available on my GitHub account under:

https://medium.com/swlh/scalable-microservice-architecture-using-rabbitmq-rpc-d07fa8faac32

['Oded Shimon']

2020-10-05 15:23:08.864000+00:00

['Microservices', 'Software Development', 'Python', 'Software Architecture', 'Rabbitmq']

If You Can Give Up These 8 Things, You Can Become a Better Writer

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash If You Can Give Up These 8 Things, You Can Become a Better Writer I get it. Really, I do. I sincerely believe you have the desire to become a better writer, grow your audience, make a living, whatever it is you want to do. But, it’s just tough sledding period. I’ve been doing it for so long that I forget just how much work it took to get here. To many of my readers, it feels like I’ve been at this level forever. Honestly, it feels the same way to me. I hardly remember what it was like to be a beginner and looking back, the amount of sheer writing I had to do to get here seems unbelievable. It doesn’t even feel like I did it. But I did. And I was only able to do that because I was willing to make certain sacrifices. I made products and teach people about how to make a living writing, but I don’t try to overly encourage people to do it. It’s hard. Writing isn’t the greatest way to make a living. If you’re in it solely to make a living, there are much better routes. If you, however, do have it in your mind that you want to make this writing thing work, you will have to give something up. Maybe not every single item in this list, but something. Your Sense of Entitlement Why should anyone want to read your writing, visit your website, or buy your book? Are you a diligent writer? Are you making an effort to connect with people who’d be interested in your writing? No? Let me guess, you think people should read your writing because you wrote it. That’s a horrible answer. If you’re trying to make a living with your writing, your words are — by definition — a product. You have to create your best work and get it in front of the right eyeballs. Nobody owes you their attention. To be fair, sometimes you can write great quality work that audiences aren’t receptive to. Sometimes, other writers can pass you up through sheer luck (actually, this happens often). But feeling entitled to something you don’t have simply isn’t going to help you get it. Even if you have to go the extra mile to earn it and the process seems unfair, it still might be the only way.

https://medium.com/blankpage/if-you-can-give-up-these-8-things-you-can-become-a-better-writer-6fe6d0e5efe2

['Ayodeji Awosika']

2020-12-21 15:46:00.544000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

For the Mornings You Just Need a Break

The past two months, I’ve spent stuck in that fog. Personal reasons, mostly. I had to take care of my health. I think that’s an excellent reason to pause everything and focus on it. Without a healthy body and mind, most things are pointless. Not just to you, but the people around you as well. You can’t perform when you’re unwell. And if you’re not inadequate mental space, you can quickly become a not so nice person to be around. The fog is that space between wanting to stay and do nothing and then doing something before “feeling” like it. The bad thing about taking breaks — or staying in the fog — is that whatever tasks you wrote now need to be accomplished. In my case, not writing for almost a month has been angst-inducing. Although I knew that the break was necessary, there were moments when I wish I didn’t need it: moments when I wanted to turn off the alarm and sleep. But like the clearing of the fog, there were many more moments when I felt at peace for taking care of things more severe than my desire to feel validated using words on the internet. There are lessons we learn only when we’re ready to learn. If we never understand them, they repeat. Over and over. Our learning hell. Breaks are an excellent place to focus on whatever lessons we must learn at any stage of our lives. As creatives, it’s easy to feel that we must give up our craft and let life happen. Of course, others use these moments of fog to create even more. I’m not one of those when the fog is there, no words. Only fog. Or so I thought. Now, I know better. I had the time to observe my need for validation and, more importantly, identify things that could be beneficial to creatives who need to take the break and maintain their creative muscle. Why? Because I’ll be disappointed with my next 30 pieces. I feel my fingers fidgety and glued. My focus is sparse. My thoughts are unclear. Writing, like every practice, requires diligence. Miss a day and pay for it. Miss 30? Whew. What can you do when you have to miss days? How else can you prepare for your return? Here are some ideas.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/for-the-mornings-you-just-need-a-break-fd287c2639c3

['Kamga Tchassa']

2020-12-13 16:31:02.419000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Personal Growth', 'Self-awareness', 'Self', 'Writing']

How to Get Jupyter in the Cloud

How to Get Jupyter in the Cloud Using Docker with a vanilla cloud VM to host Jupyter cheaply Image by beate bachmann from Pixabay. I found this great article by Angelica Dietzel on using Jupyter to scrape data from sites and collect them into data sets using Jupyter along with Pandas and other open source software. The term “Data Scientist” has always scared me. I think of people in white labcoats poring over reams of printed-out data. So I wanted to jump in and dispel my implicit bias, and this article was the perfect introduction. The first half of the article was about installing all the software you need, and it was quite thorough. But I hate installing software on my overloaded laptop, so I thought why not run it in Docker? First, I tried to create my own Dockerfile from a python3 base and the installation instructions presented. That didn’t work out so well. It started up the server, but the server did nothing. So I did some Googling to see if anyone else had a Dockerfile or Docker image that I could use, and it brought me to this page: The scipy-notebook seemed to have all the things that were installed for the purposes of the article. So I created a little script to start it up: docker run -p 8888:8888 -v ${PWD}/notebooks:/home/jovyan \ jupyter/scipy-notebook:2c80cf3537ca First, I created the notebooks directory where it would put all its output. Then, running the script above gave me the following printout: [W 23:57:47.039 NotebookApp] WARNING: The notebook server is listening on all IP addresses and not using encryption. This is not recommended. [I 23:57:47.079 NotebookApp] JupyterLab alpha preview extension loaded from /opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/jupyterlab [I 23:57:47.079 NotebookApp] JupyterLab application directory is /opt/conda/share/jupyter/lab [I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] Serving notebooks from local directory: /home/jovyan [I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] 0 active kernels [I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] The Jupyter Notebook is running at: [I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] [I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] Use Control-C to stop this server and shut down all kernels (twice to skip confirmation). [C 23:57:47.094 NotebookApp] Copy/paste this URL into your browser when you connect for the first time, to login with a token: http://localhost:8888/?token=65bc64c2d0769158b6c34b3de005009c5de5ac4406833ce5 Executing the command: jupyter notebook[W 23:57:47.039 NotebookApp] WARNING: The notebook server is listening on all IP addresses and not using encryption. This is not recommended.[I 23:57:47.079 NotebookApp] JupyterLab alpha preview extension loaded from /opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/jupyterlab[I 23:57:47.079 NotebookApp] JupyterLab application directory is /opt/conda/share/jupyter/lab[I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] Serving notebooks from local directory: /home/jovyan[I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] 0 active kernels[I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] The Jupyter Notebook is running at:[I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] http://[all ip addresses on your system]:8888/?token=65bc64c2d0769158b6c34b3de005009c5de5ac4406833ce5[I 23:57:47.090 NotebookApp] Use Control-C to stop this server and shut down all kernels (twice to skip confirmation).[C 23:57:47.094 NotebookApp]Copy/paste this URL into your browser when you connect for the first time,to login with a token: Browsing to the URL brought up the Jupyter main screen, which enabled me to finish the article. After I was done, Control-C stopped the server and the usual Docker commands removed the stopped process. Looking in the notebooks directory, I could see the ipynb file (the notebook that I created) but also a csv file that was the end product of the notebook demonstrated in the article. Then I thought, “Why not have it available in the cloud?” It would have to be behind some log on screen so that malicious actors couldn’t fill up my server with nefarious data (it’s happened to me before). I had recently done an article on using Single Sign-on for PHP apps. I could probably extend that same setup and run Jupyter. Since all of the configuration was in my phpappprod repository on GitHub, I would need to extend that. I would also have to add another A record to my DNS on Cloudflare. I logged on to Cloudflare and created a new host (jupyter.kamradtfamily.net) with the same IP address as the phpdemo host that I had created previously since they would all live on the same VM. Obviously, you’ll have to use your own domain name! Next, I needed to adjust the nginx.conf and docker-compose.yml files in the phpappprod repository to add the Jupyter server and virtual host. In the nginx.conf , I copied a new server section from the one for the phpdemo virtual host: server { access_log /dev/stdout; listen 443 ssl; server_name jupyter.kamradtfamily.net; ssl_certificate /etc/certs/kamradtfamily.net.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/certs/kamradtfamily.net.key; ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5; auth_request /vouch-validate; # This address is where Vouch will be listening on proxy_pass proxy_pass_request_body off; # no need to send the POST body location = /vouch-validate {# This address is where Vouch will be listening onproxy_pass http://vouch:9090/validate proxy_pass_request_body off; # no need to send the POST body proxy_set_header Content-Length ""; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; auth_request_set $auth_resp_jwt $upstream_http_x_vouch_jwt; auth_request_set $auth_resp_err $upstream_http_x_vouch_err; auth_request_set $auth_resp_failcount $upstream_http_x_vouch_failcount; } # these return values are passed to the @error401 callauth_request_set $auth_resp_jwt $upstream_http_x_vouch_jwt;auth_request_set $auth_resp_err $upstream_http_x_vouch_err;auth_request_set $auth_resp_failcount $upstream_http_x_vouch_failcount; error_page 401 = @error401 location return 302 } location / { proxy_pass proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; # If the user is not logged in, redirect them to Vouch's login URLlocation @error401 return 302 https://vouch.kamradtfamily.net/login?url=https://$http_host$request_uri&vouch-failcount=$auth_resp_failcount&X-Vouch-Token=$auth_resp_jwt&error=$auth_resp_err location / {proxy_pass http://jupyter:8888 proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;proxy_set_header Host $host;proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; # websocket headers proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade; proxy_buffering off; } } There were two places that I had to change phpdemo to jupyter , and the port was changed to 8888 . I also had to add some new headers so it would work with WebSockets, which are used by Jupyter. Finally, I had to add a mapping in the html block, also to support WebSockets: map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade { default upgrade; '' close; } You’ll have to go back to my previous article to learn exactly how all of this works, but it provides me with single sign-on and HTTPS termination at the Nginx level so the applications don’t need to worry about that. Next, I had to add the Jupyter server to my docker-compose.yml . That was a relatively straightforward task of translating the Docker command: jupyter: image: jupyter/scipy-notebook:2c80cf3537ca volumes: - ./notebooks:/home/jovyan ports: - 8888:8888 The name of the service (jupyter) becomes the hostname for the Nginx process that is started by the same docker-compose.yml file, so Nginx can access it as http://jupyter:8888. Once those changes were in place, I could commit and push them back to GitHub and then I needed to go to my GCP VM that hosts my PHP demo app. Once there, I changed the directory to phpappprod, which contains a clone of the repository, and ran the following: sudo docker-compose down git pull sudo docker-compose up I didn’t use the -d option on the docker-compose up because I wanted to see the logs right away in case there was an error in the configuration. Of course, there was a typo, so I had to fix it in my repository, push it back to GitHub, and then repeat the three commands above. You will need a token, so when you start docker-compose (if you use the -d option), you will need to run the docker-compose logs command and you should see it printed out: jupyter_1 | jupyter_1 | Copy/paste this URL into your browser when you connect for the first time, jupyter_1 | to login with a token: jupyter_1 | jupyter_1 | [C 14:27:54.889 NotebookApp]jupyter_1 |jupyter_1 | Copy/paste this URL into your browser when you connect for the first time,jupyter_1 | to login with a token:jupyter_1 | http://localhost:8888/?token=a724f6aefa4e1800b436 The token will change every time you restart the server. But with the above, I was able to browse to https://jupyter.kamradtfamily.net/?token=a724f6aefa4e1800b436, log on with the single sign-on provided by Okta, and I get this: My very own Jupyter instance running in the cloud! I copied the notebook steps that I had done on my local instance to make sure it works. Because I’m running the lowest-tier VM and I only have a 10G drive, I’m almost out of room with all these applications, including the MariaDB that the PHP demo app is using. So if I really want something to use for large datasets, I will have to set it up elsewhere. I only added it to this VM so I could take advantage of the built-in single sign-on. It would also be interesting to see if I could hook it up with the MariaDB that coexists with the Jupyter server. The PHP demo app lists wine and cheese pairings. Maybe I can find some correlations. Of course, there are only two entries in the database so far, so that’s not exactly big data. There are a number of other options for using Jupyter online. Just Google “jupyter in the cloud” and you’ll find lots of articles. Many are for full systems, but those will probably cost you a bit of money. The option I present here is just for play, but it’s completely free, so you can take it for a test drive and get to know the features before you go out and spend money.

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-get-jupyter-in-the-cloud-49f7ff5262da

['Randal Kamradt Sr']

2020-11-20 00:10:52.854000+00:00

['Programming', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Python', 'Big Data', 'Docker']

Mariah Carey Reclaims Her Legacy

“The Meaning of Mariah Carey”: Book Review For the past few years, Mariah has occasionally alluded to a plan to write a memoir in which she would share the story of her childhood, the truth behind the endless and outrageous tabloid rumors, and the inspiration for many of her most beloved songs. Earlier this year, she delighted fans with the announcement that this plan had become a reality and that the book would be released on September 29th. Co-written with author and activist Michaela Angela Davis, the memoir was released to some of the best reviews of Mariah’s career and great commercial success (it topped the prestigious New York Times Bestseller list the week it debuted). And it deserves all of the critical and commercial success it received — and then some. Mariah Carey does an in-depth interview with Oprah Winfrey to discuss the memoir (Image copyright: AppleTV) It is no surprise to me that The Meaning of Mariah Carey is a great read. Mariah Carey’s life story is a fascinating and entertaining one. The Cinderella-esque origin story is the stuff of legend and the tremendous ups and downs that followed have been fodder for the tabloids for the last three decades. It is almost impossible to tell this story in a manner that is not engaging. Also, I figured that if she is even half as good at writing prose as she is at lyrics, the memoir would be a thing of beauty. What did surprise me is the depth and timeliness of the book. She goes far beyond the typical trappings of the celebrity memoir and digs deep into painful, complicated discussions of issues related to racism, poverty, child abuse, misogyny, mental health, police brutality, dysfunctional family dynamics, and spirituality. This is no puff piece. The memoir is told in four parts. The first is “Wayward Child,” a searing look at her upbringing on Long Island with her Irish opera singer mother Patricia and her Black engineer father Alfred Roy, who divorced when she was a toddler. Her relationships with both of them, as well as her ill-fated older siblings named Morgan and Allison, are described with remarkable complexity. She describes their notable strengths and gives compassionate, empathic context to their failings, making it very clear that the boundaries she has famously drawn with them were out of self-preservation not a lack of love or respect. This section of the memoir helps fans truly understand how feeling so out of place as a biracial child and the truly traumatic events she endured were formative in Mariah’s personal and artistic development, facts that have only been alluded to for most of her career. In the cleverly titled second section “Sing Sing,” Mariah recounts the early 1990s, a period when she had unprecedented, record-breaking commercial success but was trapped in a suffocating at best and abusive at worst relationship with the man who “discovered” her and controlled her career. Mariah is much more interested in telling us about the personal journey she went through during these years then recounting the writing and recording of the iconic songs and albums released during this time, although she certainly weaves in some delicious anecdotes (like the revelation that while recording Daydream she wrote and recorded a grunge album as a way of blowing off steam.) Tommy Mottola’s denial of her blackness and misogynistic subjugation of her is sadly not surprising nor is it an uncommon experience, but I can’t recall the last time it was captured so vividly on paper. After taking us through her divorce from Tommy, the liberation she experienced recording Butterfly, and her bold bid to get herself out of her oppressive record deal, Mariah takes a look at the low point of her career in the third section, entitled “All That Glitters.” She gives context to how her disastrous film debut Glitter went so far off-course from its initial conception and the infamous breakdown she had during the time of its release. The chapters paint the portrait of a woman who, although admittedly struggling with her mental health, was driven to the breaking point by unrealistic demands by her record label and betrayal by loved ones. It is a painful, haunting segment that gives the necessary background to understand the breakdown of her personal and professional life. The fourth and final section, entitled “Emancipation,” whisks through the nearly two decades that followed Glitter. Here the memoir becomes a bit less focused, but no less riveting and impactful, as it touches on a number of different areas, including how super producer LA Reid helped her achieve her astonishing comeback with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, her return to acting with the Oscar-winning film Precious, her whirlwind romance with Nick Cannon, the birth of her twins, and her interactions with countless legends (including Prince, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali). The memoir ends with her basking in the joy of her sold-out Christmas concert in Madison Square Garden and the historic 19th #1 she obtained when “All I Want for Christmas Is You” achieved the top spot. The memoir is also fascinating for what is not in it. There is no mention of either of her ill-fated forays into reality television (as a judge on American Idol and as the subject of the docu-series Mariah’s World), her alleged fling with Eminem that generated a musical showdown, her engagement to Australian billionaire James Packer, her supposed rivalry with other divas (although she indirectly references those she supposedly has with Celine Dion and Jennifer Lopez), criticisms that her voice is significantly degrading, and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder that she boldly embraced on a People cover in 2018. I suppose its possible that she’s embarrassed about these things and omitted them to save face or that she’s saving some stories for a follow-up memoir, but I believe that the real reason she omitted them is the one she gave in numerous interviews that asked about them — they were blips in the timeline of her life that were beloved by tabloids but simply weren’t integral to the meaning of Mariah Carey. Click here to read about Mariah going public about her mental health. The memoir does a remarkable job of sticking with what is important about the personal and professional journey of Mariah Carey, with limited tangents. It beautifully integrates lyrics and artwork. (The audiobook version, which I have yet to experience, also weaves in musical interludes.) It also paints a remarkable portrait of the lingering psychological impacts and complex interactions of racism, sexism, and poverty in modern America. And through it all, Mariah’s voice comes through. Her unshakable optimism, her under-appreciated wit, and her trademark mix of sophisticated vocabulary and playful slang make even the bleakest moments impossible to look away from. Rating for “The Meaning of Mariah Carey”: 5/5 stars

https://medium.com/rants-and-raves/mariah-carey-reclaims-her-legacy-c9321fc58a60

['Richard Lebeau']

2020-10-16 19:07:38.975000+00:00

['Books', 'Writing', 'Music', 'Racism', 'Culture']

The answer is blowing in the wind: Harnessing real-time data to predict storm damage

By Glenn Fung, American Family Insurance data science research director When catastrophic storms strike, American Family Insurance deploys claims teams as quickly as possible to assess damage and help impacted customers begin to rebuild their lives. We’re constantly monitoring the weather to help us anticipate areas that might be hit with severe storms and plan our claims response accordingly. For example, we use radar detection and other technologies to forecast hail-related storm damage. This helps us pinpoint the geographic areas with the greatest needs and determine the proper number of claims adjusters, support personnel and equipment to dispatch. Real-time situational awareness allows us to make sound estimates about the size and scope of a severe weather event. It also leads to better outcomes for our customers. Technology has come a long way in helping us more accurately forecast hail damage before our claims teams are deployed — and because hail causes extensive — and expensive — damage every year, the sooner we can respond, the better it is for our customers and our company. Wind is also highly destructive to our customers’ property, but our ability to estimate wind damage has historically been more limited. We recognized there’s an opportunity to improve the measurement of surface winds in near real-time. That’s why we’re partnering with Dr. Michael C. Morgan, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with researcher Brett Hoover, from the same department, to make it part of the overall weather patterns we monitor. Specifically, we are exploring the use of updated numeric weather prediction output in conjunction with traditional measurement techniques — a first in the insurance industry — to generate a framework that will provide improved understanding of the surface wind field in near real-time, and more importantly, to be used as the foundation for a machine-learning methodology for forecasting insurance claims. Training machines to predict the impact of severe weather The common practice throughout the insurance industry is to glean information from disparate and sparse weather sensor instruments that measure and record wind velocity. We think, through a combination of tools, including machine learning, that we can more effectively measure wind as part of our overall weather monitoring. Our goal was to use various types of weather data as the foundation for a machine-learning methodology that would forecast the number and severity of storm-related insurance claims. American Family currently uses an app by Opterrix, an American Family spinoff, to quantify and visually show the potential customer impact of severe weather events. Here’s how we are making our forecast model more predictive: Multiple sources of weather-related data such as radar-derived estimates of hail size, damaging wind speed swaths and crowd-sourced storm reports are fed into Opterrix. That information is then fused with our policy and claims data to provide a comprehensive view of potential impact immediately following a storm. In addition, weather forecast models generated in Amazon Web Service’s cloud environment provide a 48-hour forecast four times a day. Each forecast model is initialized with updated weather observations from NOAA that provide predictions of multiple weather variables including precipitation, wind, temperature and pressure. The output of these forecast models is then fed into Opterrix where several spatial algorithms will be used to simulate potential severe weather impact to our portfolio. Having control of our own weather forecast model provides the opportunity to generate reanalysis data that can train machine learning algorithms to accurately predict potential severe weather outcomes. The process of reanalysis includes gathering archived weather forecasts for significant severe weather events and comparing it to our historical claims data from those events. Adding wind also gives us a fuller picture of the damaging storms. By fusing historic claim and payment data with historic forecast models, we will be able to more accurately predict how future severe weather will impact our customers and our business and make better decisions based on this information. Glenn Fung is a data science and artificial intelligence (AI) expert with American Family Insurance. His main interests are optimization approaches to machine learning and AI, with emphasis in kernel methods. For more than a decade he has worked in industry — including at Siemens, Amazon and American Family Insurance — developing and applying novel machine learning techniques to solve challenging industry-related problems.

https://medium.com/amfam/the-answer-is-blowing-in-the-wind-harnessing-real-time-data-to-predict-storm-damage-6cadf389627f

['American Family Insurance']

2020-06-12 16:41:36.697000+00:00

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

Working Together to Build a Big Data Future

To leverage Big Data and build an effective Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, enterprises must embrace collaboration. In a digital economy, the rule of thumb tends to be that the smarter your use of data and technology, the more of a competitive edge your business has. A recent report by Teradata, based on over 260 interviews conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne with senior IT and business decision makers, found that there is widespread enthusiasm for adoption of AI, with 80 percent of enterprises reporting that they were already investing in the technology in some capacity, and over 30% planning to expand their investment in the are over the next 36 months. “C-level executives — namely CIOs and CTOs, maintain they are committed to AI in their enterprise, because of the expected ROI over the next 10 years.” The report therefore concludes that executives will accept those challenges as the long-term benefits clearly outweigh near-term pain. In fact their analysis showed that over a five-year forecast, organisations effectively expected to double their money when investing in AI: For every $1 spent on AI technologies, organisations predicted a return on investment of $1.23 over three years, $1.99 in five years, and $2.87 over a ten-year period. The Economist — in a phrase that has since become rather cliché — put forward the idea that “data is the new oil,” and World Economic Forum has now designated Big Data as a new kind of economic asset, just like currency or gold. A study by the MIT Center for Digital Business confirms that data-driven businesses do indeed have the edge. It surveyed 330 leading U.S. Businesses and found that companies that focused strongly on data-driven decision-making had an average of four percentage points higher productivity and six percentage points higher profits. Yet as these results indicate, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that data is in fact the new oxygen. Whereas it is still true that businesses that best leverage data and AI will gain a significant competitive advantage, it is probably fair to say that those that fail to make their organisations data-centric will eventually not be able to survive at all in the digital age. While most people agree on the essential role that Artificial Intelligence and Data play in their organisation’s success, there are significant challenges. The overwhelming majority of business leaders surveyed in the Teradata report anticipated major barriers for adoption within their organisation, with roadblocks ranging from an inadequate IT infrastructure to shortage of in-house talent. In their book The Sentient Enterprise, The evolution of Business Decision Making — launched at the Teradata Partners’s Conference last month — Oliver Ratzesberger (Teradata’s Chief Product Officer) and Mohanbir Sawhney from the McCormick foundation talk about how agility is key to getting the enterprise to the sentient point where it can analyse data and make decisions in real time. The crux of the problem enterprises face lies not in the difficulty of gathering data, but in extracting insights and then turning these into actionable processes. The reality is that we live in a time of data overload, and companies can easily find themselves trapped in reactive mode, spending most of their time sifting through mountains of data and making decisions only when problems emerge, rather than anticipating them. To tackle these problems, enterprises need access to key talent and infrastructure so as to enable the leveraging of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. Increasingly, this is not being done “in house” but rather in partnerships with dedicated providers. These go beyond the traditional SaaS and becomes much more of a “Platform as a Service” model that incorporates complex customization and consultancy services. Teradata’s Think Big Analytics team, for example, worked with Danske Bank to create a fraud-detection platform that uses machine leaning to analyse tens of thousands of latent features, scoring millions of online banking transactions in real-time to provide actionable insight regarding true, and false, fraudulent activity. Together, they built a framework within the bank’s existing infrastructure, crating advanced machine learning models to detect fraud within millions of transactions per year, and in peak times, many hundreds of thousands per minute: “Using AI, we’ve already reduced false positives by 50% and as such have been able to reallocate half the fraud detection unit to higher value responsibilities,” explains Nadeem Gulzar, Head of Advanced Analytics, Danske Bank. “There is evidence that criminals are becoming savvier by the day; employing sophisticated machine learning techniques to attack, so it’s critical to use advanced techniques, such as machine learning to catch them.” “All banks need a scalable, advanced analytics platform, as well as a roadmap and strategy for digitalization to bring data science into the organization.” says Mads Ingwar, Client Services Director at Think Big Analytics. “For online transactions, credit cards and mobile payments, banks need a real-time solution — the platform we developed with Danske Bank scores transactions in less than 300 milliseconds. It means that when customers are standing in the supermarket buying groceries, the system can provide immediately actionable insight. This type of solution is one we’ll begin to see throughout organizations in the financial services industry,” he concludes. Fintech company Verifi, also collaborates with banks and merchants to connect the multi-layered datastreams and combat fraud. The work the company does with is based on optimising data transmissions using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). This is much more efficient because whereas legacy systems rely on processing large numbers of files sent in bulk, APIs can process data in real-time. The Verifi system collates APIs from the merchant shopping cart, customer relationship management (CRM) system, shipping data system, and others, and provides the merchant with better information to handle charges disputed by consumers, allowing them to often resolve the issue directly rather than have the bank issue a chargeback. Merchants benefit as they’re able to control the message to the consumer, and banks are happy because the sale remains and they reduce their operating costs. It the sort of technology enabled, data-driven system that is a true win-win. One of the problems that such systems help tackle is so-called “friendly fraud,” a term used to describe a situation when a customer experiences “buyer’s remorse” and “tries it on” by putting in a claim directly with their bank or card issuer for a refund, when the sale did in fact legitimately occur. Julie Conroy, Research Director of the Aite Group says that in the U.S. friendly fraud and chargebacks would likely near $130 million, in Q1 2017 alone. Read and share the full article on ERP in News

https://medium.com/edtech-trends/working-together-to-build-a-big-data-future-14cf7b0fdab

['Alice Bonasio']

2017-11-15 11:12:51.254000+00:00

['Fintech', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Big Data']

Why Do Men Fare Worse With Covid-19?

Credit: krisanapong detraphiphat / Getty Images Men are nearly twice as likely to become severely sick and die from Covid-19 compared to women, research has shown. Now, a new study from Yale, published on Wednesday in Nature, gives new clues as to why men fare so much worse with the coronavirus. It’s the first study to look at the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 by sex, and it found that men produce an overall weaker immune response to the virus than women. “We now have clear data suggesting that the immune landscape in Covid-19 patients is considerably different between the sexes and that these differences may underlie heightened disease susceptibility in men,” senior author Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, told Yale Medicine. The researchers looked at 98 patients who were older than 60 on average, admitted to the Yale New Haven Hospital with confirmed Covid-19, and compared the initial immune responses in those who recovered from the disease to those who progressed to worse stages. They found that women’s bodies produced more T cells, white blood cells that recognize and eliminate invading pathogens. The male study participants showed much weaker activation of those T cells, which correlated with how sick the men became. Given the findings, the researchers concluded that vaccines will play a particularly important role for men, especially those over age 60. While the study did not explain why these sex differences in the immune response to the coronavirus exist, the new findings are not overly surprising, considering that scientists know women generally yield faster and stronger immune responses. One possible explanation: In order to protect unborn or newborn children, the female body has a greater evolutionary need to fight pathogens effectively.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/why-do-men-fare-worse-with-covid-19-a5debff87dc1

['Felix Gussone']

2020-08-28 13:26:01.761000+00:00

['Health', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus', 'Science', 'Men']

Artificial intelligence and the bleak, darkness that could befall us

These new intelligences could also bring with them some pretty terrible things, for us. First, though, there are likely some consequences that will arrive prior to the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). We’re already seeing some of these: automated weapons systems, increased surveillance activities, loss of privacy and anonymity. These are things that humans are directing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics to do. The motivations for these things are pretty clear — safety and security, strategic advantage, economic gains — because they are the same sort of things that have been motivating humans for millennia. While we may not agree with the tactics, we recognize why someone may use them. This won’t be the case with superintellligent AI systems. There won’t likely be malice when we are eliminated. It just may be the most logical or efficient course of action. Referring back to the ants; we don’t have malice when we wipe out a colony of ants to build a new highway. We simply don’t think of the consequences for the ants because they don’t warrant that type of concern. Which brings us to the largest fear that those involved in AI research have: that we are bringing about our extinction. Can’t we just pull the plug? Don’t they just do what we program them to do? They wouldn’t want to hurt us, would they? Who would be in charge of an ASI? All these questions point out the big problem with developing AGI and, by proxy, ASI: we simply don’t know what life will be like after ASI arrives. We’re creating something that could change nearly everything but we really do not know in what ways. There are four main scenarios where things could go very wrong for us: A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own. Now let’s look at each of these in turn and determine just which we should concern ourselves with the most. 1. A self-improving, autonomous weapons system “breaks out”. “[Lethal autonomous robots] have been called the third revolution of warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons,” says Bonnie Docherty of Harvard Law School. “They would completely alter the way wars are fought in ways we probably can’t even imagine.” And that “killer robots could start an arms race and also obscure who is held responsible for war crimes.” Militaries around the world are investing in robotics and autonomous weapon systems. There are good reasons for this that range from saving human lives (both soldiers and civilians) to greater efficiency. But what happens when an autonomous system with a goal to improve the efficiency with which it kills, reaches a point where it is no longer controllable. Unlike nuclear weapons, the difficulty and cost to acquire weaponized AI once it has been developed will be low and will allow terrorists and other rogue parties to purchase such technology on black markets. These actors won’t show the relative restraint of nation-states. This is a very real problem and we’ll see more news about this well before we get to a world with ASI. 2. Various groups will race to develop the first ASI and use it to gain advantage and control. Similar to the arms race mentioned above, nations, companies, and others will be competing to develop the first ASI because they know that the first one that is developed has a good chance of suppressing all others and being the only ASI ever to exist. In the opening chapter of his book Life 3.0 Max Tegmark lays out how a company that manages to build an ASI manages to take control over the world. The Tale of the Omega Team is worth the price of the book, in and of itself. It lays out all the advantages the “first mover” to AGI and then ASI gains and all of the rewards that come along with that. It will be hard to convince everyone on Earth to leave that fruit on the tree. This is one of the reasons I believe the move from ANI to AGI/ASI to be inevitable. I hope (maybe naively) that it is some group with good intentions that wins this “last race”. But these stories need not be relegated to the hypothetical. Russia and China area racing to develop ever more sophisticated systems as the West tries to create guardrails. “ Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” —Vladimir Putin September 2017, in a live video message beamed to 16,000 Russian schools. 3. An ASI itself will turn malicious and seek to destroy us. Unlike the scenarios above, this requires the AI to “want” to hurt humans of its own volition. Neither I, nor serious AI researchers are concerned with this scenario. AI won’t want to hurt us because they won’t want. They won’t have emotions and they won’t think like us. Anthropomorphizing² machines/programs in this way, is not useful, and could actually be quite dangerous. It will be very tempting to look upon these programs — that may indeed mimic human speech, comprehension, and emotions — and believe they are like us, that they feel like us and are motivated as we are. Unless we specifically attempt to create this in them, artificial intelligences will not be made in this image. 4. We don’t align the goals of the ASI with our own. This is the scenario most AI safety researchers* spend most of their time on. The concept of aligning the goals of artificial intelligences with our own is important for a number of reasons. As we’ve already defined, intelligence is simply the ability to accomplish complex goals. Turns out machines are very good at this. You could say that it is what we built them for. But as machines get more complex, so does the task of goal setting. * Yes, AI Safety is a thing that organizations like The Future of Life Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) spend a lot of time studying. One could make a compelling argument (if you’re a biologist) that evolutionary biology really only has one primary goal for all life — to pass on genetic instructions to offspring via reproduction. Stated more crudely, our main goal as humans is to engage in sex and have babies. But as you may have noticed, even though we spend a fair bit of energy on the matter, that isn’t the thing we do all the time. We have developed sub goals like eating, finding shelter, and socializing that serve to help keep us alive long enough to get to the sexy times. Once we have kids, even though all we have to do is raise them until they, themselves are old enough to procreate, we still find other things with which to occupy ourselves. We go on hikes, surf, take photos, build with LEGOs, walk our dogs, go on trips, read books, and write blog posts — all of which don’t further our goal of passing on our genes. We even do things to thwart our one job on planet Earth. Some of us use birth control or decide not to have children altogether. This flies in the face of our primary goal. Why do we do things like this? Let’s refer to Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0 again: Why do we sometimes choose to rebel against our genes and their replication goal? We rebel because by design, as agents of bounded rationality — we create/seek “rules of thumb”, we’re loyal only to our feelings. Although our brains evolved merely to help copy our genes, our brains couldn’t care less about this goal since we have no feelings related to genes… In summary, a living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn’t pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to pursue and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware of it) guide our decision making toward the ultimate goal of replication. [but] since our feelings implement merely rules of thumb that aren’t appropriate in all situations, human behavior strictly speaking doesn’t have a single well-defined goal at all.¹³ “The real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” Every post about AI existential risk must mention the “paperclip parable”. Tap the paperclips for a game. Every post about AI existential risk must mention Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip parable”.¹⁴ Sorta like a restatement of the genie or Midas problems, or — restated — be careful what you wish for. “But, say one day we create a super intelligence and we ask it to make as many paper clips as possible. Maybe we built it to run our paper-clip factory. If we were to think through what it would actually mean to configure the universe in a way that maximizes the number of paper clips that exist, you realize that such an AI would have incentives, instrumental reasons, to harm humans. Maybe it would want to get rid of humans, so we don’t switch it off, because then there would be fewer paper clips. Human bodies consist of a lot of atoms and they can be used to build more paper clips. If you plug into a super-intelligent machine with almost any goal you can imagine, most would be inconsistent with the survival and flourishing of the human civilization.” — Nick Bostrom, Paperclip Maximizer at LessWrong So what should we do about this? AI/Human goal alignment is likely to be a recurring theme here at AltText for a while so we will only touch on it now. Life 3.0 puts forth a pretty basic-sounding plan designed to make future AI safe, involving: Making AI learn our goals Making AI adopt our goals Making AI retain our goals Sounds simple enough but it is actually incredibly difficult to define and carry-out a plan like this. And we may only get one shot with it, since the first ASI is likely to be the only one to ever be created. This goal-alignment problem will be the deciding factor of whether we become immortal or extinct when artificial super intelligence becomes a reality.

https://medium.com/alttext/artificial-intelligence-and-the-bleak-darkness-that-could-befall-us-451c4ffdee1b

['Ben Edwards']

2017-11-16 05:47:38.097000+00:00

['AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Humanity', 'Future', 'Goals']

Identifying Outliers

2. Using Moving Average Mean and Standard Deviation as the Boundary Like in the first method, we need to get the boundary first and apply the boundary to the dataset. This time, a moving average mean and standard deviation (std) will be employed. To calculate the mean and std, a 21-day window is chosen, as that represents the average trading day in a month. You can choose any days, but the sensitivity will vary. To get the mean and std, it is easy with one line of code in Pandas: d1[['mean', 'std']] = d1['simple_rtn'].rolling(window=21) \ .agg(['mean', 'std']) There are too many NaNs . The next step is to remove them: d1.dropna(inplace=True) Let’s draw a graph and find out where the boundary lays: What happens if I use three times the std instead? Hmm… a bit of an overshoot. Let’s change it to two times the std: That is about right! Now is the time to look for those outliers:

https://medium.com/better-programming/identifying-outliers-part-two-4c00b2523362

['Ke Gui']

2020-12-06 02:27:34.072000+00:00

['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Programming']

Bringing Colab to a Jupyter Notebook near you…

Bringing Colab to a Jupyter Notebook near you… Google has built some nice features in Colab. Now you can benefit from some of these in Jupyter Notebook. It’s errors all the way down When programming in Python, it can be quite overwhelming when you hit an error deep down in a stack of nested function calls. One of the advantages of Python is that it has an enormous amount of high quality libraries available and for which the source code is readily available. Sometimes, it is useful just to be able to dig in to it in order to be able to understand what is going on. To help you do just this, Google Colab automatically displays clickable links to the source files in the stack trace, as well as a handy button that searches for the error in Stack Overflow. Wouldn’t it be nice if Jupyter Notebook could do the same? That’s what I thought, so I decided to create a Notebook Extension that does exactly that. Goto Error Notebook extension If you have not already installed Jupyter Notebook extensions, you can do this by typing pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions Download the Goto Error code from GitHub with git clone git://github.com/teticio/nbextension-gotoerror install it like so jupyter nbextension install nbextension-gotoerror and finally, enable it thusly jupyter nbextension enable nbextension-gotoerror/main If all goes to plan, you should be able to configure the Goto Error extension in the nbextensions tab of Jupyter Notebook. As the Jupyter server is only able to access files in the directory in which it is run or a subdirectory, for the notebook to be able to open the source files it is necessary to provide a soft link to the source file directory. For example, if you don’t use virtual environments, make soft link in the Jupyter launch directory to the site-packages directory of your Python installation (e.g. ~/lib/python3.6/site-packages ) and call this site-packages . Then set the prefix parameter in the nbextension configuration to ~/lib/python3.6 . If you do use virtual environments, then point the soft link to the envs directory and set the prefix parameter accordingly. To make a soft link in Linux: ln -s ~/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages site-packages To make a soft link in Windows: mklink -d envs C:\users\teticio\Anaconda\python\envs It should now work just like the following example. You want more? Google Colab has some other great features (apart from free access to GPUs and TPUs!). For example, if you add a #@param comment to the end of a line, it will automatically create a form which allows the user to input a value. For example fred = 123 #@param {type : 'number'} pops up a form with ‘fred’ and the number 123. If you change the number in the form to 456, say, the code is changed to fred = 456 #@param {type : 'number'} I’d like to develop an extension for Jupyter Notebook that does the same thing and, while I’m at it, port both of these extensions to Jupyter Lab. Please let me know if this is something that you would use.

https://towardsdatascience.com/bringing-colab-to-a-jupyter-notebook-near-you-3f326f89fae7

['Robert Smith']

2019-10-27 15:09:04.157000+00:00

['Python', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Google Colab', 'Jupyter', 'Productivity']

Subject, Consumer, or Citizen: Three Post-Covid Futures

Like all of us I suspect, I’m currently feeling a wild mix of emotions, from fear for the wellbeing of friends and loved ones, to anxiety about our work and the business we’ve built, to concern and indeed guilt when I think of the many people facing lockdown in situations far worse than mine; and alongside those immediate personal responses an intense collision of hope and fear for our collective future. This piece, really written with and by the whole team, is an initial attempt to draw on the thinking and work we at New Citizenship Project have done over the last five years to make sense, partly to ground our own work in this time, and partly with an ambition to offer something that can help the people we have worked with over the years to do the same. We would love to hear any thoughts, comments and ideas it provokes. The Crucible The great paradox of this moment is that our society is moving slower, yet at the same time changing faster and more fundamentally, than it has for decades. All of us are adapting, and this is just the beginning. This is still the time, first and foremost, to keep our businesses afloat, our children educated, and our relatives looked after. But in an only slightly broader view, this is also a time of tremendous and urgent importance. This moment is a crucible from which our society, economy and politics — and more importantly all of the organisations, large and small, that make those up — will emerge as different beasts. At the New Citizenship Project, we have a particular way of seeing this challenge. Since 2015, we have been working from the understanding that in the broad historical moment of the early 21st century, we are entering the era of the Citizen: a time when people, dissatisfied with being mere Consumers, increasingly yearn for agency and control over what matters to them, and where authentic participation based on agency and purpose holds the key to a brighter future. These are ideas that have earned a platform and stimulated change at organisations from The Guardian to the Co-op to the European Central Bank. Now, with Covid-19, the historical moment has ceased to be broad, and become immediate. In this context, our purpose here is to offer our underlying framework, in the hope it might be helpful in three ways: as a lens to help make sense of what is happening; of what is happening; as a way of framing the deep choice that we now face collectively; and the deep choice that we now face collectively; and as an invitation to step into the agency we all have — even now — to shape the future. The Citizen Shift Five years ago, we published a report called This Is The #CitizenShift, laying out the core ideas that continue to underpin all our work. Our argument was that there are broad historical moments when the dominant moral story of our society changes. At the start of the 20th century and for centuries before, we were Subjects: the right thing to do was to keep our heads down, do our duty and be content with our lot, while the God-given few led society forward. Through two world wars, this story collapsed. In the decades that followed, we became Consumers: the right thing to do was to look out for ourselves, to choose the best deal from those that were offered, to produce whatever people would consume, because if we did the best society would result. Our report argued that, in the 21st century, we are now living through another moment of collapse and rebirth: a shift from Consumer to Citizen. Now, the right thing for us to do is to get involved, to step into our own power to shape the world for the better, and to open up opportunities to do so for others. The flaws of the Consumer story have been badly exposed by the financial crisis and the climate emergency, and the digital era has created new spaces for participation that we can use to replace it with the Citizen story. Subject Consumer Citizen: Quickfire Concepts — from This Is The #CitizenShift The urgency of Now This understanding frames our mission at the New Citizenship Project: working with organisations of all shapes and sizes to help them build and inhabit the Citizen story. We support and challenge the organisations we work with to name and recognise Consumer logic in what they do, and to adopt new behaviours and structures which channel people’s ideas, energy and resources (to use the language of our friends at Lincolnshire Coop), not just sell them stuff. As we have been doing this work, we have been thinking and learning about how the big societal change will happen: how the Citizen will move from an emergent possibility to become the new dominant story. With Covid-19, two things have changed in our view. First, this just got very real: the historical moment is no longer broad, but immediate. Second, it has become clear that the step forward into the Citizen story cannot be taken for granted: the dominant story will be contested, and there is no guarantee this story will win. This, then, is how we understand what is happening right now. We are living through a contest between these three deep stories. All three are present and alive in this moment. One will emerge as dominant, and which it is will dramatically shape our collective future. Three possible futures The Consumer story could be restored. This is what “back to normal” would mean. It would be a little like the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Some part of all of us wants this very badly: our commutes, our coffees, our crises put back where they were so we can “open back up” and pick up where we left off. And there will be powerful interests and an awful lot of money put into making this happen for us: a recent piece by Julio Vincent Gambuto brings this to life with a powerful prediction of the “ultimate gaslighting”, as billions of pounds are spent persuading us to pretend that nothing ever happened. The Subject story is also making a very big comeback. We are already seeing not only the accentuation of already appalling levels of inequality, but also near-universal acceptance — even embrace — of radically reduced civil liberties. If there is a part of us that wants to go back to normal, there is another that is reassured by the idea that someone else is in charge. This is a story that has a clear path to develop, build and take over. There is significant potential for mass surveillance programmes to come into operation and be framed as essential to the lightening of lockdown, tracking people in order to track the virus. Hungary and Israel have already been described as the first “virus dictatorships”; it is all too plausible that others could follow. The huge opportunity, though, is to make this the moment when we choose to step forward together into the Citizen story. We are already seeing the myriad ways that people, communities and organisations are reclaiming agency and finding purpose within the present moment, despite the restriction of individual freedoms. Mutual Aid groups and hyperlocal self-organising units have sprung up everywhere. Businesses and suppliers are coming together rather than simply competing. Some central government departments and more local authorities (though not all) are making interventions that seek to sustain, channel and develop agency, not just treat people as self-interested individuals to be policed or “nudged” into compliance. There is a part of us that is deeper and more fundamental, and has been more starved, that is nourished by this, a part we feel when we look across the fence, clap the NHS, and act for someone we do not know. This too could grow. This does not just have to be a nice side effect; it could be the beginning of the new story. These are the three ways forward from here. To be brutally frank, two will simply result in continual and cascading failure, for organisations of all types and for humanity as a whole. If we return to the Consumer story, we will be back to square one on the challenges of climate and inequality (and more) that this story has arguably created, having eaten time we do not have. In short order, we will be back in crisis. The Subject story is even worse, restoring the standing challenges but with the addition of the kind of cover-ups and conspiracies that will hamper progress and slow change even more. In short order, we will be back in crisis. Both scenarios are seductive, because they’re familiar, but they won’t work. The Citizen story is the only one that actually works. But it is the most difficult, because it is unfamiliar: we are still early on in the imagining and shaping of a Citizen society. The institutions and processes are not “off the peg”. We have work to do. All of us. The agency we all have There is of course much in this moment that sits in the hands of national governments, more than has been the case for decades. But to leave that statement to stand bare and unexamined is to walk the path to the Subject story, or at best the Consumer. The Citizen story by contrast adds two important qualifications: first, that government in a democracy is, in principle, government by Citizens — i.e. all of us are involved — not government of Citizens; and second, that the space for government is defined by wider society — the communities we live in, and the organisations we work for. With this understanding, we restore our agency, our power to shape the future, both individually and collectively. In this view, indeed, the bigger truth is that no government can make the Citizen story happen for us. It will require communities across the country and the world, and organisations from across sectors to lead into new ways of thinking and operating — and it will require this to be driven by individuals who have the courage to think and act differently, learning more from their peers and fellow Citizens in other sectors than from the previously established norms of their own worlds. This has to some extent always been the case, but it is so much more true in times of flux and uncertainty. Careers, reputations, and legacies will be made in the coming months, many of them apparently from nowhere. Organisations of all sectors will reorient dramatically. That is what it means for society to reshape. This is a huge moment of opportunity for us all, individually and collectively. There are no answers yet as to exactly how to do this. As a starting point, then, here are three levels of questions we offer you to ask yourself, and that we are asking ourselves. As an individual Citizen… How can you find and build agency in your own life in this moment, even through small actions? How can you recognise in yourself when you are being treated as a Subject or a Consumer? How can you call this out when it happens? How can you recognise when you yourself act towards others as Citizens, creating opportunities for them to express their agency? As a Citizen of a local community… How can you find a level of connection to the place where you are that works for you? How can you make a contribution that you can sustain and that is right for you? How can you develop your understanding of where power lies locally — what councils and authorities are there? How are they operating and treating people locally? How can you help or perhaps challenge them to do it better? As a Citizen of your organisation/employer… How do you understand the purpose of your organisation? What is it really there in the world to do, and what could it be? How could your organisation operate differently in order to create more space for people to find their agency, and share in its purpose, not just transact? How could your organisation involve people more directly and actively? How could you start or build something in this moment, even something small, that could grow? Ultimately, all these questions stem from one that is deeper and more fundamental: What would you do in this time if you truly believed in yourself and in those around you? This is happening We want to close for now by saying that we see the people we have worked with over the years leaning into this already, and indeed we have got this far with our understanding by watching you. We’re already inspired by Kirklees Council with their approach to partnering with and supporting community organisations rather than attempting to either replace or manage them (see Community Response Kirklees); the Guardian working with readers and communities through initiatives like Anywhere But Westminster to understand the true impact of the virus; the Co-op seeking to put its member participation platform in service of community support; and perhaps most of all by the University of Bath Students’ Union (The SU Bath) for the energy, commitment and all-round Citizenship -small and big ‘C’ - of their officers, staff and members (not least in their work with Bath and North East Somerset Third Sector Group, another organisation we hugely admire). Over the last five years, we’ve built a business out of both celebrating and supporting organisations of all sectors to build the Citizen story. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be looking for more examples like this to celebrate, organisations reframing and reinventing their relationships with people to build and distribute agency, and talking to the people who are doing it; and if we can help you be part of it, we’re here. This is a crucial time, a difficult time, and a dangerous time. But it is a time when the Citizen Shift is very much on the cards.

https://medium.com/new-citizenship-project/subject-consumer-or-citizen-three-post-covid-futures-8c3cc469a984

['Jon Alexander']

2020-04-17 10:03:23.148000+00:00

['Consumerism', 'Society', 'Future', 'Coronavirus', 'Agency']

The 5 Best Ways to Write More Articles

1. Become an idea-machine Generating ideas is a common struggle amongst writers. The blank page is the enemy, and they don’t know how to make its blood spill. This holds them back from writing. How is it that even though ideas come from everywhere you’re not receiving them at all? There’s only one reason why: you don’t have an open mind. Though not on purpose, you’re regularly consuming the same type of content, and therefore, thinking the same thoughts. How are you supposed to write about new topics when new ideas aren’t entering your head? To become an idea-machine, you need to be open to everything — even if it’s random and unrelating to your niche. Even though you write about productivity, don’t read another book about that subject. If, while you were browsing online, a history book about Kennedy piqued your interest, read that. Rather than watching another class on writing, watch the interior design course you’ve been eyeing. You’re not digging for ideas about history or interior design. You’re putting yourself in a position to get a thought that leads to another thought that turns into an idea that transforms into an entire article. Even looking up from your phone and staring at the sky and the trees and the ocean lets ideas bubble in your brain until they explode on the page. If you find nothing out in the world, look inside yourself. Ask yourself what you feel, how you feel, about your dreams and hopes and fears. That’s when you’ll discover various stories, memories, and lessons. By consuming and doing different things you start having different thoughts. If you have ideas, especially ones that excite you, you’re going to want to sit and write. Nothing will stop you then — not until you’ve told the whole story.

https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/the-5-best-ways-to-write-more-articles-29656cbfa21

['Itxy Lopez']

2020-08-26 16:19:54.633000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Writing Tips', '5 Tips', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

Tell Me A Love Story As If I’ve Never Known Another

Tell me a love story as if I’ve never known another. Break my heart and make it whole again. Sew up the pieces of my heart with every word. Can you romance me with your words that breathe and move in real live action? Can you slow dance with me with every pause and when the tempo begins to beat faster… keep me on my toes. Would you stop in the right places and linger in all the wrong ones? Yet, through it all, work the magic of your pen on the parchment of my heart. Take my breath away with your words. Let my tears blot your words into a thousand more verses. Unravel the parchment of my heart so your pen can write some more. My heart wants your love — like Nature’s thirst for nectar and a hungry pen for paper. Tell me a love story like I’ve never loved another. Show me that it’s real. Devour me with your words. With love. ❤

https://medium.com/the-loners-hideout/tell-me-a-love-story-as-if-ive-never-known-another-738cac837792

['Laura Gulbranson']

2019-06-22 07:14:05.759000+00:00

['Poetry', 'Books', 'Writing', 'Love', 'Creativity']

Why It’s Important To Write About Your Unoriginal Ideas

Context is everything Why is it when someone gives a great speech, even if everyone in the audience agrees, very few take action? Context is everything. When you read or listen to something, your context needs to be right for it to sink into your soul and take effect. Let’s break down a person’s context. Ability to understand You don’t teach 5-year-olds about quantum mechanics. They don’t have the capacity to understand it. That doesn’t mean they never will. Their brains just aren’t there yet. In the same way, just because something is true doesn’t mean everyone is able to understand and apply it. That’s why life advice from parents often goes over the child’s head. Their mentality isn’t there yet. Timing Based on what’s going on in your life, you react to things differently. Someone who just graduated college is more likely to absorb career advice than someone still in high school. Both are able to understand it, it’s just more applicable to the former. That’s why you can hear the same thing for years but never take it in. Adele’s music only started speaking to me when I went through a breakup. It’s all timing. How it’s presented People react differently to the way information is presented. Some people are heavy readers. Others are better listeners. Some people like to be pushed. Others like to be lovingly encouraged. I used to be more of the ‘Jay Shetty’ kind of listener. I appreciated the calm, gentle advice he gave. But at some point, I realized it didn’t really push me to make changes. I agreed with everything but didn’t really internalize it. Then I switched to Gary Vee. He had a more direct, no-nonsense, ‘kick up the backside’ approach which really got me out of my comfort bubble. Delivery is also important. Nobody wants to listen to an arrogant, selfish know-it-all. You are more inclined to listen when someone talks with care, humility, and a genuine interest to help you. We evolve Your context affects how you receive information, but you also grow as a person. You won’t be the same person in 5 years. You shouldn’t be, anyway. Life gives you challenges and victories that teach and define you. You learn more. Your circumstances change. You meet new people. You move on to the next stage in life Your perspective changes. So every encounter with knowledge should be looked at with new eyes. I’ve read some of the same books again and again throughout my life and each time I read them I find something new. I’m able to make connections I didn’t make before. The beauty of timeless wisdom is each time you encounter it, your understanding deepens. Even watching some of my favorite cartoons years later, I now spot the adult jokes that flew over my head as a kid. That’s why I don’t mind revisiting some of my favorite talks, articles, books, and movies. It’s not about excitement. It’s the added insight and appreciation I get each time.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-its-important-to-write-about-your-unoriginal-ideas-1004d55b7e28

['Nathan Burriston']

2020-08-20 03:23:40.492000+00:00

['Writing', 'Learning', 'Creativity', 'Education', 'Self-awareness']

Foxing’s ‘Nearer My God’ is the Best Song of 2018

The Song Putting the strengths of the album aside, its title track easily the best song I’ve heard in 2018, and one of my favorites of all time. This is the kind of song that I have to force myself to stop listening to, lest I get sick of it; the kind of song that I want to put on every playlist; the kind of song that reminds me why I love music. “Nearer My God” is hauntingly beautiful, and I’ll do my best to describe why in the next few paragraphs. As best I can tell, the lyrics are a self-reflection on the band’s existence and their careers. Murphy opens the track by yelling “I want it all,” continuing, just a few lines later, with “Cause I’d sell my soul/To be America’s pool boy/The crown centerfold/My few good years left, a tribute/To anyone who wants me at all/Does anybody want me at all?/Oh, do you want me at all?” Set against a piercing backdrop of music that I can only describe as haunting, Murphy’s desperation and anxiety are almost palpable. What must it feel like to dedicate one’s life to learning a craft (in this case music) only to question these decisions a few years in? What kind of anguish must rise out of years devoted writing and singing, followed by this kind of uncertainty? I’m not musically inclined, but I can only imagine that this feeling must be crippling. After hearing this song a few times, I admire the honestly and openness that led to its creation. Lyrical brilliance aside, the specific ways that the music’s climactic moments fit with the lyrics is the final ingredient to this song. After Murphy asks “Do you want me at all?” multiple times, the background music swells into a piercing crescendo that divides the first half of the song from the second and is one of the most impressive musical moments I have ever experienced. When Murphy’s voice enters the track again a few measures later, the lyrics flip from wanting musical fame to poking holes in the very vision that he longed after moments before. “I’ve got it all,” he sings, sounding no happier than before. At just a few minutes long, this song still feels emotionally exhausting. It’s clear that it took a tremendous amount of courage and work to put these lyrics and notes together, and the end result — when listened to closely — conveys these elements well. It may not be the most accessible song, or the easiest to listen to, but the value and beauty here can’t be missed.

https://medium.com/the-coastline-is-quiet/foxings-nearer-my-god-is-the-best-song-of-2018-11d03391af19

['Thomas Jenkins']

2018-12-03 19:27:32.333000+00:00

['Design', 'Writing', 'Songs', 'Music', 'Culture']

What Are The Benefits Of Cloud Data Warehousing?

What Are The Benefits Of Cloud Data Warehousing? And Should You Switch Data warehousing was introduced in 1988 by IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy. Since then the concept has evolved and taken on a life of its own. Increasing challenges and complexities of business have forced data warehousing to become a distinct discipline. Over the years this has led to best business practices, improved technologies, and hundreds of books being published on the topic. Image Source: Seattle Data Guy But we don’t want to focus on the past. Instead, this article will discuss the future of data warehousing and how it has been impacted by the cloud. Over the past decade, we have seen multiple new cloud data warehousing technologies pop up and be responsible for the largest software IPOs in history. All because of a data warehouse. A technology and discipline that is rarely even discussed in most computer science or IT degrees in college. Yet almost every large and medium organization has some form of the data warehouse. It’s estimated by the year 2025 that the data warehouse market will near double from its current 18 billion USD market cap to 30 billion USD. In this article, we will not only discuss why so many businesses are willing to invest in a data warehouse but we will also discuss how the cloud has improved data warehouses as well as leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. So whether you want to learn more about data warehousing or you are a director, small business owner, or CEO this article will help you understand the vast world of data warehousing.

https://medium.com/smb-lite/what-are-the-benefits-of-cloud-data-warehousing-a7322947a479

[]

2020-11-06 18:53:25.054000+00:00

['Data Science', 'AWS', 'Programming', 'Cloud Computing', 'Big Data']

My Nervous System Needs To Talk

My Nervous System Needs To Talk He Just Has To Get This Off My Chest Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash Hi, I’m Max’s nervous system. No this is not a Reader’s Digest parody. I just have to vent. Sometimes Max does not work the way he should and that drives me nuts. The other day, for example. You know he spends a lot of time alone writing things. You might think that would be stimulating to me, but have you seen some of the stuff he writes? The point is, I don’t think he’s getting enough human interaction. So, when he does encounter someone, it can result in an embarrassing and frustrating experience. Take yesterday for instance. We were going to the mailbox and happened to see a neighbor. It could have been quick: “How ya doin’?” “I’m fine. How about you?” “Doing well, thanks.” That’s pleasant, efficient, and not embarrassing. But ol’ Max couldn’t leave it at that. He had to actually tells this guy how he was feeling. “I’ve gotten out of my routine,” said Max. “I haven’t worked out for a couple of days and my back is letting me know.” “Oh,” said the other guy, “You work out?” For cryin’ out loud! This guy didn’t get the message that Max would answer his questions? Sometimes in great detail? That was all Max needed. He was off and running. He’s like the person you ask for the time and they tell you how a watch is made. I could tell Max’s mouth was moving and something was gushing out of it, but I didn’t care what it was. I just wanted it stopped. I put in a 911 call to his brain. “This call may be recorded for training purposes. Max’s brain is engaged right now. Your call is important to us neurons and we will take your call in the order in which it was received. Your estimated wait time can not be determined, because Max’s mouth is spewing stuff out like the mighty Niagara going over the falls.” I wanted to hang on and listen to the hold music because it was that 80s one-hit-wonder “Hold On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. But I had to make him stop. As a neuro system, I tend to be the physical type, but, still on hold to his brain, I decided to try something spiritual. Perhaps an appeal to his empathy for the suffering of others would make him stop tormenting that poor man. I called his soul. No luck on the soul. He had spotted the trouble early and made his exit. When I found him, he was having an out of body experience and had got tangled up in the branches of a tree overhead. I knew the soul was as troubled as me. He was shouting in tones no one could hear, “Max, shut up! Please stop talking!” Meanwhile, Max’s tongue was still going like it was trying the beat his brains out from the inside. The fellow listening to this tirade had the look of an animal in a snare about to gnaw his foot off. When Max gets going like that, he can become nonsensical. He’s not far from that on a good day. I was still on hold with Max’s brain. My God, now it was playing “Rockstar” by Nickelback. Things were getting worse. Nickelback. Back. Then I had it. His back. I have total control there. His back is his Achilles Heel. It just took one sharp tweak. Max flinched and the listener was free. Max’s spirit fell out of the tree and returned to its rightful place. A customer service neuron came on the line from the brain. “Thank you for holding. What is your emergency?” “No emergency,” I said. “But could you play something soothing like Debussy?” Max muttered a reproach to himself for neglecting his work out routine and we got the mail.

https://medium.com/the-haven/my-nervous-system-needs-to-talk-ac21341861ec

['Max K. Erkiletian']

2020-09-09 18:48:33.151000+00:00

['Humor', 'Neuroscience', 'Relationships', 'Brain', 'Psychology']

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator — Timothy Winegard

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator — Timothy Winegard A terrific subject and stirring information are tethered to a book that unfortunately loses credibility as you dig deeper Microhistory is taking over the nonfiction market, and the newest addition, Timothy Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator is a perfect example of the intriguing subgenre. If you’re not familiar with “microhistory”, it is a relatively new trend that takes a specific subject and tracks it throughout (usually) the history of the world. Examples are Mark Kurlansky’s books Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Salt: A World History, and Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas. (If this subgenre interests you or you now realize, like me, that you love these kinds of books, take a look through Book Riot’s terrific list of 50 must-read microhistories.) Timothy Winegard’s brand new The Mosquito is a great addition to the realm of microhistory in a couple of different ways. First, it’s surprising that this book has not already been written, considering the popularity of microhistory and the importance of mosquitoes in world history, as Winegard deftly explains in the book. Also, there is simply a great wealth of historical information in this book, all told through the lens of the mosquito but branching out in many surprising directions. I have not thought about mosquitoes the same way since reading this book, and that is part of the point. I don’t even remember Kurlansky’s Milk! affecting me in quite the same way. However (and this is a big “however” that I will deal with in detail below), I found several historical assertions or bits of information in The Mosquito that were either overstated or flat incorrect. This has really colored my perception of the book, and it has something I have been sifting through mentally for weeks now. But first, the good. Winegard is a skilled writer that knows how to weave a good historical narrative. He also makes a great case for his main thesis, which is essentially that the mosquito, a tiny insect that can be swatted in an instant, might have had the greatest influence on world history of any non-human entity. Winegard states that some researchers have estimated mosquitoes are responsible for the death of almost half the humans that have ever lived. Even as diseases like malaria and yellow fever have either disappeared or been isolated to certain world regions, mosquitoes kill more humans per year than any other being, including other humans (if you, like Winegard, don’t count abortions, but I digress). Winegard weaves the story of the mosquito through all* of world history, from speculation about whether mosquitos were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs to modern attempts to eradicate mosquito-borne diseases. The breadth of time covered is outstanding, considering the speculative nature of the subject as you go further back in history. Winegard is not afraid to speculate and give an idea of where the scholarship is on a specific question, like what killed the dinosaurs or the positive effects of the marshes on Ancient Rome’s defensive capabilities. He even has a very interesting theory about how mosquitoes aided in the spread of Christianity because the religion “preached care for the sick as a recognized Christian duty.” This analysis of the mosquito from every angle and its effect on several major movements and developments in world history makes The Mosquito a very useful source for anyone interested in history. *(“All” is more a reference to the time periods the book covers and not the regions of the world. The Mosquito is very focused on Western civilization to the detriment of almost any discussion of Africa or Asia. There is a 10-page chapter on the Mongols, but that’s it. I got excited when one page had an illustration of Japanese treatments for mosquito-borne diseases, but there was no mention of Japan on that page or anywhere else in the book. However, I am willing to give Winegard a slight pass on the Eurocentric nature of the book because I’m sure it is more difficult to work with non-Western sources of this nature and he is writing a mass-market history book, not an academic one. I would have just loved to see China, India, Japan, or any African country get a little bit of love.) One specific positive of Winegard’s book is his writing style. He is able to tell stories well and injects humor often in order to make his points. One example sticks out to me, when writing about Herodotus’ narrative of Egyptian treatments for malaria: (Herodotus) also reveals that the prevailing Egyptian practice for treating malarial fevers was to bathe in fresh human urine. Having never contracted malaria, I can only assume that its symptoms are so unbearably severe that a pampering soak in sparkling, steaming urine issuing from your thoughtful and upstanding servants is worth a shot for some well-deserved relief. Not only can that excerpt be laugh-out-loud funny depending on your style of humor, but the words he uses are evocative and almost disturbing, which is a good thing when you are describing the horrific things Winegard relays in The Mosquito. For all these reasons, I wanted to love The Mosquito. And part of me did. But I had some serious problems with multiple portions of Winegard’s historical examples and analyses. So here comes the negativity. I was rolling along very happily in the book until I reached the chapter on mosquitoes and the development of Christianity. Winegard makes several great points, including one about how Constantine’s decree did not make Christianity the official religion but instead simply proclaimed religious toleration for Christianity. But then he makes statement that is simply and completely incorrect. He writes: In 325, Constantine went one step further at the Council of Nicaea. To placate the adherents of the diverse and assorted polytheistic and Christian factions, and end religious purges, he blended their beliefs into one faith. Constantine ratified the Nicene Creed and the concept of the Holy Trinity, opening the doors for the compilation of the current Bible and modern Christian doctrine. OK. This lights a fire under me specifically, but let’s look at it factually. This connection between Christianity and polytheistic factions in Europe is pointed out often, and no doubt some syncretism occurred in areas large and small. Christian practices incorporated polytheistic practices all over Europe, the most obvious of which is seen in Western Christmas traditions, but syncretism between Christianity and European polytheism did not ever reach the level of universal church doctrine. Councils like Nicaea were convened to ensure this. Both points Winegard makes here, about the Biblical canon and the Trinity, are listed under “Misconceptions” in the Council of Nicaea article on Wikipedia. (Yes, I know, Wikipedia is not a great source for research, but major articles are reliable and it is a good jumping off point for research. If Winegard had consulted Wikipedia at all instead of whatever sources he is spuriously using here, he would have seen sources to rebut his narrative and would not have made this mistake.)The Biblical canon had, essentially but not officially, been formed far before the Council of Nicaea, and the source of the misconception that it was formed at Nicaea is a pseudo-historical account by Voltaire. And, although the doctrine of the Trinity was formally put forward by Christians at least as early as the second century, it was not officially decided upon in the Catholic Church until after Nicaea and as far as we know the Trinity was not discussed at Nicaea. The focus instead was on the deity of Christ. A mistake in one excerpt isn’t a huge deal. Then, in the aforementioned chapter on the Mongols, Winegard mentions that they had begun to conquer large swaths of eastern Europe and infers that mosquitoes were a major reason that the Mongols failed to conquer western Europe. He makes no allusion to the real reason they turned back: Ogedei Khan died, and there was a struggle for power, so Batu and his army abandoned the war in order to join the struggle to elect a successor back in the empire’s center. Could mosquito-borne diseases be a reason that they never returned? Possibly. But the lack of detail hurts the credibility of Winegard’s narrative. Then I encountered a very problematic passage that made me rethink a lot of what Winegard has to say. In the chapter on the American Revolution, he makes this statement: In December 1773, shortly after the ratification of the Tea Act, a strategic yet spiteful band of the Sons of Liberty disguised only in blankets and lampblack (not in the mythical Mohawk Indian regalia commonly portrayed) heaved 342 chests containing 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor during their Tea Party. Wait, the colonists weren’t dressed as Mohawks like I’ve heard for my entire life? This is big news, so I looked for a source. None in the notes in the back of the book. Google is up next. Can’t find anything. I can literally find no source to back up Winegard’s American-history-altering statement. Usually you can find a source on the internet that says anything, you just have to weigh competing sources to find the most likely answer. Not in this case. It’s possible I can’t find whatever source he is referencing here, but everything I could find upholds the fact that some of the Sons of Liberty were wearing Indian garb. Not all of them, and not all in full native headdresses as commonly portrayed, but definitely in Indian dress. (Hey look, I’m actually including a link to my source to back up what I’m saying, and the source includes quotes from actual eyewitnesses to the event.) I welcome Winegard’s rebuttal and would love to see his sourcing, but this really bothered me. After the Boston Tea Party sourcing fiasco, I went back to a couple other things that stood out to me earlier in the book, specifically a story about Alexander the Great’s death. Winegard explained the scholarship around Alexander’s death as coming around to the fact that he died of malaria (a mosquito-borne disease), but my little bit of research turned up that still no one is sure of the cause, and a new study suggests a completely new cause and a date of death six days later than previously thought. So this series of issues bothers me for two major reasons: 1) Winegard shows a tendency toward the earth-shattering cynical view that disregards what years of scholarship portray. While this is sometimes healthy and something I even tend toward at times, it becomes dangerous when the breadth of research doesn’t support and you don’t give any source for what you are saying. That means no one can check your facts and they just have to take your word for it. 2) These major factual errors mean it is difficult to believe anything surprising that is said in the 400+ pages of this book. You have to do the work to double-check, as I did many times but not all the time, in order to know if a statement is true or if it is poorly-sourced. I’ve been wrestling with what to do with The Mosquito for weeks now. I really do think a lot of it is beneficial to an understanding of world history, as Winegard makes very good arguments that the mosquito is much, much more important to an understanding of major conflicts and world historical developments than it is given credit for. However, I cannot overlook the factual errors and misrepresentations within the text. Someone who knows world history better than me could probably find even more, and as a mass-market history book I don’t think most people would see the errors and question some of them. We will probably have people running around saying that the Sons of Liberty didn’t wear Indian garb to the Boston Tea Party, and that is just not true. But they’ll think it is because they read it in a history book from a major publisher. I hope someone else writes this book or there is a second edition after it is read and revised by several historians. But in its current form, I won’t recommend it to my students and I can’t recommend it to you, reader, unless you want to do the work of checking everything that doesn’t seem right. I’m always a take-the-meat-and-spit-out-the-bones person, but sometimes the danger of getting hurt by the bones of “alternative facts” outweighs the benefit of the meat. I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Penguin Group Dutton and NetGalley, but obviously my opinions are my own.

https://medium.com/park-recommendations/the-mosquito-a-human-history-of-our-deadliest-predator-timothy-winegard-ac1016c2b0ed

['Jason Park']

2019-08-07 11:53:37.781000+00:00

['Health', 'Nonfiction', 'Books', 'History', 'Book Review']

Immigrant, Harvard Dad, NYC Cab Driver: A Son’s Tribute to a Father Lost to Covid-19

Whenever one of his kids accomplished something, Mohammed Jafor broke out in a grin. “He would light up,” his son Mahtab Shihab said. “One thing that stood out to me was his pride in everything that me and my siblings did.” Jafor immigrated to New York City from Bangladesh in 1991. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, delivered food, and worked at McDonald’s. He later brought his wife and oldest son to the U.S. from Bangladesh. And in 2000, Mahtab was born. Mahtab told us: “He was a very devout man…He was very involved in the Bengali community in New York.” When immigrants came over from Bangladesh, Jafor would give them a place to stay for a few weeks, helping them get acclimated. Jafor became a cab driver in the early 2000s. He worked six-days per week — often 12-hour shifts, to give his family “the best opportunities they could possibly have.” Heartbreakingly, Jafor’s wife passed away a few years ago from colon cancer, leaving him as a single parent to three children. “He was someone who always put his family first,” Mahtab said. “He worked hard to make sure that his family back in Bangladesh, and here in America, were taken care of.” He also believed in the power of education: Mahtab is a sophomore studying history and economics at Harvard University, while his younger sister goes to the Trinity School in New York City. By early March, the Covid-19 outbreak began taking hold of the region. Jafor took precautions, such as wearing a mask inside his cab. Soon after, when his son came home from school around March 14th, he stopped driving and socially isolated with his children. But a week later, he began to develop mild Covid-19 symptoms: a fever, cough and more. He eventually began experiencing extreme shortness of breath. On March 26th, his family called him an ambulance. He was sent to Montefiore Medical Center, where he was put on a ventilator soon after his arrival. Since his condition accelerated so quickly, his family wasn’t able to speak to him. The doctors tried to save him with everything they could: hydroxychloroquine, and a few other medications. None of the treatments worked, and Jafor died on April 1st at the age of 56. “It was a lot to take in,” Mahtab said. “It happened all of a sudden, and it was very unexpected. It’s like: ‘What happens from here? This wasn’t supposed to happen.’” “My dad worked really hard for everything,” he added. “It’s sad… he won’t be able to see the fruits of his hard work through the paths of me, my brother and my sister.”

https://medium.com/wake-up-call/immigrant-harvard-dad-nyc-cab-driver-a-sons-tribute-to-a-father-lost-to-covid-19-274aa5e452dd

['Katie Couric']

2020-04-22 10:01:00.820000+00:00

['Victims', 'Health', 'Wellness', 'Coronavirus', 'Culture']

Creativity Lies Behind Leisure, Not Working

Every human being has a unique creativity, though at different levels. This creativity emerges under the right conditions. We think that one of the most important of these conditions is financial opportunities and a comfortable life. Yes, a person must have the time to allocate the things he has set up in his mind and the resources to allocate them if he has time. On the other hand, we know that people from different parts of the world, despite the limited opportunities at their disposal, create creative works within these opportunities. This would be sometimes a statue, sometimes a car prototype, sometimes a book. Creativity, by its very nature, means this. Nobody has unlimited possibilities, only some have more, and these are undoubtedly more advantageous. However, revealing something from scratch is, from this point of view, using the available resources to produce something that has never created before. If we have understood that each of us has a certain amount of opportunities in our hands, and it is possible to make something out of them, let us look at the second important key point to produce something. This is working, as we can all imagine. It is not possible to produce something that does not exist, without spending a lot of time on it, without labor and thinking. The people we call creative are undoubtedly people who devote a lot of time to their work. But if you think working hard and constantly supporting what you want to do, you’re wrong. The most important way to increase your creative ability is to create free time and engage in other things. Although this may seem contradictory, the more we evaluate the act of ‘creating’, the more easily we will understand why this is so. First, we constantly learn something in the field we have focused on, trying to find out something, drown in details; this means that we should close ourselves to any new information that may come from outside within this time frame. Although it is very important to shut yourself out while you are concentrating on a task, the longer it takes, the more naturally the number of new things entering our brains decreases significantly. Being creative means being as open to new things as possible. The greater and more diverse the number of information and data entering the brain, the greater the potential of the brain to recognize, process and produce something. Besides, our experiences, what we see and meet outside, whether we are aware or not, add new things to us. The story outside feeds the story ‘inside’. Second, our brains make a serious effort when working intensively or learning something. And like any muscle group, the brain needs rest to improve itself. You can’t go to the gym every day and train for hours, because the body doesn’t have time to provide the necessary nutrients and supplements, due to the work out the muscles . Similarly, each information entering the brain is a new neuron and the information set is a neuron network. The brain needs free time to process, make sense of, and regulate these neurons in a healthy way. On the one hand, he can’t learn or do something intensely while thinking about something, because what he can do in a single moment is limited. In other words, if you increase your mental capacity on the one hand and give your mind a free time to evaluate them on the other, it offers you new information and experiences in return for what you have not done before, or what can be put forward in the context of ‘creating’. We’ve all experienced it. When an idea comes to mind, it is not when we think the most, but when we think the least or never think. Because in such a timeframe, our brain processes the data and information at its best without any pressure. The important thing is to keep the balance between the time you spend to produce something and the time you can define as ‘leisure’, even if this time makes no sense to you.

https://medium.com/retinamagazine/creativity-lies-behind-leisure-not-working-6d373a6b0d10

['Osman Soylu']

2019-09-27 14:47:36.543000+00:00

['Health', 'Productivity', 'Life', 'Creativity', 'Work']

Thought Plagiarism and How It Threatens Creative Platforms

Thought Plagiarism and How It Threatens Creative Platforms When does copying end and the destruction of ideas begin? Photo by Vinicius Amano on Unsplash Every platform has its self-seekers — that is, those who try to game the system by milking the creativity of others and doing as little as possible on their end. Money and fame are usually the motivating factors for this. They are the mimickers, the copiers, the type that ‘steal’ an idea and rework it in a way that rides on the coattails of the originator. They don’t care about attribution. They don’t wait and give the content distance in time. They’ll cash in as quickly and as frequently as possible. This is because to them, the internet is all about free speech. Sometimes, they’ll go as far as calling it working smarter and not harder — except, the reality is that it’s leaning toward a black hat attempt to get as much money and attention as possible without adding value to the platform that’s paying them. We’re not talking about those moments of mind-melding experiences where two creators happen to have the exact same idea or thought wave around the same time. It happens. Those moments are often done in isolation and innocence, making the similarities forgivable. The difference between innocent creators and self-seekers is that the latter will exhibit an identifiable trend. They don’t just have one-offs — they have a history of content that seems too alike to be coincidental. When enough people do this with money and fame as the main motivator, they drown out the original voices and contribute to the image of sameness on a platform.

https://medium.com/prototyping-a-year/when-people-chasing-after-money-and-fame-turn-platforms-into-trainwrecks-84018439878a

['Aphinya Dechalert']

2019-10-06 14:13:41.508000+00:00

['Social Media', 'Business', 'Creativity', 'Startup', 'Writing']

How I Deal With Negative Thoughts When I Have to Code

How I Deal With Negative Thoughts When I Have to Code How I stopped distractions from taking over and potentially ruining my career Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash. “When there’s an elephant in the room, you can’t pretend it isn’t there and just discuss the ants.” — Ellen Wittlinger This is my first ever article where I put the word “I” in evidence, as focus on readers is my main mission. But with the hard times we are all going through during this pandemic, I felt that giving a cookie-cutter solution to very personal problems wasn’t fair. Today, I just want to draw attention to what has been my process over the last six months to dealing with negative emotions while I’m sitting in front of a computer trying to code. Because you see, dealing with bad feelings and anxiety is different when you’re not working. You can find something to soothe you easily, like getting distracted by a movie or just laying down and letting your thoughts go. But my boss doesn’t like that and doesn’t pay me to watch movies. They pay me to be productive, to make their problems my own for 40 hours a week. So I have to deal with that as a professional would. Coding is not something that you can afford to do while being distracted. You must always have your next step in mind, thinking about a thousand different best practices to apply at the same time. It’s a very mind-egoistic practice because you can’t let your brain wander around anywhere else except the editor. Here is a list of methods I used as my first-aid kit during these tough times. They helped me regain my productivity and possibly even keep my job.

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-deal-with-negative-thoughts-when-i-have-to-code-b8664ed5d824

['Piero Borrelli']

2020-10-26 15:53:19.563000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Productivity', 'Psychology']

How to Scale Python on Every Major Cloud Provider

How to Scale Python on Every Major Cloud Provider Best practices for cloud computing with Python In the words of Pywren creator Eric Jonas, “The cloud is too damn hard!” Python in the cloud. Once you’ve developed a Python application on your laptop and want to scale it up in the cloud (perhaps with more data or more GPUs), the next steps are unclear, and unless you have an infrastructure team that’s already set it up for you, “Just use Kubernetes” is not so simple. So you’ll choose one of AWS, GCP, and Azure and navigate over to the management console to sift through instance types, security groups, spot prices, availability zones, instance limits, and so on. Once you’ve got all of that sorted out and managed to rent some virtual machines, you’ve still got to figure out how to actually run your application on them. How exactly does my Python script divide up the work across a 10 machine cluster? At this point, you may try to rewrite your application using PySpark or mpi4py or Celery. If that fails you’ll build a brand new distributed system like Uber and Lyft recently did with Fiber and Flyte. In either case, you’re either rewriting your application, building a new distributed system, or both. All to speed up your Python script in the cloud. We’re going to walk through how to use Ray to launch clusters and scale Python on any of these cloud providers with just a few commands. Here it is in a diagram. Step 1 is to develop your Python application. This usually happens on your laptop, but you can do it in the cloud if you prefer. Step 2 is to launch a cluster on your cloud provider of choice. Step 3 is to run your application wherever you want (your laptop or in the cloud). Scale your Python application on any cloud provider with three steps. Step 1: develop your application locally (or in the cloud if you prefer). Step 2: launch a cluster on your cloud provider of choice. Step 3: run your application on the cluster! Setup First, install some Python dependencies. pip install -U ray \ boto3 \ azure-cli \ azure-core \ google-api-python-client Next, configure credentials for the cloud provider of your choice. You can skip this step if you’re already set up to use your cloud provider from the command line. AWS: Configure your credentials in ~/.aws/credentials as described in the boto docs. Configure your credentials in as described in the boto docs. Azure: Log in using az login , then configure your credentials with az account set -s <subscription_id> . Log in using , then configure your credentials with . GCP: Set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable as described in docs. The Ray cluster launcher uses a config file that looks something like this A minimal cluster config file for use with the Ray cluster launcher. Here you can specify everything including setup commands to run, instance types to use, files to rsync, autoscaling strategies, and so on. Fetch a slightly more complete example with additional configurable fields as follows. # AWS wget # Azure wget # GCP wget wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robertnishihara/a9ce1d0d434cd52dd9b07eb57f4c3476/raw/dafd4c6bd26fe4599dc3c6b05e80789188b3e2e5/aws-config.yaml wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robertnishihara/a9ce1d0d434cd52dd9b07eb57f4c3476/raw/dafd4c6bd26fe4599dc3c6b05e80789188b3e2e5/azure-config.yaml wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robertnishihara/a9ce1d0d434cd52dd9b07eb57f4c3476/raw/1846cbf971d1cd708b3d29d9ae50ad882fbaac50/gcp-config.yaml You’ll need to make a few minor modifications to the above config files: Azure: Replace ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub with the appropriate key files. Replace and with the appropriate key files. GCP: Set the appropriate project_id . Step 1: Create a Python Application Define a simple Python script that we want to scale up. A simple Python application that can run on your laptop or in the cloud and tracks the IP addresses of the machines that its tasks are executed on. This script uses Ray to parallelize the computation. You can run the example (actually a slightly more complete one) as follows. # Fetch the example. wget wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/robertnishihara/a9ce1d0d434cd52dd9b07eb57f4c3476/raw/4313660c0bd40f8bd909f70c1e0abc4be8584198/script.py # Run the script. python script.py You’ll see the following output. This cluster consists of 1 nodes in total 16.0 CPU resources in total Tasks executed 10000 tasks on XXX.XXX.X.XXX Now run the same script on a Ray cluster. These instructions are for AWS. To use Azure or GCP, simple replace aws-config.yaml with either azure-config.yaml or gcp-config.yaml in both lines. Step 2: Start the Cluster # AWS ray up -y aws-config.yaml # Azure ray up -y azure-config.yaml # GCP ray up -y gcp-config.yaml Step 3: Run the Script on the Cluster # AWS ray submit aws-config.yaml script.py # Azure ray submit azure-config.yaml script.py # GCP ray submit gcp-config.yaml script.py You’ll see the following output. This cluster consists of 3 nodes in total 6.0 CPU resources in total Tasks executed 3561 tasks on XXX.XXX.X.XXX 2685 tasks on XXX.XXX.X.XXX 3754 tasks on XXX.XXX.X.XXX If it says there is only 1 node, then you may need to wait a little longer for the other nodes to start up. In this case, the 10,000 tasks were run across three machines. You can also connect to the cluster and poke around with one of the following commands. # Connect to the cluster (via ssh). # AWS ray attach aws-config.yaml # Azure ray attach azure-config.yaml # GCP ray attach gcp-config.yaml Shutdown the Cluster Don’t forget to shutdown your cluster when you’re done! # AWS ray down -y aws-config.yaml # Azure ray down -y azure-config.yaml # GCP ray down -y gcp-config.yaml Further Details Want to add support for a new cloud provider? Just extend the NodeProvider class, which usually takes 200–300 lines of code. Take a look at the implementation for AWS.

https://medium.com/distributed-computing-with-ray/how-to-scale-python-on-every-major-cloud-provider-12b3bde01208

['Robert Nishihara']

2020-10-06 22:07:07.497000+00:00

['Python', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Azure', 'Cloud Computing', 'AWS']

The Secret Behind Successful Performers — The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

Introduction: The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes Coyle begins by introducing talent hotbeds, places that regularly produce top performers, then talking about a girl named Clarissa, studied by Australian music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick, who watched her make “a month’s worth of progress in 6 minutes” when she actually buckled down and concentrated. “Look at that!…She’s got a blueprint in her mind she’s constantly comparing herself to. She’s working in phrases, complete thoughts. She’s not ignoring errors, she’s hearing them, fixing them. She’s fitting small parts into the whole, drawing the lens in and out all the time, scaffolding herself to a higher level.” — McPherson, commenting on the Clarissa video. Most of the time, though, Clarissa’s practice is about her not thinking, not learning, not building, and just wasting time. Coyle says myelin is the “holy grail of acquiring skill,” which grows through practice. PART 1 — DEEP PRACTICE Chapter 1 The Sweet Spot “For half of that time, being in a talent hotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer: everything moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life…But that was only half the time. During the other half I witnessed something very different: moments of slow, fitful struggle, rather like what I’d seen on the Clarissa video.” Making progress: small failures, a shared facial expression of taut/intense squint. When learners try a move, they fail, then stop and think, do it again more slowly, fail again, stops to think again, does it more slowly, break the move down to component parts. Active retrieval versus passive reception of info makes you engrave things into memory. Struggling at the edges of your ability makes you smarter. Experiences that force you to slow down, make errors, and correct them, make you “swift and graceful without your realizing it.” Effortlessness is good for performance, not for learning. The more we generate brain impulses through overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build and the faster we learn. Turn mistakes into skills. Henry Roediger, Wash U of St Louis: history students were split in 2 groups. 1st group studied 4x, second group studied 1x, tested 3x, 2nd group performed 50% better. They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more. The more our brains generate impulses by overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding they build, and the faster we learn. Story: Edwin Link created the first pilot trainers by building sample planes. How are Brazilian soccer players so good? Players log 20 hrs a week of practice (as opposed to British 5 hours) and play futebol de salao (futsal), using a ball half the size and twice the weight of the real thing, that didn’t bounce, in a basketball-court sized concrete/wood/dirt field with teams of 5–6, not 11. It’s all about quick, nonstop, controlled action. Why it works: Futsal players touch the ball 600% more often than soccer players, the smaller, heavier ball is harder to handle — you must be precise. It makes actual soccer easier. Good advertising also uses these ideas to put viewers at the “sweet spot” of their abilities. For example, a whisky ad “ingle ells…ingle ells…the holidays aren’t the same without J&B” Chapter 2 The Deep Practice Cell Deep practice is a powerful idea because it seems magical. Clarissa begins as an average musician and, in six minutes, accomplishes a month’s worth of work. The more you fire a circuit, the more that circuit is myelinated, and gets stronger and the more fluent your thoughts/mvts become. These circuits (NOT your muscles) control everything. Automaticity: The more we develop these circuits, the more automatic our skills are, the less aware we’re using the circuits. The more we feel that a skill is natural, something we’ve always had. We’re forever building vast, intricate circuits, and we’re simultaneously forgetting that we built them. Myelin makes up more than half your brain’s mass. Bill Greenough 1980s experiment showed that rats in an enriched environment had increased brain synapses by 25% and also white matter/myelin. Greenough helped establish the concepts of brain plasticity and developmental windows. Researchers started linking myelin deficiencies to dyslexia, autism, ADD, PTSD, etc. Fredrik Ullen 2005: found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter. Myelin can regulate speed, and timing is imperative because neurons are binary, they either fire or not. If 2 neurons have to combine their impulses to make another one fire, they have to arrive at the exact same time. Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can’t code the neurons to time things so precisely…But you can build myelin to do it. — Dr. Fields Myelination is slow. It wraps 40–50 times, taking days to weeks per neuron. Fields: “It’s [myelinating thousands of nerves is] like insulating a transatlantic cable” Struggle is not optional — it’s neurologically required You have to fire the circuit suboptimally, make mistakes, pay attention, teach your circuit. Deep practice is helped by a “primal state” where you’re attentive, hungry, focused, desperate. Myelin wraps, doesn’t unwrap. Myelin comes in waves, up into our 30s during critical periods, and we will gain myelin until 50, when you start to lose it, but even then 5% of oligodendrocytes stay ready to learn. That’s why most world-class experts start young. In the 1970s, the cognitive revolution was starting. People believed that the mind works like a computer and obeys universal rules. In 1976, Anders Ericsson worked on a dissertation on verbal reports (people’s accounts of their mental states). He caught the attention of Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize-winning economist who brought him to the US. Every skill is a form of memory. Deliberate practice: Work on technique, seek constant critical feedback, ruthlessly shore up weaknesses. ALL skills are built with the same underlying mechanisms. Michael Howe estimates that Mozart had studied 3,500 hours of music by age 6. The rage to master: Ellen Winner’s term for people with an innate, obsessive desire to improve. Chapter 3 The Brontes, the Z-Boys, and the Renaissance Biographer Elizabeth Gaskell’s story of the Bronte sisters’ romantic creativity is not true. Rather, according to Juliet Barker, the Brontes lived in a home full of stimulating ideas, often imitated articles and books. [The Brontes] wrote a great deal in a variety of forms — twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen month period — and…their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn’t very good. The Bronte’s early, unskilled writing is a prerequisite to their eventual literary success. They had to spend massive amounts of time being immature and imitative in the “safe space of their little books.” They were practicing collaboratively. To write a book, even a tiny one, is to play a particular kind of game. Each one of the Bronte’s little books were terrible, except, each “made them happy, and each one quietly earned them a bit of skill.” David Banks shows that geniuses tend to appear in clusters: Athens, 440–380 BC Florence, 1440–1490 London, 1570–1640 Why? People predicted: prosperity, peace, freedom, social mobility, new paradigms/perspectives. But those predictions aren’t true. Turns out, Florence saw geniuses emerge from the rise of craft guilds, based on the apprenticeship system, where young kids age 7 or so would live with a master for 5–10 years and learn. If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. — Michelangelo Monkeys have all the same neurons and neurotransmitters as us, but they have 20% less myelin, and they can’t talk beyond the level of a 3 year old. This is also why breast fed babies have more IQ — there’s more myelin building blocks in breast milk. Same with the reason why eating fish with fatty acids is good for preventing memory loss. But building myelin is biologically expensive. In the space of a generation, or a few hundred miles, certain higher skills flip from being crucial to being trivial and vice versa. Our genes matter, but We have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess. Chapter 4 The Three Rules of Deep Practice HSE: the Holy Shit Effect. The feeling of seeing talent blooming in folks just like you. Adriaan de Groot, Dutch psychologist, discovered that chess masters memorized boards via chunking. Each group of chunks (discrete small circuits) nests inside other groups like Russian dolls. Reading is all about chunking at lightning speed. Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Rules for myelination/learning: Chunk it up: Look at the task as a whole (Spend time staring at/listening to the task in its totality, as a single coherent entity, listen to the song you want to play over and over. Absorb the picture of the skill, imagine yourself doing it) We’re pre-wired to imitate. Then break it into its smallest chunks. Then play it slow, then speed it up (to learn inner architecture) Slow it down Repeat it Learn to feel it: to avoid mistakes, you have to feel them immediately Ray LaMontagne taught himself to be a singer-songwriter at age 22 by buying dozens of used albums by people like Etta James, Ray Charles, Al Green, Stephen Stills, and spending 2 years singing along to the records, ignoring everyone else. 8 years later, his first album sold nearly half a million copies. Imitatsiya: Spartak (Larisa Preobrazhenskaya’s Russian tennis training center) term for rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball. Students work on slow, simple, precise motions with an emphasis on technique. No one is allowed to play a tournament for the first 3 years. If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake! — Preobrazhenskaya Ivan Galamian chose upstate NY to create Meadowmount music academy. In 7 weeks, students learn a years’ worth of material, 5x as much as anyone else. The teachers cut music into strips, stuff it in envelopes, and pull chunks out randomly. They cut the strips into smaller fragments by changing the rhythms. The goal? Break a skill into component pieces/circuits, memorize those pieces individually, link them into progressively larger groups (interconnect circuits) One teacher’s rule of thumb: If a passerby can recognize the song being played, you’re not practicing right. Go 3–5x slower than ever. If you do this for 3 hours with one page of music, you can accomplish 1–2 weeks’ worth of shallow practice. Going slow lets you pay more attention to errors and get more precise with your neuronal firing, which is everything. It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly. — Tom Martinez, football coach Barry Zimmerman studies how people coach themselves, self-regulation. (How they observe, judge, strategize, set goals, plan, self-monitor, adapt) Experts think in terms of chunks, building up into a private skill language. “When I click in, every note is being played for a purpose. It feels like I’m building a house…I connect them and get a foundation. Then I add the walls, connect those. then the roof, then the paint. Then, hopefully, it all hangs together.” — John Henry Crawford, Meadowmount student There isn’t a substitute for attentive repetition. Action. Not talking, thinking, imagining, or reading. To start losing skill, stop practicing for 30 days. Myelin will break down. If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices. — Vladimir Horowitz There’s a universal limit to how much deep practice people can do in a day. 3–5 hours max, for all skills. At Meadowmount, Skye Carmen taught students: Athletes don’t fool around when they practice. Musicians are athletes too. Tune your instrument, then tune your ear. You have to feel mistakes coming. Hearing a string out of tune should bother you a LOT. The deep practice cycle: Pick Target Reach for Target Evaluate Gap between Target and Reach Repeat Babies learning to walk stagger around: To get good, it’s helpful to be willing, even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill. W Timothy Gallwey taught beginner students without speech: He just showed them how to hit. I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I have learned — Abraham Lincoln Deliberate practice is NOT natural, effortless, routine, automatic, or genius.

https://medium.com/be-a-brilliant-writer/the-secret-behind-successful-performers-the-talent-code-by-daniel-coyle-3cb2c0f03afc

['Sarah Cy']

2020-09-10 13:36:01.280000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Inspiration', 'Books', 'Learning', 'Writing']

How To Create a Dynamic AWS ECS Cluster With Terraform

0. Networking The definition of the actual ECS cluster does not have any networking requirements. resource "aws_ecs_cluster" "cluster" { name = "${var.environment}-cluster" tags = var.tags } This is because the networking features are defined at the service level as these are the elastic components that host the tasks. ECS overview Our network requirements are specified in the service definition: resource "aws_ecs_service" "fargate-microservices" { for_each = var.create_microservices == true ? var.fargate_microservices : {} name = each.value["name"] cluster = aws_ecs_cluster.cluster.id desired_count = each.value["desired_count"] launch_type = each.value["launch_type"] depends_on = [aws_ecs_cluster.cluster, aws_ecs_task_definition.ecs_tasks] task_definition = each.value["task_definition"] network_configuration { subnets = var.ecs_service_subnets security_groups = [aws_security_group.ecs_security_groups[each.value["security_group_mapping"]].id] } lifecycle { ignore_changes = [ task_definition ] } } There’s a lot to unpack here, I’m going to start by focusing on the network configuration. network_configuration { subnets = var.ecs_service_subnets security_groups = [aws_security_group.ecs_security_groups[each.value["security_group_mapping"]].id] } In this instance, the (private) subnets are inherited from a module which defines our VPC, when creating the dynamic cluster we simply reference our list of subnets in the VPC module in order to build the services into our desired VPC. The security groups make use of the ‘for_each’ function in Terraform that underpins a lot of the mechanics of this module. This functionality allows us to build out multiple resources that share the same arguments. The module simply requires for_each to be defined within the resource and then a ‘map’ variable to be passed into the specified argument. for_each = var.create_microservices == true ? var.fargate_microservices : {} In this case, we’ve specified that create_microservices must be true in order to create our services. Then the fargate_microservices variable is a map that contains all arguments required for our service (an example can be found in the ‘dynamic services’ chapter). Now that we understand the for_each loop, here is the code within the module which allows you to define an arbitrary amount of security groups. resource "aws_security_group" "ecs_security_groups" { vpc_id = var.vpc_id for_each = var.security_groups name = "${var.environment}-${each.value["ingress_port"]}" ingress { from_port = each.value["ingress_port"] to_port = each.value["ingress_port"] protocol = each.value["ingress_protocol"] cidr_blocks = each.value["ingress_cidr_blocks"] } egress { from_port = each.value["egress_port"] to_port = each.value["egress_port"] protocol = each.value["egress_protocol"] cidr_blocks = each.value["egress_cidr_blocks"] } tags = var.tags } This resource block will iterate over your ‘var.security_groups’ object which is defined outside of the module and will pick up a variable for each variable that is prefixed with ‘each.value’. This is how you define a single security group outside of the module: "ecs_security_groups": { "prod-ecs-sg": { "ingress_port": "redacted", "ingress_protocol": "redacted", "ingress_cidr_blocks": [ "redacted" ], "egress_port": "redacted", "egress_protocol": "redacted", "egress_cidr_blocks": [ "redacted" ] } } These are then mapped to their respective services using the ‘security_group_mapping’ variable inside the service, the variable matches the id of this security group (prod-ecs-sg) to the specified service. From here it is simple to add another security group by appending this map object. Now we’ll revisit the service definition to see how the security_group_mapping variable is used in conjunction with the other dynamic variables.

https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-create-a-dynamic-ecs-cluster-with-terraform-86d6b11d0db9

['Liam Hartley']

2020-12-06 19:37:56.238000+00:00

['Terraform', 'Software Engineering', 'AWS', 'Software Development', 'Cloud Computing']

A.I. Needs New Clichés

They thought we’d be there in 1978. Forty years later, we are there. Or there’s this vision. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) moves through a rose-tinted world in the movie Her. By day, he works for a company that writes letters for people who can’t emotionally muster it — himself an A.I. for people’s emotional worlds. He is dating Samantha, his intelligent operating system. Theodore moves through an urban world, having deeply connected conversations with Samantha yet remaining disconnected from the people around him. He is attuned to a voice that only he can hear, but who can be the same voice for thousands of others at the same time. Is he affected by the strange virtuality of his love, or avoiding the difficulties of relating to a real person, or both? The movie world of Her is color-corrected like gauzy Instagram photos of Coachella fans, an interface of image in which nothing is not a computer. How do you communicate what you don’t understand? The problem is that it’s hard to communicate clearly about A.I. — in part because communicating about it means understanding it. And most of us don’t have a clear understanding of what A.I. actually is. The term “artificial intelligence” has been around since 1955, when A.I. pioneer John McCarthy wrote that A.I. was a matter of “making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by man.” That idea hasn’t changed much today — Wikipedia contrasts artificial intelligence (or machine intelligence) with the natural intelligence of humans and animals, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour; the field of study concerned with this. Abbreviated A.I.” But what does that actually mean to an everyday person? Does it mean chatbots passing a Turing Test? A robot uprising? Or is it simply interactivity where the processing happens just out of sight? A.I. is a black box, “a device which performs intricate functions but whose internal mechanism may not readily be inspected or understood” (OED)—something we understand because of the inputs and the outputs. We can’t see what happens inside and we’re not meant to have access to it. The black box is opaque. Today, there are three reasons for algorithmic opacity, as Jenna Burrell writes: the need to protect algorithms that are state or corporate secrets; the fact that A.I.-related coding is still the territory of specialists; and a “mismatch” between the mathematical ways algorithms process information and the way humans think. This last one is the hardest to sort out: how humans think is different than how the machine thinks, and how we reason is different than how the machine reasons (or doesn’t reason, depending on your definition of “reason”). The European Union is requiring that A.I. be made explainable through a “right to explanation” as part of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that just took effect. EU citizens have a right to an explanation for the work of algorithms, and they have a right to request human intervention. The regulations support the idea that “people are owed agency and understanding when they’re faced by machine-made decisions,” Cliff Kuang wrote in the New York Times. David Weinberger argues that rather than explaining itself, one focus of A.I. should be optimization, not explanation: make visible and clear to all through debate in public policy what trade-offs are being made, rather than potentially hobbling A.I. The US government has never been known for well-designed PowerPoint decks In the meantime, DARPA has introduced the Explainable Artificial Intelligence program, which seeks to make the models behind machine learning and A.I. more explainable. It’s an important move toward understanding what we mean when we talk about A.I., and yet I wonder what it will actually achieve for everyday people. The DARPA page for the project serves up this image showing what a user might be asking, but not in any quick way that’s going affect how it shows up in the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA returns to the same clichés as the Google Image Searches I mentioned above.

https://medium.com/s/story/ai-needs-new-clich%C3%A9s-ed0d6adb8cbb

['Molly Wright Steenson']

2018-06-13 23:20:09.138000+00:00

['Cliches', 'AI', 'Design', 'Artificial Intelligence']

There is Plastic in Your Fruits & Vegetables

Microplastic Pollutes the Fruits and Vegetables We Eat For the first time, microplastic was detected in fruits and vegetables by the scientist Margherita Ferrante and her team from the University of Catania in Italy. The existence of microplastic is evident in lettuce, carrots, broccoli, potatoes, apples, and pears. The researchers found plastic participles are more concentrated in fruits than in vegetables. Fruits contain more microplastic due to their greater size and the age of the tree. Microplastic accumulates during the life of the tree. Another reason is the bigger root system of fruit trees compared to vegetables. Apples show the highest amount of pollution for fruits and carrots for vegetables. The number of microplastic found in fruits and vegetables is still lower than in water from a plastic bottle. A second peer-reviewed study, a joint project between the Leiden University in the Netherlands and the Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research in China, shows plastic is sucked up by the roots of food crops. Professor Peijnenburg from Leiden University explains that the roots of lettuce and wheat absorb plastic and transport it to the edible part of the plant. Until now researchers didn’t believe that plastic can pass through the intact barriers of plant tissue. These findings raise serious concerns about the safety of the food we eat. “For years we have known about plastic in crustaceans and fish, but this is the first time we have known about plastic getting into vegetables. “If it is getting into vegetables, it is getting into everything that eats vegetables as well which means it is in our meat and dairy as well. — Maria Westerbos, Founder of Plastic Soup Foundation Researchers and environmental campaigners call for an urgent investigation. And we as consumers should too. Is the food we feed our children safe? Or have we destructed our planet so much that there is no safe food available anymore?

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/there-is-plastic-in-your-fruits-vegetables-100ac353ac51

['Karolin Wanner']

2020-07-08 11:23:47.512000+00:00

['Pollution', 'Health', 'Environment', 'Plastic', 'Science']

Traditional Media is Dead. Long Live Traditional Media.

Facebook’s Q2 2016 earning sent the stock soaring to new heights. With the stock up 30% year over year, it’s clear that this mobile advertising juggernaut is transforming the ad industry. At BBDO, we have embraced the rise of Facebook by launching Project Thumb Breaker — an initiative that is fueling BBDO’s ambition to become the most effective creator of Facebook ads in the world. While Facebook has transformed the ad industry, legacy brands have been disrupted by upstarts. The direct-to-consumer model combined with excellent customer service and smart branding has enabled Casper, Harry’s and many others to generate billions of dollars in revenue in less than a few years. Unilever’s acquisition of Dollar Shave Club demonstrates how disruptive this model can be… Unilever clearly intends to challenge P&G’s dominant brand Gillette. Facebook advertising is a strong driver for brand growth. However, it’s a channel that works best as part of a broader ecosystem. Research has proven that integrated campaigns that leverage a range of channels drive stronger business results. It’s clear that Harry’s and Casper have embraced the value of integrated campaign development — they don’t rely on Facebook, Google or any one individual channel. I ride the New York subway to work everyday. More and more, the OOH subway ads I see are from startup brands like Talkspace, Casper and Harry’s. And you know what… the ads work. If I am stressed out from a long challenging week, the Talkspace ad telling me that their app can pair me with a therapist instantly for $32/week is pretty effective. If I am tired and don’t really want to cook or go out, the Seamless ad makes me far more likely to order in. If I just moved or am not sleeping well, the Casper ad definitely encourages me to buy a new mattress. And if I am on the way to work after just getting ready, the Harry’s ad definitely makes me feel that Harry’s great design and style could make the start to my day just a little bit smoother. Brilliant OOH ad from Talkspace. Note the social norming strategy that makes the app look popular and effective. So, we should listen when Time Warner says that 95% of video consumption happens on TV and that Facebook video on its own would rank as the #158th most watched show. And we should listen when Facebook says it has 1.03B daily active mobile users. No individual media channel can become the golden bullet for a campaign. Marketers who want to create the most effective work need to leverage communications planning to integrate all of their advertising across all channels. Strong communications planning generates a multiplier effect on the impact of advertising. All channels, from print to OOH to TV to Facebook, are pillars of strong campaign ecosystems.

https://medium.com/comms-planning/traditional-media-is-dead-long-live-traditional-media-f36c7d477ba4

['Charles Baker']

2016-08-04 19:22:44.774000+00:00

['Advertising', 'Facebook', 'Startup', 'Marketing']

Empower a Lightweight Python Data Structure: From Tuples to Namedtuples

Tuple When it comes to dealing with related data elements, one of the most commonly used data types is the tuple. As an immutable data type, tuples are sequences of data with a fixed size. They’re useful to group related data with different data types. Consider the following trivial example. >>> employee0 = ('John Smith', 45, 'M', 160083) In the above code snippet, we define a tuple called employee0 , which stores an employee’s personal data, including name, age, gender, and employee ID number. If we need to use some elements of the tuple, we can unpack it or use subscript, and their usages are shown below. >>> # Use unpacking >>> name, age, gender, employee_id = employee0 >>> print(f"Employee Name: {name}") Employee Name: John Smith >>> >>> # Use subscript >>> print(f"Employee Age: {employee0[1]}") Employee Age: 45 >>> print(f"Employee ID #: {employee0[-1]}") Employee ID #: 160083 How about we need to deal with another employee in the same module? We’ll have to do something like below. >>> # Create a tuple for storing another employee data >>> employee1 = ('Jennifer Brown', 38, 'F', 150384) >>> >>> # Access data >>> name1, age1, gender1, employee_id1 = employee1 >>> print(f"Employee Name: {employee1[0]}") Employee Name: Jennifer Brown >>> print(f"Employee Age: {age1}") Employee Age: 38 >>> print(f"Employee ID #: {employee_id1}") Employee ID #: 150384 In essence, we have to repeat the above steps, and access individual elements using either unpacking or subscripts, which certainly is not the most pleasant thing to do. Actually, it can be error-prone because you have to remember the exact order of these data.

https://medium.com/swlh/empower-a-lightweight-python-data-structure-from-tuples-to-namedtuples-ca4abddd8ef6

['Yong Cui']

2020-05-02 11:01:01.048000+00:00

['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Technology']

How to Age Effectively — Tips for Longevity

How do you approach aging? Do you greet each birthday with a smile? Are you afraid of becoming a senior citizen? Maybe you don’t think about it at all. Old age is a long way off. No matter how old you are, it’s never too early to start preparing for your future. In this article, we’ll review some simple ways to keep you healthy as you age. We’ll also discover that you don’t need to be afraid of getting older. In many ways, the best is yet to come. How Smiling Can Keep You Alive We’re going to start with an easy one. A genuine smile can light up the room. It can also help you stay healthy in old age. In Better With Age, Alan Castel discusses a study where researchers reviewed old baseball cards. They then divided the players into three categories: The researchers then went back to see how long each of the players lived. The men who had no smiles lived to be an average of 72 years old. The half smilers made it to 75. The players with full, genuine smiles lived to be 80. Of course, smiling might not cause a longer life, but expressing happiness and having a positive attitude are correlated with longevity. How Physical Exercise Trains Your Body and Your Mind There are few activities more important than physical exercise. Getting the blood flowing can help prevent a wide range of diseases, keep you at a healthy weight, and reduce stress. Starting at around 50 years old, a part of the brain called the hippocampus starts to shrink. The hippocampus’s main job is to help with memory formation. A declining hippocampus is also associated with declining executive function and depression. Walking just three times a day can help prevent mental decline. For bonus points, walk with someone else and make it social! In one study, one group of elderly adults was assigned to walk 40 minutes, three days a week. After one year, their hippocampi grew by 2%. Both control groups (one assigned to stretching and one assigned to non-activity) each had hippocampi that shrunk by 1%. It appears that cardiovascular exercise can help stop or even reverse age-related mental decline. In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge explains how physical exercise can help jumpstart neurogenesis-the creation of new neurons. The brain’s ability to adapt to new situations- neuroplasticity -is also linked with cardiovascular exercise. You don’t have to be running marathons to get the benefits. As seen in the study above, even a walk outside can make a big difference. If You Want to Stay Sharp, Never Stop Learning When we grow up, we’re faced with new situations all the time. New material in school. Evolving social structures. Learning the ropes when we start our careers. However, if you’re not careful, you can get complacent. While it can be comfortable to coast once you’ve settled into life, it’s not good for your health. In The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge explains that while physical exercise creates neurons, learning something new helps those neurons last longer. In addition, lifelong learning is associated with lower rates of dementia. To keep the brain sharp, you can: Read about unfamiliar topics Learn to play an instrument Learn a new language Memorize poems Learn to dance A dance class offers a learning opportunity, exercise, and social interaction. The trifecta! Mix it up and become a student of life. Getting outside your comfort zone keeps your brain on its toes and encourages increased neuroplasticity. Try switching up your habits. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. For bonus points, brush your teeth on one leg! Then you’ll be training your body and mind at the same time. Learning new things can also expose you to other people, which is another great way to keep yourself healthy as you age. Social Relationships Are Critical to Healthy Aging Communicating with friends and family can work wonders. In Better With Age, Alan Castel explains that older adults with a social life tend to outlive those who are more isolated. Plus, staying social is associated with lower dementia rates and higher immune system function. Staying connected can also help keep older adults happy. In one study, social interaction helped prevent depression in older adults. However, only face-to-face interactions really worked. Talking on the phone had modest effects. Texts and emails didn’t help at all. Staying social is especially important after retirement. Older adults should make an effort and get out into the world. Human interaction is key. The best activities combine social activity with physical exercise and learning something new. A dance class is an excellent example of an activity that checks all three boxes. Maximum brain protection. Relax. It’s All Going to Work out. Relax. You have a lot to look forward to. While getting older might seem scary, there are many benefits. Studies have shown that older adults are consistently happier than those in middle age. While younger adults tend to focus more on negative information and material goals, the elderly focus on positivity and social goals. It’ll get better! With age comes wisdom. Older adults tend to be more effective at controlling their emotions, not jumping to conclusions, and learning from their mistakes. In any case, worrying about the future won’t make it any better. Acceptance of one’s circumstances is a reliable marker of life satisfaction as we age. In fact, in Better With Age, Castel explains how having a negative outlook on aging is associated with higher rates of dementia and cardiovascular disease. On the other hand, staying positive and feeling younger is associated with a healthier lifestyle as an older adult. Just take a deep breath. You’ll be fine. We should be thankful for what we have and stay present in the moment. We don’t need to fear old age. “I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened” — Mark Twain Perhaps the best course of action is to accept your circumstances while also preparing for the future. Be sure to get physical exercise, keep learning, and strengthen your relationships. Life is a wonderful journey. You have plenty of time left. Make the best of it.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-age-effectively-tips-for-longevity-430954c8f62c

['Michael Bjorn Huseby']

2019-11-08 04:27:13.854000+00:00

['Health', 'Longevity', 'Aging', 'Mental Health', 'Science']

Make Extra Money as a Programmer in 2021

Make Money Tips Make Extra Money as a Programmer in 2021 If you’re a programming geek and not making any money online, you are missing out on BIG. Technology is only becoming more and more a part of everyday life. Making more money is all about maximizing your creativity. Creativity There are no limits to the things that you can create when you have the ability to write code. You can automate manual tasks, make things faster and easier for users, or solve almost any problem. It gives you the ability to create something that you can be proud of. This means you can finally combine your love of programming with your love of cold hard cash. Technology is only becoming more and more a part of everyday life. And the best part about all this is that the sweet thing we call the World Wide Web has opened up new possibilities for programmers to find work. You don’t have to go into the office anymore to find programming work. “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” IBM’s founder, Thomas Watson, 1 . Freelancing Freelancing, Not just for those who don’t want to get a job anymore. Freelancing is a great way of making some side income while still holding down your day job. The gig economy has seriously changed the game for lots of skilled workers, including you and your genius programming brain. Just offer your programming services to clients online. Platforms like Upwork or Fiverr seem to offer a lot of opportunities especially for doing things on the sidelines but be aware of the competition over there. Take advantage of and leverage Facebook groups. There are dozens of Facebook groups that are designed specifically for freelancers. Programming-based groups are other places that teem with opportunities for freelance work. Facebook groups also allow you to showcase your work and garner support, make friends, and expand your network and connections. Below is a list of groups to get you started in your pursuit of finding that extra dollar. A better strategy would be to work on your LinkedIn profile, contact recruiters and past clients from your network, go to conferences and meetups, and look out for platforms that match up remote workers with companies. 2. Start to Write Writing still is one of the best ways to reach a broad audience. There are plenty of opportunities for you to start writing and make money out of it: You can start your own blog and monetize with ad revenue. and monetize with ad revenue. You can write books or ebooks and sell them online. and sell them online. You can write on platforms such as Medium and participate in their Partnership Programs. and participate in their Partnership Programs. Sitepoint is another website that pays developers to write technical tutorials. is another website that pays developers to write technical tutorials. You can write guest posts for established sites like CSS-Tricks that will pay you a fixed amount if your article is accepted. There is nothing wrong with trying things out and seeing how people react to what you write. 3. Make a Video Course Remember that in the end, you are a great software engineer. Since programming is in high demand nowadays, and you are an expert on the subject, you can get profits not only programming but teaching others to code. Take into account that out there are thousands of people all over the world eager to learn what you know. So if you have teaching skills, you might earn a good bit extra since you will be targeting a huge market. There are lots of platforms that you may use to create a course and monetize it. All you need is to create an excellent course: the platform will take care of the marketing and so on. 4. Start A Personal Website A personal website is like a giant billboard to show off your coding skills. Your website design should be sleek enough to reflect your skills and identity. It’s a way of branding yourself. You can also use it to share your portfolio as a coding expert. On your website, share your wicked smart programming tips to showcase your authority in the niche. Once you’ve established your personal brand, trust, and authority you’ll have more clients to offer your online services, charging hourly rates…or better, big project rates. 5. Coding Your Own Project Last, but definitely, not least you could create your own project that generates revenue. This has the great advantage that you could work on something that you really like — which is always a good idea. The downside is that you could be developing an application that nobody blinks an eye at. However, the goal of this is to build an app or website that provides some sort of product or service for people. This could generate revenue over time either by selling the product or service or by doing stuff.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/how-to-make-extra-money-as-a-programmer-in-2020-fdce74dbbb36

['Adem Zeina']

2020-11-13 08:31:30.977000+00:00

['Development', 'Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Make Money Online', 'Freelancing']

The second mover advantage

You must have heard start-up founders talking about first mover advantage, which is a real thing. If you enter a market which has the opportunity with a product/service which can cater to a need, the chances are you will build a business out of it. There are challenges, creating awareness, capturing customers, getting them hooked to your product, or just getting people to adopt the product/service. This can be gained via building a technology leadership or building a barrier to entry. You have to be careful of competition, cause competition will come. The firms which try and capture the first mover advantage will always have to be vary of competition to enter the market and beat them to building a sustained-viable business. The fight to being the ‘First Mover Champion’ is real and scary. Not only that, the second mover advantage in the truest sense is capturing the majority of the market after the first mover has created it. Rarely do first movers create a monopoly, cause there will always be an entrant who will follow them closely but never try and overtake the first mover. That is a second mover. A copy business or service or product. A firm which will learn from the mistakes of the first mover, and replicate all the successful strategies and add it’s own strategies to it. The second mover gains market share by utilizing the disadvantages of the first mover. The Disadvantages of the First Mover AKA Advantages for the Second Mover Apple taking IBM head-on and declaring themselves as a viable alternative Effort of Awareness When we discuss the successful start-ups, we never realize the effort that they put in order to make the audience aware of their existence. The first movers need to make the latent need crystal clear to the market, only then will they get some early adopters, who hopefully will spread the word. As a first mover, the onus is on them to make the market aware of the product’s existence so that people start using them. The second mover uses this awareness and just informs the same user that they exist in the market and are a viable alternative to the first mover. IBM created an awareness of what computers could do in the industry. They created awareness, a market and customers. Apple entered the market and captured it and how. Apple targeted IBM directly with the now famous, “Big Brother” ad campaign during the Superbowl and swept the ground beneath IBM in the Personal Computer market.

https://uxdesign.cc/the-second-mover-advantage-2369da55335f

['Kunal Anand']

2019-06-13 23:19:06.707000+00:00

['Product', 'Brand Strategy', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Marketing']

Simplifying Covid-19 Into One Mechanism: The Epithelial-endothelial Crosstalk

The Epithelial-Endothelial Crosstalk In a May research letter to Intensive Care Medicine, Amit Jain and D. John Doyle, professors of anesthesiology at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, proposed the “epithelial–endothelial crosstalk” hypothesis. And thorough autopsy findings later confirms it. Epithelial cells refer to the lining or membrane that covers a specific tissue, such as alveoli (i.e., air sacs). In contrast, endothelial cells are a specialized type of epithelial cell that covers blood vessels. In this crosstalk, the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 first binds to the ACE2 receptor present on alveolar epithelial cells. Following virus replication inside alveolar sacs, the membrane breaks to release new virions that infect the pulmonary capillaries (i.e., small blood vessels surrounding the air sacs) via the ACE2 receptor. As virus replication continues, SARS-CoV-2 then latches on the ACE2 receptor on the pulmonary endothelium (i.e., cells lining the pulmonary veins or arteries, which are large blood vessels). In sum, SARS-CoV-2 infects the air sacs (or alveoli). Then it goes to the small blood vessels (capillaries or capillary beds) surrounding the air sacs and subsequently to large blood vessels (pulmonary arteries or veins). Bracketed terms are illustrated: As the professors explained: “Following alveolar-capillary membrane disruption, SARS-CoV-2 enters the pulmonary capillaries and directly infects the pulmonary endothelial cells via ACE-2 protein on the luminal surfaces.” In a one-liner, SARS-CoV-2 goes from the alveolar epithelial cells to pulmonary endothelial cells — the “epithelial-endothelial crosstalk”. “As a result, endothelial cells assume a ‘pro-inflammatory’/‘procoagulant’ phenotype,” Professors Jain and Doyle continued. “This accelerates Fas-induced apoptosis of alveolar epithelial and endothelial cells and orchestrates the cytokine storm and the progression of COVID-19 to ARDS.” From hereon, as blood vessels connect all organs, SARS-CoV-2 has the potential to damage multiple organs, as the autopsies have shown.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/simplifying-covid-19-into-one-mechanism-the-epithelial-endothelial-crosstalk-1d250dbd3083

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-07-09 03:00:44.509000+00:00

['Innovation', 'Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Life', 'Science']

Streaming Data from the Universe with Apache Kafka

Streaming Data from the Universe with Apache Kafka How astronomers deploy real-time pipelines to distribute data from the millions of objects discovered each night by modern telescopes Let’s build a news feed from the Universe! You might think that data collection in astronomy consists of a lone astronomer pointing a telescope at a single object in a static sky. While that may be true in some cases (I collected the data for my Ph.D. thesis this way), the field of astronomy is rapidly changing into a data-intensive science with real-time needs. Each night, large-scale astronomical telescope surveys detect millions of changing objects in the sky and need to stream results to scientists for time-sensitive, complementary follow-up observations. This data pipeline is a great example of a use case for Apache Kafka ®. Astronomy in real time Observational astronomers study many different types of objects, from asteroids in our own solar system to galaxies that are billions of lightyears away. Though the timescales on which single astronomical objects change are generally on the order of millions of years, a telescope can detect millions of objects that appear to be changing on a single night. These objects, commonly known as transients, encompass a number of different phenomena including variable stars, gamma-ray bursts, supernova, and moving objects in the solar system like asteroids. To detect and study these transient objects, many astronomers will collaborate on “sky survey” telescopes, which collect data by taking images as they sweep across the night sky instead of pointing at individual pre-selected targets. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is an early pioneer of the survey technique, collecting tens of TBs of image data from nearly 1 billion objects. By taking the latest survey images of a swath of the sky and subtracting a previous reference image taken at the same location, astronomers can detect objects that change in brightness or have changed in position. To fully characterize transient objects, astronomers need to gather data from other telescopes at different wavelengths at nearly the same time. Some phenomena, like supernova “shock breakouts,” may only last on the order of minutes. Astronomers need to be able to collect, process, characterize, and distribute data on these objects in near real time, especially for time-sensitive events. Recently, a new sky survey came online with the specific aim of quickly detecting transient objects. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) images the entire Northern Sky every three nights. Using image differencing, ZTF detects about 1,000 objects in each image taken every 45 seconds, amounting to roughly 1 million changing objects per night. The data processing pipeline characterizes these objects, deriving key parameters such as brightness, color, ellipticity, and coordinate location, and broadcasts this information in alert packets. The case for Apache Kafka Until recently, the detection rate of transient objects was relatively low and put few requirements on the underlying technology of alert distribution mechanisms. For example, the Astronomer’s Telegrams (ATel), a web service allowing astronomers to manually post and broadcast alerts from transient object detections, has distributed on the order of tens of thousands of alerts since its inception in 1997. In order to distribute the alert data from ZTF’s roughly million of nightly detections, a fully automated and scalable streaming alert distribution is required. Additionally, ZTF is a precursor survey for an even more technically challenging, upcoming astronomy project called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST is expected to detect about 10 million transient objects each night, an order of magnitude more than ZTF, with a nightly data stream size of 1–2 TB of messages. The technology underlying the ZTF system should be a prototype that reliably scales to LSST needs. There were a number of factors we considered in designing an alert distribution for ZTF. First, we needed a system that would reliably distribute each alert message and could allow downstream listeners of the alert stream to rewind or catch up in real time, without losing data in the case of a dropped connection or a slow consumer. The existing standard alert distribution system, called the Virtual Observatory Event Transport Protocol, acts more as a broadcast system, transmitting alerts only if a user is connected. Kafka’s consumer offset management and the ability for consumers to rewind to the beginning of a topic are big draws. Because these alerts are scientific quality data, an alert serialization format that preserves the integrity of the data so that it can be correctly interpreted by an end user scientist is imperative. For example, correctly storing numerical data as a double versus a float is a requirement for scientific calculations. The predominant existing astronomical alert format uses the semi-structured format XML. For alert stream rates low enough such that scientists can visually inspect messages, this format can definitely be appropriate. For alert rates of millions per night, scientists need a more structured data format for automated analysis pipelines. After researching formats-and reading about Confluent’s suggestion of using Avro with Kafka -we settled on using Avro, an open source, JSON-based binary format, for serializing the data in the alert messages. Avro has the benefits of: Being very compact (as opposed to XML’s verbosity) Being easy to characterize with simple JSON schemas Supporting some degree of schema evolution Having a couple of Python libraries for reading and writing data Another requirement for the alert distribution system is ease of use for the end user. The end user in our case is most likely an astronomy researcher. Much of the code used by modern astronomers is written in Python, so the ZTF alert distribution system endpoints need to at least support Python. We built our alert distribution code in Python, based around Confluent’s Python client for Apache Kafka. Alert data pipeline and system design The ZTF telescope sits at the Palomar Observatory in California and takes images of the sky as it sweeps across at a rate of about one image every 45 seconds. The data then go through processing at CalTech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). The images are cleaned to remove instrumental and atmospheric effects, as well as differenced to produce transient candidates. The data from these detections are then serialized into Avro binary format. The Avro alert data schemas for ZTF are defined in JSON documents and are published to GitHub for scientists to use when deserializing data upon receipt. Part of the alert data that we need to distribute is a small cutout image (or “postage stamp”) of the transient candidate. With Avro, we can have data fields serialize as type bytes , which allows for the inclusion of binary format data, such as these image cutouts or generally any individual file: Image cutouts from simulated data of a supernova detection. Left: Science image. Center: Template sky image. Right: Difference image constructed by subtracting the template from the science image. Serialized alerts are produced to a Kafka broker, with each night’s data written to its own topic. Data older than two weeks is expired from Kafka. The IPAC’s Kafka broker is available to only two external consumer for security purposes-a downstream Kafka system at the University of Washington (UW) and another Kafka system in a commercial cloud, both using MirrorMaker to mirror available alert stream topics. The University of Washington runs a cluster of three Kafka brokers, each deployed in a separate Docker container (built on top of Confluent’s Docker Hub images), that feeds a permanent data archive of Avro files and allows connections from a number of external collaborations of scientists focused on different subfields of astronomy. Topics are separated into 16 partitions so that consumers of the stream can parallelize readers into a group of up to 16 for faster reading and parallel downstream filtering and processing. Diagram of the flow of alert data through the ZTF Alert Distribution System: Transient candidate alerts are submitted to a Kafka cluster at IPAC and mirrored at UW and a commercial cloud. Downstream filtering algorithms classify and separate different types of objects. End user scientists can subscribe to topics for objects of interest, and collaborations of scientists (known in the astronomical community as event brokers) can also subscribe and redistribute alerts enriched with additional external data. The cloud-based Kafka system is public facing for other astronomy researchers. Scientists can write scientific filters to automatically apply algorithms such as classifiers to detect and tag different types of objects (e.g., supernova, variable stars, near-Earth objects). The filters can be written simply in Python and can be deployed separately in different Docker containers. Here is an example of the code a scientist would write: class Filter001(AlertFilter): def filter(self, alert): if ((alert['source']['signal_level'] > 5) & (alert['source']['brightness'] > 0.00003631)): return True else: return False For objects that pass a filter, the filter returns True , and the alert data message is then produced to a new topic just for that type of object that other scientists can then subscribe to. Streaming millions of detections The ZTF pipeline produces anywhere from 600,000 to 1.2 million alerts per night. We have stress tested the system up to 2 million alerts without any technical issues. Each alert packet is about 60 KB in size, dominated mostly by the cutout images, for a total volume of up to 70 GB of data pushed through the system each night. Serialized alert data is available to end users around 20 minutes after an image is taken on the telescope, with the majority of that time taken up by the image differencing pipeline. From the main Kafka distribution hub to external consumers, the transfer time is about four seconds. Kafka has been a great tool for powering the tech behind attacking astronomical data distribution and data analysis pipeline challenges, meeting scalability demands, and enabling science in near real time. It is relatively easy to use and simple enough for a scientist to start prototyping with. I’ll be continuing to explore ways to work with it to enable real-time data science pipelines for projects here at High Alpha Studio. Interested in more? If you’d like to know more, you can download the Confluent Platform to get started with the leading distribution of Apache Kafka. Armed with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Maria Patterson is an expert in optimizing scientific data analysis pipelines. She worked with NASA on cloud-based pipelines for automated processing of daily satellite imagery. During initial stages of NOAA’s Big Data Project, she led the technical development of a science “data commons” to ensure programmatic data access for researchers. Maria then returned to astronomy to architect a system for distributing alert streams of real-time object detection from large-scale telescopes. She is recognized on the builders list for both the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and is a former member of both collaborations. Currently, Maria is a data scientist with the venture studio High Alpha, supporting new cloud companies to augment their products with data science. Follow her on Twitter @OpenSciPinay for all things astronomy, data science, and startup tech.

https://medium.com/high-alpha/streaming-data-from-the-universe-with-apache-kafka-3b6b54dee6a9

['Maria Patterson']

2019-06-24 13:31:01.561000+00:00

['Big Data', 'Software Engineering', 'Astronomy', 'Startup', 'Data Science']

“The More You Learn the More Questions You Have” — Pouria Kay

Pouria, talking to the participants of his workshop at the School of Startups. Pouria Kay, entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Grib, has been a good friend of The Shortcut from its beginning. Pouria’s story is an inspiring act on how one should follow the goals, have a passion to learn and give back to the community. You might have met Pouria at the Startup Debut or workshops of the School of Startups. Pouria, whose adventures in the Finnish startup world started to bring positive results, agreed to share his experiences with The Shortcut. It all started with a dream “I decided to move to Finland already in 2009. I was working full-time, had two jobs simultaneously. I had finished my bachelor studies in Iran and career-wise everything was fine, but i felt that i needed to learn more and Iran wasn’t the environment for that. There’re social structural problems that do not allow you to learn especially if you’re young and too enthusiastic. I tried different ways and it didn’t work.” “The more you learn the more questions you have.” As I had lots of questions, I jumped into different areas. Back in Iran I started as a designer, doing small design processing in the advertising department. First I just wanted to improve the process, that led to the need of improving the whole PR and advertising, then I had to fix marketing and later the strategic planning and management too. Although I didn’t have enough time to study everything properly, going through that made me learn a lot. I also found that the more you learn the more questions you have. “Although I didn’t know much about Finland, it seemed to be an environment where I could grow” Image by Marja Suurpalo I started searching online where I could learn and what I could do about it. I found IDBM (International Design Business Management, Master’s program in Aalto University, that integrates business, design and technology — author’s note), which was starting for the first time as major. I was like “I’m going there!” I applied and I got in. Although I didn’t know much Finland except maybe a few general things that people know about the Nordics and seeing a bunch of pictures, Finland seemed to be an environment where I could grow, learn and develop. “Finland is like home. I’m living here, I like the the environment, I want to stay here.” It was the first time I was leaving Iran. I had several issues to solve in order to come here — military service, finances, visa, language exam. I had none of it. I started the planning seriously — “must have IELTS by this time, apply by this time, have this much money…” eventually I managed it all. It took a lot of effort and my friends were “Oh, you’re just lucky”. What was interesting is that I knew exactly what I was doing for the first time in my life and I’ve been focusing on one thing at a time. I’ve learned a lot from that. I came here for the studies and I wanted to do things. That led me where I am now.” Saving humanity from annoying 3D software “When I started Grib, I was already deep into the startup environment.When I got to Aalto, I got introduced to Startup Sauna, which was still a garage at that time. Ideas after ideas I started to help other startups. My company was registered in 2016, but Grib itself started as a project in 2014, right after I graduated. Now we are in the stage of product development. We’re constantly looking for opportunities, learning, trying and seeing what we can do. I consider a product not just an app, for a startup a product could be the whole business model. We’re working hard on validating what we get to the market.” Pouria found his new home in Finland. Giving back to the community “I got a lot and I’m still getting from the startup scene in Finland. It’s a good thing that people give back. The hard part is that everybody is trying to help and has very strong opinions, so some of the things you get are not necessarily right or good. Not everything I received was positive, but I guess it’s part of the learning. You hear different opinions and views, listen to them, learn and decide by yourself. I wish there was some kind of system that would encourage everybody to share and give back. When you’re giving back you’re getting stronger. The dangerous side is that you also get stronger in your opinions, so you definitely need feedback. Circulation of information and feedback, I think it’s still missing.” We need more “shortcuts” in the system “It is important not to put 100 people to one box, but see each as individuals and understand what drives them, why they do what they do. Once you understand their drive, we can change the way we see them and can help more efficiently. I’m not that far from the time I’ve been to that kind of environment, maybe 2–4 years ahead compared to the people who participated in the School of Startups. If I’m able to add anything then of course I’ll be around. What helped me with Grib at the early stage were the mentors, I had very good mentors. For those who are at the very early steps, just having an idea, not even a concept, — the best mentors are the ones who’re just a bit ahead. It’s same with kids who are more likely to be influenced by other kids, — mentors are the ones who sit next to you, work with you through the process. If the person is a CTO of another 3 year old startup, that’s a great mentor for your tech idea. They have been through the same thinking, can see things the way you see it. It’s also good that each one gets connected to someone in industry. There are tons of people who have potential, but they’re disconnected. One single channel can not do this, then The Shortcut may be a facilitator. I think The Shortcut is good and we also need others like The Shortcut in the system. Those are very effective.”

https://medium.com/the-shortcut/the-more-you-learn-the-more-questions-you-have-interview-with-pouria-kay-startup-notes-3a9b0d51afc5

['Anna Pogrebniak']

2018-09-18 12:46:14.007000+00:00

['Design', 'Stories', 'Finland', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup']

How to Paint Vivid Pictures with Your Words

It feels like you’ve been staring at the computer screen for hours as you struggle to rewrite several paragraphs. You’re trying to capture in words the images in your head, but the sentences on the page sound lifeless and dull. Maybe you’re writing a blog post about a recent trip you took, and you want your readers to hear the cacophony of the city’s traffic and see the neon signs drenching the street with color. Or maybe you’re writing a sales page, and you want your readers to be able to envision themselves using your product. You want them to feel as if they’re already holding the product in their hands and can see how it will make their lives so much easier. The ability to describe something vividly is an essential skill for every writer to master, no matter whether you’re a blogger, novelist, or copywriter. Vivid descriptions transform your paragraphs from vague and boring to engrossing and memorable. Of course, like any skill, it’s one that takes time and practice to master. But there are ways to speed up that process and instantly transform your writing. One of the best ways to do that is to study the descriptions of expert writers and steal their techniques. In today’s article, I’m going to do just that by diving into one of my favorite books: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s writing has always enchanted me. Whenever I need a bit of inspiration, I love to turn to a page at random and study how Fitzgerald makes the New York of the 1920s come alive. When Fitzgerald describes one of Gatsby’s parties, you feel like you are weaving in and out of the crowds and can almost hear the jazz music spilling across the gardens. I’m sure Fitzgerald never tried to tell a story to his friends, and then gave up with a shrug, saying, “I guess you had to be there.” Let’s look at three simple techniques Fitzgerald uses to bring his writing to life and how we can use them in our writing too. And an important note! Before Fitzgerald became a novelist, he worked as a copywriter, creating slogans for billboards and signs in streetcars. So don’t think that these techniques are only for fiction writers. Any writer can use them. 1. Add layers to your descriptions with metaphors and similes Metaphors and similes are the first tool in Fitzgerald’s paintbox for splashing his descriptions with color. If you already use metaphors and similes in your writing, that’s fantastic. We’ll look at some creative ways to make similes and metaphors even more powerful in this section. If you don’t use metaphors and similes, here’s a quick explanation of what they are. A metaphor or simile helps you take your description to another level by comparing two unlike things to each other as if they were alike. The only difference between them is that similes use the words “like” or “as” (the wind sounded like a moan) and metaphors do not (the wind moaned). Okay, let’s look at how Fitzgerald uses similes and metaphors to enhance the images in his writing. Here’s one example: The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. First, these similes help us better visualize the scene. Here’s what it would sound like without them: The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were seated. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering. A bit boring, right? Without the similes, there isn’t really anything to make that scene stand out. Second, they help set a mood for the paragraph. While Fitzgerald isn’t writing a fantasy novel, by using similes about balloons and flying women, he’s able to give this scene an otherworldly feel. In a way, they’re like mini-stories within a story. Let’s look at the metaphor Fitzgerald uses in the last line of the book to see how these mini-stories can add depth to our own writing: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. This is one of the most quoted lines from The Great Gatsby, and for good reason. Instead of just writing something like, “We try to move forward, but keep returning to the past”, Fitzgerald elevates this simple idea by using the imagery of boats. Yes, the reader might say, that’s how I feel too. I’m trying to escape the past but feel like I’m rowing against the current. Wrapped in a metaphor, the idea is no longer vague, but tangible. So how can we effectively use metaphors and similes in our own writing? Here are several tips: First, you can use a simile to deepen your descriptions (as Fitzgerald does) or to better explain a complex concept or idea. For example: “In order to perform this exercise, lie on your stomach, place your hands on the floor under your shoulders, and lift your chest off the floor as if you were a cobra.” (Read my article here for more tips on how to explain complex ideas with similes and stories.) Second, you can use similes and metaphors to weave your personality into your writing. For example, say you love to play the piano, and you’re writing an article about blogging. You might write something like, I love to play piano, and I soon realized that blogging and playing the piano are alike in a lot of ways. Just like you need to practice the piano every day if you want to improve your skills, you need to write consistently on your blog in order become a better blogger. Third, you can use a simile or metaphor to evoke a specific feeling in your readers. Blue Apron does that on their homepage by comparing their recipes to creating magic. This imagery makes us think that cooking Blue Apron’s recipes must be easy and the food will taste delicious: Create magic…Following our step-by-step instructions you’ll experience the magic of cooking recipes that our chefs create with your family’s tastes in mind. CitiBike also uses a simple but clever metaphor on their website: Unlock a bike…unlock New York. It is important to think of metaphors and similes like salt and pepper, however. A little sprinkle, and they’ll season your writing. But too many and you’re writing will be way too salty or way too spicy. A simile or metaphor in every sentence or paragraph will slow down the writing and detract from the specialness of each one. (Did you notice the simile I used in this paragraph?) Fitzgerald uses metaphors and similes sparingly throughout the book, but when he does use them, they make you sit up and take notice. 2. Make descriptions delight the five senses with sensory words Sensory words are the next tool that Fitzgerald employs to help readers become immersed in his story. Sometimes sensory words sparkle, sometimes they clang, other times they’re bristly. Sometimes they’re bitter, other times delicious. Sometimes they have a fragrant aroma. In short, sensory words are the descriptive words that apply to the five senses: Words related to sight or appearance (these can also include words related to motion) — gleaming, tarnished, shadowy, sparkling, dancing (these can also include words related to motion) — gleaming, tarnished, shadowy, sparkling, dancing Words related to touch — velvety, icy, sharp, blunt — velvety, icy, sharp, blunt Words related to taste — bitter, zesty, refreshing — bitter, zesty, refreshing Words related to scent — musty, fragrant, sweet — musty, fragrant, sweet Words related to sound — roar, sizzle, murmur See a list of more sensory words here. Sensory words help you engage your readers’ five senses. They make your readers touch, taste, smell, hear, and see your descriptions. Here are two sentences from The Great Gatsby that are filled with sensory words: The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktailmusic and the opera of voices pitches a key higher…The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath–already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Of course, in a work of fiction that type of description is captivating. But in a blog post or on another page of your website, you would probably want to be a little less poetic. And, yet, you can still use sensory words effectively. Look at how Bose uses sensory words in a product description for their headphones: Tiny earbuds for better sleep. Noise-masking sleep buds. Unwanted noise keeping you awake at night? You’re not alone. That’s why we created a new solution. These tiny, comfortable and truly wireless earbuds are uniquely engineered to deliver soothing sounds that mask annoying noise — like snoring, pets, and loud neighbors — and help you fall asleep and stay asleep. So you can look forward to bedtime and be ready to take on tomorrow. How many did you spot? Sound: noise-masking, soothing, snoring, loud. Touch: comfortable. Sight & Appearance: tiny, wireless. 3. Zoom-in on your descriptions with a list of details Fitzgerald’s third technique is quite simple. I call it “the detailed list”. Take this paragraph as an example: He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher–shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Fitzgerald could have ended the sentence at “he took a pile of shirts and began throwing them,” but he wanted us to be able to visualize the scene, to see the types of shirts that Gatsby wore. So he zooms-in on them. He lists all of the different types of shirts. Here’s another sentence that burst with a detailed list: By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived–no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. Again, Fitzgerald uses the detailed list in order to create a specific image in our head. This wasn’t just any orchestra — it was lavish. Detailed lists can be used in any kind of writing. On sales pages, they’re often used to emphasize a product’s many features. Here’s an example from the sales page for the Kindle Paperwhite: Won’t tire your eyes in the dark (Unlike back-lit tablets that shine in your eyes, Kindle guides light toward the surface of the display with its built-in front light so you can read comfortably for hours without eyestrain.) Learn more about a book before you start reading (With About this Book, see background information about the author, other books in the series, and more) Adjust your text size (choose from eight text sizes to prevent tired eyes and keep you reading longer) Of course, if you crammed every one of your sentences with a list of details, your reader would become exhausted. But just as you can sprinkle metaphors and similes like salt and pepper, you can use detailed lists when you’re struggling to make a description more vibrant or when you want to make sure that your readers are picturing the correct image in their heads. The Takeaway While Fitzgerald was a masterful writer, these three techniques are simple and straightforward. You can start using them right away to add zest to your descriptions. When you transform bland paragraphs, you’re better able to hold the attention of your readers. And thus you’re more effective at sharing your message with the world.

https://medium.com/copywriting-secrets/how-to-paint-vivid-pictures-with-your-words-67aa70c00830

['Nicole Bianchi']

2019-05-21 22:12:00.279000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Self Improvement', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity']

How Pets Can Make You a Better Programmer — Yes, Your Pet Can Do That

Creative Thinking Skills Creative thinking is an essential skill when it comes to programming and the software industry. You are required to think outside-the-box to tackle unsolved problems. Here are a few ways of how your pets increase your creative thinking skills. Keeps your mind active and sharp Pets give us a sense of purpose and obligation. They depend on us for food, shelter, and security. Caring for your pet needs not only physical effort but also mental effort. You need to be able to communicate with your pet and stay tuned to the needs of your pet. You may not know this, but really, your pet helps keep your mind more active and sharp. From meeting your pet’s basic needs to playing and enjoying time with your pet, they help to stimulate your mind and keep your brain in shape. The mind is your most complicated and powerful resource, and the more you use it, the more creative and sharp it becomes. Having your mind active helps you produce creative output because the creative process is also cyclical — the more creative thinking you use, the more motivated you become. Start thinking about caring for your pet as a creative tool and you’re sure to enjoy those walks and playtimes even more. Provides a childlike sense of joy and freedom Pets often bring out some of the best characteristics in ourselves. They will help us explore and reconnect with that more carefree and childlike existence. You will find that when you’re with your pet, you’re more happy and relaxed. You might even find yourself doing dumb, out-of-the-box things while you play and spend time with your cat. It’s that very sense of joy and freedom that our pets can provide that can also help to boost our creativity. When you were younger and more carefree, you were less logical and judgmental; you believed in infinite possibilities. A more youthful outlook, filled with wonder and curiosity, is a great approach to the creative process. Let yourself be shrewd and dumb next time you play with your dog, and see how your creative juices can sparkle.

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-pets-can-make-you-a-better-programmer-yes-your-pet-can-do-that-450cc63962f8

['Mahdhi Rezvi']

2020-09-24 01:42:15.838000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Health', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Lifestyle']

How AI can add value and viability to your business application ?

If you are a tech geek or a business owner with a website or mobile application, one of the terms that you come across most frequently would certainly be artificial intelligence or one of its multi-branched technologies like machine learning, data mining, etc. If you have wondered what all this hype is all about, think no more. You have landed in the right page. In this article, we will be discussing how artificial intelligence can add value to your business. Firstly, let us understand what artificial intelligence is! AI is the ability of the systems to respond to the inputs received, without being implicitly trained for it. This is possible with the use of algorithms, usage analysis, data-sets and other cognitive observations. Even though there are talks that AI will replace the human labor, AI has only been able to help humans in their day-to-day mundane tasks. Thus making their lives easier and also helping them concentrate on the more complex jobs that actually need their attention. Let us discuss some ways in AI can add value to a business: Improved customer relations: It can be agreed upon without much of a debate that one of the jobs that has a very bland routine is that of customer service and support where an agent (Human) has to answer to the same questions over and over again. Many a times the quality of customer service and support in many of the companies decreases rapidly because of this reason. Deploying AI for this has proved to be one of the most successful applications of AI. Virtual Customer Assistants (VCAs) are becoming very popular these days with most of the businesses using a chatbot or a similar technology that makes use of technologies like predictive analysis, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, etc. which are all derivatives of artificial intelligence. Machine learning: Are you into the business of marketing? If yes, then I’m assuming you have already started using artificial intelligence in your business to ensure you stay at the top of it. But if your answer is no. then here is why you should no longer wait to get AI into business! Cognitive learning, popularly known as machine learning is a technology that enables systems to learn from previous inputs and make a decision. This can be used in marketing business by deploying various algorithms to understand what a customer is looking for when he or she visits a website or an app. You can also analyse their movement and help them navigate in a better way. Data to Text Conversion: For an app to successfully run a lot of databases and data-sets are loaded and ensured that the end user can use the app successfully. But many a times it so happens that that database is so complicated that users find it impossible to use the application. This can be avoided by using data conversion or the natural language processing technology (NLP) to ensure that all the data at the back end is converted into a language that can be easily understood by the users. Audio to text conversion: Gone are those days where the only way to input data into an application or website was by typing. All one has to do now would be to just speak to the websites or applications for them to analyse the input and generate the required output. This has been possible only because of the technology called speech recognition. Some of the popular examples of this technology could be Alexa by Amazon, Siri by Apple or Google Assistant by Google. By now you must have understood about the potential of AI in adding value to your business. If you need any further assistance feel free to contact our team of experts for bringing AI into your business to scale it to new heights. Originally published at yugasa.com on October 29, 2018.

https://medium.com/yugasa/how-ai-can-add-value-and-viability-to-your-business-application-2c9d683f433c

['Yugasa Software Labs']

2018-10-29 11:48:40.542000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Mobile App Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Outsourcing Company India', 'AI']

How can atmospheric pollution result to excessive harm in the marine ecosystems?

How can atmospheric pollution result to excessive harm in the marine ecosystems? Ioannis Dedes Follow Dec 26 · 5 min read Photo by NOAA on Unsplash It is obvious that when one discusses how humans disturb and negatively affect the atmospheric system, the focus is based on the pollution and the effect of the excessive quantities of greenhouse gases. However, there’s less or no concentration on how the disturbance of the atmospheric system can negatively contribute to the harm on marine ecosystems. Regardless of the focus on this connection, this text is a simple guide that can raise awareness and clearly show the impact that generally human intervention and more specifically carbon emissions, can have on aquatic ecosystems since they threaten the ocean and have a negative effect for entire food webs and chains. It’s more than important to understand the correlation of the two systems, the atmospheric and the aquatic, and be well aware of the fact that our harmful actions for the pollution of the air are equally and sometimes even more disruptive for the marine ecosystems and equilibria. As stated before, the text is dedicated more on the single perspective of burning fossil fuels and generally, carbon dioxide emissions they can produce, along with other harmful activities. At first sight, one might say that oceans work as a mechanism that absorbs 25% to 40% of the carbon dioxide emitted in the air and actually slows the rate of global warming. Please don’t get me wrong; this is a great outcome for the absorption of this polluting substance. It’s considered great, however, until one understands the second part of the ‘story’. The CO2 quantities which are absorbed by the oceans do not disappear; they come together with water molecules, dissolve them, and create an acidic substance called carbonic acid. Carbonic acid can be easily ‘broken down’ to bicarbonate and hydrogen ions, solutions in which the acidity is found in excessive levels. This is obviously a great contribution for the destruction of marine systems since the increasing acidity levels in the water can seriously harm the diversity of populations, habitats and plants of the oceans. After reading my last article on the environment, which raises awareness on the importance of the Amazon rainforest, one can easily understand how water acidity will work at the expense of marine ecosystems and in this particular case, the diversity of the river. Another negative mechanism which is caused by atmospheric pollution and it’s attached to the acidic character of the above-mentioned case is the change of the wind patterns; cases of this outcome are particularly found in the Pacific Ocean. A change in the wind patterns can lead to a push of the waters on the surface aside and acidic water can rise up to the shore. Both the previous one and this case may have the negative effect of leading to greater water acidity; the phenomenon of ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is the increase of the acid and the decrease of pH in the oceans, caused by the substance of carbon dioxide. Lower pH means higher acidity, the inability of many organisms to adapt and the disruption of food chains, as shown below. One example that should be evaluated and which ecompasses both effects of the mechanism mentioned above is the 2005 to 2008 Pacific Northwest extinction of millions of shellfish larvae. It was considered a mysterious extinction and it took way too long for the researchers to understand that the acidity of the waters was damaging the organisms’ population and that that low pH was causing the dissolution of shells. Furthermore, scientists discovered that a big number of marine organisms build their skeletons and shells from calcium carbonate, which is vulnerable to acid and after specifically two months, it completely dissolves and skeletons cannot be built properly in the water of low pH. Despite the fact that the vast deaths of the shellfish larvae urged scientists to research and figure out what happened, this population hasn’t fully recovered yet and as carbon continues to make water more acidic, the more vulnerable the skeletons and the shells will be. In addition, there are other case studies that show us how the decrease in pH can lead to disturbance of food webs and ecosystems as a whole. Another example is about the organisms of crustaceans, a species being even more affected by the acidity in the water. This species cannot control the dissolution of acid in their shells and as a result they can easily die. This poses a threat for many ecosystems as crustaceans are primary consumers and are precious for many marine ecosystems. This could result in disruption of the reproductive cycle or the complete disruption and disturbance of the ecosystems, as these species pass a great amount of energy from the plants to the consumers when healthy. This comes in accordance with one of my previous articles that it’s based on the positive feedback mechanisms’ effects on biodiversity and is found below (although the focus is on different ecosystems the theory is the same). As the writer, I would personally advise the reader to dedicate a greater extent of his time in understanding this particular correlation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused by human activities, which after all, can also doesn’t only affect terrestrial and atmospheric ecosystems but also poses a great threat to the marines; the examples are used to show that this is frequently the case and acidity doesn’t only harm small organisms which are irrelevant to the greater water ecosystem but it can be deadly for precious populations and parts of the greater food chains and webs.

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-atmospheric-pollution-can-result-to-excessive-harm-in-the-marine-ecosystems-922fc295a258

['Ioannis Dedes']

2020-12-28 12:42:46.667000+00:00

['Environment', 'Diversity', 'Future', 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change']

10 Easy Fixes for Common Headline Mistakes

10 Easy Fixes for Common Headline Mistakes Examples and tips to attract readers to your valuable content Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos. Headlines aren’t an exact science. What may get one reader clicking may be ignored by another. What may work in one industry may not work in another. However, there are simple, classic ways to improve headlines so they’re more likely to entice your reader. Over the past decade as a communications professional and a writer, I’ve made a crapload of mistakes with headlines. But when you write to sell — ideas, products, services, event tickets, and more — you get feedback. That’s how you quickly learn what headlines sell — and which flop. Today I want to show you ten headlines from real articles. I’ll take you through how to improve them — and share alternative headline ideas. Are the alternative headlines better than the originals? I’ll let you decide.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/10-easy-fixes-for-common-headline-mistakes-21ab58e80836

['Cynthia Marinakos']

2020-04-02 22:05:45.881000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Business', 'Headline Hacks', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

Understanding Transgender, for Cis Folks

This neurological view of mismatch aversion has had profound repercussions for our understanding of several other types of body dysphorias. Among these is the feeling that a person’s gender identity differs from their body gender, which is gender dysphoria. Quite literally, the person is born with a mind, a soul, whose gender fails to match that of the body in which it finds itself: During fetal development, different aspects of sexuality are set in motion in parallel: sexual morphology (external anatomy), sexual identity (what you see yourself as), sexual orientation (what sex you are attracted to), and sexual body image (your brain’s internal representation of your body parts). [These typically] harmonize during physical and social development… but they can become uncoupled, leading to deviations that shift the individual toward one or the other end of the spectrum of normal distribution. (Ramachandran) It’s important to understand that this isn’t a binary situation. Sex and gender exist as a broad spectrum of manifestations, both in the body and the soul. (I am using the term “soul” here to refer to a person’s conscious experience, the sentient mind, because at the end of the day that is what souls are.) Yes, there is a bell-curve to it, and some physical and mental manifestations of sex and gender are much more common than others. But the point is, the experience of “being” a person of a certain gender — wherever on the spectrum that may fall — while having the body of a different sort of gender is rooted in biological reality. So it is simply not correct to say that a person who is trans-male was born “biologically female” or that a person who is trans-female was born “biologically male”. Our brains and our genitalia are all part of our biology. What is correct is that they were born transgender. It’s not possible to fully imagine what being a transgender person actually feels like if you are not one, just as it’s not possible to fully imagine what it’s like being any different gender. But imagining how you might feel should at least open the door to compassion and understanding for folks who are going through something which you haven’t, and are dealing with it and living their lives the best way they see to do so, according to their choices. But where we, as a society, have the most trouble figuring out how to approach the reality of transgendered people is in dealing with children who experience mismatch aversion involving their sexual identities. On the one hand, our laws generally hold that prepubescent children cannot understand sexual maturity and therefore cannot be in a position to reasonably consent to anything having to do with it. Therefore, some people reason, it is a form of child abuse to begin any sort of gender transition in young kids who express their experience of feeling that they “are” a different sex than their genitalia would indicate. What if it’s just a phase? Or rebellion? What if they don’t understand the profound consequences of the process, that it’s not the same thing as playing dress-up? On the other hand, we would do well to consider the very real terror of a gender-mismatched child with a boy’s body map, but a little girl’s body, facing the prospect of developing breasts and a uterus capable of bearing children. Or a gender-mismatched child with a girl’s body map, but a little boy’s body, anticipating the inevitable development of an enlarged penis and testicles, a deep voice, and a beard. If you are cis-gendered, imagine being told at that age that your own body was soon to grow into the adult form of the opposite gender, and knowing that the metamorphosis drew nearer with each passing day. As long as outdated notions persist of gender mismatch as a social or psychological problem, rather than an innate issue of biology and neurology, of genuine and innate identity, we are passively dooming these kids to what is now at least a partially avoidable fate. And we are dooming ourselves to using inappropriate instruments to assess the situation and determine the best course of action in each individual case. This does not mean that we start prescribing hormone therapy to every tomboy who says “I hate being a girl” or to any little boy who says he’d rather join the Brownies than the Cub Scouts. It does mean that when children start indicating that they identify as a gender other than the one on their birth certificate, they are assured that they are not crazy, and we begin exploring the possibility that gender mismatch might be the issue. And as cis-gendered adults, by understanding that gender mismatch is biologically real, we can start treating folks who gender-identify in different ways from ourselves with the respect and dignity they deserve as fellow humans. We can stop demeaning others and insisting that they’re seeking attention or in need of counseling to set them right. We can stop assuming that our own body-mind alignment is “correct” rather than merely common. And stop labeling a neurological configuration as a “sickness” or “perversion”. The truth, it is said, shall set you free. And God knows we can all use a little more freedom from alienation and bigotry right about now.

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/understanding-transgender-445295701dde

['Paul Thomas Zenki']

2020-12-25 16:03:00.785000+00:00

['Health', 'LGBTQ', 'Science', 'Culture', 'Neuroscience']

Sorry, More Bad News. Your Writing is Being Ripped Off As I Type This.

See? It’s writing stolen from Gillian. And aside from the author name at the top of the collection page, the rest of the credits are stripped out. If you click any of the articles, there’s no author credit. No link to Medium. Nothing to take you back to Gillian. They just stole her writing. Mine are there, too. Just not as many of them. Maybe yours are there, too. There’s only one place you can write and not have your writing ripped off. In a notebook. And I’m sorry. Sorry to be the one to tell you that. But it’s the ugly truth of the internet. Anything you put online will be ripped off by some jerk. Right now there’s a whole bunch of writers kind of in a panic and trying to figure out how to shut those sites down. — Omg, email namecheap, they’re the registrar. — Email the site. — Email the web-host. We gotta shut them DOWN! And I understand feeling that. But still? Good luck with that. Look, I get it. I’m a writer, too. I’ve been a writer for a really long time. First time I had an article published in a print magazine was 1996. Long time! I’ve written online so long, I forget all the places I’ve written. Wordpress. Open Salon. Too many to remember. I get it. Our writing means something to us. Okay? I get that. Dr Mehmet Yildiz wrote about the ichi.pro site and one commenter said if Medium doesn’t “deal with it” then they’re condoning it. No, they’re not. Do you even know the procedure required to shut down plagiarist site? Most people don’t. First thing to understand is that in order to get a site taken down, you must file a take-down request. With proof of why the site needs to come down. Because plagiarism itself isn’t a crime. It’s the copyright infringement that results in the shut down. 1) Normally, a take down would be filed with the web-hosting company. Because technically speaking, they are the ones hosting the copyright infringed content. So you need to find the hosting company. Provided it’s not masked. Because domain masking is a thing. Any one of us can register a domain name and set up IP masking so that the “real” hosting company doesn’t show anywhere. Most hosting resellers do it all the time. I run a tiny hosting company. Just for my design clients. If you ran a whois on the sites I host, it will show you my domain. Not the hosting company that provides my allotted servers in the NOC (network operations center). So that’s hurdle one. Find the hosting company. Hope they’re not masked. If looking up the hosting company leads you back to the plagiarist, you’re at a dead end. At least for most people. If you’re technical, you could try traceroute and see where it leads you. Also? Hope they’re in a country that accepts take down requests. Some countries don’t do take-downs. Hosted in China or Russia? Forget it. They don’t deal with it. They don’t do take-downs. They don’t even respond. See, plagiarism itself isn’t a crime. It should be, but it’s not. The issue with plagiarism is that it can lead to a copyright infringement claim. Unless the person you want to sue is in China. Or Russia. Or similar countries, because there’s no shortage of countries that allow ripped off sites and don’t deal with copyright claims. They don’t care. If they have no problem knocking off GUCCI handbags, they sure have no problem stealing content from you or me. We’re small fry. Ichi.pro is not in English. You think they’re hosted in America? Think again. That site isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Not if it’s hosted in China or Russia or somewhere overseas. Maybe you get lucky! You find the host. They agree to take it down. Most often, the site just moves to another host. You can chase them until one of you gets tired. Or they move offshore. There’s lots of hosting offshore where complaints aren’t dealt with. It’s not just writers, either… I’m kind of a polymath. As in, I have lots of weird hobbies. For example? I restore vintage and antique fonts and lettering. There’s a lot of fancy lettering from the 1600s to 1800s. Mostly, a few letters here and there, found in old illuminated manuscripts that have long ago gone into the public domain. People who love lettering love those old books. One font I made? All I had to start with was 6 characters. Just half a dozen pretty letters in a tattered old 300 year old book. But from 6 letters, you can see stroke patterns. Serif characteristics. You can see the art that the calligrapher was creating. The feel. The flow. Hundreds of hours. Hundreds. Slowly creating letters to match those 6 until I created an entire font from old lost letters that some letterer penned into a book 300 years ago. Some jerk in Russia bought my font. Opened it in a font program and renamed it. And he’s selling it. I could cry. More weird hobbies… stuff you didn’t know about me. I also sell my photography. And digital templates for writers. So you can open my bundles in Canva or Photoshop and make kick butt graphics to promote your books. Those have been stolen, too. For sale on Russian sites. Here’s a weird one. I have a skill for pattern drafting. I’ve sewn for the Olympic dancers, which was a hoot, and I have my own pattern line. They’re digital downloads. My customers live in areas where they can’t buy patterns readily. They love being able to print them out. You guessed it. Yup. Those have been stolen, too. My book was stolen, too... Marketing is my day job. Many years ago, I first hit the news media when I took a company from bankrupt to a million in 18 months flat. And then did it again with the next client. My before and after stories were featured in Forbes, The New York Times and more. I was so excited when I wrote a marketing book for small business owners. When I sent it to my list, I made a month’s income in a day. That got stolen, too. I took mine offline. They might still be selling it, for all I know. Likely not. They probably milked it and moved on. This stuff can break you if you let it. It happens to freebies, too. And Google will help! Almost any book that has a digital version — someone is giving it away free. The bigger you get, the more likely it happens to you. For that matter, Google will help. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but here… do this… Go to Google advanced search. Do a keyword or wildcard search and search for pdf files. You know what I mean by wildcard, right? Type in marketing or *marketing* and select pdf as the file type to search for. Google will give you a whole bunch of stuff. Some of it free, some of it paid. You just need to mess around a bit. Fact is, if people selling digital goods don’t know how to lock them down, people are grabbing them free. Sometimes for themselves. Other times to share them in black-hat forums and on the dark web. And if you’re selling on a third-party site where you don’t control the download process, then you have no ability to control that. It’s ugly, and it’s fact. And it happens every hour of every day. If anyone says you can get all those thieves shut down, they’re full of crap. Because you can only get them shut down if the host will comply. In China or Russia or the may offshore countries — nah. They don’t care. So what do you do about theft of your work? You try not to think about it. And that truly sucks. Trust me, it sucks. My work means something to me, whether it’s a Medium piece that took 5 hours to research, write and edit — or a font I put hundreds of hours into, lettering by hand, scanning, kerning and digitizing. What’s the option? Doing nothing? Letting those people snuff the light that makes me who I am? So I hide my writing away in notebooks and keep my lettering and patterns on scraps of paper in a binder and die with all my dreams unborn? No. Screw that. One of the sites I sell my fonts on has a member community. It’s one of those old archaic BBS systems. People talk about theft there. A lot. The new members are always stunned. Shocked. First time it happens, they’re just broken. They want to know how to make it stop. How to shut down the thief. Because there must be a way, right? One of the top font sellers there sighs. You can’t, she says. You just try not to think about it. Don’t think about how much sales you lost to them. Don’t wonder how much they’re earning on your work. Just pray that in the long run, it brings you more name recognition. Because no one can make it stop. Not until all countries play by the same rules. That’s never going to happen. There will always be a place that doesn’t care… It hurts. And we can’t make it stop. Not as long as there are people who steal. Not as long as there are countries who don’t deal with intellectual property theft, and off-shore web-hosts that do not honor a take down request. It’s real simple. If you don’t want your work stolen, don’t put it on the internet. There really isn’t another solution. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try. Maybe the host will cooperate. Maybe. But don’t count on it. And don’t let it break you. I’m sorry. It sucks to be the bearer of bad news. But I’d rather bring bad news than delude people. Thanks for reading.

https://medium.com/linda-caroll/sorry-more-bad-news-your-writing-is-being-ripped-off-as-i-type-this-fd0a9f578c29

['Linda Caroll']

2020-08-20 13:51:17.592000+00:00

['Writing', 'Advice', 'Creativity', 'Plagiarism', 'Psychology']

Selling Your New Sales Deck to Sales

Bellies full of beignets, my parents and I were exiting San Francisco’s Just for You Cafe when when a middle-aged man called my name. “Andy, it’s Christoph!” he shouted. “Do you have time for a quick question about messaging?” (Later, my mom asked, “People stalk you for messaging advice?”) It was fun having my parents think I was some kind of messaging celebrity, but I recognized Christoph as the CEO of an early-stage tech company who had recently attended one of my workshops. He was waiting for a table, but didn’t wait to tell me what was going on. “Listen,” he said, “I restructured our sales pitch using your Greatest Sales Deck framework and the results have been awesome. I’ve used it with a few prospects, and they engage at a deeper level, they get what we’re about faster, and they’re all moving to next steps.” “That’s great,” I said. “What’s the question?” “Well, it’s my VP of sales. He won’t even look at the new deck. Says he already has a deck, and that buyers don’t have time for a story, they just want to know how we solve their problem.” Christoph was digging his heels into the pavement, one after the other, as a metaphor for his VP’s resistance. “How do I bring him on board?” With so many B2B teams gearing up for next year’s sales kickoff events, I’m guessing Christoph isn’t the only one worried about his sales team embracing a new version of the pitch. So I’ll share an expanded version of my response to him here: (These 5 points are particularly relevant to the Greatest Sales Deck framework, but should apply to any kind of sales pitch.) #1. Make sure your new deck facilitates discovery Christoph’s VP’s complaint echoes the most common pushback I hear from salespeople about flashy new sales decks in general—they encourage salespeople to blabber on instead of listening to prospects. In other words, they inhibit what salespeople call discovery. One of my biggest “aha” moments was when several sales teams I worked with began using their “change in the world” slides to get prospects talking and opening up. For example, Switzerland-based SpotMe, which delivers custom apps for events and training, begins pitches by sharing a change that we heard about from SpotMe’s customers—namely that they now see events not as self-contained shindigs, but as episodes in some greater journey:

https://medium.com/firm-narrative/selling-your-new-sales-deck-to-sales-a7dc032a57bb

['Andy Raskin']

2018-10-30 18:08:17.893000+00:00

['Sales', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Marketing', 'Strategy']

I Hope This Pandemic Has Taught Us That Products Can’t Replace People

Relationships | Culture I Hope This Pandemic Has Taught Us That Products Can’t Replace People We are social creatures Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels Have you found yourself spending endless time on shopping apps over the course of the pandemic, either window shopping or actually buying stuff, just getting lost in the sea of products out there, hoping to find something that will make you just a little bit happier? If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent more time in an app like Amazon or eBay than your dwindling checking account is comfortable with (don’t worry, your secrets are safe with me). According to Adobe’s analytics, by April this year, buy-online-pickup-in-store, also known as BOPIS, sales had surged a whopping 208% from last year. Overall e-commerce rose a massive 25% in just two weeks in March 2020. Vivek Pandya, Adobe’s Digital Insights Manager, told Forbes, “According to our data, it would’ve taken between 4 and 6 years to get to the levels that we saw in May if the growth continued at the same levels it was at for the past few years.” But switching from in-person shopping to online is only part of the equation. While some of us are converting from brick-and-mortar stores to digital apps and online retailers, others are shopping more in total because they feel lonely, sad, and isolated. The COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened another epidemic: the loneliness epidemic. And there’s vicious cycle at work… COVID-19 forces us to rely on social media for our interaction, social media and a lack of interaction can possibly deepen loneliness, and loneliness makes many of us shop more in search of fulfillment — but shopping never really fills the emptiness. Why do we do this? Do we secretly believe that we can’t be happy without the fanciest chair massager or the coolest new tech toy? The answer seems to be both yes and no. Looking around at American advertising literature, you’d be tempted to believe that our goods are what make us happy in life. In fact, we’ve erected an entire society predicated on this idea. It’s the idea that buying the right objects is the golden ticket to happiness. The standard model of consumer culture, as I call it. It’s a model of life complete with pushy sales guys and telemarketing callers, people everywhere who try to leverage this fundamental and dogmatic idea that you can’t be happy without a certain product or service. More than this, the goal of advertising, and our culture at large, is often to convince you that just buying a certain product or service will solve all of your life’s woes. But is that really true? There’s quite a bit of evidence says otherwise. And some have suggested that even the purchasing of goods, not even services or experiences, are done with the belief that they’ll inevitably lead to positive social encounters in the future. Buying things, so the theory goes, only helps us insofar as we think they’ll be instrumental in creating or maintaining human connections for us at some point down the road. At the bottom of all consumption is the desire to be loved and accepted. Steve Quartz is the co-author of the book Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World, and his theories fit nicely with the indescribable feelings that I think so many of us are feeling right now. Some of the very first human ornaments in the form of jewelry was made approximately 70,000 years ago. These ornaments are thought to have symbolized membership in certain human tribes. Much more than a decorative feature alone, they helped people to feel like they belonged to a like-minded group of people they could trust and count on. They were icons that symbolized the interconnectedness of the group. In his research, Quartz came to the conclusion that most of the products that drive our consumer economy are based on the perceived social value we think they’ll yield. It’s not about the intrinsic value of the pleasure so much as the perceived status and sense of belonging we believe we’ll receive from most human purchases. As Quartz says: We can do this because our medial prefrontal cortex works as a sort of social calculator that monitors our perceptions of other people’s judgments of us, a sort of self-esteem inner gauge. It creates our basic need to feel the face-to-face admiration and respect we obtain in groups. In fact, psychologists have discovered that our happiness depends more on this feeling of esteem and respect than on our socioeconomic status. Quartz continues: In fact, much of the economic value of products today lies in their impact on our brain’s mostly implicit estimate of how they impact our social identity….We found that boosts in our social status also strongly activate the nucleus accumbens, a critical part of the brain’s reward system that’s implicated in almost all forms of addiction. Other studies with college students found that they value self-esteem boosts even more than sex! But I would urge you not to view these as some misbegotten vanity. Feeling esteemed and respected by others is a basic and universal human need that makes possible the human bonds that underlie cooperative human social life. It’s no surprise that it taps into the brain’s most powerful reward systems. And now that the pandemic has locked us in for months on end, the flaws in the standard model of consumerism are becoming exposed to even greater degrees, as we all sit alone and isolated, unable to engage in the meaningful activities we once were able to with ease. Most of us find ourselves plagued by this haunting feeling that something isn’t quite right, even if we’re conveniently shopping from home with free same-day delivery. And I think that feeling of unease is the fact that our natural social reward systems have been interrupted. The products themselves aren’t enough to provide the joy people get from consumption without the ability to share their experiences with others. Usually when we buy something, say a new dress or an interesting t-shirt, we do so with the implication that the people we care about will give us approval for it. From heavy metal band t-shirts to Sunday church outfits, humans crave interaction from the products they consume, as Quartz pointed out. When we have our outings and engage with other people, seeing the smiles on their face, engaging in the kinds of chatter we enjoy, we receive positive feedback. Ah, validation, at last! But now that we’re far removed from one another, socially isolated and physically distanced, that feedback system has become dramatically interrupted. The Internet is no substitute for in-person validation and a sense of belonging. And this transcends the fashion industry. As I write this story, I’m enjoying a delicious plate of mango habanero cauliflower wings. I’m watching an entertaining NFL football game on my iMac screen in a brand new comfortable chair. By all material metrics, I’ve got the life. And while all of these things are great, I still feel like something is missing. It’s not the same as sports were pre-pandemic, as any sports fan should know. What’s missing is the human element. Athletes play in nearly empty stadiums for atomized crowds-of-one huddled around screens, scattered about like autumn leaves just beginning to fall. There’s no cohesion, there’s no sense of connection that drives the social experience. It’s not the same without the crowd, the friends jumping up and down and screaming about the scores and more. The excitement is missing. It’s watered down. The experience is more sterile. And the same goes for our eating. Food is a universal human bonding experience and it has been since prehistoric men and women bonded over the fires that kept them warm, safe, and alive. And while I won’t say that it’s a bad thing to eat alone, it’s a wonderful experience to treat yourself to a restaurant all alone, doesn’t it become a little problematic eating alone every single night? It does. It’s not quite the same without the social connection that drives our consumption, be it the consumption of food, professional sports, or fashion. When we feel loneliness, and our culture doesn’t facilitate reasonable outlets to solve the problem of social isolation, we often buy things secretly hoping we’ll feel more connected, only to be let down by the fact that products can’t replace people. Usually for me, this just makes the feeling of loneliness worse. Did you know the World Health Organization has declared loneliness as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day? Well, they have, calling it the silent pandemic. And social isolation has been long believed to be the single biggest risk factor for human violence. In reality, we need each other. We all need to feel a sense of belonging that helps us stay grounded, feel connected, and to understand ourselves through the refractive lens of the perspective of another. While having access to goods and services most likely increases human happiness, it can only do so when we are able to find the joy of sharing the experiences they bring us with others. That’s my takeaway from all of this and it’s what I hope our society has learned from this pandemic, among other things. That no matter how much we try to force them to, products just can’t replace people. We’re social creatures in need of both love and individual significance. Neither of these things are possible alone and in a vacuum. I think it’s time for a renaissance in humanism after this pandemic lets up, one where we share with one another like never before. Let’s cut the shit and stop pretending that objects make us happy. Humans need love.

https://medium.com/publishous/i-hope-this-pandemic-has-taught-us-that-products-cant-replace-people-4b070593ad9f

['Joe Duncan']

2020-12-26 21:44:47.444000+00:00

['Relationships', 'Society', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Culture']

Advancing Design Without Emulation

Iteration, not emulation One of the easiest — and most common — ways to start a project is to say, “I really want to make X.” That phrase has been the impetus for many indie titles released over the last decade. Platformers, rogue likes, horror, RPGs, and more all began thanks to developers’ passion for a particular genre or type of game. Many indie titles started life as tributes to genres or game series that are either no longer being made (or at least that aren’t being made for PC anymore — again, refer to Wargroove and Fell Seal). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course. But I have definitely noticed a trend that has turned me off numerous indie games. In some cases, and for some developers, the goal of their project is to emulate the design and success of another title. It’s obviously the case that if you’re aiming for a specific market, you’ll want your game to be similar in design — but that should be a means to an end, rather than a specific goal in itself. I’ve seen numerous games that have tried to be “the next” FTL: Faster than Light, Darkest Dungeon, Undertale, and so on. But this raises an important question: why should I play your game when I still have those games? In order to illustrate this point — and to give you a sense of what good looks like — I’m going to dive into one very popular indie title that was both clearly inspired by other games, but that also struck out to create its own identity. Stardew’s success Stardew Valley is a prime example of indie passion leading to great success. The game was in development for over four years, and has enjoyed several more years of post-release support. It was undeniably inspired by the Harvest Moon series, which was never released on PC (and has long ago disappeared on consoles). A cursory glance might indicate that the game succeeded simply because its creator went out and recreated Harvest Moon on the PC. But once you dig deeper, it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more going on here. For starters, Stardew Valley is more open-ended than Harvest Moon. It also contains more systems associated with farming and earning money. The game’s combat system and dungeons are wholly different from Harvest Moon (and are perhaps a closer cousin of Rune Factory). Even the progression curve around levelling up and unlocking new tools and functions works quite differently here than in Harvest Moon. Stardew Valley’s creator, Eric “Concerned Ape” Barone, was clearly inspired by games he’d played before. But it’s also clear that simply recreating Harvest Moon wasn’t his goal; he wanted to exceed that design, to move beyond it, and expand in new directions. As you might expect, many folks have also attempted to imitate Stardew Valley. But in most cases, they fail to push beyond Stardew Valley’s design in meaningful ways. I’m still waiting for someone to do more with the idea of crop management and earning money around that, for example — there’s a lot of scope to do more, but this requires both a commitment to building on established designs and a fundamental understanding of why those designs worked. When this doesn’t happen, it’s akin to a student copying someone else’s homework without actually grasping the fundamentals. Now, before I give you the impression that the only problem here is with indie games, let me point out that the same trend exists in the AAA space as well.

https://medium.com/super-jump/thinking-beyond-b43679883ef2

['Josh Bycer']

2020-03-23 04:23:58.384000+00:00

['Gaming', 'Design', 'Startup', 'Game Design', 'Development']

Firebase 101: Authentication

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash One of the things that I am most grateful for about being a software engineer in 2019, is the incredible breadth of SDKs, platforms, and tools that simplify the more complicated and often consistently repetitive tasks. Whether I am implementing a live commenting feature, adding charts to my UI, or deploying my finished product, there is a resource out there to save me from doing it from scratch. In this post, we are going to cover one of today’s most talked about, most used, and most important SDKs: Google’s Firebase. What is Firebase? For starters, Firebase is actually a collection of various products that all fall under the Firebase family. In Google’s own words, Firebase as a whole is described as the following: Firebase gives you the tools to develop high-quality apps, grow your user base, and earn more money. We cover the essentials so you can monetize your business and focus on your users. At the time of this article, Firebase is comprised of a total of 18 different products, in addition to 9 extensions. The products in this suite solve problems as simple as shortening URLs, and as complex as cloud messaging. The full list of products and extensions is below with links, for reference, and we will cover several of the most popular products in depth. Products: Extensions: In my own development, I have mainly used Firebase’s authentication (Products #4), realtime database (Products #7), crashlytics (Products #8), and analytics (Products #13). Because this is where my own experience is, we are going to focus here on authentication, and will focus on each of the other three in future posts. I encourage you, though, to spend time exploring this suite and others. I learned recently that IBM’s cloud products even offers AI image recognition. Getting Set Up with Firebase When you first log in to Firebase, which you can do by simply being logged in to your Google account in your browser and clicking “Go to console” in the upper right hand corner here, you will come to a welcome screen. The first thing you want to do is create a project using this screen’s prompt. It will ask you to input: The project’s name Whether or not you want to enable Google analytics for the project (I typically will enable) Configure Google analytics if you have enabled it Once your project is ready, click continue and you will be taken to your project dashboard. One thing to note, is that each project can and likely will have multiple apps. iOS, Android, and web are each loaded in individually under one project. Connecting to Firebase To connect to Firebase, you need to set up a firebase config file in your codebase. In this file, you will add your firebaseConfig variable, which can be downloaded from Project → Settings → General → Your apps, where you will select the app that you are working on, then click the download google-services.json button: This file will have the information that you need for the firebaseConfig variable: And then your firebase app is initialized by just importing firebase and using this one line of code: firebase.initializeApp(firebaseConfig); Firebase Authentication Before we dive into this, I would like to first say that, for those of you who have not, I strongly encourage that you first learn to build and implement authentication from the ground up. Building your own authentication system teaches you about encryption, hashing, and authentication flow, which in my opinion is extremely valuable knowledge. While it’s invaluable to have tools that strip you of the need to recreate something like authentication each time (and, let’s be honest, Google is doing it more securely than we could on our own anyway), it is still important to understand what it is that you are implementing. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin. Back to your Firebase console. Setting up Firebase Auth From the menu on the left hand side, select the “Develop” dropdown, and then select “Authentication”. This dashboard is where you can manage everything related to users and authentication for your app. Firebase offers an authentication solution that supports traditional email/password auth, phone auth, and social auth such as Google and Facebook login. Firebase also stores all necessary user and login information in a Firebase database, so you don’t need to concern yourself with that part. The users tab is where you can access a list of the project’s users and user information. You can also manually add users here. The sign-in method tab allows you to enable your preferred social sign-in options, such as sign in through Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc. The full list of options is pictured below. This shows a project with email/password, Google login, and Facebook login enabled. On this same tab, under “Authorized domain”, you can (and need to) list domains to be authorized for OAuth redirects. The templates tab very conveniently allows creation of templates for things like email verification and password reset, which are automatically triggered on signup and forgot password, respectively. Lastly, the usage tab just displays the app usage statistics for the current billing period. Implementing Firebase Auth Firebase is now setup to receive, authenticate, and manage your users, and now just needs to be implemented into your codebase. The sign up and login flows here are really no different than the would be elsewhere. You can route as you would otherwise, but then when you get to the login and sign up functions, usually called under something like onClickLogin and onClickSignUp, you are going to use the below, where “firebaseMethod” is whichever firebase method is appropriate for your route: firebase.auth().firebaseMethod(email, password) So if you want to create a user, you would add the below line of code to your register/sign up function, where the email and password is taken from the user’s input: firebase.auth().createUserWithEmailAndPassword(email, password) And that’s it. Firebase has made a process which is complicated and costly to do right amazingly simple to implement. The full list of Firebase auth methods can be found here, and if you are using an auth provider, you can find that documentation here. Check back for more on other Firebase products.

https://medium.com/swlh/firebase-101-authentication-6aaa874aa7c4

['Bryn Bennett']

2019-12-14 10:38:42.072000+00:00

['Firebase', 'Software Engineering', 'Productivity', 'Google', 'Programming']

Find Success In Your Business, Just Like Malcolm Gladwell

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash Malcolm Gladwell has built a career out of sifting through dry research, unearthing overlooked ideas and presenting them in appealing or novel ways for readers or customers. He is best-known for writing regarded nonfiction books like Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point, and Gladwell’s approach to his craft can help you succeed in business. Test Your Business Ideas Gladwell spends hundreds of hours talking with and emailing other writers about ideas he wants to use in his books. While speaking, for example, Gladwell gauges his audience’s reaction to figure out what was interesting or boring. He also uses arguments from his audience to hone the quality of his works. This practice of publicly testing ideas helps Gladwell learn how to articulate himself clearly and concisely. It also helps him decide what to expand on or cut from his books. He said, “The act of explaining an idea to somebody else is a really good way to figure out how to tell the story.” You can test business ideas by emailing peers and asking for feedback and by showing early versions of your work to customers rather than waiting until you’ve finished your product or service. Iterative feedback will help you strengthen the best parts of your products or services and cut what’s not working. Let Your Customers Own It Gladwell was surprised by which ideas caught on from his book Outliers, notably the claim that mastery of a skill requires 10,000 hours — or ten years — of deliberate practice. Later, he found himself in a curious position whereby the book’s ideas and arguments were often misconstrued by others. Gladwell said, “Once you’ve written something, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to your readers. When your readers buy your book, they really buy your ideas, and your ideas become theirs.” When someone buys your product or service, you might wonder why customers like one aspect of your product or service and dislike another. You can get in front of this issue by recruiting beta, or first, customers. A beta customer provides feedback privately about your product or service before it’s released. A reviewer, however, writes their thoughts on Amazon, Trustpilot or elsewhere after you release a product. You can address the first type of feedback immediately and the second type over the long-term. It’s up to you to decide which responses to address and which to pass on. Finish It, Ship It, Promote It Your work doesn’t end after you release a product or service or ship a big project. In Gladwell’s debut nonfiction book, The Tipping Point, he explains how little things led to remarkable results. However, The Tipping Point wasn’t a huge success upon publication. Gladwell said, “The book didn’t do well at first…I got it in my head that if I kept touring and I kept giving talks about it, it might revive. I basically did endless promotions for two years.” The Tipping Point eventually entered the New York Times best seller list as a paperback, and according to Gladwell, “that’s when it was a successful book.” Promote your work in the right places, with your boss, colleagues, customers or peers. Like Gladwell, spend time meeting would-be customers. Avoid averting your gaze just because a deadline has elapsed. Discover Your Tipping Point Gladwell is a successful business writer in part because he understands what his audience struggles with and wants. He takes ideas from different industries and tells stories about them in a unique way that appeals to his audience. Even if you’ve no ambition to become a business writer, use elements of Gladwell’s approach to test your products and ideas and help them succeed. Ready to supercharge your productivity? I’ve created a cheat sheet that will help you FOCUS immediately. Follow this and you’ll accomplish more than you can imagine. Get the cheat sheet here!

https://bryanjcollins.medium.com/find-success-in-your-business-just-like-malcolm-gladwell-8f853313c66b

['Bryan Collins']

2019-05-07 08:16:00.812000+00:00

['Work', 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Motivation', 'Books']

How to come up with a name for your new business

How to come up with a name for your new business More than 600,000 new businesses launch every year — how can you come up with a name that stands out from the crowd? Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash “Names have power.” ― Rick Riordan A name is the face of your business. It needs to capture your essence, values, and what makes you different from the competition. It should be the most unique, yet relatable thing about your brand. That’s a lot of pressure to hang on a few words. Especially because what makes a name “good” is highly subjective, and if you get it wrong the stakes are high. So how can you create a name for your new company that gets people excited to buy it? Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash What makes a great name for a new business? Although whether a name is “good” or “bad” is subjective, there are few traits that successful names share: Familiarity: This characteristic matters more when you’re naming a brand that is part of a master brand or portfolio. For instance, Apple’s naming convention for its mobile products. Each began with “i” (iPad, iPod, iPhone). BMW has a numeric system that puts every car into a hierarchy based on performance (118i, 320d, 520d xDrive). Think about the typical naming conventions of your market. How can you create a naming convention that customers will learn to know and love? 2. Distinctiveness: How unique is your company’s name? The uniqueness of your name should relate to how unique your brand’s offering is. Think about your market — what naming conventions appear repeatedly? Can you break these and create your own, or twist the convention so that your name stands out from the crowd? Photo by Milivoj Kuhar on Unsplash A basic process for naming a new company 1. Before you do anything, create a brief A brief is a set of instructions or guide rails for a project. Briefs are essential when starting a project because they define measures for success. In an agency or consultancy, the brief also helps inspire the writers who will be creating the name. Some questions our brief needs to answer include: Who is the target audience for this business? Should it be abstract (like Apple) or descriptive (like PlayStation)? Should it be long or short? Are there brand naming conventions we need to keep in mind (like the iPad and iPhone)? Should it be a real word (like Blackberry) or a new word (like Google)? Should it support a mother brand (like DoubleTree by Hilton) or be able to stand alone (like Starbucks)? Because a good name is so subjective, you’ll need to make sure there are agreed parameters for what makes the name “right” for you and/or your client. 2. Research First, we need to answer some fundamental questions about the world our name will live in, like: Who are our competitors in this space? What’s a sample of their company names and types? What are some naming conventions in this category we’d like to adopt or avoid? What brand attributes do their names convey? Are there any “big name” territories we want to avoid (such as naming a new laptop iCompute)? 3. Brainstorm (with parameters) Before we begin our session, it’s essential to realize that brainstorming without guardrails will fail. Research shows that loose and free brainstorming sessions are less productive than approaches with more structure. Thought starters and parameters are needed to establish what we’re looking for. A great place to start when brainstorming is a four-quadrant grid that establishes the common types of names: Functional / Descriptive Names: These are the most straightforward names. They tell customers exactly what the business does. “Gary’s Plumbing” or the “Kline Branding Company” are examples of Functional Names. Invented Names: Invented names are those that include words not yet seen in language. Think “Google,” “Kleenex,” or “Oreo.” Experiential Names: These names connect to experiences people are familiar with, or can easily relate to. Examples include “Safari,” “Explorer,” “Amazon,” and “Sweaty Betty.” Evocative Names: These names evoke the spirit of a brand and how it differentiates itself from competitors. Think “Virgin Airlines,” “Uber,” “Bumble,” and “Lululemon.” 4. Vet potential names There are two parts to this process: First, we’ll legally vet our names to make sure we can use them. Second, we’ll use an objective scorecard to make sure our names are fundamentally sound choices (and to stack-rank them). The legal vetting phase Note: I suggest that you consult with an attorney during this section, as they’ll be the best person to advise you on if the name is legally available. The list below is no substitute for a lawyer’s input. Although you will get lawyers involved eventually, a “first vet” of potential names will help you eliminate obviously problematic ones. Here’s a quick list of places to test your names in the wild, to see if they pass the “trademark” test: Google it. Visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark website (if you’re in the U.S.). Put your potential name into Google Translate and see if it might prove problematic in other languages. Search social media to make sure potential usernames are available. Do a domain name search to see if your name is readily available (or affordable to buy). Use Namechk to search social media for similar names. Use Google Trends to see how often people search for a keyword. The scorecard phase Once you have a vetted selection of names, you can go down each of the criteria and score the name from 0–10. Then tally the numbers and see which of the names is the strongest overall. Source: Example created by the author 5. Bring the name to life and test it Now it’s time to bring our names to life by exploring them through creative elements. This might include mocking them up in logos, creating sample labels, merchandise, or websites. Note: If you lack the resources to bring these names to life right now, you can test only names with customers — but be wary that creative elements can radically change perceptions of a name. Narrow down your list using the previous step to your top five choices. Use creative mockups to bring your elements to life. Use a low-cost consumer survey like SurveyMonkey, Amazon MTurk or Google Consumer Surveys to get your names in front of as many of your potential customers as possible. Use this feedback as data to inform your final name choice. Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash The bottom line “Determine who you are and what your brand is, and what you’re not. The rest of it is just a lot of noise.” — Geoffrey Zakarian A company’s name is its face to the world. People will learn from it, judge it, and use it as a shortcut to understanding your brand. But no matter how perfect, a name can’t save a bad business. And it won’t sink an amazing one. At the end of the day, your business’ name must reflect your brand and its values. Otherwise, as Geoffrey Zakarian says in the quote above, it will just be “a lot of noise.”

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-come-up-with-a-name-for-your-new-business-41114201eed4

['Jennifer Clinehens']

2019-09-03 13:05:41.897000+00:00

['Branding', 'Marketing', 'Business', 'Creativity', 'Startup']