Datasets:

Kamaljp

/

medium_articles

like 1

Set Up Your Real Time Chat App On Amazon EC2 With Docker and FeathersJS

Introduction Amazon AWS is a service where you can borrow a machine (sometimes for free) to do whatever you want. We are going to learn how to set up a server to run a real time Chat App with FeathersJS. FeathersJS is an open source REST and real time API framework.We will need to set up a database and Feathers. We will launch those 2 parts on your Amazon AWS service. This is a simple tutorial, where we will learn how to run your real time app on your Amazon AWS. Connect to Amazon Web Service, and create an account, this is maybe the most time consuming task! Create a free AWS EC2 instance and SSH Connect to your Amazon AWS profile Select menu -> products -> compute -> Amazon EC2 -> get started with Amazon EC 2 (It is completely free) Click on EC2 Dashboard on the left and then launch instance Select Ubuntu server and choose the Free Tier Eligible T2.micro, then click on Next until you reach the security step We need 2 network rules, the ssh rule on port 22, source custom and the custom tcp, port range 3000, source anywhere, then launch your instance ! This step is important to reveal the port 3000 to the world on tcp, and the port 22 on ssh. This step is extremely important to connect to your EC2 machine ! Choose to create a new key pair, name your key pair webApp, and download it, then view instance. Congratulations, you have launched your Amazon AWS instance. The next step is to try to connect to this instance. This step is for linux / mac users, if you have a windows, please follow this link. Create a directory called webApp, and put the webApp.pem in it (if you are a mac user, you may have downloaded a webApp.pem.txt, rename it webApp.pem), navigate inside this directory using bash, then run : > chmod 400 webApp.pem to modify the rights on the key. > ssh -i “webApp.pem” ubuntu@name_of_your_ubuntu_instance You can find the right command by connecting to the Amazon AWS website, and click on the connect button. A pop-up will appear with the right ssh command. For me for instance, it is going to be : > ssh -i "webApp.pem" ubuntu@ec2-54-186-155-245.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com Congratulations, most of the dirty work is done by now ! The aim is to be pretty simple, and help you set up your machine. Install Docker Now, we need to install Docker on your ec2 machine. Docker runs “kind of” virtual machine which are called images, but are way lighter than virtual machines. Docker will allow you to run all the bricks of your app with a simple command line ! The good thing about Docker is that it encapsulates all the software you may need. This is precisely what we want to do when we run an app, we wrap the different components of our architecture in containers. To install docker, you can type on your ec2 terminal the following commands : > curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add - > sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" > sudo apt-get update > apt-cache policy docker-ce > sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce > sudo systemctl status docker The last command is to make sure that docker is installed. Install Feathers, Get And Launch The Chat App To install Feathers, and download the app, we will simply pull a Docker image. That is where the magic resides. There is already a Docker image with Feathers installed and the real time chat app coded. We will use this ready to use image, and deploy it to amazon. You can then quit your shell, and the AWS instance will still be running your app ! Let’s try. Run the following command : > sudo docker pull kevbac/feathers-chat Now we need to create a folder and bind it to the docker container. For instance, navigate to your webapp folder and run : > sudo docker run -itd -p 3000:8080 -v ~/webapp:/home --name feathersChatApp kevbac/feathers-chat bash -c "npm start" You can notice that the folder is empty, but the app is running! You can copy the content of the docker container to your host machine with this command: > sudo docker cp feathersChatApp:/usr/src/app . We now run in a detached mode “npm start”, you can use “yarn start” as well. This means that in the background, we have a process keeping our chat app alive! We can now access to our EC2 Amazon machine through HTTP. Give it a try, copy the public DNS to your browser and add the port :3000 in the end. For me it looks like this : http://ec2-54-187-133-189.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:3000/ You should have the same picture as this one. Now you can chat with your friends or build a code on top of this “boilerplate”, manage or change the database, etc… You can signup, login, and test your real time chat app by creating two accounts and exchange messages. Now Close Your Terminal And Enjoy Your App! Next steps for the best worflow in dev mode Create the same project in your local machine. Push this project to github. Develop locally, and deploy by asking your ec2 machine to pull your github repository. Write a Dockerfile and a Makefile to manage your builds / deployments in one command line ! Enjoy agility with an environment iso-staging where you can deploy in one command line. Conclusion Today you learned to deploy a real time application to Amazon. Real time is easy to set up with FeathersJS. Docker can help you encapsulate all FeathersJS environment and push it to Amazon. Docker can even help you launch your application on Amazon and restart it when it crashes, but it is not a production ready environment. You can now start coding and enriching your real time application and deploy it to the cloud. In the next articles, we will deploy deep learning / big data applications. Don’t hesitate to follow me to get notified when the next article comes out! More links

https://medium.com/sicara/https-medium-com-redaboumahdi-amazon-aws-real-time-chat-app-simple-tutorial-with-docker-1dbbbbb9b4db

['Reda Boumahdi']

2018-04-12 15:47:23.364000+00:00

['Feathersjs', 'Development', 'Data Engineering', 'AWS', 'Docker']

7 Things Highly Productive People Don’t Do

7 Things Highly Productive People Don’t Do They understand that time is limited. Photo by Toni Koraza on Unsplash You can travel the world, write books, start businesses, and retire by the time you’re 35. People that run 10 companies from a Yacht in the Mediterranean are real. The good news is that you can be one of those founders with 10 companies and more free time than a toddler. The ideas and concepts are easy to understand. I’ve published 300+stories, wrote a novel, traveled 6 months this year, started a Medium publication and a digital agency in London, and lost 20 pounds while never having to lose a single second from my social life. However, most people will never dare to take control of their time. Focus on getting the right stuff done to achieve more in less time. 1. Highly productive people don’t create unnecessary conflict. I’d rather wash the dishes myself every day than have to discuss who’s house chore it’s supposed to be that day. Taking 10 minutes out of your day to avoid an unnecessary conflict feels good and keeps your mind focused on what’s important. Trust me, dishes are everything but important. And cleaning can be quite therapeutic. I’ve cut down on friction at home by simply taking the whole task for myself. Mutual respect is essential for any co-living and co-working environment, but sometimes picking your battles can free more mental bandwidth for what is important to you. And the dishes are rarely that important. 2. Highly productive people don’t fall out of the blue on every task. My writing routine jumped to another level when I started annotating my plans and images. You can create mental maps and timestamps about any of your plans and tasks. With free tools like Good Annotations, you can simply snap your screen and add text to it for later use. Also, design your workflow, how-to images, and product templates with simple annotation tools. Good annotation skills made a difference between writing a single article and writing two in the same time-frame. 3. Highly productive people don’t tease themselves with things they might regret later. Know yourself. Are you one of those all-in addictive personalities, like most people? My life changed when I just stopped trying to self-contain myself around personal vices. I know I can’t just smoke socially, and that trying to smoke only a few cigarettes a week leads to eventually buying a pack every day. I don’t entertain myself with only one beer because I know that it might lead to a wild party and a hangover the next day. Know yourself, and don’t push the wrong buttons when you’re trying to stay productive. 4. Highly productive people don’t indulge in random distractions. I don’t entertain myself with only 10min of YouTube in the middle of my workflow. I know YouTube binge will probably take an hour, and I’ll feel frustrated with myself later on. Focus on the task at hand until you reach the flow-state. When you’re chasing the next task just for the sake of getting it out, it is a telltale sign that you’re in the flow-state. Your work becomes self-sustaining, and you want it only for itself. Who you’re working for and why you’re doing it is not as important as getting it done. 5. Highly productive people don’t create unattainable goals in short time frames. Instead, develop long-term systems and chase short-term goals. My shift from working for a boss to being a self-sustaining entrepreneur comes from systems and not goals. I decided to write every day and publish every day. I wrote 15min every morning until I had a 300-page novel in my hands. I study languages daily with 15min tasks and can communicate in 5 languages, and speak two fluently. 6. Highly productive people don’t overstuff their schedule. How many nights did you go to bed with the plans to change the world the next morning? I did that most of my student days. Some something happens within your brain right before you fall to sleep. The doors of immense creativity open, everything seems possible, and you suddenly know how to fix everything. My plans fell short from the reality of the next day. I was still the same person, and now I felt unaccomplished because of all these unrealistic ideas I had planned for the day. Motivation plays a key role in staying productive, and having a real to-do list is essential to win the day. 7. Highly productive people forgive themselves when they fail. Dwelling on your mistakes and bathing in self-pity is the surefire way not to accomplish anything for the day. Your life is full of bad and good karma, and you can choose what you focus on. Focusing on salvaging, damage-control, and proactive approach has helped me overcome the worst days. I know I can’t perform at my best and realize all my plans exactly how I imagine them in my head. And that is fine. Forgive yourself. You can always make more money, but you can’t ever get the time back. Highly productive people understand that time is the only commodity that is limited for everyone. You’re getting more of your life for yourself by staying productive and using more time within your hours. I’m buying time now. Once you run out of time, you can’t ever get it back.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/7-things-highly-productive-people-dont-do-de769608ef15

['Toni Koraza']

2020-10-15 22:07:38.061000+00:00

['Writing', 'Time Management', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Entrepreneurship']

When Should You Quit?

Quitting has a negative association. We describe it as giving up, being non-committal, or lacking perseverance. When someone quits, it’s easy to assume that the person simply didn’t give it their all. To be sure, quitting prematurely happens too often. Whenever you try something, you’re going to have difficulties. You’re going to face obstacles. You’re going to battle doubts swimming in your head. Quitting may not be the best choice. But other times, it doesn’t make sense to keep going. What if you attempt something, but never see any progress? What if you continue down a route, but just don’t feel passionate about where you’re headed? How do you know when it’s time to buckle down, and when to let go? Two Friends With a Shared Dream In 1973 on Long Island, two seventh grade boys met in gym class and became friends. Over the years, their friendship continued until twelfth grade rolled around. Then, it was time for the two to go their separate ways for college. Ben Cohen went off to Colgate University and then spent the following summer working at an ice cream truck. In his second year, he dropped out and moved back to Long Island, where he worked menial jobs while attending jewelry and pottery courses at various universities. Before the decade was over, he worked as a cashier, a deliverer, a floor cleaner, a taxi driver, a guard, and an assistant superintendent. Jerry Greenfield, on the other hand, was a diligent student. After high school, he chose to study pre-med at Oberlin College. As a side job, he scooped ice cream for students at the cafeteria. After graduation, Greenfield applied to medical school and was rejected twice. He then moved back to New York, where he shared an apartment with Cohen while working as a lab technician. For the third and final time, he applied to medical school. After his rejection, he moved to North Carolina to continue as a lab technician. A couple years later, he decided to move up to Saratoga Springs, New York to room with Cohen again. This time, they considered doing something together. Both of them had always wanted to run a business. So they turned to ice cream. After spending five dollars on an ice-cream making correspondence course (they split the tuition), and a $12,000 investment, they opened shop. The Question At the Back of Our Minds Ben & Jerry’s was a success. From that single shop in Burlington, Vermont, they’ve since expanded across the world. But how did they know that opening an ice cream shop was the right decision to make? How did they know to stick with it? The answer: By quitting numerous things beforehand. Now, that may sound overly simplistic. It sounds as if they just knew when to quit, and when to keep going. But what is simple should never be confused with what is easy. Opening an ice cream shop with a correspondence course and start-up capital is simple enough. But knowing what they needed and didn’t need to focus on wasn’t. While they started their business venture, there were other options in their lives — options where they said “no”. Whenever we start something, there’s always that question at the back of our minds: Should we keep going? For instance, if your business is suffering losses, you may be at a crossroads on whether or not to call it a day. If you keep applying to grad school and get rejected, you start to second-guess your qualifications. If you fall behind people who started learning a skill at the same time, you wonder whether your talent lies somewhere else. How to Know When It’s Time to Quit If you’re not sure whether to keep going or pursue something else, consider these points. Do any of them resonate with you? 1. You don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel When you don’t see things getting better, or you stagnate despite multiple approaches, it might be time to consider quitting. For instance, you keep running in the same arguments with somebody, or you always seem to get skipped over for promotion. An interesting part of the Ben & Jerry’s story is that Ben Cohen suffers from severe anosmia. He cannot taste or smell. To compensate for his lack of taste perception, he put large chunks into the ice cream to feel the texture. The large chunks have since become a trademark. It doesn’t seem to make sense to start a food business if you can’t smell. But Cohen managed to turn his weakness into an advantage, which shows one of the biggest differences between a temporary setback and a permanent one. A temporary setback involves hitting difficulties, but still having a pathway towards where you’re headed. Even if there are obstacles, they’re manageable and can be overcome. It may have helped that Cohen had a business partner who could taste and smell at his side. A permanent setback happens when you’re faced with an insurmountable problem. The probability of progressing further is low and possibly decreasing with time. Maybe you want to pursue a career with age or physical restrictions and your chances of succeeding go down with time. In Greenfield’s case, he was rejected from medical school three times. It’s hard to say whether he would have been accepted eventually. But in any case, he decided he’d had enough and moved on to other projects. 2. The pain is greater than the reward If doing something makes you feel physically or mentally ill, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate. Putting up with pain takes its toll in the long term to the point that it becomes unbearable. How do you know whether your pain comes from doing something you dislike, or because you work too hard on something you want? After all, author Margaret Atwood developed spinal neurosis from writing too much. She worked on her craft to the point that she became physically ill. I think the difference was that, for Atwood, the reward of writing was greater than its downside. She saw value in continuing to write, despite the injuries and discomforts. She was compelled to write, no matter what happened. But if you dread doing something or going somewhere, you have to assess the value in continuing. Is the reward worth the pain? After all, by staying in one endeavor, there’s an opportunity cost. Trade-offs are involved. We’re often hesitant to quit because of the “sunk cost fallacy”. The more time, energy, and resources we invest, the harder it becomes to walk away. This is why it makes sense to quickly test out an idea before spending too much on it. In Cohen and Greenfield’s case, they considered running a bagel shop, but learned from a bagel-making equipment supplier that the start-up costs were too high for their budget. 3. You stay because there’s nothing else out there There are many reasons why we stay in one place. Believing there are no other options is the wrong one. Still, it’s easy to close yourself to new ideas when you fall into a routine. After a while, daily habits become difficult to change. Experiencing routine brings both comfort for sameness and an increasing discomfort for the unfamiliar. As time drags on, it may seem like the only set of options available are the ones put in front of us. For instance, when a restaurant hands you a menu with five choices, how often do you ask the server about a sixth choice? We usually opt for what we see. It may not be what we want, but it’s convenient. This isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, we just need to pick something and get on with our day. But for more important choices, this scarcity mindset can lead to a dead end. It could mean staying in a job with no prospects, or pursuing an idea with little chance of taking off. We stay simply because we think that we have no choice. If you’ve been stuck in this frame of mind, experiencing something different can widen your perspective. For Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, moving to a new town and teaming up gave them the courage to pursue an idea. 4. Your current path doesn’t align with your values Before Ben & Jerry’s was created, Ben Cohen was a cab driver and potter with no one who wanted to buy his pottery. Jerry Greenfield was working with animal brains in a research lab. Neither of them was particularly interested in what they were doing. Once they got together, they brainstormed what they liked. It had always been a dream of theirs to start a business. Looking back, they realized that they wanted to incorporate their love of eating. The two also shared a good sense of humor. The first time they met, the coach yelled that if they didn’t run a mile in under seven minutes, they would have to keep trying. Cohen retorted, “Gee coach, if I don’t do it under seven minutes the first time, I’m certainly not going to do it in under seven minutes the second time!” With this in mind, they wanted their business to be fun and spirited. Later, the company became a platform for fair trade and environmental issues. There are many reasons why we decide to do something. Sometimes, social pressure influences what we choose to pursue. Other times, we fulfill others’ expectations by stepping into a pre-determined path. Possibly, Greenfield had applied to medical school out of expectation rather than desire. It takes time to find out what you value. You could value independence, creativity, or the outdoors, for instance. There are some values that you place higher than others. You may still be sorting out your values. But once you find them, like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, it becomes obvious. If Things Aren’t Working, Pivot It’s not an easy decision to drop something and start afresh. It’s even harder to know what to quit and how to go about it. Sometimes you don’t need to quit what you’re doing, but you need to quit your expectations. Ben & Jerry’s didn’t set out to become a global enterprise. They just started by selling ice cream out of a renovated gas station. Sometimes, you don’t need to quit your expectations, but you do need to quit your approach. It’s not impossible to start an ice cream company if you have anosmia, but you need to find a way around it. And other times, you might be headed in the wrong direction altogether. Like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, you won’t get things right from the beginning. You’ll have to make things up as you go along. But if you keep exploring and adjusting, quitting in one thing may be the necessary ingredient to succeeding in another. Melissa Chu writes about creating great work and successful habits at JumpstartYourDreamLife.com. You can grab the guide How to Get Anything You Want.

https://medium.com/swlh/when-should-you-quit-114c499c6dac

['Melissa Chu']

2020-02-03 15:04:08.700000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons']

The Cold Mountain Effect Explains Why Incredibly Talented People Struggle to Achieve Their Goals

The Cold Mountain Effect Explains Why Incredibly Talented People Struggle to Achieve Their Goals Don’t be too good for your own good. Photo by Trace Hudson from Pexels She was too smart. I mean that. “You should try reading Shakespeare in German,” she told me once. “It’s funny as hell. You’d get a kick out of it.” She paused. “I mean, you’ll have to learn German first…” This kind of thing would usually irritate me. But my friend wasn’t trying to show off. She was just being her brainiac self. She was the smartest girl I ever met. She knew four languages, not counting Old English — or the Japanese she picked up from living in Tokyo. Given all of this, you might wonder why it took her almost ten years to finish her PhD, more than twice as long as her friends. I told you. She was too smart. My friend didn’t struggle with the usual problems. She didn’t hate her job. She didn’t procrastinate. Over the years, she wrote hundreds of pages for her dissertation. She loved spending all day (and night) in the library. She wasn’t shy. She was downright charming. You could go out for coffee with her and come back feeling like a different person. She made everyone around her smarter. She didn’t have problems with confidence, or getting dates. Somehow she managed to live a full life, just stitching together gigs and living that photogenic minimalist lifestyle. She eventually found someone who appreciated her brains, along with everything else she had to offer. She just couldn’t finish her dissertation. Some people are too good for their own good. My friend isn’t the only incredibly talented person who took an extra long time to accomplish something. Remember the novel Cold Mountain? It made history in 1997 with a 61-week run on the New York Times best-seller list, moving 3 million copies. Based on its success, Charles Frazier got an $8 million deal for his second book, with nothing more than a 1-page proposal. Cold Mountain swept the award scene that year, and went on to become a hit film that earned seven Academy Award nominations. Sometimes it takes an intervention. You probably don’t know that Frazier spent almost a decade working on Cold Mountain. According to lore, he couldn’t stop. One of his friends finally snuck an unfinished copy of the manuscript to a literary agent, who signed Frazier on the spot. That’s the only reason anyone knows anything about Charles Frazier. It’s hard to imagine how long he would’ve kept revising it. Frazier didn’t lack confidence. It would be easy to say Frazier just didn’t have confidence in his work, or that he suffered from imposter syndrome. But that doesn’t explain everything. If Charles Frazier lacked confidence, he wouldn’t have quit his job as an English teacher to finish working on the book. He had to believe in it on some level. Frazier’s problem was that he was just too good at what he did. He loved doing it too much. It’s a strange problem to think about, but not as rare as you think. We all know someone who has the same issue. There’s a chance you are that person. And if you’re not, there’s even better news: There’s absolutely no reason to be jealous. The Cold Mountain Effect explains what we mistake as perfectionism. You’ve probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which explains why incompetent people think they’re so smart. It’s where we get that saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The Cold Mountain Effect explains the opposite. Someone can know too much. They can be too talented. They’ll turn any project into an epic journey through the Himalayas. They don’t get tired of working. They don’t want to see the end. They’re not even perfectionists. They just love their work too much. Beware of The Cold Mountain Effect. You don’t want to be like Charles Frazier. It’s a fun story. Most of us look at his career with a mix of awe and envy. But here’s the thing. You probably don’t have a friend who’s going to conduct a secret operation to show your unfinished project to their literary agent, or some angel investor. We have to advocate for ourselves. For every Charles Frazier, there’s hundreds of incredibly talented people who never learn how to finish their work and leave it alone. They never know when to say, “It’s good enough.” They wait for someone else to tell them. You have to climb down from Cold Mountain. Anyone can get stuck on Cold Mountain. We can turn our goals into an endless climb. The question is, why? We’re perfectly capable of accomplishing what we want. We’ve even done it. We’ve finished the ascent. But we refuse to plant the flag. We stay just below the summit, because we don’t want to climb down. It feels good to be close to your goals. Almost done feels better than actually done. We see the top. Instead of pushing our way there, we linger. Talented people fear success more than failure. Almost nobody’s afraid of failure anymore. We’ve seen enough ads. We’ve read enough articles about it. Failure is old news. Success, that’s the scary part. Most of us don’t have the first clue what to do when we achieve something. Accomplishing goals usually doesn’t bring the euphoria we expect. If it does, the sensation never lasts too long. It leads to more pressure and expectations. After extraordinary success, some people even sink into an abyss of depression. They start abusing drugs and alcohol. They just don’t know what else to do with themselves. They chase the high they thought their enormous success would bring them. There’s no reason to fear enormous success. Every few months you see a story about some dude who sells his company for billions of dollars. Instead of enjoying it, he falls into an existential crisis. We’ve seen the same story with everyone from famous authors to word-class athletes and musicians. That fate scares incredibly talented people more than anything, even if they don’t know it. But it shouldn’t. Our odds of enjoying that level of success are so small, it’s not worth the worry. It’s way more likely that we’ll spend a lifetime never accomplishing our first big goals, even though we could. There’s no reason to fear a thud, either. Incredibly talented people fear one thing even more than enormous success that puts more pressure on them. They’re afraid of the thud. A thud isn’t a failure. A thud is a success that doesn’t live up to your expectations by any measure. It doesn’t bring the high. It doesn’t bring the money or attention you craved, either. When someone thuds, their book or album or startup just does pretty well. Incredibly talented people are secretly terrified of this, too. They think if they sink an enormous amount of time and energy into something and it doesn’t pay off with early retirement or a Nobel Prize, then their life is over, and they’ll never make anything again. This is wrong, too. You can’t live at the top of Cold Mountain. When you finish something, you have to start something else. Or you have to take a break and figure out what’s next. That’s often the hardest part for smart, talented people. They don’t like hangovers that follow achievement. They die by comparing themselves to their own potential. They try to outdo themselves. Think of it this way: They try to write Cold Mountain, every single time. The solution is to stop caring so much. The most satisfied and emotionally stable artists and content creators don’t spend years sweating over a single piece of work, even if they pretend that it’s what they’d rather be doing. After Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier went on to publish three more books. None of them did as well as his first. It doesn’t matter. You might even say it’s impossible to top that kind of success. What matters is that he learned how to put his work out there, and stopped relying on people to steal his work. Don’t be too good for your own good. My friend eventually let go of her dissertation. She defended a few years ago, well after most of her friends had finished and gotten tenure-track jobs, many of which she was overqualified for. She’d written almost a thousand pages, and hundreds of footnotes. Deciding what to submit became a project of its own. Now she’s married with a kid, and a decent job. She’s still too smart and talented for her own good, but she doesn’t let that get in her way anymore. Neither should you. When you’re incredibly smart and talented, you have a different struggle. You have to let yourself stop when the work feels okay. Because your version of okay is mind-blowing.

https://medium.com/curious/the-cold-mountain-effect-explains-why-incredibly-talented-people-struggle-to-achieve-their-goals-2935b2af79cc

['Jessica Wildfire']

2020-10-15 06:46:12.160000+00:00

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

Writer’s Bling Block: How Your First Recognition Can Kill Your Writing

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash With the exception of the great composers, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, an artist’s talent is not often immediately seen. They have to start from the ground up — no, the basement. They have to pound the pavement whether they be a painter, singer, dancer, actor, or in this case, a writer. We’ve all been there, the burgeoning excitement as you open an envelope, hoping that maybe, just maybe there is an acceptance rather than a rejection slip inside. Unless you’re like Stephen King who posted such slips all over his writing wall — you, the writers who are reading this, are no doubt familiar with that disappointment. But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about the paralyzing pressure that takes over after the sea of disappointment gives way to the one pearl of hope: An acceptance letter, perhaps accompanied by a fat wad of cash depending on where you publish. Life is good! You, the amazing connoisseur of the pen and keyboard, have finally achieved the impossible! You have been paid for your writing! If Johnny Depp proposed to you on top of the London Eye, it wouldn’t even compare to how self-satisfied you are now! You spit out words, and somebody paid for them! You are a Queen, a King, a demigod of scribes! You are amazing! You are on your way! You are — now under 10,000 metric tons of pressure to write something just as good, immediately. You start off being generous to yourself, that’s how the deterioration begins. “I feel like writing about this, and if these people liked that one piece, they ought to like this one.” Or you can sometimes be a victim of the cocky approach. “That last piece flowed so easily. I can do it again whenever I want. I’ve got some money put away now — I can rest and maybe go watch some Netflix.” You do watch Netflix, but you can’t seem to relax as the newly published jitters are vibrating in your veins like a thousand bees. That paycheck is burning a hole in your pocket, but no, you have to save it. Maybe you just got lucky. You don’t know where your next big hit is coming from. You tear yourself away from your celebratory cookie dough and The Walking Dead, envisioning your career crawling toward you, lifeless and taunting like one of the many zombies on screen. You can’t stand it anymore. This check is not a guarantee. You must keep writing to ensure you’re not a fluke. Again, your generosity continues to be aimed towards yourself. You write what you want to write, and what you are passionate about. You publish one after the other, earning meager amounts, but at least it’s something. There is a tick in the back of your brain, like the annoying crocodile from Peter Pan: “What if that was it? What if that was luck?” Immediately you toss out your passion projects, convinced that nobody is going to go for them, as you analyze statistics, and what genre makes your voice strongest. Forget what you’re feeling passionate about, the things you are passionate about right now are making a name for yourself, not to mention money. The demographics become more and more confusing as you try and think of what is trending and relatable — your personal take on current events. Be snarky. Be truthful. Be funny. Be funnier. You pander to what you believe the masses want, with no success, barely having enough to take care of your Disney + addiction — ahem, subscription. Without knowing it, you’ve turned yourself into an Idea devoid hack. You don’t know what to write. When you do write, barely anyone gives a crap. You don’t even give a crap. The subject matter no longer matters — just the voracious drive of sustainability. The need for recognition and recompense chokes out creativity. If any of the above relates to you, I’m going to give you a word of advice that is going to make every little ambitious bone in your body scream in terror. Take a break. “But if I take a break, how will I earn — ” Stop right there. You’re missing the point. Almost anybody who writes doesn’t write with the intention of becoming the next Nora Roberts or J. K. Rowling. They write for enjoyment. They write for release. And then they realize they’re good at it and that it might help somebody else too. If you get caught up in the publishing aspect of it, oftentimes you will lose the very thing that made you publishable in the first place. Be true to your writing and be patient. Good prompts come to those who wait.

https://medium.com/swlh/writers-bling-block-how-your-first-recognition-can-kill-your-writing-5fe705074ec3

['Freya Galvin-Green']

2019-11-21 15:58:38.625000+00:00

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

The 3 Most Important Things I Know About Consumers I Learned From Bartending

My day job is in digital marketing. By night, I bartend. And it’s kind of remarkable how consistent the two are — mostly because: People are people. 1. It’s never really about the product People don’t drink because they need alcohol. People drink to socialize, to kill time, to have fun, to fit in, to numb their existential crisis. They drink to feel something — or stop feeling something. (This is true even for people who make alcohol for a living — some of my area’s local brewery and distillery owners sometimes pop into the bar on their nights off, and even they drink simply to take a load off, not for the drink itself. Everyone does.) Conversely, my previous business was in women’s clothing. Not a single one of my customers actually and truly needed another dress. They were all solving for some other problem — to feel important, to feel beautiful, to feel special, to feel more comfortable or confident in her skin, to feel younger or more sophisticated or whatever else. This was the case even when I worked with other women in the industry, who lived and breathed clothing — as products — every day. When it came time to dress themselves, they were the same as all of us. It’s never about the clothes — the clothes are simply a means to an ends, and solving for other, bigger problems. It’s the same with any product. Unless you are selling electricity or heat or the absolute most basic of food and clothing to someone in dire straits, you are never, ever selling a product. And the need is never what it seems. Understanding these needs goes a long way. You almost never want to speak or market directly in terms of these needs, because it freaks people out and breaks the “magic” of what they’re doing, but understanding the deeper motivations goes a long way in building rapport. 2. People want to be guided People don’t want to do the heavy lifting of decision-making. Very rarely do customers come to the table knowing exactly what they want — and if they do, it’s either because (a) they’ve built experience in the subject matter or, more likely, (b) already received input from some other source ahead of time (i.e., “my friend told me…” or “I heard…”) Outside of this, most people want guidance. a. People want to know your expertise “What do you recommend?” This is by far the number one question I get asked — as both a bartender and in my day job in digital marketing. People know that this is your domain. They know you see countless exchanges just like this one every single day. They trust your expertise. And, most importantly, they trust this more than they want to entrust themselves with the responsibility of deciding. To be honest, this question can be a bit frustrating at the bar, mostly because it’s usually asked cold—i.e., the first thing the customer says to you, with no further context. So I always counter, “what do you like?” Because we gotta start somewhere, people — a whiskey and a pina colada are very different drinks, and I would never recommend one to the other’s crowd. At the day job, it’s easier — because (a) you almost always have some context — you at least know what their business does before they ask this — and (b) when it comes down to it, there are infinitely fewer options. The power is really in the execution. But either way, people are always looking for your recommendation. b. People want to know what everyone else is doing “What do others do?” Again, one of the most common questions I hear at both the bar and at my day job. I’d estimate the most popular drink at the bar accounts for 30–50% of the cocktails we pour. And almost everyone who orders it does so because they heard it was the most popular. The funny thing about this is that it’s circular and self-fulfilling. The “most popular” has a good chance of staying the most popular, because the minute people hear this, they want to have it, too. Of course, for those paying attention at home: this also means you can “create” a “most popular” item simply by telling people that it’s the most popular. This is sometimes the truth behind “featured products” lists. Social proof is a powerful thing. And with great power comes great responsibility. 3. Consistency vs. Novelty Consistency On the one hand, people love consistency. They want to believe that they are consistent — and will often continue historical behavior in order to demonstrate this — and they want consistency in their environments. They want to understand what they’re getting into. You can pretty much always tell when it’s someone’s first time in the bar, because they’ve always got a look on their face like they’ve never been out in public before and they smell dog poop. They don’t hear the bartenders’ greeting. They don’t know where to sit. They look at the menu like they can’t read and they glaze over looking at the wall of booze and beer. They’re lost, they’re disoriented, and they need foothold. This is probably how people feel when they first interact with a brand online — each time acting as though they’ve never used the internet before. And a look on their face like it smells like dog poop. Customers want rapport with you. And themselves. Regulars are confident; secure; happy. They walk in and they know where they want to sit. They know where the bathroom is. They know your name. And most importantly, they know what they want to order — even if it’s different than last time. Because their drink is an extension of their personality, mood, or needs, and it’s important to them that the two are consistent; that one serves and satisfies the other. And that you’ll get them there. Novelty If you put something in front of people, they will engage with it. I was recently working from a (different) bar while on a business trip (for the day job), having a beer and minding my own. It was mid-afternoon, so the place was pretty empty. But it was a knock-off of one of those big-box restaurants, this one “Caribbean” themed, so the bartender was making mixed drinks. I’m not a fan of mixed drinks. And I’m definitely not a fan of free sample (srsly — don’t make it weird.) But I’ll be damned if when she set a few ounces of the extra from her most recent concoction down in front of me, I didn’t down that white, syrup mystery like I’d ordered it. People love new shit. I definitely get this question — “what’s new?” — a lot more in my day job. Clients always want to know what new functionality we offer that we didn’t last time we all met — and, more specifically: “Can you give me a taste of what others’ are ordering?” “What else you guys making?” “What am I missing out on?” And it trickles right down to their customers, who have come to expect that each time they hit your site, there will be something new. That’s consistent and the same. People love new. They love novelty. Free Shit, Full Prices, Rapport and Reciprocation Now’s as good a time as any to include a note about “free shit.” People love free shit. They love beer samples. They love giveaways. They love discounts. When companies — and bartenders — give little shit away, it gets people engaged, and it inspires them to come back and spend, through the power of reciprocity. They feel like you guys really had something special. The caveat, however, is that it has to seem targeted, special, and unexpected. If customers know that you’re giving everyone a sample of beer — or 10% off — the magic is broken. They’re definitely still going to reciprocate — but it’s going to be in like-kind. They’re going to treat you as a source for discounts. If you want this, awesome — seems like it’s working fine for Costco. But if you don’t want this, tread lightly. Build the relationship instead — or alongside. There’s a little local deli two blocks away from our office, and a group of us go there for lunch almost every day. They make good sandwiches, the prices are good, and the employees always remember us — and our orders. I had heard that they had “get a free sandwich on us!” cards floating around — at least one of my colleagues had received one — but they don’t hand them out like candy. They don’t shove them in your face as you walk by on the sidewalk; they aren’t laying around on the counter. They are given person to person, probably with first names used, and unexpectedly. And when I finally got one, on probably my 100th visit, it was simply icing on the cake — an almost superfluous acknowledgement — and not something I was grabby for. People want to like you And they want you to like them. And perhaps most importantly, they want others to like them. And they want to like themselves. The closer you help them get to all of these goals, the closer you are to your goals as well.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-3-most-important-things-i-know-about-consumers-i-learned-from-bartending-6a5f36829b

['Kris Gage']

2017-11-11 15:57:39.755000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Psychology', 'Digital Marketing']

Light on Serotonin, Heavy on Creativity

Day 86. I’ve been unemployed for 16 days. I’m upset and frustrated. I want to go out to my favorite restaurant with my friends, order one of their on-tap cocktails and some ricotta doughnuts and stay until the waitress that somehow always manages to serve us has to remind us they are closed. I try watching Designated Survivor. I want a political show but I need a break from The West Wing so I try Keifer Sutherland and Kal Penn but suddenly I’m weeping and can’t place why (this seems to be happening a lot). I scroll through Netflix and then there it is. Twister. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve watched the movie, I’m always pleasantly surprised to recall that Cary Elwes is in it and by the end my knees are curled up near my chest and I’m yelling at the screen for Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to get their act together and work out their marriage and get Dorothy set up in time and goddamnit, run!. There is adrenaline and desperation and a deep ache to see things turn out alright. At least I’m not crying.

https://medium.com/inspired-writer/light-on-serotonin-heavy-on-creativity-c3a52492de24

['Melissa Boles']

2020-07-25 23:02:15.425000+00:00

['Art', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Storytelling', 'Creativity']

Questions I Get as a Self-Published Writer

Questions I Get as a Self-Published Writer And encouragement for anyone starting or thinking about their publishing journey Photo by Da Kraplak on Unsplash I’ve officially been a full time writer for three months, and holy cow it’s been an amazing adventure so far. In that time, I’ve started, finished, and published six titles, set two more for pre-order, and finished two additional books. The material varies between short stories, nonfiction, novels, and series, but the end result is that I get another checkmark in my goal for 20 self-published books. In that time, I’ve built my writing community, reading community, and even extended my reach beyond to old friends and connections. I’ve had more people reach out to me in the last three months to check in than before. It’s been a great ride. I think the fun part is getting all the questions from people who have no clue what the writing or publishing process is like. Their genuine interest in it reminded me that these are some of the questions I had about the process when I was just starting out as a writer and learning the ropes. So, I gathered some of the best questions and answers to help not only those who are new to the process but encourage anyone who might be starting their publishing journey. What’s your book about? Which one? I could go on for hours and hours if there wasn’t a time limit to our conversation. Talking about writing is potentially my number two favorite thing about writing, after, of course, writing. With a series under my belt already, I can usually give a quick synopsis of that before diving into my new series. The great part about this question is that it forced me to actually create an elevator pitch for my book. I never queried to publishers or tried to get someone to buy my idea so I didn’t exactly have this sorted out. But this is potentially the most common question an author gets so it’s important to work on it. I cover genre, a rundown of theme, and then get super giddy if they ask more pointed questions about the idea. Why didn’t you want to get a publisher? Honestly, at one point I thought about it. My standalone book hits hard enough topics and sends a tough message to where I thought I should consider querying. But after careful consideration, I decided that I loved the freedom and ability to run my writing like a business. It fits my personality, authorpreneurship spirit, and, quite frankly, I love just writing and sending my work into the world on my own time. But you’re not a “real” writer… WTF? I write, and that makes me a writer. I publish, which makes me a published writer. I write books, which makes me a novel writer. Just because I don’t go the “traditional” route doesn’t mean I’m no less of a writer. I’m also not better, but I love that I can be in control of my work. I’m stubborn so I prefer being in control of every portion of the writing and publishing process. I rely on myself alone for success, which is just how I like it. So, you just write? I mean, I write, yes. But I also run my publishing like a business. I market, I advertise, I write, I read, I write again, I design covers, and I do a million other things. I run every part of the business, and I do it constantly. I’m always looking for the resources to grow my business, get traction and eyes on my books, and make money. How do you do all of that during the day? An insane amount of planning, focus, and caffeine. I’ve transitioned to a Passion Planner (affl) to keep my schedule in order. I can track my word count, time block and make sure I’m staying focused but also giving myself breaks, and monitor my publication dates. I can run my social media schedule, know when a book needs to be written to hit a deadline, and celebrate wins with treats and look back on my productivity. I’m able to keep track of all my projects using this system. I know when I’m publishing nonfiction too, so I make sure I have three or more articles prepared on Sunday for the week ahead. I know when I work best on each of my tasks so I can stay on task. Nonfiction can be written when there are more potential distractions so I keep those ideas for my weekend writing when my husband is busy around the house. Fiction is best written in the morning when the dog has settled down and my husband has left for work. Every weekday, I know I’m working on fiction at 9AM sharp. But in reality, you just sleep most of the day, scroll social media, and watch TV, right? No. Some days I take a break. Some days when I can’t seem to produce words, I focus on administrative tasks. Other days I’m writing well into my lunch break and even after my husband gets home from work. Some days require more work on marketing and design while others can be spent writing. There’s variation, but I’m stubborn, hard working, and run my writing like a business that I refuse to see fail. Because I refuse to fail. I will keep at it until my fingers bleed because this is my passion and I’m in love with it. Don’t you get burned out? There’s always a danger of burning out, especially because I am treating it like a business and I’m the only employee. I make sure to take healthy breaks, get exercise, drink tons of water, and focus on other things when I just can’t get the words to work. There’s a balance and it varies between every writer. I’m lucky enough to get work done during the week and take the weekends “off”. I minimize the amount of absolute requirements that must be done on the weekends, instead delegating lesser tasks like cover design, scheduling social media, and reading to my weekend hours. How can you keep producing work? How do you have so many ideas? Creativity and ideas favor the consistent. Every day, I do something related to my writing business (on vacations, I suffer and only think about writing). The more you stick with a habit, build a routine, and work on it every day, the easier it is to find ideas in everything. I have two more series ideas working in the back of my mind, growing and developing as I consider how things could play out. When I finish this current series, I’ll know which one is developed enough to pick up and make my next project. For nonfiction, I keep a growing list of headline ideas I can pull from when it’s time to write an article. I’m always prepared for what’s next, even when I’m in the middle of a big project. How many words do you write each day? Depends. Sometimes I get 2K really awesome words. Some days I can get over 10K (more rare now that we have a puppy). Other days I’m scraping for 300. Some days I need to focus more on administrative things and can only get a few hundred. Other days I need to focus on editing and can even negate my word counts. I understand that a 150 word day doesn’t necessarily mean failure (unless I totally wasted my time doing something else, which is rare). I wish I could write a book… Great! How can I help you? What questions do you have? Do you have an idea? Do you currently write daily? What about write, period? Where are you willing to sacrifice some time to get 100 words in during the day? What are you willing to cut from your schedule so you can sit in front of the keyboard? Are you willing to work for a long time on it to get that first draft done? What about the extra few months after the book is finished to edit and polish and prepare? This is usually when people stammer, and not just because I’m intense. Everyone loves the idea of “having written a book” but realize that there’s actually a lot of hard work to “write the book”. There are people who want to have a book but don’t want to actually do the work and there are people who are willing to power through the hard parts to get to the finish line. And that’s okay. Not everyone is going to write a book. The idea is nice, but those writers who are actually invested in the process are the ones who will actually put in the work. It’s like wanting to get a marathon medal without actually running the race — the people who train and actually run are the ones who will cross the finish line.

https://medium.com/the-winter-writer/questions-i-get-as-a-self-published-writer-73e4668a1a90

['Laura Winter']

2020-09-16 10:41:01.647000+00:00

['Books', 'Writing', 'Writers On Writing', 'Productivity', 'Writer']

5 Strategies To Accomplish Consistent Publishing During The Pandemic

Redefine Publishing Staying consistent during a pandemic is ridiculously hard to do. It can feel like a massive uphill battle to publish anything on a routine basis, but today’s conditions can seem herculean. The internet cycle of 2020 has been a constant barrage of increasingly bad news. Unemployment has skyrocketed to depression-era levels, there is a seemingly unending global virus wreaking havoc on society, and the news cycle is filled with enough negativity that even fluffy kittens can’t fix. With so much going on, it’s easy to give up on your publishing schedule and give in to the madness around you. It can be exhausting, and no one will blame you for wanting to take a break. However, your publication routine can survive if you’re willing to adopt a new perspective.

https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/5-strategies-to-accomplish-consistent-publishing-during-the-pandemic-810ada5ca0b9

['Dayon Cotton']

2020-11-26 13:02:16.777000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity']

Introduction

Introduction Hi, I’m wormwood. Author’s favorite glass The clouds have parted. Blinding at first, the glow is starting to soak into these rigid bones and draw me to the buzz of microphones. I have a voice — I swear it’s rising from the depths of my own personal hell, beware: I’m an introvert who’s been hurt, and I have no idea what it’s gonna share. A rich mine, bejeweled with a lifetime of untapped, untainted, dark inner-world; hilarious and about to be unfurled; my tongue the red carpet (so to speak). It will stumble and may sound meek for now — be patient. Soon…this weirdo will howl.

https://medium.com/no-crime-in-rhymin/introduction-fe94c0e69a5f

[]

2020-03-10 22:03:03.520000+00:00

['Poetry', 'Creativity', 'Mental Health', 'Self-awareness', 'Inspiration']

AI Essentials: Working with Matrices

Matrix Multiplication Matrix multiplication follows a slightly more verbose methodology than simple addition or subtraction. When multiplying matrices, each row of the previous matrix multiplies with each column of the next matrix. This will become clearer in the example to follow. One way to think of this process is that each row of the first matrix processes each column of the second matrix. Let’s firstly present two 2 x 2 matrices to multiply: To calculate the final matrix (that is currently empty) each row of the first matrix needs to multiply with every column of the second matrix. The resulting matrix is known as the dot product of the matrices being multiplied. Dot products are widely used in machine learning, with NumPy supplying their own dot function to leverage. This process is admittedly is extremely hard to visualise, so let’s break it down into stages. The first row and column process resembles the following: Notice that we’re starting with the first row of matrix 1, and the first column of matrix 2. The corresponding values are multiplied, with their products added together resulting in one dot product value. Since there are more columns to multiply, row 1 then multiples with the next column of matrix 2: Now row 1 of matrix 1 has processed all columns of matrix 2, we can repeat the whole process for row 2: And finally process the last column of matrix 2 with the currently active row of matrix 1: And this concludes the dot product process. We can now simplify the resulting matrix with its true values: This concludes the dot product process! However, there are some requirements in order for a multiplication to be valid. The above example multiplies two matrices of shape 2 x 2 for simplicity, but there are a couple of rules that one must be aware of when dealing with matrix multiplication that pertains to the shapes and ordering of the matrices being multiplied. Let’s briefly take a look at these requirements. The requirements of matrix multiplication Even though the size of the matrices being multiplied does not need to be the same, the inner numbers must match. This requirement is obviously always met in the case of square matrices, but when the dimensions are different, then the column count of matrix 1 must match the row count of matrix 2. The shape of the resulting matrix is also determined by the shapes of the multiplying matrices— their outer numbers to be exact. These two rules are summarised in the following multiplication: Outer values determine the resulting shape, and the inner values must be the same for the multiplication to be valid, or defined. If the inner values are not the same, the resulting matrix will be undefined. Because of these requirements, it is not possible to multiply a non-square matrix with itself! The result would be undefined. This would entail multiplying, for example, a 2 x 3 matrix with a 2 x 3 matrix, and the inner numbers here do not match. We could however do an element-wise multiplication, that will be mentioned further down. With multiplication, ordering also matters Unlike scaler products, the resulting matrix will differ depending on which way round the matrices are in your formula. In other words, matrix multiplication is not commutative. If we take the product of two regular numbers, it does not matter which way round they are multiplied. E.g: 6 x 4 = 24 A x B 4 x 6 = 24 B x A == Same result This is not the case with matrices. Re-ordering even the simplest of matrices yields a drastically different dot product: Dot product vs element-wise multiplication Another type of matrix multiplication is known as element-wise multiplication. This is where each index of matrix A is multiplied with matrix B. For this type of multiplication to be valid, both matrices must be the same shape. Element-wise operations are useful for adjusting a matrix in some way, such as normalising the elements with element-wise multiplication, or adjusting magnitude by increasing or decreasing all the elements uniformly. Did you notice? — matrix addition and subtraction are also element-wise operations. Working with scalers Matrices can also be manipulated using plain scaler numbers, with all the operations previously mentioned. This is a nice shortcut for manipulating every matrix element in the same way without having to define another matrix to achieve the same result — and works great in code. NumPy supports such operations out of the box: """ Scaler operations on matrices """ import numpy as np arr1 = np.array([[2, -3], [5, 9], [-4, -0]]) # adds 5 to each matrix element print(arr1 + 5) >>> [[ 7 2] [10 14] [ 1 5]] # subtracts 20 from each matrix element print(arr1 - 20) >>> [[-18 -23] [-15 -11] [-24 -20]] # multiplies each matrix element by 5 print(5 * arr1) >>> [[ 10 -15] [25 45] [-20 0]] Let’s explore some key interesting properties with matrix multiplication next. What about division? There is no such thing as division when working with matrices. You can add, subtract, and multiply matrices, but you cannot divide them. There are concepts that loosely resemble division such as inverse matrices — this will be covered further down.

https://rossbulat.medium.com/ai-essentials-working-with-matrices-2ceb9ca3bd1b

['Ross Bulat']

2020-12-11 15:37:36.336000+00:00

['Python', 'Neural Networks', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'AI']

Making AI Better by Making it Slower

The difference between beneficial and destructive AI may be whether making fast thinking faster has any utility for the user. A couple of months ago I left my job at Auth0 to join a defense and national security company founded by some friends of mine. It was a risky decision both because the company is new and because when one is working with the military, one is inevitably building technology that will either directly or indirectly kill people. It is an environment rich with ethical dilemmas and most technologists prefer to keep their hands clean by simply opting out of any involvement at all. There were lots of reasons why decided to take the risk, but the most relevant one to this blog post is that everyone in the tech community lately is talking about building “ethical” products and no one can really define how a software development process that produced ethical products is different from a process that produced normal products. Just “don’t be evil” may no longer be Google’s motto, but it is definitely still how Silicon Valley thinks about things. I’m not the kind of person that believes that outcomes are determined by the quality of the people. The best engineers sometimes build shitty technology together. Teams are not a sum of their parts. Simply assembling a collection of thoughtful people (and Rebellion has employed A LOT of lifelong pacifists) does not mean they will build ethical technology. But team are a sum of their interactions and interactions are government by formal and informal process. I am the type of person who likes designing effective process and I had by the time I finally accepted my friend’s offer come to believe that AI in defense is a when situation not an if situation. The opportunity for an outright ban has come and gone, these tools will enter the battle space and the impact of that will largely be determined by who participates in bringing them there. Escalation -vs- De-escalation Every month at work we have a standing organization wide meeting to discuss our ethics. In one early version of this meeting we decided that the distinction between offensive tools and defensive tools was not a useful one for exploring the impact of what we might build. The difference between defensive and offensive is really who’s holding the tool and what they are pointing it at. That’s not something easy to design software around. Instead we ended up focusing on the idea of escalating and de-escalating conflict. Responsible technology in the defense space is technology that helps people think deeper and more critically about the choices in front of them. Irresponsible technology encourages them to jump to conclusions or leaves them so far removed from the on the ground reality it dehumanizes the people who are negatively effected when the technology is deployed. But how does one design AI that de-escalates? Human in the Loop Ethical AI people love to talk about “Keeping the human in the loop.” In an earlier blog post I discussed this concept using the framework of System Safety, an existing scientific field that studies the counter-intuitive ways safety policies either benefit or sabotage safety outcomes. Human in the loop is an effective guiding principle when designing policy, but it is a little more difficult when designing technology because ALL technology redistributes how human labor is applied in a given process. When new technology is introduced to an existing task, some steps are automated away and other new steps become necessary. How does the product team determine when moving the human’s position in the process is taking them out of the loop or not? Type 1 -vs- Type 2 Thinking The answer may come from how human and computer thought combine and play off one another. One model of how human’s think popularized by the book Thinking Fast and Slow is called Type 1 -vs- Type 2. Type 1 is intuitive (fast) thinking. It’s low effort for humans. Instinctual, based mainly on pattern matching and how close a given piece of knowledge resembles another piece of historic knowledge. Type 2 is analytical (slow) thinking. Calculating, often statistical in nature. It’s high effort for humans and therefore needs to be budgeted appropriately, but often corrects mistakes made by Type 1 thinking. Funny enough, the early days of AI research documented something called Moravec’s Paradox which observes that computers have the complete opposite relationship to Type 1 and Type 2 thinking. For a computer Type 2 thinking is easy, Type 1 thinking is hard and resource intensive. Nearly all of machine learning and AI is Type 1 thinking. AI products therefore tend to focus on accelerating Type 1 thinking for human operators. But Type 1 thinking is already fast, and I’m beginning to suspect the line between beneficial AI products and the ones that create problems is asking how much utility the user really gets out of making fast thinking faster? Web developers understand the law of diminishing returns almost as well as economists. It’s what governs the development of Service Level Objectives. There is a point where simply making a website faster doesn’t really improve the user’s experience any, it just spends money. Similarly there is a point where making Type 1 thinking faster doesn’t actually offer the user any added benefit, but it does dramatically increase the odds of a critical error. If humans struggle with Type 2 and excel at Type 1 thinking, and computers struggle with Type 1 thinking and excel at Type 2, and good decision making involves using Type 2 thinking to error check Type 1 thinking….why are we building machines to do Type 1 thinking for us? Isn’t there much more utility from using computers to make slow thinking more resource efficient rather than making fast thinking faster? Problem Selection The more I explore the question of AI and ethics, the more I understand how critical problem selection is. The exact same technology can have dramatically different ramifications depending on how the problem it is solving is framed. Consider two scenarios: A police officer is trying to identify people in a photograph. AI isolates their faces and looks for matches in a facial recognition database. A police officer has seized a hard drive with thousands of files on it. AI searches the files and prioritizes them based on faces of significance that might be present in them. In the first scenario the computer attempts to do the Type 1 thinking for the human operator. Although some operators will examine the match carefully and critically to confirm the AI’s results, most will not. Most will do no thinking at all and simply assume that a match is a definite match. The second scenario unblocks the human from doing the Type 1 thinking. In real life, the backlog of digital forensic evidence to be processed is often years long. So long that much forensic evidence never gets looked at at all, the case just moves on without it. For all the power of modern computers this work still involves a lot of manual searching by a human operator. Using AI to increase the efficiency of the process, increases the critical thinking being done by the human in the loop, rather than replacing it. Even if some important files are missed you still get more than you would have without it. Here’s a non-hypothetical example: compare the notorious sentencing recommendation application COMPAS to a similar system called ESAS. On the surface, both technologies seem to solve the same problem: making recommendations on sentencing based on historical data. COMPAS attempts to distill lots of data down to simple conclusions that the user can disregard, but cannot dig into or challenge. It considers everything from your parent’s criminal history, to the lifestyles of your friends, to your answers to personality questions. ESAS, on the other hand, focuses on just the case information. It looks for similar cases and lets the user easily find and explore the context around the sentences that resulted. What made one case worth a long prison sentence and another case with the same charge a shorter one? COMPAS attempts to do the Type 1 thinking for the user and because both the algorithms and data used to create the recommendation are hidden, the Type 2 thinking that would check for Type 1 errors is blocked. Worse, COMPAS assigns a numerical value to their recommendations. Someone wasn’t just “high risk” they were high risk on a numerical scale. One of the things we know about Type 1 thinking is that it is susceptible to anchoring. Give someone a high number, and even if they think that high number is wrong, the number they replace it with will be higher than they otherwise would have estimated. Much has been made of the biases in the data that backs COMPAS, but in truth even if the data had been perfect COMPAS would still have created bad outcomes. It automates error prone Type 1 thinking, poisons the user’s judgment with an arbitrary anchoring value and prevents Type 2 thinking from spotting problems. Buried in COMPAS’s definition of the problem is also one monster of an unchallenged assumption: that a person at high risk of reoffending will be made less likely to reoffend by giving them a longer prison sentence. That the cause of reoffending is some character flaw that the prison system corrects. COMPAS does not consider that the relationship might actually be reversed: that people who spend more time in prison become disconnected from social support networks and are more likely to reoffend in order to survive. This is the danger of replacing Type 1 thinking done by humans with Type 1 thinking done by computers. Computers can calculate a correlation, but they cannot construct a narrative around it that turns that correlation into actionable insight. Therefore even the best algorithms need human beings to consider the context of their results. AI that removes that context lives or dies by the accuracy of its model. AI that removes that context over several layers of abstraction carves a large blast radius into the Earth when it goes wrong. On the other hand, AI that increases the speed and opportunities in which human beings can apply both Type 1 and Type 2 thinking fairs much better. Early trials with ESAS in Florida have shown that by matching a case to a range of comparable cases and allowing users to explore their context overall length of sentences were reduced, sometimes considerably. The ESAS team estimated that just five criminal cases saved the state of Florida $1 million in the daily costs of incarceration. Designing AI by Redistribution The narrative with advancements in technology is usually about what gets replaced, but technology doesn’t actually replace, it redistributes. The time, energy and money spent on one part of the process shifts to another part of the same process. Adding a computer to something might remove a human being performing a manual process, but replaces it with multiple human beings who build, deploy and maintain the computer doing the work. The impact and ultimate effectiveness of any product that uses AI, therefore, is determined not by which algorithms it uses, but how it redistributes human effort. Is it creating more opportunities for critical thinking or encouraging more action with less thought and discussion? Software engineers who build AI need to pay attention to computer human interaction more so than other programmers. AI that does Type 1 thinking for the user and blocks Type 2 thinking typically leads to disastrous outcomes. AI that increases the opportunities for Type 1 thinking and encourages the user to add the Type 2 error checking to the machine’s Type 1 thinking, tends to increase utility.

https://medium.com/software-safety/making-ai-better-by-making-it-slower-34e09ba9fcb9

['Marianne Bellotti']

2020-06-19 05:41:05.791000+00:00

['Software Development', 'Psychology', 'Programming', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence']

A Call for Great Stories: We’re Reimagining The Startup, Medium’s Largest Publication with +680K Followers

I’m excited to take on the role of Editor in Chief of The Startup, Medium’s largest publication (680K+ followers). Our tagline, “Build Something Awesome,” gets to the heart of our mission: to help readers get smarter at building their things; and to offer writers a platform to share their stories — of work, inspiration, and creativity. This year in Paris, after the mandatory quarantine was lifted, one of the first things I did was visit the Centre Pompidou, Paris’s modern art museum. The featured exhibition was a tribute to late artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whom I first discovered through their installation, The Gates, in New York City’s Central Park. I was a college student at the time and rode the subway downtown to experience what seemed like a unique moment in history. I remember feeling mesmerized as I watched the gates’ saffron fabric swaying gently in the midtown breeze. In Paris, the exhibition focused on the artists’ Pont Neuf project — when in 1985, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris’ oldest bridge, Pont Neuf, in shimmering, celestial gold fabric. The result was breathtaking. Lesser known, and what the exhibition revealed, was the years of meticulous planning and persistent convincing it took to realize it — nearly a decade’s worth. I left the Pompidou inspired, both by the beauty of the artists’ work and the underlying takeaway: Great things take time — and a lot of planning. Speaking of which, as we approach the seven-year mark since our launch, we’ve been doing a lot of planning for the future of The Startup. We’ve decided to reimagine our publication. Here’s why. The other day, I told a close friend about my new role at The Startup. After offering her congratulations, she asked, point-blank: Caitlin, what is The Startup? To me, The Startup should be a digital visit to a space for education and inspiration. As editor, I want to curate original and valuable insights from our contributors. I want readers to walk away inspired — and equipped with the tools to realize their own Pont Neuf. But more recently, we’ve come up against some challenges. The Startup has grown — fast. Having nearly 700k followers and a quarter of a million daily readers doesn’t just equal extensive readership. It also means that we get an incredibly high volume of submissions from Medium authors — according to Medium’s internal data team, the highest of any publication on their platform. The beauty of working with an innovative platform like Medium is that traditional publishing barriers are removed. Anyone (with a Medium account) can submit a story for consideration. But with that waived entry fee comes the challenge of sifting through all of those stories, and somewhere along the way, our mission got diluted. As EIC, I want to reaffirm our raison d’être. I want to reestablish our standards and in doing so, give authors better, clearer guidance to boost their chances of being published on The Startup. And, I want to cultivate a diversity of voices. And authors: Once you submit, we promise, we read and carefully consider every single story. With the Medium interface, we see your headline before we see your name. Our publication decisions are based on merit, not your existing portfolio. The benefit of this, and the excitement for us editors, is that we have the opportunity to offer a platform to new and emerging writers. And trust me: great writing shines instantly. So let’s start with our revamped editorial strategy. To pull back the curtain on our editorial strategy, I think it’s necessary to consider four questions. 1. Who are we? In short: The Startup isn’t just for tech entrepreneurs. Our readers and contributors include founders, creatives, designers, developers, marketers, freelancers, and writers. Some are 9–5 office professionals launching a side hustle; others have already founded a startup (or several); still, others are just at that nascent, daydreaming stage, taking the first step toward planning to build their thing. Regardless of where they are on their entrepreneurial path, The Startup should be a resource — because it’s never been easier to start a company, but it’s also never been harder to build something successfully. “It’s never been easier to start a company. It’s never been harder to build one.” — Naval Ravikant Whether they’re thinking of building an internet empire, launching an AI startup, or looking for sustainable productivity advice, our stories empower readers with insightful perspectives. 2. What do we cover? Big picture, our content falls into two categories. First, the “evergreen” topics. These include: Maker life: Entrepreneurship, creativity, freelancing, startups, investing, innovation, marketing, social media Culture today: leadership, diversity, inclusivity, climate change and sustainability. Technology: Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, VR/AR/MR, IoT, robotics, data science, machine learning and big data. Web dev and design: UX, UI, design, developing, programming, apps, software, hardware and SaaS. Second, stories relating to a monthly theme, which will be shared in our “call for stories” published at the outset of each month. This month, we’re interested in: the psychology of building your own thing. How does the entrepreneurial journey affect our state of mind? How does it impact our relationship with others? Is there new thinking on entrepreneurial guilt from taking time off? How does the “always-on” mindset affect our quality of life? Is your startup bleeding into your family time? (Note: please don’t send us a story that reads like a diary entry.) These are just a few examples of potential topics to explore. Most importantly, we want fresh, eye-opening insights. Send us stories that explore your experience with the psychology of building your own thing. 3. How can I be published? If you’re wondering how to increase your chances of becoming one of our writers, here, some tips for making your story shine when submitting to The Startup. Do the research — Not infrequently, we receive stories that include assertion after assertion with zero authoritative sources or research. Unless you’re Elon Musk, you’ll need something to hang your hat on. On second thought, we’d probably ask Musk for links to sources, too. Because even the best writers back their facts up with references — be it published research or expert opinion. Include links to sources that support the factual assertions in your writing. Don’t skimp on the intro — You know what they say: first impressions are everything. We receive a lot of submissions that begin with a couple of lines and quickly cut to: X tips for doing Y better. Instead of rushing, get creative with your introduction. Drop us into the action; paint a vivid picture of a real-life example; come up with an attention-grabbing way to introduce us to your story, be it a shocking research finding or a little-known statistic. Master the headline — We can help you tweak this part, but the stories that immediately grab our attention already have strong headlines and subheads. Consider the stories that draw you in — do their headlines sound like clickbait-y advertisements? (The Secret to This Productivity Hack Will Shock You!) Or, are they thoughtful, high-quality propositions that leave you deeply curious for more. (Productivity Is About Prioritizing, Not About Time Management). I’m guessing the latter. Don’t transplant ideas — Again, we allow and even encourage you to rely on other publications to support your facts. But we do not accept the transplanting of another writer’s ideas entirely. (Also, it violates Medium’s rules against plagiarism.) Simply rewording doesn’t cut the mustard, either. Read our publication — Your birth story might be very interesting (I’m a new mom! I love birth stories!) but that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for our publication. I can’t tell you how many submissions we get on topics that are completely unrelated to our publication. That, or a topic that’s already been covered (e.g., chances are, the story behind [insert big-name startup] has already been told). Take some time to browse our publication before sending us your story. Ask yourself: why? Why should the reader spend the time it takes (typically 5–10 minutes) to read your story? Will it add value to their lives? Will it entertain them? Could it change their way of thinking? It’s good practice to consider the “why” before you sit down to write anything. 4. How will The Startup support me, the writer? During the editing process, we’ll work with authors to make their stories even better. We’ll also regularly share guides and tips for getting published. Consider this the first of an ongoing series of stories from The Startup, aimed at improving our communication and providing you the tools to get your great stories heard. As an official Medium partner, The Startup will work to achieve an even higher rate of curation for our authors and distribute their stories to an even wider audience.

https://medium.com/swlh/a-call-for-great-stories-were-reimagining-the-startup-medium-s-largest-publication-with-680k-b06013ae1017

['The Startup']

2020-10-16 13:14:39.106000+00:00

['Writing', 'Creativity', 'Freelancing', 'Writing Tips', 'Startup']

A Simple Framework for Capturing and Organizing Your Blog Post Ideas

Several times a week, I run writing workshops. This morning one of my students mentioned that she wished she had some sort of a framework for capturing and organizing her blog post ideas. At first I thought she meant just making a list of them, but it turned out what she really wanted a was a framework — a way of quickly taking down the bones of blog post idea so that she doesn’t lose it, in a way that would make writing it later easier. Oh, I told her, I actually have one of those. My students were excited — to the point of taking me by surprise. And I was super excited, because I’ve always struggled with how to help my students who want to write more blog posts, but just aren’t. I realized all of a sudden that I was missing what the real problem was. They needed a way to wrap their heads around what they want to write so that they can A) keep track of their ideas as they get them and B) write them quickly and efficiently. The PSST Framework The PSST Framework is something I just do it without really thinking too much about it. A mentor told me once that’s the kind of thing that needs to be taught the most. As soon as you think something’s too basic to teach, you know you’re on to something that’s right in your wheelhouse. Because if it feels easy to you, then you’ve got a good enough handle on it to teach it to someone else. And trust me, there is always someone else who wants to know how to do what’s easy for you because it isn’t easy for them. So, I impromptu spent an hour teaching my PSST Framework to my students this morning. There are four parts. Once you get the hang of it, you can build a PSST Framework around any idea in a few minutes. Today, during our workshop, we organized a blog post for four different writers in an hour, so it took about fifteen minutes each and that included a lot of teaching and workshopping that you wouldn’t have if you were doing this on your own. Each of my students came away with an idea that was both well-documented and organized so that they’ll be able to easily write it when they’re ready. I can do this in five or ten minute with even a complicated idea. I don’t think it would take long for anyone to get to where they can do it as quickly. The four parts include: Premise, Story, Subheads, Takeaway. (Hence, PSST.) Let’s take a look at each one. Premise This is just a sentence that states your idea. I think about it as a working title. You want your working title, or premise, to be a sentence that you’ll understand when you come back to it even weeks later, when the idea isn’t in the forefront of your mind. In other words, don’t be clever here. You can rework the title later. This is a great exercise though, because your final title actually should be this clear and concise. Ask yourself this question: If I read this sentence to a friend, would they know what I was writing about, without any more information? Here’s an example of a premise that doesn’t really work: What kind of writer are you? That doesn’t really mean anything. I would have known just what I meant by it the day I came up with it and forgotten my intent entirely when I came back to it. Here’s a revised premise for the same post: How to figure out what kind of writing career you want to have and make a plan to make it happen. As far as post titles go, it’s too long. But if I read that to someone, they would know what I was talking about without any other information from me. And I’ll remember what I wanted to write, even weeks or months later if it comes to that. Story Every blog post should start with a story. I firmly believe that. So, the second part of the PSST Framework involves making a note to yourself about what story you’re going to tell. Your story should be personal and specifically related to your post. Think about it as an invitation to your reader into your story. It’s their assurance that you’re someone they can trust. And your story hooks them and keeps them reading. For the post I mentioned above, my story note was about a Facebook post that came across my feed that asked the question what kind of reader are you? and how that question had stuck with me all day. It’s a small story, but knew the post would run long, so I didn’t want a long, in depth opening. Subheads Once you have your premise and your story, now you can just make a list of your possible subheads. This is a bullet list of points you want to make in your post. Don’t worry about writing the actual subheads that you’re use in your post. You’ll rewrite them later. For now, just list the points you want to hit. For the post I wrote this morning, my subheads included: What kind of writers are there? How to use your notebook to figure out what kind of writer you are. Your past experience. Your current writing life. Your future writing plans. The gaps. When I come back to a list like that later, I can very easily see exactly what I what I was thinking of when I had this idea. I have an outline for my post that only took me a few minutes to write down. Can you see how writing this post will be easier than it would be without the Framework? I just have to go from subhead to subhead. But it isn’t written in stone. I might come up with other ideas as I’m writing and that’s okay, too. This is a framework, not a steel cage. Takeaway Every blog post ends with a takeaway for the reader. Some reason why you’ve told them the story you’ve just told them or given them the information you’ve just given them. Even very personal essays end with some kind of take away. What do you want readers to do with what they’ve just learned? What do you want them to think about or know or understand? Sometimes your takeaway is very clear. A specific call to action — directions or instructions for how to do something very specific. The take away for the post you’re reading now will be to go forth and create a PSST Framework for your own blog post ideas. Sometimes it will be a little more esoteric. If you were writing a personal essay, your takeaway might be more along the lines of a reminder that something you’re talking about is worth doing or learning. Or that your reader isn’t alone in whatever they might be suffering. The takeaway for the post I wrote this morning was a list of possible kinds of writers and examples of plans those writers might use to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The hope being that those examples would help readers understand how to do the same planning for their own specific situations. Putting the PSST Framework All Together I have a Google Doc with a simple table where I can record my ideas in the PSST Framework format. It looks like this when I’m done. Screenshot: Author If you’d like a copy of the Google Doc that I use, click here. I also just use my notebook, if I’m out and about and get an idea. Usually, I just make a note of the first part of the framework — the premise — and then wait until I’m on my computer to fill out the rest. But if I’m feeling inspired, it’s super easy to remember just the four questions sections of the framework, especially with the acronym. Challenge yourself to work through the PSST Framework on one new idea every day and see what happens.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/a-simple-framework-for-capturing-and-organizing-your-blog-post-ideas-c771da90eb38

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-02-05 23:38:03.035000+00:00

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

How to Get Your Article Distributed by the Medium Curators

Who are Medium’s Curators and What do They do? Medium’s editorial curation team is tasked with reviewing thousands of stories every day. They have 30–50 curators with a diverse set of interests and experiences. Some come from writing and editing backgrounds, while others have specific expertise in fields that are popular on Medium. The curators look for quality stories on Medium. When they select a story, they then add it to topics, which makes those stories eligible for personalized distribution and promotion across Medium — on the homepage, on topic pages, in the app, in the Daily Digest newsletter, and in other emails. Below is a job listing that was posted by Medium awhile back, that may offer some insight into the curators role: Is Having Your Story Distributed by Medium’s Curators Essential to Success on Medium? Yes and no. If you have no following, are writing fiction or poetry, or have no experience with SEO — it is going to be very hard to receive views and gain traction on Medium. Curators have a lot of say in selecting “the best writing.” Curators are the gate keepers of Medium’s coveted homepage, topic pages/top writers, the Daily Digest newsletter, and other emails that millions receive. Before I explain how you can succeed without being curated, it’s worth reviewing the list of Medium’s topics. These represent all the categories that your article can be curated in. While many other tags exist, these are the topics that your article must be relevant to. What are the Medium Categories for Possible Curator Selection? Medium Topics Arts & Entertainment Art Beauty Books Comics Culture Fiction Film Food Gaming Humor Medium Magazine Music Photography Podcasts Poetry Social Media Sports Style True Crime TV Writing Industry Business Design Economy Freelancing Leadership Marketing Product Management Productivity Startups Venture Capital Work Innovation & Tech Accessibility Android Dev Artificial Intelligence Blockchain Cryptocurrency Cybersecurity Data Science Digital Life Gadgets iOS Dev Javascript Machine Learning Math Neuroscience Programming Science Self-Driving Cars Software Engineering Space Technology UX Visual Design Life Addiction Cannabis Creativity Disability Family Health Lifestyle Mental Health Mindfulness Money Parenting Pets Psychedelics Psychology Relationships Self Sexuality Spirituality Travel Society Basic Income Cities Education Election 2020 Environment Equality Future Gun Control History Immigration Justice Language LGBTQIA Media Philosophy Politics Privacy Race Religion San Francisco Transportation Women World Does Being Featured in Multiple Topics Result in Exponentially More Article Views? This is a question I have been asked a lot. While it is not a very large sample size, below is some of the data on my own articles (the ones that have been curated). Clearly curation is not a guarantee of success and being selected for multiple topics has a surprisingly small multiplier effect.

https://medium.com/blogging-guide/how-to-get-your-article-distributed-by-the-medium-curators-be938442f81e

['Casey Botticello']

2020-07-10 00:06:33.040000+00:00

['Curation', 'Writing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Medium Partner Program']

Almost Every Man I Know Is Falling Apart Because of Social Distancing

Almost Every Man I Know Is Falling Apart Because of Social Distancing Men tend to experience depression in ways tailor made to leave us hanging in a pandemic. By Jerónimo Roure There’s no getting around it. This winter is already horrible, and it’s going to get worse. Not sure how much more I can take. The constant death, the social isolation, the widespread unemployment, the closing of my favorite small businesses. What’s hardest, though, is watching people I love struggle. Seeing them cope in unhealthy ways. Worrying about their increased drinking and drugging, their fake “I’m fine’s”, their unraveling relationships, their closing off and going inward. Sometimes it’s like I’m all that’s keeping them from jumping into a black hole. Sometimes I just want to shake them, yelling “Wake the fuck up!” Sometimes I’m annoyed that it seems like no one’s helping me help them. Sometimes I’m pissed at the government for leaving so many of my friends and neighbors hanging. Sometimes I beg the Universe for mercy. I’ve got a regular meditation practice, a therapist, a good job, a stable family, and plenty of close friends. And I’m barely staying halfway sane. Sometimes I want someone to hold me and pet my hair and tell me everything’s going to be alright. Mostly, I’m exhausted. We’re in the middle of this thing, and who knows when it ends? The men in my life are struggling the most What I’ve come to notice is that my friends who are struggling the most are men. This is not to say that others aren’t struggling too. It’s just that men tend to experience depression in ways tailor made to leave us hanging in a pandemic. We often hide our vulnerability in fear of being less “manly.” We tend to have more “shoulder-to-shoulder” interactions — like playing or watching sports — than deep, connected, face-to-face friendships. We tend to avoid doing anything that would make us seem “needy.” This causes all the toxic shit that gives so many men a bad rap: isolation, emotional numbness, angry outbursts, binge drinking. No wonder some 80 percent of people who die of suicide in the U.S. are men. This isn’t to say that men deserve attention more than anyone else. Women have been taking care of men’s emotional needs — without acknowledgement, without reciprocity, without pay — for way too long. I’m just saying most of the men in my life are depressed right now. And I don’t know what to do. You are not alone I also wanted you to know that if it feels like you’re holding everyone else up right now, you’re not alone. I see you. Maybe the Serenity Prayer will resonate with you like it does with me? “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” If the word “God” turns you off, just take it out. The point is, I can’t save my friends. What I can do is make sure they know that I’m here for them, that I’m curious how they’re doing, and that they aren’t “weak” for struggling during the biggest crisis of our lifetimes. Everything else, I just have to let go of. There’s no way around it. Maybe letting go just isn’t supposed to feel good.

https://medium.com/wholistique/almost-every-man-i-know-is-falling-apart-because-of-social-distancing-da5ef6f34b88

['Jeremy Mohler']

2020-12-10 16:09:18.456000+00:00

['Depression', 'Self-awareness', 'Self', 'Coronavirus', 'Psychology']

Writing Challenges & Prompts

Section 1: List of Challenges and Related Stories Challenge 1: Create a story featuring your best stories. This story, similar to your bios, is expected to showcase your writing capabilities. This story can include around five stories. You may consider even one story with details at a minimum. However, the maximum is ten articles to make it a readable piece. It will be helpful to use a standard title such as “Best Stories of [Insert Your Name]”. You can choose your preferred subtitle. I plan to compile each story and include them in our promotion pack. This exercise can create visibility to your profile and stories. If you require further clarification, you can open a discussion thread on our Slack channel, and I will provide my input and guidance. We compile stories submitted as response to this challenge in the attached story. We also distribute this story to our readers in our daily distribution list and newsletter. Challenge 2: Create a story featuring the best stories of your selected writers. Now that we have the best of best stories as assessed by the writers, as part of our cross-pollination goals, I want to propose each writer to choose one or more writers and review their stories from their selected stories. You need to review each story in a bundle. Leave a comment, tweet the story and write a brief note about what you learnt from each story. You share your views of the reviewed stories in your story titled “Review of Stories [Insert Name]”. There are five reasons for recommending this activity. Our publication was established based on cross-pollination, reciprocity, diversity, collaboration, synergy, and serendipity principles. Here are my ideas: 1. You have a new powerful story opportunity to feature someone’s work. 2. You get a chance of reviewing several articles from a single writer and gain a deeper understanding of this specific writer. 3. You build a stronger relationship with the writer and turn that writer to your fan. 4. You learn new writing styles, discover new topics, and broaden your knowledge. 5. This activity can undoubtedly create serendipity. We keep the stories submitted as response to this challenge in the same story for easy access and distribution. Challenge 3: Create testimonials for your favorite writers. To support our cross-pollination values, I recommend you to create at least one testimonial for another writer whom you admire. Please introduce your selected writer, including some sample stories. I plan to use these testimonials as an extension to our writer bios. As you know, 250+ writers presented their bios. We share these bios with our readers. Some readers have already become familiar with some writers, and they specifically ask more stories from them. It is an honor for our writers. Adding testimonials to our distribution list can further enhance the visibility of our writers. I provided some sample testimonials in this bulletin. Challenge 4: Create theme-based stories to prepare for curation. I plan to create a new theme-based article collection to give a great reading experience to our followers. Some readers want to explore stories based on classified themes. The purpose of this collection is to categorize stories based on keywords. For example, the first concept I propose is writing an article about “jealousy”. Based on your experience and background, you can create a story with an attractive title of your choice as long as you use the term “jealousy” is identifiable in your title or subtitle. You can choose relevant tags. I believe you can create unique stories by looking at the term from your angle. One of the objectives of this new challenge is to increase the chance of curation. Therefore, we need to consider some preparation work. The articles in this challenge must adhere to Medium curation guidelines. You may consider your stories to get peer-reviewed by sharing your draft with one of your fans. If you don’t have fans yet, you can request reviewers in our Slack channel. You can gain ideas from the curated articles. For example, you can check the presentation and styles of curated articles. One way of finding curated articles is to check the Medium topics. You can also review the stories curated from our publication writers. Challenge 5: Share your monthly gems. The purpose of this writing challenge is to enhance collaboration and build a relationship with your readers. This challenge may reflect your monthly experience with your followers. I propose writing a story each month describing who you followed and what you explored from these followers. You can tag the follower account and write in a way that you are conversing with this specific follower. For example, I found your story XYZ and found the following points interesting. My take away points from your story were XYZ. You can select as many followers and their stories as you explored within a month. I recommend these stories in a conversational tone to the owner of the content and aiming to give useful, practical, thought-provoking, entertaining, inspiring, motivating points to your readers. We aim to kill two birds with one stone. While showing our appreciation to the content owner, we can also provide useful content to our readers. To collect these stories in the repository and distribute to our readers, we need to standardize the heading. Your story heading can be “Monthly Gems Discovered by [Insert Your Name]”, and you can put an attractive sub-title. You can even choose a kicker “ILLUMINATION Writing Challenge”.

https://medium.com/illumination/writing-challenges-prompts-e030efe44f20

['Dr Mehmet Yildiz']

2020-11-06 06:10:34.472000+00:00

['Leadership', 'Self Improvement', 'Design', 'Writing', 'Entrepreneurship']

Chrissy Teigen Lost Her Baby After Folks Trashed Her “TMI” Tweet

Chrissy Teigen Lost Her Baby After Folks Trashed Her “TMI” Tweet And that’s exactly why her brand of vulnerability matters. Chrissy Teigen | Twitter As I scrolled through Twitter a couple of days ago, I caught one of Chrissy Teigen’s tweets, and some of the responses were appalling. Writing an update on her pregnancy with husband John Legend, Chrissy wrote: Just had a really scary morning 😩 huge clot, almost save-worthy. The scramble to hear the heartbeat seemed like hours. I never thought I’d relief sigh so much in my liiiiife One user who calls themselves “Rob” asked, Why post such personal information on this or any other public platform? Another user going by the name of “Jack” chimed in too: I wouldnt come on social media to talk abo[ut] my root canal either. Tbh I don’t see the need to tell anyone my business Then, there was Hautechick69: Just because you have a gazillion followers doesn’t mean you should post EVERYTHING at ALL TIMES. Sometimes you have to have class. Someone called Cheryl wrote: I’m all about sharing personal information like this w/close friends who could offer support, but to put it on the internet for complete strangers to see? Why would u want to share such a personal thing w/thousands of total strangers? Boundaries? Sincerely glad all is well though The audacity of Rob and company enraged me. I sarcastically tweeted: Um, can we get a list of approved topics of conversation for women on social media, please? White men, I know you’re just itching to put in your six cents 🤦‍♀️ And in another tweet, I wrote: Some white dude on a horse (that’s literally his Twitter profile pic) tried shaming @chrissyteigen for talking about a miscarriage scare bc that’s "so personal." Now ask me why I’m such a "TMI" writer. Bc there are men who think they know what women shouldn’t talk about. The saddest thing about all of this is that Chrissy and John wound up losing the baby. After that first tweet about the blood clot scare, Chrissy posted two more heartbreaking updates. The first contained these two images: Image text: We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before. We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions," the post said. It just wasn’t enough. We never decide on our babies' names until the last possible moment after they’re born, right before we leave the hospital. But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack. So he will always be Jack to us. Jack worked so hard to be a part of our little family, and he will be, forever. To our Jack — I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you. Thank you to everyone who has been sending us positive energy, thoughts and prayers. We feel all of your love and truly appreciate you. On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it. The second update was this: Driving home from the hospital with no baby. How can this be real. After the updates, thousands of fans and followers expressed their condolences, yet others still felt the need for trash talk. Dr. Jen Gunter replied, “There is nothing worse. I’m so sorry.” And then this happened: Tweet text: You’re wrong. There IS something worse. When the baby dies, but on purpose, at the mothers’ choosing. That’s much, much worse. Reading that, I just about lost it. I understand that this is just one of the millions of social media interactions that happen in a flash, but it’s one more reminder that pro-lifers (oxymoron, I know) across the country will use any excuse to bring up abortion. Even to downplay another woman’s pregnancy loss. God. Sometimes, I hate social media.

https://medium.com/honestly-yours/chrissy-teigen-lost-her-baby-after-folks-trashed-her-tmi-tweet-a221f50e8da7

['Shannon Ashley']

2020-10-02 14:54:28.378000+00:00

['Health', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Mental Health', 'Women']

Video: Big Data on Kubernetes - Make It Flow (Hebrew)

Big Data on Kubernetes: Make It Flow — Lior Winner Apache Airflow is a leading framework for managing data workflows. It’s pretty good out of the box, but we think running it on K8s makes it even better! It takes out the tedious work and lets you focus on orchestrating and scheduling pipelines. In this talk, Lior shares our story of how we chose and deployed Airflow on k8s, the challenges we faced along the way, and all our insights from behind the scenes. Lior is a Big Data Engineer at Riskified, responsible for collecting, processing, aggregating and storing large amounts of data. He is a true asset player to every team — engineers data in Riskified’s big data team, scores in Riskified’s soccer team and plays the drums in Riskified’s own band. Lior is driven by a passion for technology, and he always challenges it to the max. *Talk is in Hebrew

https://medium.com/riskified-technology/video-big-data-on-kubernetes-make-it-flow-hebrew-ecbd255255b3

['Riskified Technology']

2020-08-30 17:14:30.393000+00:00

['Airflow', 'Engineering', 'Big Data', 'Videos', 'Kubernetes']

Duck Typing in Python — 3 Practical Examples

Practical Examples Iterators In Python, iteration allows us to go over a list of items to perform particular operations. One common way to create an iteration is to use the for loops, which have the following general format. for i in iterable: expression As discussed in my previous article, we can create our custom iterators that can be used as iterables in the for loops. To satisfy the “duck testing” for iterators, the custom class needs to implement the __iter__() and __next__() methods. A specific example is given below. Duck Typing in Iterators In the above code snippet, we implemented both __iter__() and __next__() methods that make the instances of the custom class Cubes iterators, such that the instance was able to be used in a for loop. Callables Besides the built-in dict data type, another important dictionary type is defaultdict , available in the collections module. This dictionary-like data type has the following constructor: defaultdict([default_factory[, ...]]) . Specifically, the default_factory argument is a type of callable, such as a function or lambda function. In my previous article, I showed that we could utilize the defaultdict by passing a lambda function. Here’s the example of its usage. >>> from collections import defaultdict >>> letter_counts = defaultdict(lambda: 0) >>> for i in 'abcddddeeeee': ... letter_counts[i] += 1 ... >>> letter_counts.items() dict_items([('a', 1), ('b', 1), ('c', 1), ('d', 4), ('e', 5)]) Notably, we can have better flexibility to use the defaultdict data type if we create our own default factory. With the “duck typing” philosophy, the custom class needs to implement the __call__() method, which is to make something callable. Let’s see how it works. Duck Typing in Callables As shown in the above code, we create the DucklingFactory class, whose __call__() function returns a list of one Duckling instance. Using this factory function, we’ll be able to make the desired number of ducklings by multiplying the default duckling list. Sorting With Len() Another possible usage of duck typing is to implement the custom len() function, which can be used in sorting a list using the sort() function. As a side note, some people refer to the len() function as a magic function, because it’s implemented by calling the __len__() function behind the scene (those functions with double underscores as prefix and suffix are called magic functions). Suppose that we want to sort a list of ducks based on the length of the name of each duck. Here’s how we can apply the duck typing in this case. Duck Typing in Sorting In the above code snippet, the custom NamedDuck class implements the __str__() and __len__() functions, which enable us to use the str() and len() functions on its instances in Lines 10 and 12, respectively. Importantly, as you can see, although the list is mixed with named ducks and strings, all elements can call the str() and len() functions, such that the list can be sorted using the len() as the key and used in the list comprehension when we want to print out the sorted result. Thus, the broader implication of this usage is that when we have a mixed list of elements of different data types, as long as each data type implements the same functions, the elements will pass the duck testing and be applied with the proper operations. Here’s a general use case example using the len() function on a mixed list of data types of str , tuple , and list .

https://medium.com/swlh/duck-typing-in-python-3-practical-examples-a40d8113266c

['Yong Cui']

2020-03-30 21:01:01.999000+00:00

['Software Engineering', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Programming']

Tutorial: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) with Categorical Variables

Tutorial: Plotting EDA with Matplotlib and Seaborn Code to load in the Titanic dataset (CSV file located in this GitHub repo): import pandas as pd import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from matplotlib.patches import Patch from matplotlib.lines import Line2D import seaborn as sns df = pd.read_csv("titanic.csv") # PassengerId is a dataset artifact, not something useful for analysis df.drop("PassengerId", axis=1, inplace=True) # We want to use Age as one of the main examples, drop rows that are missing Age values df.dropna(subset=["Age"], inplace=True) Note that we have not performed a train-test split or even separated X (features) from y (target) — everything is in one dataframe. This is for compatibility with Seaborn, but in a real machine learning context you will need to perform additional steps to ensure you avoid leakage and other undesired side effects of sloppy data preparation. Note also that in all instances we use blue to represent “survived”, green to represent “did not survive”, yellow to represent “1st class”, orange to represent “2nd class”, and red to represent “3rd class”. When showing different representations of the same data, it’s important to use meaningful colors to help the reader follow the meaning of the visualization. Numeric vs. Categorical EDA These code snippets represent alternatives for the first scatter plot shown above, plotting Age (a numeric value) against the target Survived (a categorical value). Multiple Histograms Rather than using the y -axis to represent the two categories, let’s use two different colors. That means that we can use the y -axis to represent counts rather than trying to discern this information from the density of dots. fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.hist(df[df["Survived"]==1]["Age"], bins=15, alpha=0.5, color="blue", label="survived") ax.hist(df[df["Survived"]==0]["Age"], bins=15, alpha=0.5, color="green", label="did not survive") ax.set_xlabel("Age") ax.set_ylabel("Count of passengers") fig.suptitle("Age vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers") ax.legend(); Multiple Density Estimate Plots This is showing largely the same information as the histograms, except that it’s a density estimate (estimate of the probability density function) rather than a count across bins. Seaborn has nice built-in functionality for this. fig, ax = plt.subplots() sns.kdeplot(df[df["Survived"]==1]["Age"], shade=True, color="blue", label="survived", ax=ax) sns.kdeplot(df[df["Survived"]==0]["Age"], shade=True, color="green", label="did not survive", ax=ax) ax.set_xlabel("Age") ax.set_ylabel("Density") fig.suptitle("Age vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers"); Multiple Box Plots Here we lose some of the information about the distribution overall in order to focus in on particular summary statistics of the distribution. Dcbmariano / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) fig, ax = plt.subplots() sns.boxplot(x="Age", y="Survived", data=df, orient="h", palette={1:"blue", 0:"green"}, ax=ax) ax.get_yaxis().set_visible(False) fig.suptitle("Age vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers") color_patches = [ Patch(facecolor="blue", label="survived"), Patch(facecolor="green", label="did not survive") ] ax.legend(handles=color_patches); Categorical vs. Categorical EDA These code snippets represent alternatives for the second scatter plot shown above, plotting Pclass (a categorical value) against the target Survived (a categorical value). Grouped Bar Charts This shows the distribution across the categories, similar to the “multiple histograms” example for numeric vs. categorical. First, an example where Pclass is represented along the x -axis and Survival is represented by color, essentially answering the question for each passenger class, how many passengers survived vs. did not survive? fig, ax = plt.subplots() sns.catplot("Pclass", hue="Survived", data=df, kind="count", palette={1:"blue", 0:"green"}, ax=ax) plt.close(2) # catplot creates an extra figure we don't need ax.set_xlabel("Passenger Class") color_patches = [ Patch(facecolor="blue", label="survived"), Patch(facecolor="green", label="did not survive") ] ax.legend(handles=color_patches) fig.suptitle("Passenger Class vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers"); Second, an example where Survival is represented along the x -axis and Pclass is represented by color, essentially answering the question for passengers who survived vs. did not survive, how many were in each passenger class? fig, ax = plt.subplots() sns.catplot("Survived", hue="Pclass", data=df, kind="count", palette={1:"yellow", 2:"orange", 3:"red"}, ax=ax) plt.close(2) # catplot creates an extra figure we don't need ax.legend(title="Passenger Class") ax.set_xticklabels(["did not survive", "survived"]) ax.set_xlabel("") fig.suptitle("Passenger Class vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers"); Stacked Bar Charts These can be used for counts (same as grouped bar charts) but if you use percentages rather than counts, they show proportions. Basically like a pie chart but better, because you are visually comparing heights rather than angles. This requires a bit of dataframe manipulation to prepare for plotting: # Create a dataframe with the counts by passenger class and survival # ["Name"] could be any column within the data; it is the equivalent # of COUNT(id) in SQL counts_df = df.groupby(["Pclass", "Survived"])["Name"].count().unstack() First, an example where Pclass is represented along the x -axis and Survival is represented by color, essentially answering the question for each passenger class, what proportion of passengers survived vs. did not survive? # Transpose so survived + did not survive add up to 1, divide by the total number (transposed), then transpose one more time for plotting survived_percents_df = counts_df.T.div(counts_df.T.sum()).T fig, ax = plt.subplots() survived_percents_df.plot(kind="bar", stacked=True, color=["green", "blue"], ax=ax) ax.set_xlabel("Passenger Class") ax.set_xticklabels([1, 2, 3], rotation=0) ax.set_ylabel("Proportion") color_patches = [ Patch(facecolor="blue", label="survived"), Patch(facecolor="green", label="did not survive") ] ax.legend(handles=color_patches) fig.suptitle("Passenger Class vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers"); Second, an example where Survival is represented along the x -axis and Pclass is represented by color, essentially answering the question for passengers who survived vs. did not survive, what proportion were in each passenger class? # Divide by the total number and transpose for plotting pclass_percents_df = counts_df.div(counts_df.sum()).T fig, ax = plt.subplots() pclass_percents_df.plot(kind="bar", stacked=True, color=["yellow", "orange", "red"], ax=ax) ax.legend(title="Passenger Class") ax.set_xticklabels(["did not survive", "survived"], rotation=0) ax.set_xlabel("") ax.set_ylabel("Proportion") fig.suptitle("Passenger Class vs. Survival for Titanic Passengers"); Numeric vs. Numeric vs. Categorical EDA Sometimes it’s interesting to see the relationship between two different numeric features and the target, not just one at a time. This code snippet represents an alternative for the third scatter plot shown above, plotting Age (a numeric feature) vs. Fare (a numeric feature) vs. Survived (a categorical target). fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5)) ax.scatter(df[df["Survived"]==1]["Age"], df[df["Survived"]==1]["Fare"], c="blue", alpha=0.5) ax.scatter(df[df["Survived"]==0]["Age"], df[df["Survived"]==0]["Fare"], c="green", alpha=0.5) ax.set_xlabel("Age") ax.set_ylabel("Fare") color_patches = [ Line2D([0], [0], marker='o', color='w', label='survived', markerfacecolor='b', markersize=10), Line2D([0], [0], marker='o', color='w', label='did not survive', markerfacecolor='g', markersize=10) ] ax.legend(handles=color_patches) fig.suptitle("Survival by Age and Fare for Titanic Passengers"); Summary Most of the time if your target is a categorical variable, the best EDA visualization isn’t going to be a basic scatter plot. Instead, consider: Numeric vs. Categorical (e.g. Survived vs. Age ) Multiple histograms Multiple density estimate plots Multiple box plots Categorical vs. Categorical (e.g. Survived vs. Pclass ) Grouped bar charts Stacked bar charts Numeric vs. Numeric vs. Categorical (e.g. Age vs. Fare vs. Survived )

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/tutorial-exploratory-data-analysis-eda-with-categorical-variables-6a569a3aea55

['Erin Hoffman']

2020-07-15 14:26:48.908000+00:00

['Python', 'Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Matplotlib', 'Tutorial', 'Data Science']

Habit Becomes a Challenge When It’s Time Bound

When I’m coaching a writer, I try to be mindful of the fact that for some people, the concept of making a big goal can be — fraught. Some people have anxiety that looks like worrying about the other shoe falling. If something good happens, they are on edge waiting for something bad to balance it. Some people struggle with feelings of failure if they fall anywhere short of perfect completion of a goal. Some people are derailed by disappointment. And guess what. That’s okay. I’m not here to convince you to dream outside your comfort zone. But I am here to share my philosophy with you. Do with it what works for you. Here goes. Dreaming is Worthwhile in its Own Right There’s real value in the act of getting your hopes up. I personally do it every chance I can. It might be the only good thing that will come out of trying something new. Why would I give that up? My actually philosophy is this: I get my hopes up as often as possible, and work toward those goals one little step at a time. I don’t always get where I hoped I would. In fact, let’s face it, usually I don’t. For many reasons. Sometimes I get started and change directions. Sometimes I just can’t make it happen the way I want it to. Sometimes life gets in the way. But if I take little steps — if I direct my daily habit — toward my goal, I get somewhere. I started out meaning to be a romance writer. I write children’s books. I started out meaning to make my living writing novels. I wouldn’t give up teaching for anything. There are so many unknowns in this business. One of the few things you can control is how much enjoyment you let yourself take from getting your hopes up. Start Big Picture and Go Small Here’s how I think about habits. You start with a BIG idea. It can be something you want to start, like: I want to write a novel. I want to finish an Ironman. I want to learn to play the guitar. It can be something you want to stop, like: I want to stop smoking. I want to stop eating processed foods. I want to stop leaving my kitchen a mess after dinner. The process is the same. You have this lovely, big idea — and then you find the smallest component of it. In the samples above, those components might be: Writing for ten minutes Exercising for ten minutes Practicing for ten minutes Not smoking a cigarette before noon every day Not eating processed foods for one meal Making sure the dishwasher is empty before dinner every night On their own, there’s nothing very exciting about any of those. Do them once and — yeah, nothing much. But do them over and over and over again? Do that and they become habits that take on a life of their own. Habit Becomes a Challenge When it’s Time Bound I know the conventional wisdom says that it takes three weeks. I’ve found that for me it’s more like three months. If I do something every day for three months, I have time to see real progress and it becomes just part of my life. My favorite way to do this is something I call a 10X100 (or ten by one hundred.) I pick a thing and do it for ten minutes a day for 100 days. Keeping a log helps with accountability. Blogging about it can be super helpful, if you’re into that kind of thing. Or just write about it on social media, if you want some outside pressure to meet your goal. Go ahead and get your hopes up about where this might lead. But be open to the idea that your challenge might take you somewhere on day 100 that you can’t even imagine on day 1. How Will You Challenge Yourself? So, think about your big picture. What do you want to get your hopes up about. Then choose a little bitty habit that represents the tiniest little component of that goal. Then do it for 100 days. Don’t worry about where it will lead. Just do it today, then do it tomorrow, and so on. See what happens. When the habit is set, do it again.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/habit-becomes-a-challenge-when-its-time-bound-f652e686ae65

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-08-16 21:11:50.679000+00:00

['Ninjabyob', 'Habit', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

Are You Ready to Write Your Book in the Next Month?

We’re three days away from starting the writing part of the Blog-Your-Own-Book Challenge. Three days from a goal of writing 31 blog posts in 31 days, all on the same topic, that come together into a book. Are you ready? Just in case, came up with tips for you. I hope they help. Make sure you’ve chosen the right topic. I’ve talked to a ton of writers in the last month about their BYOB projects. One thing comes up over and over that I want to talk about for a minute. Your topic should not be your entire empire. Your empire = the business you want to build around your writing. AKA, your niche. My empire is ‘teaching people how to become writers.’ That’s way too big a topic for my BYOB project. Like I said, it’s my entire empire. I had to find a little slice of my niche to focus on for 31 days. For me, that’s ‘how to create a writing habit.’ In 31 days, I could skim along the surface of my whole niche. But the point of the BYOB Challenge is to go deep on one little part of it. Think about your empire, the whole of your niche, and then choose one thing you can teach your audience about that thing. If you’re a fiction writer, that might be telling a series of connected short stories set in the world of your novel. If you’re an essayist, it might be delving into one specific thought or idea. If you’re a teacher-writer, maybe you’ll do what I’m doing and teach something on a deeper level than you could with a single blog post. Make sure you’ve got your posts pre-planned. Once you have your topic narrowed down, try this exercise. Think about five or six themes within the topic. What are a few topics that your main topic can break down into? My BYOB project, creating a daily writing habit, breaks down to these themes: Tiny goals Goal stacking Ramping up to a daily goal Objectives and Key Results Writing as a job and resources Once you have your topic’s themes decided, you’ll just have to come up with five or six blog posts you can write about that theme. My best advice, in the next few days, is to use the PSST framework on each of those post ideas, if you haven’t already. That’s what I’ll be doing today and tomorrow. Having those posts planned out will make writing them so much easier. And more likely. Make sure you know how you’ll capture your audience. One of the reasons we’re writing our books as blog posts is so that we can start to build an audience for the finished project. In order to do that, you need to make sure you’re set up for capturing your readers so you can reach out to them. Yep. That means building an email list. And that means having an opt-in on your blog posts. I wrote a pretty exhaustive post, with about a million screenshots, about how exactly to do that. Be sure to read that and choose your opt-in, then get your email server set up to receive those new subscribers. Make sure you’re ready to meet this goal. The last thing I want you to do in the next three days is be sure that you’re ready to actually achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself. That means having time set aside to write your blog post. And a space for doing the work. It means getting your mind wrapped around the idea that for the month of August, writing a blog post everyday is part of your job as writer. It’s not a hobby. At least not for this month. Set aside perfectionism. Set aside fear. You’ve got this. You’re going to rock it. Ninja Writers is hosting daily write-ins — quiet writing time on Zoom — and we’ve got nearly daily workshop calls in August. We’d love to have you join us for the month. It’s free.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/are-you-ready-to-write-your-book-in-the-next-month-c0c953f0607e

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-07-29 15:20:34.238000+00:00

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

How to Actually Get Your Lead Magnet to Your Reader

The rest of the Google Doc format is pretty self explanatory. I’m all about simple and this is a super simple tool, perfect for creating your first opt-in. Make Sure It’s in Shareable Form Once you’ve made your opt-in, you’ll need a shareable link. Here’s how to get that. Click the blue ‘share’ button up in the right top corner of the screen. Screenshot: Author You’ll get this pop-up in the center of the screen. Screenshot: Author Name your document if you haven’t already. Then click save. You’ll get this pop-up. Screenshot: Author Your document is set to ‘restricted’ by default. You need to change that. Click the little down arrow next to the word ‘restricted.’ You’ll get the menu below. Click ‘anyone with the link.’ Screenshot: Author Now, your permissions have been changed. Anyone with your link will be able to view your document. Screenshot: Author All you have to do now is click ‘copy link’ and you’ll be ready to share the URL with your audience. If you’re not ready to quite yet, that’s okay. At any time, click the blue share button again and you’ll get the pop up below. Just click ‘copy link.’ Screenshot: Author Create a Landing Page or Sign-up Form Now that you have your opt-in, you need to create a sign-up form so that your reader can grab it. I use Convertkit for my email server, so I’m going to show you how to do this in Covertkit. You can find directions for making a landing page in almost any email server by Googling. Here are directions for Mail Chimp and Mailerlite. On Covertkit, start by clicking ‘landing pages and forms’ on the top menu. Screenshot: Author Then click the red ‘create new’ button on the right side of the screen. Screenshot: Author You’ll see a choice between a form and a landing page. A form is super simple — literally just a form with a few words. The landing page is more advanced (but still pretty easy.) Screenshot: Author It says that the form is for embedding, but you can use it as a landing page, too. If you choose ‘form’ you’ll get a list of choices for the mode of delivery. Choose ‘modal.’ Screenshot: Author You’ll have the option of several different types of forms. Just pick one — I picked the one called ‘Mills’ for this tutorial. Screenshot: Author Once you’re in there, you’ll see all the options on the right for changing things up. Screenshot: Author Just click on the part of the form you want to change (the lines of text) and you’ll be able to change it. When I clicked on ‘Join the Newsletter’ I was able to type a new headline right on the form and was offered some choices for font color, size, and weight. Screenshot: Author If you click the plus sign under the ‘your email address’ box you can add another field. Like ‘first name.’ You can rearrange the boxes by clicking with your mouse and dragging. Screenshot: Author Keep working at it until you like the way it looks. When you’re all done, click the ‘preview’ button to see how it will look when readers see it. Screenshot: Author When you’re happy with it, you can click ‘embed’ next to ‘preview.’ You’ll get this screen. Click ‘share’ to get a URL to link your readers to. Congratulations! You’ve made your first simple form. Link an Automated Email to Your Form This is the step where you attach your opt-in gift to your new form, so that when someone gives you their email on the form, they’ll automatically get their download. To do that in ConvertKit, you’re going to go to ‘automations.’ It’s on the top black menu bar, right next to ‘anding pages and forms.’ Screenshot: Author When you’re there, you’ll see ‘sequences’ on the next menu bar down. Click that. When you get to the next page, click the red ‘new sequence’ button. Screenshot: Author First, you’ll name your sequence. I always name it the same name as my opt-in. Screenshot: Author When you name your sequence, the next screen with be a page where you can write an email. I named my sequence ‘sample.’ You can see that in the upper left corner. There’s some sample text in the email field that you can just delete. Write a subject line. Something like “Here’s the (free thing) I promised you.’ Then write a short, simple email that does a few things. Thank your reader for asking for your opt-in. Link them to it. Just write something like ‘here’s that thing I promised you’ and then highlight the text, click the icon that looks like a figure eight, and paste in the link to your opt-in you created in the last step. Let them know what to expect from you going forward. (For example, I’ll send you a newsletter every Friday or over the next week you’ll get my free class, etc.) Screenshot: Author Now, the little pencil next to ‘after 1 day’ and change it to 0 days. That will set your email to send immediately when it’s triggered. Change the ‘status’ to active. That’s it! Next you’ll want to go back to ‘automations.’ This time, click on the red ‘new automation’ button. Screenshot: Author Now click ‘create automation.’ Screenshot: Author You’ll see this form on the next page. Choose ‘joins a form.’ Screenshot: Author Pick the form you just made. Then click ‘add event.’ You’ll see this page next. Screenshot: Author Click the plus sign below the form box. You’ll be able to choose the sequence that you just created. Screenshot: Author Now your automation looks like this. All done! Click the greyed out ‘paused’ button in the top right corner to activate your automation. Screenshot: Author That’s it. Now every time someone uses your opt-in form, they’ll be automatically sent your welcome email with the link to your opt-in gift. Good job! If you’re using a different email server, you’ll have to Google directions for setting up an automated email. Here’s how to do it in Mail Chimp and Mailerlite. Create a Call-to-Action Sentence Next thing you need to do is let your readers know you have a gift for them. You can do that by adding a call to action, or CTA, sentence at the bottom of your blog posts. I put mine just above my bio. Screenshot: Author I highly recommend writing a short, engaging bio that includes links to your social media and any other information you want people to know about you. You can see here that I link to my books and to Ninja Writers, as well as sharing my Twitter handle. The sentence “Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is” is my CTA sentence. When a reader clicks that, they get sent to a form where they can ask for my secret weapon. You want a sentence that’s enticing and generous. Don’t say ‘click here.’ That’s A) too salesy and B) it’s you asking something of them. Just offer something awesome to your reader. Think ‘here you go’ rather than ‘do this.’ You’ll be able to see on your email server dashboard how well your link is performing. On Convertkit, just go to ‘landing pages and forms’ and look for your form. You can see here the number of times someone has seen my forms (visitors), how many have subscribed, and the conversion rate. Screenshot: Author Give it a few days. If no one is clicking your link, it’s your CTA sentence. Tweak it until you get one that people click on. If you’re getting clicks, but no conversions, it’s the form and/or the opt-in that’s the problem. I look for at least a 10 percent conversion rate. You can see here on this example, only my FRED Freebie was really successful. This is a form I’ve used on my website for five years. It’s got a great conversion rate, so I just keep using it. Screenshot: Author It’s worth playing around with the components until you get an opt-in, a form, and a CTA sentence that work together really well. Voila! That’s it. You’ve done it. Now you’re ready to add your CTA sentence, linked to your form, to your BYOB posts. Your readers will automatically get your opt-in gift. You’ll have to decide what to do with that list now. My suggestion is to touch bases with your list weekly. Just send out an email every Friday and link to your posts, share some cool information, or offer them some support.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-actually-get-your-lead-magnet-to-your-reader-9ea37e292a66

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-07-17 19:23:52.629000+00:00

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

Long-Covid Risk Factors, Symptoms, and Treatments: New Insights

Long-Covid Risk Factors, Symptoms, and Treatments: New Insights More than 5 initial symptoms predict long-Covid. And a drug just passed phase III clinical trial for chronic fatigue syndrome. Hand vector created by freepik — www.freepik.com As with any other systemic disease, Covid-19 may bring systemic complications that may not resolve so soon. We identify them as long-haulers, long-Covid, post-viral Covid-19 syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Importantly, a positive SARS-CoV-2 test is not important for long-Covid diagnosis. We understand what they look like and the probable causes. But how much do we know about its risk factors, namely, what traits make a patient more likely to develop long-Covid, and its potential treatments? Prevalence and cause The prevalence of long-Covid depends on the population studied. For example, a study in China detected residual lung abnormalities in 25% of discharged Covid-19 patients in a 3-month follow-up, of whom 31% still had gastrointestinal distress, 18% had headaches, 16% had fatigue, and 15% had dyspnea (shortness of breath). A study in Italy, on the other hand, followed 179 Covid-19 patients for two months. They uncovered one or two lingering symptoms in 32% of patients and three or more in 55%. Common symptoms were fatigue (53%), dyspnea (43%), joint pain (27%), and chest pain (22%). Other data from King’s College London that studied over 4000 Covid-19 patients found that 13% of patients had persisting symptoms for at least 28 days, of which over 90% had fatigue and headache. This study further discovered a few risk factors for long-Covid, as discussed below. Reasons for Covid-19 long-haulers, scientists believe, are due to the residual tissue damage or the aberrant immune responses that persist despite that the coronavirus may no longer be present, or both. More details here: Risk factors Two new preprints released in October have tracked a sufficient number of Covid-19 patients to identify the possible risk factors of long-haulers. While preprints have not gone through peer-review yet, these two are from research institutions with a good academic publishing record. The presence of more than five symptoms during the first week of illness predicted 16.3% of cases [of long-Covid]. Part I: King’s College London Researchers at King’s College London authored one of the preprints, titled “Attributes and predictors of Long-COVID: analysis of COVID cases and their symptoms collected by the Covid Symptoms Study App.” This study is led by Claire J. Steves, an honorary consultant physician in geriatric medicine and deputy director of the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, with over 70 published academic papers. This study followed 4,182 Covid-19 patients in Sweden, Great Britain, and the U.S. for several months. In the end, they found 13% of patients had symptoms lasting more than 28 days. This number was 4.5% and 2.3% for those suffering symptoms for more than 56 and 95 days, respectively. The study then pinpointed risk factors that all together could predict 76.7% of long-Covid cases. The researchers also tested their predictive model in another dataset of 2,472 Covid-19 patients, which proved their model’s accuracy and generalizability. Individual risk factors are ranked as follows: The old age of 70 years and above predicted 29.2% of cases. The presence of more than five symptoms during the first week of illness predicted 16.3% of cases. A high body mass index of 27.5 and above predicted 10.3% of cases. Horse voice symptoms predicted 4.1% of cases. Shortness of breath symptom predicted 3.8% of cases. Female sex predicted 3.7% of cases. In those aged 70 and above, fever, loss of smell, and comorbidities (particularly heart and lung diseases) were also predictors. Socioeconomic status was not a predictor. Lastly, the authors pointed out their study’s limitations, which include the dominance of females and those younger than 70 years. Data on race were also lacking, preventing risk factor analysis. And data relied on self-reports, which may not be as accurate as doctors’ assessments. Regardless, both studies identified more than five initial symptoms and shortness of breath as predictors of long-Covid. Part II: Helix The second preprint, “Long-term COVID-19 symptoms in a large unselected population,” is from Helix, a population genomics research center in California. This study used survey data from over 20,000 participants of the Helix DNA Discovery and Healthy Nevada Projects. But only 233 people had Covid-19, and most were not tested. Prevalence of long-Covid was 42%, 34%, and 24% after 30, 60, and 90 days, respectively. This study only found three risk factors of long-Covid: more than five initial symptoms, shortness of breath, and blood type A+. In contrast, sex, BMI, or comorbidities were not associated with long-Covid. Evidently, this study is weaker than the King’s College London study Dr. Steves led — owing to the smaller sample size while also using self-reports. Regardless, both studies identified more than five initial symptoms and shortness of breath as predictors of long-Covid. Subtypes and unique symptoms Another interesting finding from Dr. Steves’s study were the two subtypes of long-Covid. One type is the combo of fatigue, headache, and upper respiratory tract symptoms like shortness of breath, sore throat, persistent cough, or smell loss. The second type is a multi-system complication with ongoing fever and gastrointestinal symptoms. Although rare, science has recently described new and unique aspects of long-Covid ranging from symptoms of the heart, brain, peripheral nervous system, ear, and skin. Dr. Steves et al. also noticed a few symptoms unique to long-Covid. Using short-Covid-19 patients as a comparison group, these were cardiac symptoms like palpitations or tachycardia (6.1% vs. 0.5%), concentration or memory problems (4.1% vs. 0.2%), tinnitus and earache (3.6% vs. 0.2%), and peripheral nerve symptoms like prickling or tingling sensation and numbness (2% vs. 0.5%). These differences reached statistical significance (p<0.05), which means that results were not due to random chance. In a study published this month, Harvard Medical School scientists searched for cases of Covid-19-related skin symptoms in the American Academy of Dermatology and International League of Dermatological Societies databases. They identified 171 such cases from 31 countries. While most skin symptoms lasted less than a month, pernio, chilblains, or redness and swelling of feet or hands—also known as Covid-19 toes — persisted more than 60 days in six cases and more than 130 days in two cases. Although rare, science has recently described new and unique aspects of long-Covid ranging from symptoms of the heart, brain, peripheral nervous system, ear, and skin. Possible treatments At this point, the guidelines for Covid-19 long-haulers include proper sleep, nutrition, and mental health management. Slow and gradual pacing of physical activities is also recommended but should be avoided if symptoms worsen. According to an unpublished study of 1,600 Covid-19 long-haulers, the self-reported supplements that helped with symptom relieve were vitamin D (500 people), vitamin C (290), zinc (250), magnesium (259), B12 (228), multivitamins (184), turmeric (156), N-acetylcysteine (134), and others. While these are anecdotes, they make sense since proper nutrition is advice for long-Covid recovery. Self-reported prescriptions were heartburn or acid reflux medications (230 people), steroids (221), antihistamines (215), inhalers (196), aspirin (80), ibuprofen (74), and others. “Rintatolimod is the only drug to have completed successful advanced placebo-controlled clinical trials (Phase II/III) for ME/CFS and is approved for severe ME/CFS in Argentina.” Long-Covid is a syndrome similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Presently, there are no approved treatments for ME/CFS, but that may soon change. A phase III clinical trial of 75 sufferers of ME/CFS for 2–8 years was published a few days ago. And results found that an immunomodulatory called rintatolimod improved the exercise duration of 51% of patients. In contrast, only 17.6% of the placebo group saw improvement. That is nearly a tripled efficacy in terms of the number of responders. “Rintatolimod is the only drug to have completed successful advanced placebo-controlled clinical trials (Phase II/III) for ME/CFS and is approved for severe ME/CFS in Argentina,” the authors wrote, which may apply to long-Covid as well. “Covid-19 debilitated patients with “long hauler” post-viral syndrome would benefit from rintatolimod are topics for further investigation.” Rintatolimod is now being investigated for its antiviral potential against Covid-19 in Japan.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/long-covid-risk-factors-symptoms-and-treatments-new-insights-555285d27698

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-10-31 09:42:21.673000+00:00

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

The how, when, and what of AI

1. How probable is it that we’ll develop AI that is smarter than humans? Of the three questions, this is the least fun but also, perhaps, the easiest to answer. At a recent conference comprised of the people most involved in working in the field of artificial intelligence, participants were asked when human-level intelligence would be achieved and less than 2% of the respondents believed the answer to be never. This poll asked specifically about AGI and not ASI, however, many people (including me) believe that the difficult task is developing a sufficiently advanced AI that can teach itself new things (AGI) and that a super intelligent version will emerge quite quickly thereafter. Some think this this emergence could take years or decades once we arrive at AGI. Others warn that it could be just a matter of hours after that first AGI is developed due to the speed of recursive self-improvement. It is this capacity for recursive self-improvement that many software engineers are indeed hoping to instill in their programs to speed development. It is also this ability that could very easily see our world go from no human-level AI’s to one to the first super-human AI very rapidly. While there are still a few skeptics who believe we will never develop human-level intelligence or that it won’t be for hundreds of years, a growing consensus among those closest to these efforts⁴ believe it will happen, and soon… 2. When might we develop such an AI? Here’s where we are right now: We’re here. But it doesn’t feel like it. We can’t see what will happen just to the right of us. (Wait But Why) We’re at this point in time, just before a massive spike in human progress. This has occurred before with the industrial revolution and the advent of the Internet but this spike will dwarf those. Due to the Law of Accelerating Returns — advancement as an evolutionary process that speeds up exponentially over time — life in 2040 — just a scant 23 years away — may be as different from today as life today is from medieval times. It may be so different that we can no more picture it than could a serf from the middle ages understand the technologies used to create a website or a cellphone. When we consider the timeline and effects of superintelligent AI systems and overlay them on top of our expected lifetimes we see the enormous wondrous and scary impacts that we — you and I — can expect. Let’s check in on those same AI researchers for their expert opinions. A large majority (>68%) believed we would develop AGI by 2050 with 43% of respondents believing this would occur by 2030. So in 13 to 33 years there is believed to be a good chance that we will have developed a computer program that is at least as intelligent as us. This will include many different types of intelligence including the ability to learn on its own. It seems hard to fathom it going this fast. It doesn’t feel like things will advance this quickly. If you’re like me, you read about new tech daily and buy the latest and greatest gadgets and gizmos. The pace of technology advancement is slooooow, right? But our perception is flawed. “Advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly.” — Tim Urban One of the most optimistic and vocal proponents of this new era being ushered in is Ray Kurzweil. He came up with and bases many of his predictions on the aforementioned Law of Accelerating Returns and expects AGI to arrive by 2029. Again I turn to Wait But Why: “The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985 — because the former was a more advanced world — so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.” Kurzweil “believes another 20th century’s worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century’s worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th century’s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month.” And “all in all, that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.” This is due to the power of exponential growth versus the linear growth of which we often think.⁵ 3. What impact will such development have on humanity? The remainder of this post will lay out what life could look like once we are no longer the most (generally) intelligent being on the planet. We’ll touch on both the good and bad outcomes (for humans) and describe some ways in which we could hope to nudge things toward the better outcomes. It will likely be impossible to know exactly “what” and “how” these AIs are thinking. My guess is they will have advanced through a combination of directed programming and training from humans as well as recursive self-development efforts of their own. Once they can efficiently self-improve, we will quickly lose our ability to know what the hell is going on within them or comprehend what they are doing. It’s not just that an ASI will think a million⁶ times faster than us, it’s that the quality of the thinking will be that much better. Here’s an example from Wait But Why that illustrates the gulf between human cognition and that of chimps. “What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn’t a difference in thinking speed — it’s that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps’ brains do not. Speeding up a chimp’s brain by thousands of times wouldn’t bring him to our level — even with a decade’s time, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying. But it’s not just that a chimp can’t do what we do, it’s that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist — a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he’ll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it’s beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper. That’s the result of a small difference in intelligence quality. And in the scheme of the intelligence range we’re talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures, the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny.” And it is tiny. We are pretty close in intellect to chimps — no offense. In fact, there are intellectual tasks that chimps can perform better than us. Chimps can recognize and recall certain patterns far better than we can. Don’t be so full of yourself. So let’s say we now imagine a superintelligent machine that represents a cognitive gap equal to the one between us and the chimp. But in this example, we’re the chimps and the machine is trying to explain things to us that we cannot comprehend. Even these small gaps in level present huge chasms in understanding. Now let’s examine the much larger gap between us and ants. An ant building an anthill on the side of a highway has no idea what that highway is. They cannot possibly comprehend how we built it, for what we use it, what benefits it bestows upon us, or even who we are. Attempting to explain any of this to the ant is a preposterous idea for good reason. Even if we somehow could transmit our language or thoughts to the ants, they are simply not capable of comprehending any of it. A machine with the sort of smarts we’re talking about would be about as far away from us as we are to ants. The gap would be huge. We could not comprehend what the machine was doing and it would be pointless for the machine to attempt to explain it to us. Tim Urban uses a staircase metaphor to explain this.

https://medium.com/alttext/the-how-when-and-what-of-ai-cdc6df4aaabc

['Ben Edwards']

2020-02-01 23:22:59.688000+00:00

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

How I Created a Self-Published Planner in 72 Hours

This week, I launched my second self-published work, The Thriving Life Planner. It was a work that I wasn’t planning on doing this year and in fact, only had it as an idea about a month ago. But then, I got a cold with a terrible cough which would keep me up at night. In the middle of the night during November, I would write down ideas and play with timelines and outlines to keep my mind on my body’s need to cough uncontrollably. And then, one night, it came to me. It was time to create a planner that did everything I wanted it to do. The Thriving Life Planner was born. What I wanted in a planner was a place for my life plan, annual goals and monthly goals, annual and monthly calendars, and daily pages to help me achieve these goals. And I didn’t want to pay $50 for it every quarter like I had been doing. That is exactly what I created. You can find it here. How did I go from idea to proof product in 72 hours? Before we go any further, I want you to know something. I decided that if I was going to pursue creating this as a product that I didn’t want to spend any more than a week creating it. Maybe two weeks if getting a proof back took longer. I had it in my head that this was going to be a quick, crazy idea and I would not let it take months of wasted time if it was merely a delusion of a man who was up later in the night sick with a terrible cold. Step One: Clarify Your Why In between coughing fits, I thought I would start with a one-pager for myself. And it started with one sheet of printer paper. I put a header on top: The Perfect Planner. And then I asked myself the following questions: What do I want in a planner? What do I need in a planner? Is there anything that doesn’t need to be in a planner? Why have other planners not worked? Is this only for me, or would other people be interested in it? I answered these five questions and decided I would at least create a rough idea design for the planner. And then I would consider doing some research or give up on the idea. ***And to be very honest with you, I decided in the middle of my designing that I was going to create this product no matter if other people wanted it or not. Why? Because, it was a product I have wanted for years, and never found anything that did exactly what I wanted.*** Step Two: Create a Draft I created my first draft of The Thriving Life Planner in less than two hours. I pulled out the planners and journals I had used in the last four or five years (yes, I keep them) and started looking through them for the things I really liked and the things I didn’t like. This helped me focus on my one-pager. And then, on index cards, I started drafting was the inside of the planner would look like for almost every page. After two hours, I had the basic design and information I wanted in the planner. This initial draft helped me envision what I was looking for in the planner. And my mind was spent, my cough started to reduce, so I went to bed. Step Three: Create a Proof Copy The following night I was shocked awake by one of my daughters sneaking into our room and scaring the dog so he howled like crazy. This woke me up from a dead sleep and it awakened coughing fits. Once I got everyone else to bed, I was wide awake. So, I pulled out my laptop to work on my planner. I looked at different dimensions for my planner to be first. Once I finished this, I formatted a Pages document on my MacBook for those dimensions and set to work taking the scribes on index cards and turning them into the second draft of sorts. It took me about an hour to do this. Since most planners are the same pages over and over again, I only had to format about 20 pages. And then copy and paste them in the appropriate locations. With the second draft done, I realized I should take a break from this and moved onto the next step. Mostly, because I was still wide awake, but now it was due to the excitement of a project. Step Four: Cover Design For my first book, Productivity Success, I hired a designer to create my design. In the end, I paid $75 to have them design a cover that I had to hold their hand to get it just right (Or perhaps, they were holding my hand). Nevertheless, I decided I was not going to pay $75 for an idea I still wasn’t sure if it mattered to a lot of other people. So, I went over to Canva and created my own cover. I entered the dimensions for the front and back covers, decided not to do any writing on the spine, and I went to work. In less than an hour, I created the front and back cover for my planner and only paid $1 for the main graphic that was on the front cover. How did I come up with a cover design? For the cover design, I went and Googled: Self Published Planners. And reviewed all of the covers that came up on the first page. I did the same thing on Amazon. And then I went to Barnes and Noble's website and searched planners. These 20 minutes of research gave me insights into what I was going to do on the front. In the end, I spent an hour and a half-ish designing my cover. Then I sent it off to my brother to slap them together so I could upload it to Amazon’s KDP Direct. And then it was morning, so I started my day. Step Five: Editing Once I had everything together, it was time to do some serious editing. I did this on the evening of the second day of all my hard work. And was able to get a lot done from myself and with the help of two other people to make sure I had a good handle on the edits. Again, for my first book, Productivity Success, I hired an editor. This cost me something like $250 to edit the book. Since this was not a regular book and still a far-flung idea, I decided to self-edit. ***Warning: Self-editing is a hazardous business. What I did here also involved two other people looking through the initial second draft, and then again after I got the proof back. If you are going to do this, you need to be very vigilant. And to be honest, I probably have errors I haven’t caught yet.*** First, I reviewed every written aspect and read it out loud. Then I ran every written aspect through Grammarly. Then again, I used the grammar tools within Pages. I read everything out loud one more time. And then had two friends take a look at everything. At this point, the final draft to be sent off for the proof was done. Look back, reviewed this document six times in a self-editing process. It probably isn’t enough, but it catches almost all the major things, hopefully. Step Six: The Proof The next day on the way to work, I stopped at a Starbucks, uploaded my cover and ‘manuscript’ to KDP Direct. Set up the initial aspects for it and ordered a proof. I had created all of this in 72 hours. And now, all I had to do was wait to see what came back in the proof. What came back was marvelous. For the most part. I did have some more editing to do. Something about seeing it in person helps bring out the issues. But the formatting looked great. The cover looked great. I was shocked at how much I could do in three days' time. And so, I updated the things that needed to be fixed and started test driving my proof. Published December 1, 2019 I published the planner this week and could not be happier. And I am going to be honest. If no one buys it, that is fine, because it is the planner I wanted and I paid a total of $12 to create it and get my first one. The beauty is that others have shown their interest and THEY ARE BUYING THEM! It is a great sense of accomplishment to know I can create something and make it a reality. And I hope you might find The Thriving Life Planner to be the planner you have been looking for to achieve your dreams. Two Things to Remember: First, I decided that I was going to create this because I wanted it. And I didn’t care if anyone else bought it. This is a terrible idea if you are trying to actually sell a product to make money and start an online business. However, this product is for me. And I was fine with it. Second, I share all of this so you know it is easy to self-publish something, but I don’t want you to do it carelessly. Put in the work to create something awesome. And spend time reviewing it. I spent a lot of time in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep. If you don’t have a ton of time to put into something don’t try to force it out fast. Have you ever created something like this in a short amount of time? What was it? Share a link in the responses or share what it was and how you did it!

https://medium.com/the-thriving-life-publication/how-i-created-a-self-published-planner-in-72-hours-a1181efa5f19

['Jack Heimbigner']

2019-12-06 14:21:57.890000+00:00

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

Grokstyle wins LDV Vision Summit 2016 Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge

(Originally posted on May 30, 2016 on the LDV Capital blog here. Update April 4, 2017: GrokStyle announced raising $2M. Our annual LDV Vision Summit is May 24–25, 2017 in NYC, early bird tickets on sale now!) Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge Winner: Grokstyle, Sean Bell, CEO & Co-Founder ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit Our annual LDV Vision Summit has two competitions. Finalists receive a chance to present their wisdom in front of hundreds of top industry executives, venture capitalists, top industry executives and companies recruiting. Winning competitor also wins $5,000 Amazon AWS credits. 1. Startup competition for promising visual technology companies with less than $1.5M in funding? 2. Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge (ECVC) for any Computer Vision and Machine Learning students, professors, experts or enthusiasts working on a unique solution to empower businesses and humanity. Competitions are open to anyone working in our visual technology sector such as: empowering photography, videography, medical imaging, analytics, robotics, satellite imaging, computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous cars, media and entertainment, gesture recognition, search, advertising, cameras, e-commerce, visual sensors, sentiment analysis, and much more. The Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge provides contestants the opportunity to showcase the technology piece of a potential startup company without requiring a full business plan. It provides a unique opportunity for students, engineers, researchers, professors and/or hackers to test the waters of entrepreneurism in front of a panel of judges including top industry venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, journalists, media executives and companies recruiting. In the 2014 and 2015 Summits the ECVC was organized into predefined challenge areas (e.g., “estimate the price of a home or property,” “estimate how often a photo will be re-shared”) plus a “wildcard” category. Initially we proceeded in the same way for the 2016 ECVC, but we found that the most exciting entries were overwhelmingly the wildcards, so we decided to go all-in on that category. Attendees at this year’s summit bore witness to the outstanding lineup of finalists, including GrokStyle (visual understanding for interior design) from Cornell, MD.ai(intelligent radiology diagnostics) from Weill Cornell, DeepALE (semantic image segmentation) from Oxford University and Vision+Love (automated kinship prediction) from Carnegie Mellon. Congratulations to our 2016 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge Winner: Grokstyle, Sean Bell, CEO & Co-Founder ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit What is GrokStyle? GrokStyle, co-founded by Cornell researchers Sean Bell and Kavita Bala, is developing state-of-the-art visual search. Given any photo, we want to tell you what products are in it, and where you can buy them. We want to help customers and retailers connect with designers, by searching for how others have used and combined furniture and decor products. The world is full of beautiful design — we want to help you find it. As a PhD Candidate — what were your goals for attending our LDV Vision Summit? Did you attain them? My goals were to understand the startup space for computer vision, to connect with potential collaborators, find companies interested in building on our technology, and generally get our name out there so we can have a running start. The event definitely far exceeded our expectations and we attained all of our goals. Why did you apply to our LDV Vision Summit ECVC competition? Did it meet or beat your expectations and why? Serge Belongie recommended that we apply, and saw the value that the summit would have for us. We were excited, but certainly did not expect the amount of positive feedback, support, and connections that we made. My pocket is overflowing with business cards, and I’m excited to continue these conversations as we turn our technology into a company. Why should other computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence researchers attend next year? I think that all CV/ML/AI researchers should attend events like the LDV Vision Summit. The talks here are interesting and varied, and it is inspiring to see how algorithms and computer vision research are having a real impact in the world. You don’t get that at academic conferences like CVPR. We try to have an exciting cross section of judges from computer vision experts, entrepreneurs, investors and journalists. Asking a question is Barin Nahvi Rovzar, Hearst, Exec. Dir., R&D & Strategy. Judges included: Serge Belongie (Prof., Cornell Tech, Computer Vision), Howard Morgan (First Round, Partner & Co-Founder), Gaile Gordon (Enlighted, Sr. Director, Technology), Jan Erik Solem (Mapillary, CEO), Larry Zitnick (Facebook, AI Research, Research Lead), Ramesh Jain (U. California, Irvine, Prof., Co-Founder Krumbs), Evan Nisselson — LDV Capital, Partner), Nikhil Rasiwasia (Principal Scientist, Snapdeal), Beth Ferreira (WME Venture Partners, Managing Partner), Stacey Svetlichnaya (Flickr, Software Engineer, Vision & Machine Learning), Adriana Kovashka (U. of Pittsburgh, Assist. Professor Dept. Computer Science) ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit What was the most valuable part of your LDV Vision Summit experience aside from winning the competition? The most valuable part of the summit was connecting with three different companies potentially interested in building on our technology, and with four different potential investors/advisors. Last year, a key potential collaborator had presented at LDV Vision Summit, looking for computer vision researchers to solve challenging problems in visual search, interior design, and recognition. This year we were able to connect and say “we solved it!” Sean Bell, CEO & Co-Founder of Grokstyle ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit Do you have any advice for other researchers & PhD candidates that are thinking about evolving their research into a startup business? My advice would be to keep potential commercial applications in mind, early on in the project, so that what you end up with at the end is easier to take out of the lab and sell to the world. For me, one of the most challenging aspects of research is deciding which problems are solvable and which are worth solving — if you are interested in startups, this is even more important. There is the extra step of understanding who cares and who wants to use it. What was the timeline for you to take your idea for your research to evolving it into a startup plan? We presented a research paper at SIGGRAPH 2015 about our ideas from last year. It has taken us a year to flesh out the work, develop it from a research prototype to a product prototype. But there is still a lot to do. I am graduating in a few months, and Prof. Kavita Bala is joining full time on sabbatical. We plan to hit the ground running this summer with our engineer Kathleen Tuite, and two interns we are taking on. As technologists, we are looking to partner with business people to take the lead on evaluating which markets and customers can benefit the most from our technology. Starting in the fall, we plan on fundraising to help scale up our technical infrastructure.

https://medium.com/ldv-capital/grokstyle-wins-ldv-vision-summit-2016-entrepreneurial-computer-vision-challenge-80a06275f6b5

['Ldv Capital']

2017-04-04 22:11:38.945000+00:00

['Visual Technology', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Computer Vision', 'Machine Learning']

Microservices vs. Web Services Part 2

Continued Before the era of web services and microservices, software engineers have always been in the pursuit to build perfect information systems and automated solutions. Trailing on old technologies have inspired new ones by adapting and improving on existing systems. Ever wonder why web services and microservices rival? Software engineers have always been in the pursuit to build perfect information systems and automated solutions. Structure Microservices is an architectural style built usually for business capabilities. At the same time, it can be integrated into a web service. Nevertheless, microservices can be a stand-alone service or a function that has its own database and can be implemented and deployed independently of other services. Web services is a service provided from one application to another through the World Wide Web. As an API representation through HTTP, it is an abstraction layer that separates between a platform and the specific programming details of how the application code is really called to function. Size Web services mostly include a lot of business functions. They are usually implemented as complete subsystems making the whole system larger. On the contrary, “micro” services, as the name implies, refers to smaller internal components with limited functionality. The implication is that they are more compact than web services. Bounded Context Web services allow the sharing of components while microservices are limited in sharing by bounded context. A bounded context is simply the joining of a component and its data as a single unit with low dependency. Since web services depend on multiple services to carry out a business request, a system built on web services has a tendency to be slower than microservices. Interoperability Through its messaging middleware component, web services enhance the use of several heterogeneous protocols. Microservices differs by reducing the number of choices for integration by having a simple architectural pattern. Pros and Cons of Microservices and Web Services What are the advantages and disadvantages of web services and microservices? Let us take a look at some critical factors for judgment such as fail-safety and customization. Fail-Safety Both web services and microservices solutions promote fail-safety management in business applications without any form of downtime in performance. They are the best replacements for monolithic app structure as they function separately, yet with an interconnected set of components. Every microservice or web service connects to a separate data source. The simultaneous use of an application’s multiple features means that its structure can execute several user requests. This can lead to an app crashing if there is heavy traffic of active users. A request may be handled by a single microservice or a handful of collaborating microservices. Moreover, since each microservice has its own database, the load of the system can be evenly distributed across different databases. Although web services provide a neutral point of balance between scaling accessibility and fail-safety level microservices scale much better. Customization Customization of the initial monolithic software structure is also a factor even if you decide to decentralize it. There is always a challenge with some components that can be made into microservices. These components will not work independently inside an existing functionality. It is better to reprogram them from scratch. This is why such components provided as web services is a complex but better solution. To be Microservices or not to be Web Services Which is the best for my project you may finally ask yourself? Here goes the analysis to show which of the API representation tools are of the best in different situations. Requirements will always be the primary determiner in choosing the ideal architecture for any type of project. It is not professional to outrightly say that one architecture is superior to the other. The main reason for a choice should be the purpose of the application in question. Small desktop and mobile applications don’t use microservices architecture or web services because there is no need for a network connection. In situations like this, software development is less demanding to make and can be produced in a short time frame. For more complex software projects, with the need for communication over a network, web service is a good professional choice. It works well for bigger and complex enterprise application environments due to the integration with several other applications. Microservices, are best for smaller and well-partitioned, web-based systems. Additionally, if you are a developer working on a mobile or web application, then it is better to use microservices as it gives better control. Haven considered all the facts we have discoursed, we can conclude that both, microservices and web services, serve different uses and are therefore different types of architectures. In a more practical sense, a software solution can actually function with the combinational use of microservices and web services simultaneously. Finally, the development process for a critical project must be with some scrutiny. The choice of the best architecture for your software project is a top priority from the go. It is an important decision that determines if the project will be a success, how much time it will take, the validity of testing, and the release of a well-robust product. Are you a new business startup, an established business owner, or a product manager? Do you want to create, tweak, or manage an app? iTwis is willing to see you through this process. Our well-skilled and experienced mobile development team can successfully facilitate your app production process from scratch and bring it to a significant product release. Contact us today for a consultation.

https://medium.com/itwis/microservices-vs-web-services-part-2-8239e0533c81

['Ayo Oladele']

2020-11-19 10:32:39.154000+00:00

['Microservices', 'Software Engineering', 'Mobile App Development', 'Web App Development', 'Web Development']

Write, I Must — And So Must You!

Write, I Must — And So Must You! A new publication incorporating solid foundations and modern fun Design by the author I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years — back when guidelines were requested by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope and waiting a few weeks. To say the process of publishing has changed some would be a massive understatement. It’s been rebuilt to take advantage of current technologies. Over the years, I’ve seen Medium writers come and go. I’ve watched publications grow from the ground up, and I’ve wondered how some ever survived. But one thing has never changed: the writing world is ever-growing. Advances in technology have made it super affordable and possible for all types of people to enter the game, even if only for themselves. Write, I Must is a publication for all types of writers. The goal is not to replace Medium’s best writing pubs. Rather, it’s to embrace what we can learn from old-school writers, editors, and publishers, and mix it up with modern tech and lots of fun. Aside from actionable tips and compelling stories, Write, I Must will feature weekly challenges and writer spotlights. And while we’ll do our best to be nicey-nice about things, some of the challenges and voting sessions will be raw and public. Because who really learns from their moms reviewing their work? Publication features There will likely be some adjustments as we grow, but here are some of the key focuses of this publication. Forget the time caps Write, I Must is more about actionable content and compelling information than certain read lengths. We’re about taking as much space as necessary to provide valuable insight. Sometimes this takes just a few hundred words; sometimes, it results in a 15-minute read. Take the challenge Weekly challenges are designed to provide writers education and inspiration. Some will be difficult; some will be fun. Hopefully, you’ll see them all as a little of both. Remember (or learn about) when Newer writers missed out on some amazing products and practices of yesteryear. We’ll shine the spotlight on awesome memories of longtime writers.

https://medium.com/write-i-must/write-i-must-and-so-must-you-8292b81cb4a1

['Pamela Hazelton']

2020-11-05 17:19:05.118000+00:00

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

Entrepreneurship Is Stressful. Here’s How to Deal With It.

People tend to think of fast cars, luxury vacations, and designer clothes when they hear the word “entrepreneur”, but for many, this is far from the reality. The life of an entrepreneur is filled with hard work, long hours, and stress — the sacrifices they make to achieve their goals. Stress management is an essential skill for entrepreneurs. Why? Running a business is tough, and you’re bound to run into some issues on your journey. Perhaps some of your orders are delivered late and you need to deal with upset customers. Maybe you’re struggling to find new products to sell in your online store. Whatever the issues are, it’s important that you understand how to manage stress so you can continue moving forward with your business. I’m here to help you succeed as an entrepreneur, so I’ve created this article to provide you with my personal stress management tips. At the end of this article, you’ll be armed with the information you need to turn your stress into positive energy. First of all, what is stress? Stress is a natural response from your body when things start to get tough. Stress is that frustration that you feel after an especially hard day at work. It’s the anxiety that you feel if you’re worried about your job security. It’s that sinking feeling that you get if you’ve taken too much work on. But, it can also be the cause of that extra burst of energy that you get when you really need to perform. Stress can come in different forms, and it’s essential that you understand how your body reacts to stress. Once you gain an understanding of how your body handles stress, you can take the necessary steps to build a stress management routine that works for you. The Benefits of Managing Your Stress Stress management is essential for the longevity of your career, no matter the industry you’re involved in. We all face issues and pressures, but when you’re building a long-term career for yourself, you need to think and act for the long-term too — that includes looking after yourself. There will always be bumps in the road, but effective stress management will help you to overcome them, and power through at full-speed. How to Manage Stress Remember, there isn’t an exact science to this list — it’s important that you find what works best for you, as everybody is different. Try out as many or as little of the stress management tips from this list and try to settle on a routine that works for you. Alright, let’s get started. 1. Break Down the Problem First things first, try to break down the problem that is actually causing you stress. You might already know, but take some time and think about what it is exactly that’s making you feel stressed. Grab a pen and paper (or your laptop) and just start writing. Maybe it’s the tight deadline that you’ve got coming up, or perhaps you’re struggling to land your first sale with your new business. Whatever it is, try to break it down. Be critical with yourself. If you’re facing a task which looks impossible at first, I guarantee it’ll look much more manageable if you break it down, and face the task in smaller segments. Start off by noting down the first thing that you need to tackle your issue, and think about how you’ll achieve success. Once you’ve got that down, move onto the next task you’ll need to complete, and so on. Soon you’ll have a list of micro-tasks that you’ll need to tackle, and you’ve already listed down a clear path to success. I guarantee that you’ll be spurred on to succeed when the problem seems smaller, and easier to manage. 2. Yoga for Stress Management Yoga is one of the oldest stress management techniques in the world, and for a good reason too. Yoga provides many different health benefits to those who regularly hit the mat. Reduced stress levels, lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, and reduced anxiety are but a few of the benefits that you’ll receive if you adopt a regular yoga practise. Yoga might seem daunting, especially if you’ve never done it before, but you can always join a beginner’s class, or try out a tutorial on YouTube. 3. Take a Break If you’re starting off your day with a huge list of tasks that you need to complete, your natural reaction might be to try and power through and complete them as quickly as possible. This might work for some, but others might become flustered and fatigued. And if you’re fatigued it’s likely that you won’t be performing at your peak. Don’t be afraid to take a break — it’s actually an effective stress management technique. And don’t rush your break either, take as long as you need before you feel ready to continue tackling your tasks. It might seem counterproductive at first — especially if you have other plans later on in the day — but taking the time for a break can actually help you to clear your mind, and finish your tasks even faster. 4. Exercise Regularly Exercise is truly one of the best stress management tactics. You’ve undoubtedly heard how important it is for your overall health to make sure that you get some exercise multiple times every week, and this sentiment remains true when it comes to managing stress. If you want to use exercise as a way to manage your stress levels, make sure that you stay consistent. If you’re hitting the gym, set aside specific evenings (or mornings) of the week which you’ll dedicate to your workouts. If you’re looking to engage with team sports do some research and enquire into local sports clubs — they’ll likely have multiple practice sessions every week which you can fit into your schedule. My best advice is to pick something that you like doing — you’ll find much more success if you’re going into your workout excited, rather than dreading it. 5. Watch Your Diet To help manage your stress, your diet is always a good starting point. Your diet is so important for your overall health, but it’s one of the things that the majority of us let slip when we’re under stress. After all, there are so many fast food and delivery options around nowadays which make junk food the easier option, instead of a healthy, balanced diet. But, you’re going to need a lot of energy if you want to tackle your daily tasks, and you’ll feel much more energized after eating healthy food. Treat your body like a sports car — you wouldn’t put cheap fuel in a Ferrari, so why would you put cheap, unhealthy food in your body? 6. Spend Time Socializing When it comes to stress management, socializing can be so effective. We’ve all been there: your friend has asked you to come and grab a drink after work, but you turn them down because you’re too tired, or you need to work on your business after work. All of those excuses are valid, but when it comes to stress management, socializing can benefit some much more than an early night. If you’re the type of person who feels energized after hanging out with some friends, try to do it more often — it can help you to wind down and come back to work feeling refreshed. 7. Try Out Meditation Many entrepreneurs have already experienced the benefits that meditation can bring to those who are looking for stress relief. Research suggests that meditation helps to lower your stress levels, helps to aid anxiety and depression, and decreases your blood pressure. Meditation is a great stress management technique that you can easily incorporate into your daily routine. It doesn’t matter if you choose to meditate in the morning before you tackle your daily tasks, or in the evening after a hard day’s work. If you’re looking to try meditation, I’d suggest using Headspace. There are plenty of guided sessions on the app that’ll help you test out this stress management technique. 8. Get an Early Night If you’re stressed because of your workload you could be tempted to work late into the evening hours to complete your tasks. Yes, this shows your dedication to your craft, and will probably help you to achieve your short-term goals, but you’re building for the long-term, and it’s important that you look after yourself. Sleep is essential for recovery, so try to get an early night most days of the week. If you get enough sleep it’s likely that you’ll be energized for the next day. Also, try to ensure that you have high-quality sleep too — switch off all the devices in your bedroom which emit light, and wake up on the first alarm. No snoozing! 9. Learn to Say “No” My final stress management tip is a simple one, but you’d be surprised how effective it can be. Simply put, learn to say “no” more often. If you’re the type of person who loves to help others out, you can fall into the trap of putting others before yourself. And this won’t help you to manage your stress levels. When you’re under stress, put yourself first. Politely decline if somebody asks you for help — they’ll understand completely, and you’ll feel relieved that you haven’t taken more work on. Then you’ll be able to use that extra time to finish your tasks early, rest, cook yourself a nice meal, or anything else that helps you to wind down. And remember, stress isn’t always a bad thing. Try to think of stress as energy. It’s energy that when harnessed properly, can be used to propel your business towards success. This story was originally published on the Oberlo Blog on October 13, 2018.

https://medium.com/the-first-step/entrepreneurship-is-stressful-heres-how-to-deal-with-it-8b3cece0eb66

['Andrew Roach']

2019-03-06 23:47:16.696000+00:00

['Stress', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur']

Considering Writing a Book? Answer These 6 Questions First

Extra tips and tricks If you’ve decided that a book is something you want to write after answering these questions, then here are some extra things that may help you, which I use and have found to be very helpful. Journaling More writing! Yes, but for an excellent reason. Journaling helps you identify anything that is preventing you from achieving your book writing goals. Keep a record of how you feel and what is currently going on in your life, ideally daily. Reading back over your journal at the end of each week or month will help you pinpoint anything you didn’t realize was a problem, but actually is. I identified that by leaving my novel writing until late in the day; I was then more likely to want to watch TV rather than write. In my head, this only amounted to a few incidents, but my journal told me it actually happened 2–3 times per week. As a result, I switched to writing in the morning instead and found this worked much better. My journal showed that over the course of the next month I had missed no writing days at all; a massive improvement on the previous month. Overachieving This sounds like a positive rather than a negative; writing more than you have planned to. However, what I found was that I then gave myself a day off from writing the next day because I was ahead of target. This, unfortunately, led to me having several more days off and then I fell behind schedule. Now, when I have a productive day, I think about how I’ve brought my end goal closer, and make sure I use that momentum to continue being productive. Rewards Writing a book is tough and time-consuming. I’ve found that small rewards help keep me motivated when I reach a goal of every 10,000 words. Treating myself to a fancy hot chocolate and a slice of cake in my favorite cafe or buying (more expensive than I would normally buy) bath salts gives me the little boost to keep going. Set yourself small goals and reward yourself with something when you hit them. Alternatively, if you think you’ll be more productive by having a bigger reward in mind when you complete the whole book, then do that instead. Whatever works for you.

https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/considering-writing-a-book-answer-these-6-questions-first-5c2c02eebb0c

['Elizabeth Dawber']

2020-12-17 13:54:06.285000+00:00

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

Your Unabridged Guide to Making a Passive Income on Medium

In a lot of ways, discovering Medium can be like walking onto a red carpet. (At least, this is what I imagine it must be like.) You’re dazzled, overwhelmed, excited, and ready to vomit all at once. Finally, you have an outlet for your writing, one that pays you! And, look at that — tons of people have made Medium into their full-time jobs! How incredible would that be?! And then you start to come up with all of these dream scenarios; you’re filled with idealized hope that is exacerbated by the previously mentioned success stories. You become intoxicated by the possibilities. Perhaps tangentially related, you may start thinking rashly and make decisions you come to second guess later on. How do I know? That’s exactly what I did when I started on this site in February 2019. I learned about Medium through a podcast and I did some research. (Not nearly enough, mind you.) As I detailed above, I allowed the idea of ‘making it big’ wash over me like a tsunami, but I wasn’t at all prepared for the destruction that would follow. (Perhaps the use of the word ‘destruction’ is a bit melodramatic, I still had a roof over my head and food to eat, but things have been tight for me financially for the last year or so.) Anyway, within a few days of learning about Medium, I made the impulsive choice to quit my part-time retail job and throw myself into the site wholeheartedly. Not because I felt financially comfortable enough to do so; but because I wanted out of that place and I saw a chance to make that happen. That job made me miserable, but when I look back, I wish I’d stuck it out just a little bit longer. I can’t go back and smack my former self upside the head, so I’ll take the lessons I’ve learned and keep them in my pocket for the future. Hopefully, they help you as well.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/your-unabridged-guide-to-making-a-passive-income-on-medium-6a1cd792b11e

['Brianna Bennett']

2020-09-26 14:50:50.633000+00:00

['Medium', 'Creativity', 'Ideas', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

Is the “Greatest Sales Deck” Great for Savvy Prospects?

In this series, I answer questions about crafting strategic narratives for sales, marketing, fundraising, product, and recruiting. To ask a question, respond to this article or email me: andyraskin@gmail.com. A few days ago, I received this email from Stephen, an enterprise salesperson at a New York City-based software company: Dear Andy, I recently read your post The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen, about Zuora’s strategic story. Following your advice, I built a pitch very similar to Zuora’s for enterprise companies. However, on more than one occasion I’ve been cut off midway through. Prospects say they know all about the trends/sector, and they ask if I could please switch instead to something “less general.” That makes me wonder: Is the Zuora style OK for general, top-of-funnel sales, but less appropriate for prospects who are more knowledgeable — those that understand a bit about the space and what your company does, but want to understand your unique offering? —Stephen D., enterprise account executive, New York, NY If you haven’t read the post Stephen’s referring to, you can find it here: With upwards of 1 million views, “The Greatest Sales Deck” inspired a lot of people, like Stephen, to re-craft their decks in Zuora’s image. If you’ve read the post (or others I’ve written), you know that I advocate taking time to lay out, as Zuora does, what’s at stake for prospects before introducing your product or the problem it solves. And more than a few of those who followed my advice have reported that their prospects, like Stephen’s, get impatient during that setup. Likewise, some have questioned whether it makes sense to spend all that time setting context for audiences who are already very knowledgable. But that question betrays an assumption that I’d like to challenge: that the goal of setting context is education. In my experience, you’ll be most successful if your primary goal in setting context is not educating prospects, but engaging them emotionally. Last I checked, savvy, knowledgable people have emotions too, so let’s talk about what else might be going on for Stephen and others. 3 Lessons from Stephen’s Attempt at a “Zuora-style” deck Stephen graciously sent me his deck so I could take a look. He asked that I not present his slides or divulge identifying details, and I’ll honor that request. Instead, I’ll share my general feedback to him in the hope that it will be useful to others. #1. Treat “The Greatest Sales Deck” as a framework, not a template. There are plenty of books about how to write great screenplays, yet plenty of unwatchable movies that follow their advice. What dooms these films? Tons of things, of course, but a biggie is lack of originality. Many slides in Stephen’s deck were essentially the Zuora ones—different images but identical headlines, with a few of the words changed. The resulting flow may have worked for Zuora’s story, but with Stephen’s it lacked energy. No surprise that prospects wanted him to get on with it. To boost the odds that your story connects, harvest language about what’s at stake directly from customers and prospects. Literally ask them, “What changes in your world are creating opportunity and risk?” and write down their answers. Then, tailor your pitch’s flow — whether you present it with slides, whiteboard sketches, or just speaking over coffee—to work for that story. #2. Convey what’s at stake in 5–8 slides (and through other channels!) I hesitate to give advice about how many slides to use, since I’ve seen company and product stories told equally well with very few slides (or none) and with more than 20. That said, when I look back on the strategic narratives I’ve built with leadership teams, and how those have translated into sales decks, they almost always get to the product in eight slides, max. Frequently it’s fewer. Stephen’s deck, on the other hand, required prospects to sit through 12 slides before he introduced his product. That’s almost always too many. It’s worth noting, by the way, that it’s a tall order for your sales pitch alone to convey what’s at stake. In my work with teams, the goal is making sure that everyone—CEO, marketing team, product managers, recruiters, etc.— is telling the same story, conveying those same stakes. For example, I love how 90% of Zuora’s content marketing is not about how great Zuora is, and not about some new Zuora feature announcement. In fact, it’s not about Zuora at all. As you can see from this recent snapshot of Zuora’s blog headlines, it’s about what’s at stake for prospects—and how to win—in a world of subscription business models: Zuora’s blog—not about Zuora, but about what’s at stake for customers. #3. Don’t just “add storytelling” Every once in a while, I encounter the notion that you can take a pitch that isn’t working, sprinkle in some “storytelling,” and voilà! I sensed that was Stephen’s approach, so I emailed him to ask. Sure enough: [Yes, I] bolted the Zuora setup to the meat of our [old] deck. How did I know? Because when Stephen’s deck eventually did get to his product, the feature discussion was largely detached from the stakes he attempted to lay out in the story’s setup. In Stephen’s question, he asked about pitching to people who “understand a bit about the space…but want to understand the unique offering.” These are people who are looking to understand your differentiation. The best way to communicate that is not feature comparisons but to first establish a differentiated, happily-ever-after Promised Land. Then you talk about features, but solely in context of how they help prospects overcome obstacles to that Promised Land. In other words, to really work, the whole thing has to tie together as a cohesive story, not just the beginning. Knowledgable people, too, respond to well-crafted strategic stories In the face of a prospect’s impatience, it’s understandable if your first instinct is to get rid of the “story stuff.” And if you don’t have the time or resources to structure a compelling story, your wisest course of action might be to just “show your wares.” That said, it’s likely that your story—like any story when it first sees the light of day—will better engage audiences after a rewrite (or two). In my experience, when you ask prospects and customers what’s at stake for them, and you repeat it back through an efficient, well-honed setup, you get the opposite of impatience: you get nods of recognition, and you get invaluable conversations about how those stakes are playing out for the person/company you’re pitching—regardless of your audience’s level of sophistication. If anything, the savvier the prospect, the more they’ll want to engage in a discussion of stakes, as long as you’ve conveyed them credibly. (For more on how to do that, check out How Great Sales Narratives Drive Urgency.) In short, a strategic story, well told, builds trust. And that’s worth striving for, no matter whom you’re pitching.

https://medium.com/firm-narrative/is-the-greatest-sales-deck-great-for-savvy-prospects-d5de48fb2f94

['Andy Raskin']

2017-04-17 16:45:35.314000+00:00

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

Faster way to use faster RCNN : using detectron2

We can get pretrain model in model zoo of detectron2 for training. I believe that using model pretrain by coco dataset to detect PCB error will not get a good performance. However, I get 64 in AP value with only 3000 epochs. We could get 75 in AP value if we train for 30000 epochs. It’s better than I expect. Here is the results of prediction. tensor([0, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5], device='cuda:0') Boxes(tensor([[289.1584, 326.0847, 325.2099, 358.8866], [233.4901, 118.8735, 262.8138, 149.5809], [106.2966, 181.0337, 140.5350, 211.7205], [259.9618, 240.3079, 288.6585, 271.2735], [500.9987, 334.7750, 527.8199, 374.0154], [347.2850, 146.7405, 395.6854, 180.7809]], device='cuda:0')) Although, its resolution isn’t quit well, you can find that model recognize the error on PCB and get right classification. We can’t know how well this model is, so we use the evaluation from coco to figure it out. In detectron2, it is quit easy to use evaluator to get AP, AP50, AP75. | AP | AP50 | AP75 | APs | APm | APl | |:------:|:------:|:------:|:------:|:------:|:------:| | 64.318 | 93.136 | 79.455 | 62.998 | 65.486 | 70.000 | [01/16 06:41:56 d2.evaluation.coco_evaluation]: Per-category bbox AP: | category | AP | category | AP | category | AP | |:-----------|:-------|:-----------|:-------|:-----------|:-------| | open | 59.408 | short | 50.631 | mousebite | 63.177 | | spur | 65.522 | copper | 77.720 | pin-hole | 69.452 | OrderedDict([('bbox', {'AP': 64.31825163056139, 'AP-copper': 77.72030131795276, 'AP-mousebite': 63.177111687191676, 'AP-open': 59.407758192556805, 'AP-pin-hole': 69.45151146413728, 'AP-short': 50.63100208959249, 'AP-spur': 65.52182503193735, 'AP50': 93.13612566723208, 'AP75': 79.45463612126157, 'APl': 69.99999999999999, 'APm': 65.48557070350444, 'APs': 62.997574669449286})]) Its results is better than the paper I read A VGG-16 Based Faster RCNN Model for PCB Error Inspection in Industrial AOI Applications. It should not being compared with AP values only because we use different data set and different kind of backbone model, but we get 75 in AP values in only 30000 training epochs. You can realize how powerful resnet is. Detectron2 can also customize the backbone model by your own. If you find that isn’t VGG16 in model zoo, you can create one by yourself. I didn’t do it, so I wouldn’t show it to mislead you guys.

https://medium.com/disassembly/faster-way-to-use-faster-rcnn-using-detectron2-10431d4ee6e1

['Yuan Ko']

2020-05-27 03:40:22.599000+00:00

['Deep Learning', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Facebook', 'Machine Learning']

How to Get More out of Your Conversations

Check for intent and attitude Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash My problem is that I talk a lot and I love connecting and reconnecting with people. I am also guilty of indulging myself in long, meandering phone conversations. So much so that I have considered creating an auto cut phone app like a pre-set timer to keep me in check. Realizing, that I get easily drawn into conversations at home, one day I went to a local coffee shop to get some work done. I wanted to avoid distractions by being amid strangers. At the coffee shop, I needed the wifi password and I figured the quickest way would be to just ask the guy sitting close by. I ended up talking to this stranger for over an hour! What was I seeking by talking to him for so long and not focusing on my work at hand? I justified the conversation by reminding myself that I enjoyed listening to his motivations for his non-profit. I found his goals intriguing and inspiring at the same time. As our conversation neared the end I had a sinking bittersweet feeling as I tried to justify the time I had spent. My original intent of focusing on my work was in shambles once again, but surely I had gained a lot. Even after leaving the comfort of my home, I still found myself in the same quandary of getting distracted. I then realized it was not the surroundings but how I engaged in conversations that hampered my work. As I tried to be more introspective about improving my conversations, two factors stood out to me: Intent and Attitude. Image by author Take a minute to reflect on any interesting talk you remember having. Did you have a clear goal in mind or did you just go with the flow? Image by author The second choice may seem devilish at first glance. Is this akin to having an agenda or at a more sinister level a hidden agenda, every time we open our mouths? Are we robots? Pre-programmed? Is it so wrong to monitor a conversation to see if is serving its intended purpose? For example, if the end goal is to help the other person would it be wrong to monitor the talk to see if we are serving the purpose we intended? What about just fun? Why can’t conversations be simply for fun? Of course, they can be, and just being aware of that end goal may make them more satisfying. Usually, there are a few clear goals for engaging. Yes, there may be overlapping intentions but even then, if you dig deeper, there is probably an overriding intention. One is to listen to viewpoints that are different from our own. Another is to brainstorm solutions, evaluate them, and make decisions. A third is to connect with others — be ourselves, relax, entertain, and have fun sharing our thoughts for the sake of sharing. Another reason is to convince others, to influence their thought process and try to get them to follow our viewpoint. Sometimes when self-doubt creeps up, we seek validation of our thoughts from those that we respect, so that we feel better about our stance. We look for people to talk to who will assure us that we are right. These conversations allow us opportunities for loud thinking, where our thoughts can marinate and become clearer. On the surface, the conversation may look like one is trying to convince the other person but actually one is trying to convince oneself. Some conversations happen out of curiosity, others to make our intentions clear or gain clarity about someone’s intention. Often times, for those of us who think out loud, conversations are the exploratory sandbox that allows us to play with our thoughts. The challenge for people like me is to learn how not to filibuster our productivity goals by permanently living in the sandbox but to know when to step out. My new self created rule: Think of your intention, remind yourself that you have control over your thoughts. Before you go into a meeting or pick up the phone and look for someone’s name to call them, think — why … what goal — for how long? Image by author We find some conversations to be more rewarding than others. This is probably due to the attitude of the participants. Next time you get a chance to analyze the quality of a conversation check for some of the following constructs, just for the fun of it. Are you or someone you know responsible for any of the following? Conviction Bias Is everyone listening with an open mind? Or, is there someone who always assumes that they know more or better? Someone who thinks that they have all the knowledge needed? Someone with an “I know for sure that I am right” attitude? Power Bias Does everyone view the conversation as one among equals? Is one person always telling others what to do? “I am the boss” bias? Attention Bias Are all parties listening intently when it is the other party’s turn to talk? Does someone check out as soon as they are done talking? Winning Bias Is the conversation a dialogue? Or is someone intent on turning it into a debate so that they can win? Air Time Bias Is everyone getting enough time to articulate their thoughts? In a discussion either extreme does not help. If you always sit silently, nod your head, and do not say much then you may not be adding value. And if you want all the time to explain your brilliant ideas, you may be stiffling others. Being aware of our conversation style can help us improve it. I realized that I would often cut people once I thought I knew what they meant, without waiting for them to finish their thought process. And I would have never recognized this except when a good friend pointed it out to me. She helped me immensely… now I try to be more patient and I make a conscious effort to let others complete their thoughts without interruption. I learned that one of the highest forms of respect you can pay someone is your undivided attention and your willingness to improve your conversations.

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-to-get-more-out-of-your-conversations-be81ebc45050

['Primal Dhillon']

2020-10-31 13:30:47.671000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Communication', 'Productivity', 'Psychology']

One Psychological Superpower I Wish I Had

I wish I didn’t feel so obligated to help people. Earlier this morning, while playing a game of League of Legends, I dove headfirst into the losing side of a 2 vs 5 after my jungler (the guy who “floats” around the map) fell for a bait. If you don’t know what a ‘bait’ in LoL is, it’s when an enemy player tricks you into thinking they’re alone or at a disadvantage. When you take the bait and try to secure the kill, his teammates, waiting closeby in the shadows, jump your ass and make you feel like a fool. An experienced player can smell a bait from a mile away. I tried telling the guy, “stop, don’t do it.” But he went for it anyway. Not surprisingly, the rest of the enemy team came out of the woodwork and started to chase him down. I threw myself into the mix in a feeble attempt to turn the tides. We both died. He flamed me. LoL is great.

https://medium.com/dreamweaver-stories/one-psychological-superpower-i-wish-i-had-b729ac127f22

['Jason Gutierrez']

2020-11-10 14:08:47.515000+00:00

['People', 'Mindset', 'Motivation', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement']

The Rest Will Take Care of Itself

I’m working on a project right now. A big experiment. I have this theory that writing short pieces — fiction and non-fiction — and publishing them on Amazon could lead to a decent income stream. My goal is to make $100 a month within 90 days and $1000 a month within a year. Maybe I’ll do more. Maybe it’ll fail completely. I honestly have no idea. This isn’t the time for me to think about that. Because I have no control, really, over the results. My experiment might fail spectacularly. It might take off and be the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Right now, at this early stage, all I can do is focus on what I can control. That’s my work ethic. Creating content. My willingness to take risks. My persistence. My vision. The Perfect Day Exercise My very favorite self-help book was written by Barbara Sher. It’s called Wishcraft. I’ve written about it before, and how it really changed my life when I was very young and my marriage was falling down around my ears. One of the exercises in Wishcraft that I still do at least once a year, even 25 years later, is something I call The Perfect Day Exercise. Basically, just sit down and right out a perfect day sometime in the future. Just imagine that you already have everything you want. Where do you live? Who do you live with? What do you do with your time? What kind of work do you do? Go into detail. When you’re done, do a little analysis. What are the elements of that perfect day? How do they compare to your current life? You’re trying to identify the gaps, so that you can figure out how to bridge them. One of my gaps is blogging. I love writing for Ninja Writers via a blog. I even blogging here on Medium. But my income from that blogging is so unpredictable and the platform is so volatile, that it is difficult to count on. I’ve also been teaching other people to blog on Medium for almost two years. I can teach all kinds of things — my students are curated regularly, they have great habits, they know technically how to blog well. But I none of us have any control over the income that comes from it. To bridge that gap for myself and for my students, I started thinking about Amazon. It’s much, much bigger with many times more readers visiting it every day. The pool of money that goes to readers is multitudes larger at Amazon than it is at Medium. While Amazon also has some volatility, it’s got more transparency and stability than Medium. So — my experiment. Can something like expanded blogging work for building an income stream? My thought is that short nonfiction works of 5,000 words or so (or fiction under 10,000 words) can be created regularly and published consistently. Starting next week I’ll be publishing one non-fiction piece and one fiction piece on Amazon every week. My goal is to keep it up for a year. There are parts of this project I can control and parts I can’t. Three Layers of Control Control over your work has three layers. There are things you have absolute control over. There are things you have some control over. And there are things you have no control over at all. Putting the bulk of your effort into the things you can control, less into what you can sort of control, and leaving what you can’t control alone will help you stick with your plan long enough for it to have a chance to work. And it will give you the best chance for success. Let’s look at all three layers. What You Can Control The number one thing you have control over is your own effort. Your work ethic. You might not have control over anything else in some instances, but you can always show up and do the work. When I think about my Amazon experiment, I have control over whether I actually produce those non-fiction and fiction short pieces. The only thing that can stop me, other than something totally out of my control like illness, is me. As long as I’m capable of working, it’s up to me to decide whether or not to do that work. I can control my efforts to learn, too. That means reading a lot and finding other people who can help me figure out the things I don’t know how to do. What You Can Kind of Control I can sort of control my ability to pivot. I say sort of, even though, of course — I can pivot anytime I want to. I have less control, though, over whether a pivot is a good idea. Even taking on this experiment at all is a thing I can only sort of control, right? Because I have no idea whether or not it will work. And at some point in the next year, I’m sure I’ll step back and evaluate and have to decide whether what I’m doing is working or not. Am I pivoting to try something new too soon? Am I waiting too long? It’s so hard to know, and that can be maddening. Sticking with something too long, just because it’s what I’ve decided to do, can be a big mistake. Switching gears too soon and too often can undermine my efforts. Ugh. Another thing I can sort of control is making sure my work keeps improving. Of course, I have total control over my willingness and desire to improve. But I have less control over whether I actually am getting better. I can only try to do my best. What You Can’t Control I can’t control whether or not people buy, read, or enjoy my work. That’s hard. It’s so hard. I want to control it. I want to be a bestseller, damn it. I want everyone to love me and my work and all my stories. But it’s not up to me. Once I put my work out there, either it’s going to hit or it’s not. All I can do is go back to the beginning and start all over again with what I can control — which is the work. The Rest Will Take Care of Itself So. We can control our work. We can sort of control what we do with it. And we can’t control at all whether or not other people want to read it. If we focus on the work and on what we have at least some control over, then I really believe the rest will take care of itself. Eventually. It might take some time. It might take some hard pivots and difficult decisions. It might take longer than I want it to. But eventually the rest will take care of itself.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/focus-on-what-you-can-control-47b0499f7913

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-10-10 14:38:09.537000+00:00

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

5 Tips to Talk Persuasively About Climate Disruption

5 Tips to Talk Persuasively About Climate Disruption Katrine Follow Dec 15 · 5 min read Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash Someone close to me does not believe in human-caused climate disruption. He’s a successful businessman and highly rational. How is it possible that he doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus? After all, 97% of climate scientists agree that human activities are causing climate disruption. People develop defence mechanisms to avoid the uncomfortable truths around global warming, explains Per Espen Stoknes. He is a psychologist and economics PhD who focuses on climate psychology, climate economics, and climate policy. If your job is in the fossil fuels industry, or you depend on cheap gas (thanks to a long car commute to work, say), it is psychologically much harder to admit that your lifestyle is disrupting the air than if you work in the re-insurance industry (which daily calculates climate risks) or drive an electric car. — Stoknes, Per Espen. What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming (p. 107). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition. How can we talk more persuasively about climate disruption to get past people’s mental defence mechanisms? 1. Paint a Picture of a Beautiful Future I feel disheartened reading about the imminent catastrophes in our news. “Stop travelling,” we’re told, and still we are headed for tragedy. Instead, we need a joint vision to fight for, where we are healthier, breathe fresher air, and enjoy wildlife. Here’s a beautiful world described by the author Mike Berners-Lee: The air is fresher. Life is healthier, longer, more relaxed, more fun and more exciting. Our diets are varied, tasty and healthy. More of us get out as much as we want to, both socially and physically. Travel is easier — but we spend less time in transit. We feel freer to live life in whatever way seems meaningful to each of us at the time, in negotiation with other people’s equal right to do likewise. There is less violence at every level. Cities are vibrant whilst the countryside teems with wildlife. Our jobs are more interesting, and the pressures are more often self-imposed. We expect, insist on and get higher standards of trust and truth, in politics, in the media and in fact everywhere. We are better connected to the people around us and to our sense of the global community. We give more of our time and attention to others and we notice and enjoy more of what is going on around us. We might compete with each other for fun but where it really matters we collaborate better than ever before. Berners-Lee, Mike. There Is No Planet B (p. 9). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. Steal some lines for the next time you are selling people on our better future? 2. Make the Numbers Come to Life With Imagery Climate terms include the 2-degree target, the 1.5-degree target, CO2 levels in ppm, and other technical words. Just understanding the terms requires hours of studying. No wonder there are still many climate sceptics and deniers out there. To convey how we are burning our globe, we can use imagery. Look at how Per Espen Stoknes makes the numbers come to life: “Let’s imagine that CO2 is a brown haze heavier than air. All CO2 thus falls down to earth and creates a blanket layer, a pool around us that we are ‘swimming’ in. How high would this layer be if spread out evenly all around the world? It used to be around fifteen feet before the industrial revolution. But humans have now added around seven extra feet so we’re today immersed in a dense twenty-two-foot-high fog all over the world. Feels a bit more suffocating than ‘400 ppm,’ doesn’t it?” Stoknes, Per Espen. What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming (p. 70). Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition. I’ve tried describing how we are swimming in a “dense twenty-two-foot-high [7 meter] fog” to friends. Trust me — it works wonders. Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash 3. Appeal to Our Loss Aversion We hate giving up something we already have. If you’re like most people, you’ll feel much worse about losing $20 than about winning $20. This concept is known as loss aversion. How can we use loss aversion to our advantage? Stoknes suggests that we talk about insurance to avoid higher costs in the future. “One way to utilize this framing for climate could be: We must build a climate defense today so we can avoid the climate declaring war on us in the future. Future climate mayhem may release waves of unrest, riots, refugees, and terrorists. Good climate policy is good military strategy — something the US Department of Defense has emphasized in its own reports.” — What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action by Per Espen Stoknes Insurance is something most people understand. I’ll certainly try this with my highly rational, business-minded friend. 4. Use Bold Words The phrase “climate change” is bland and plays into the hands of sceptics. After all, does “climate change” need to be caused by humans? And could “climate change” even be a good thing? Let’s look at alternative words. “Climate cancer” was put forth as an alternative in an engaging 3-minute video by Simon Sinek, the author behind the bestseller book “Start With Why.” Stoknes suggests “climate disruption” and “global burning” as alternatives. I’ve chosen “climate disruption” in this article. How does it sound? 5. Communicate Certainty The public opinion evolves continuously. We debate and shift the boundaries for what is normal versus what is radical. In climate communication, we need to be explicit about these boundaries. We should show that we know that human behaviours cause climate disruption. We can highlight that it’s an outlier opinion to think anything else. After all, 97% of scientists, the United Nations, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and governments across the world state that human activities cause climate disruptions. Some questions are not up for debate. Just like I won’t engage if someone tries to argue that the Earth is flat. Instead, we can debate how bad and frequent the following extreme weather, drought, and other disasters will be. Or how we should act. Or our underlying values around national and international solidarity which form the basis for our policy reaction.

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/5-tips-to-talk-persuasively-about-climate-disruption-7bd364c03f5c

[]

2020-12-15 15:03:49.049000+00:00

['Climate Action', 'Psychology', 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change', 'Writing']

This Quiz Will Tell You Exactly What Type of Writer You Are

We are not all the same. Writers are people, of course. And people come in all varieties. We all have different goals, different interests, different needs. We all have different struggles and different strengths. When I write about writing, I’m trying to create a blog post that will appeal to the broadest audience. I can’t write just to you. I need you to dig a little and find yourself in the advice, so that you can apply it in a helpful way. That can be difficult to do, if you struggle with knowing exactly what kind of writer you are. I’ve Identified Five Writer Archetypes Just five. Every writer I know falls into one of them — and then there are intersections. Those five archetypes combine in a wide variety of ways. Here are the archetypes: Hesitater. Let’s start here. A hesitater is someone who has one foot on the gas and the other on the break. They are learners. They are perfectionists. They want to get everything just right, and that keeps them from getting started. They struggle to get started with a new project, but are excellent students and are open to new ideas. No one is just a Hesitater. When they take their foot off the break, they slip into one of the other archetypes, even though they will always be a Hesitater, too. Skipper. A Skipper is a writer whose happy place is having an assignment. Skippers often are journalists or work for publications. They can struggle with coming up with ideas for what to write, when they don’t have an assignment and they are usually very good with discipline and finishing what they start. Like Hesitaters, they are never just Skippers. Skippers will always have a strong suit in one of the following three archetypes. They write for the paycheck. Spiller. A Spiller is a confessional writer. These inward-facing writers excel at storytelling. Their writing often is very cathartic and healing — for the writer and the reader. They tend to niche easily, writing deeply on the same handful of topics. Spillers sometimes struggle with remembering to invite their readers into their story. They are exceptionally good at being authentic and vulnerable. They write for themselves. Teacher. A Teacher is a writer who, not surprisingly, writes to teach. This writer is inundated by ideas — their own and other people’s. They are outward-facing writers who would most likely not do their work if they didn’t have readers. Teachers are great with starts, but struggle to finish. They write for their readers. Artist. Artists are writers who have a top-level goal of creating beautiful work. They tend to have a single idea at a time and work on it with single-mindedness until it’s complete. They tend to be good with having a smaller number of readers, as long as those readers appreciate their art. Artists struggle with writer’s block more often than other writers, but they are dedicated to learning their craft. They write for their muse. Most writers have a top-level archetype and a secondary that informs and refines it. Let’s Figure Out Your Archetype Choose one answer for each question. Don’t overthink it. (Here’s a printable version of this quiz.) 1. For whom do you write? A. I’m not sure yet. B. Whoever pays me. C. Myself. D. My readers. E. My muse. 2. How prolific are you? A. I write, but no one has ever seen my work. I will share it as soon as I’m ready. B. Highly. I write as often as my employer requires me to. C. As prolific as I want to be. I write when I have a story to tell. D. I tend to write a lot, because I’m excited about my ideas. E. Not particularly prolific. I often focus on one project for a very long time. 3. How do your ideas show up? A. As another thing to learn about. B. They are assigned to me. C. My ideas come to me as I move through life, they are closely tied to my actual experiences. D. In a constant barrage, from all sides. E. One at a time. 4. How important is earning a living as a writer to you? A. It’s important, but the whole concept is overwhelming. B. Highly important. (Even the most important thing.) C. Important. If I could earn a living as a storyteller, that would be so amazing. D. Important. If I could earn a living connecting with my tribe, that would be so amazing. E. The last thing on my list of what’s important about being a writer. 5. Why do you write? A. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and I love being immersed in the culture of writers. B. Because I love creative work. C. For healing. D. To teach. E. For the art of it. 6. Which book do you wish you’d written? A. The last book I read is almost always my new favorite. I wish I’d written them all! B. I’d love to ghostwrite a novel for my favorite celebrity. C. A memoir. D. Something that is a universal favorite, like The Chronicles of Narnia or a highly-impacting creative non-fiction book. E. Any National Book Award winner. 7. How much detail do you put into your writing? A. I haven’t written much yet, but I’m drawn to one of the answers below. B. As much as is expected by my editor. C. Tons of detail — most of it very personal. D. Some, but I’m more interested in clearly sharing ideas. E. All of the detail — this is my happy place. 8. How much of yourself do you put into your writing? A. I’m not sure yet. I haven’t started writing. B. None at all. C. My writing is almost always about myself. It is possible that people who know me are uncomfortable reading my work. D. I have to remind myself to put myself in my stories. Sometimes people say my writing is too dry or academic. E. It depends on the story — sometimes a lot, sometimes none at all — but my writing is always in my voice. People often say they would know my work anywhere. 9. Which of these is your biggest strength? A. Research. B. Switching gears between topics. C. Storytelling. D. Sharing ideas. E. The artistic craft of writing. 10. Which of these is your biggest weakness? A. Insecurity. B. My writing is sometimes generic or boring. C. Audience building. D. Finishing what I start. E. Perfectionism. 11. My favorite thing about being a writer is . . . A. Being part of a writing community. B. Earning a living doing something I love. C. Processing my life via my art. D. Building a tribe around my niche. E. Creating something beautiful. 12. I feel like I’m successful when . . . A. I start a project. B. Someone pays me for my work. C. People are talking about my story. D. When someone has learned something from me. E. My muse and inner editor are both satisfied. Results If your answers are mostly A: You’re probably a Hesitater. If your answers are mostly B: You’re probably a Skipper. If your answers are mostly C: You’re probably a Spiller. If your answers are mostly D: You’re probably a Teacher. If your answers are mostly E: You’re probably an Artist. Pay attention to your second most popular answers — or if there was a second answer you were drawn to on several questions. That is most likely your secondary archetype. If you don’t have a clear secondary, particularly if most of your answers were A, consider taking the test again, choosing your second-best answer. Now What? Lean into your archetype. It will help you both be a happier writer and overcome the things that you struggle with. Once you know what kind of writer you are, you can build systems to support you. If you’re a Hesitater, know that you’re always going to have to combat your natural tendency to find reasons not to write. Your perfectionism will get in the way. You need a system to help you get over the hump between not-writing and writing. Tiny goals and a writing accountability partner — another writer who will hold you to your goals — are a good start. If you’re a Skipper, then you can stop feeling guilty for not wanting to do work that you’re not paid for. Lean into your business skills and build a writing career that pays the bills. You need a system to help you find those jobs and treat your work like the business that it is. Self-imposed deadlines will help. If you’re a Spiller, then you can stop trying to write listicles and how-to posts. They aren’t your thing. Your authenticity is your shining light. You need a system for remembering to invite your reader into your work. Start by creating an avatar for your ideal reader — an invented reader that you’re writing for. If you’re a Teacher, then you can stop trying to write highly personal essays that don’t feel natural to you. That’s not your strong suit. You are an idea person and sharing those ideas is where you blossom as a writer. You need a system for capturing those ideas and sticking with one long enough to finish it. Try keeping an idea notebook and rewarding yourself for finishing one project by allowing yourself to explore another. If you’re an Artist, then you can stop feeling like you have to be anything else. You have goals that go beyond how many copies you sell or readers you have. You are really good at sticking with an interesting idea until it’s finished, with such single-mindedness that it can seem like you’ll never have another one again. You need a system for combating writer’s block. Start with a teeny, tiny goal. Write for ten minutes a day, even when your muse isn’t cooperating.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/this-quiz-will-tell-you-exactly-what-type-of-writer-you-are-831b6679fa6c

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-06-17 19:30:33.608000+00:00

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

dataxu’s journey from an Enterprise MPP database to a cloud-native data warehouse, Part 1

This is part 1 of a series of blogs on dataxu’s efforts to build out a cloud-native data warehouse and our learnings in that process. At dataxu, we deal with data collection, storage, processing, analysis, and consumption at massive scale. For this reason, we were an early adopter of the Hadoop framework. We quickly discovered that Hadoop and Hive alone were not sufficient for the growing needs of interactive analysis and querying. And so, about five years ago, we incorporated an MPP database as our warehouse solution. The on-premise solution served us well as the cluster size expanded 16 fold over the course of five years. However, even with the addition of an MPP, we started to run into significant operational challenges: While it is possible to expand the MPP database, it takes months of planning and execution. The capacity planning is particularly tricky. If the business experienced unexpected growth, it would be difficult to bring additional capacity online in a timely fashion. If the business growth slowed, we could be stuck with an over-sized cluster for a number of months, before the volume eventually caught up. The capacity planning is particularly tricky. If the business experienced unexpected growth, it would be difficult to bring additional capacity online in a timely fashion. If the business growth slowed, we could be stuck with an over-sized cluster for a number of months, before the volume eventually caught up. The database requires constant maintenance , both in terms of hardware (like replacing failed disks) and software (like vacuuming catalog). Moreover, the database constantly experienced failed processes, which requires DBA to perform recovery operations. , both in terms of hardware (like replacing failed disks) and software (like vacuuming catalog). Moreover, the database constantly experienced failed processes, which requires DBA to perform recovery operations. Ad-hoc query users constantly compete with production ETL loads for the fixed capacity, leading to unpredictable load times and SLA misses. The MPP solution was clearly not a sustainable option for serving dataxu’s business needs. As such, we started to look for an AWS cloud-native solution. After reviewing several competing solutions, we settled on Apache Spark on EMR as our primary ETL solution and AWS Athena as primary query solution. In this blog, we will discuss the comparison of a cloud-native warehouse vs. MPP, with some focus on Spark as an ETL solution. Cloud-native warehouse vs. MPP First and foremost, the primary reason to choose Spark is not for performance. As it currently stands, even if a Spark cluster is configured with an equivalent amount of CPU, RAM, and disk capacity, it is unlikely to beat the query performance of the MPP solution. There are many reasons why an MPP database will “beat” Apache Spark on paper: EMR clusters run on VMs, while MPP on-prem runs on highly tuned bare metal servers. EMR clusters run in VPC, while MPP on-prem has a dedicated network switch and 100Gbit throughput. EMR clusters use S3 as storage, while MPP on-prem has superior I/O performance with direct attached disks on RAID10. MPP database has years of query optimization expertise, while Spark has a lot to catch up on. MPP databases allow for data locality. That means the data can be split into shards by a key — so each fixed node “owns” a shard. A well chosen distribution key cuts down on so-called broadcasts (data movements over network across the nodes). Reasons for choosing Spark While an MPP may look like the better option on the surface, there are a number of reasons why here at dataxu we chose to implement Spark as our primary ETL solution. Separation of Compute and Storage. The Storage tier is S3, with all the durability, infinite scalability, and recoverability built-in. The Compute is EMR with a wide range of possible instance families to match CPU and RAM needs. We also use transient and dedicated EMR clusters for ETL loads, where there is no sharing of workloads. A single cluster is dedicated for only one load, which enables a predictable execution time and guarantees SLA. We never have to worry about having the right balance of storage and compute. We never have to worry about running out of storage or having enough compute. Separation of Metadata and Data. Hive metastore has evolved as the de facto open source standard for managing schema objects, supporting tables, view, partitions, and UDFs. We no longer need to vacuum data catalog which also removes a common locking condition on MPP databases. Dynamic Elasticity. The ability to scale the computing resources to dynamically match the business and technical requirements. In addition, with EMR auto-scaling features, a cluster can be scaled up and down even when active queries are executing and newly provisioned capacity can be put to in-flight query instantly. Reduction of Maintenance. There is no longer a physical database to manage. No more backups, no more disk failures and replacement, and no more shutting down databases for hardware/network maintenance. Resilience and Fault Tolerance. Any tiny issues in MPP will cause a query to fail, while Spark will re-try multiple times. This leads to significantly increased resilience, particularly in the hostile cloud environment. Cost Efficiency. Spot pricing and Instance Fleets yield significant savings over a fixed-cost, on-prem solution. Open Source. As the most active Big Data open source project, the amount of contributions for Spark hugely dwarfs that for any other MPP solutions out there. Electrical wiring: A visual analogy For simplicity’s sake, we can compare MPP vs. the cloud-native warehouse to different methods of electrical wiring: The left side is a serial circuit with no switches. The capacity is fixed, has to size for peak capacity and is always on. Bringing in a new workload meaning less throughput to all existing workloads, such is the case with an MPP solution. On the other hand, the right side is a parallel circuit with switches. The capacity is elastic — you can use and pay when needed. Bringing on a new workload does not diminish or interfere with any existing workload, such is the case with our cloud-native warehouse. Cloud-native warehouse: Endless possibilities With cloud-native warehouse, there is no longer a monolithic database stack. The database is decomposed into Storage (open file formats on S3). File formats are open, like Parquet or ORC, no longer locked into proprietary formats, support queries via many different platforms and query engines. (open file formats on S3). File formats are open, like Parquet or ORC, no longer locked into proprietary formats, support queries via many different platforms and query engines. Compute (EMR, Athena, Redshift-Spectrum), with pluggable query engines like Spark or Presto, also platforms like Qubole. (EMR, Athena, Redshift-Spectrum), with pluggable query engines like Spark or Presto, also platforms like Qubole. Metadata (schema) layer, can be hosted on RDS-Aurora or the AWS Glue-Data catalog. Each of the component layers has many options that allow you to piece together different systems with different characteristics, suitable for a variety of use cases. dataxu’s Cloud-native warehouse: Performance is better with Spark And finally, let’s take a look at the performance benefits Spark brings to the table: As we iterate over versions of Spark, from 1.6, to 2.0 and 2.2, the common thread is a significant performance improvement with each release, see discussions here and here. With this background, we are confident that the Spark project will continue on this trajectory. The separation of compute and storage is huge. Running a single query as the sole workload will perform better on MPP over Spark on EMR, yet, in reality, the MPP database is almost always shared among a variety of competing workloads, resulting in much slower performance than a dedicated EMR cluster or Athena. And last but not least, with dynamic elasticity, the option to scale out to meet SLA/performance requirements is always available at your fingertips. Keep an eye out for the second post in this series, where we will take a deeper dive into how we “rewired the house” at dataxu. Please post your feedback in the comments — what kind of solutions do you employ? If you found this post useful, please feel free to “applause” and share!

https://medium.com/dataxutech/dataxus-journey-from-an-enterprise-mpp-database-to-a-cloud-native-data-warehouse-part-1-e36952d87a1f

['Dong Jiang']

2017-12-13 19:47:41.788000+00:00

['Big Data', 'AWS', 'Spark', 'Data Lake', 'Data Warehouse']

Welcome to the Creators Hub

Medium 101 Welcome to the Creators Hub A new blog for Medium writers Over the last few weeks you’ve seen quite a few updates on Medium, including a move toward a Medium that is more expressive for you, and a Medium that focuses on the connection between you and your audience. And there’s more to come. Today we’re launching the Creators Hub, a new Medium blog where you can find resources to hone your skills in writing, editing, storytelling, and audience growth. You’ll find best practices, guidelines, writer spotlights, and creative resources from Medium staff, as well as advice from writers across the platform. We are launching with a collection of stories on creativity and writing with the help of the team from Medium’s personal development publication, Forge: How can you find ideas for stories that will resonate with your audience? Senior Editor Michelle Woo shares an approach, bringing you an inside look at a fundamental question that helps her team decide what articles to publish and why. that helps her team decide what articles to publish and why. We share a tried and true checklist for how you can edit yourself from Forge Editor in Chief Indrani Sen in “ A Self-Editing Checklist. ” Finding time to write is an ongoing challenge to maintaining a writing practice. Senior Editor Amy Shearn offers a quiz that’ll help you discover the best time to write, based on your creative habits. is an ongoing challenge to maintaining a writing practice. Senior Editor Amy Shearn offers a quiz that’ll help you discover the best time to write, based on your creative habits. Writing expands far and wide, be it tweets, emails, viral stories, and more. What are the best practices across these formats? Ross McCammon, Executive Editor shares a guide in Forge’s eminently useful package on how to write anything. In the coming weeks, you’ll find Q&As, submission guides, inspiration, and more. Stay tuned! Thanks again for writing, Kawandeep Virdee and Shaq Cheris, Creator Success

https://medium.com/creators-hub/welcome-to-the-creators-hub-a67e1708fbd

['Medium Creators']

2020-10-22 15:26:04.516000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Writing Tips', 'Medium 101', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

Insert Yourself Into Any Picture With C#, Dlib, and OpenCV

Just kidding! That’s actually Bradley Cooper front and center. I used a C# ‘face-swapping’ app to superimpose my face over his, and digitally insert myself into the famous DeGeneres Oscar selfie. Would you like to learn how I did that? Let’s find out how to tackle this problem in C#. I am going to use the awesome Accord library which is perfect for creating computer vision apps. I’ll also use OpenCvSharp3, a C# wrapper for the awesome OpenCV library. I will be using a couple of image transformation functions from this library. And I’m going to be using DLib. In the computer vision world, this is the go-to library for face detection. It’s written entirely in C++ but fortunately there is a wrapper called DlibDotNet that exposes all functionality to C#. So the first thing I need is the original selfie: And a nice picture of me where I’m looking roughly in the same direction as Bradley: The Dlib library has fantastic support for face detection, so that’s what I’m going to start working with. I’ll start by detecting all Landmark Points in Bradley Cooper’s face. Landmark points are predetermined and numbered locations on a face: The Dlib face detector is pre-trained to recognize 68 landmark points that cover the jaw, chin, eyebrows, nose, eyes, and lips of a face. Here’s what it looks like when I detect and plot every landmark point for every celebrity in the picture: Dlib is pretty awesome in that it can track these points in real time. The computational overhead for calculating all these points is only 1ms! My code can swap faces with anyone in the picture, but the results look best when I pick Bradley Cooper. Here’s the C# code to detect all landmark points in Bradley’s face: I start by instantiating a FrontalFaceDetector and a ShapePredictor. Please note two things about this code: Detecting faces and detecting landmark points (called a ‘shape’) are two different things in Dlib, with wildly different performance. Detecting faces is very slow, whereas shape detection only takes ~1ms and can be done in real time. The ShapePredictor is actually a machine learning model that loads from a fully-trained data file. You can re-train the shape predictor on anything you like: human faces, cat & dog faces, plants, objects, … Dlib uses a different image format than the NET framework (it’s written in C++, remember?) so I need to convert the selfie before I start. The ToArray2D<> method converts my bitmap to an array of RgbPixel structs which is what Dlib uses. Then I use Detect() to detect all faces in the image, and just grab the first one which happens to be Bradley Cooper. The result is a rectangle that identifies where Bradley’s face is in the picture. Next, I call Detect() on the shape predictor and provide the selfie and the face rectangle. The result is a class that has a GetPart() method I can use to retrieve the coordinate of any landmark point. My upcoming face swap code relies heavily on OpenCV code which has its own point structs. So my last line is a LINQ expression that converts the Dlib points to OpenCV points. Seriously, 80% of all computer vision code is just converting points and rectangles from one library format into another 😉 The next thing I need to do is calculate the Convex Hull of the landmark points. This is just a fancy way of saying I want the outermost points that form a smooth boundary around the face: OpenCV has a built-in function that can calculate the convex hull for me: The ConvesHullIndices() method calculates the indices of all convex hull landmark points, so all I need to do is run another LINQ query to get an enumeration of those points for Bradley Cooper. Here’s what the convex hull looks like on Bradley’s face: Next, I need to repeat these steps with my own face: This is exactly the same code, but now I’m working on the newImage bitmap instead of image. And here is my hull: So at this point I have two convex hulls: one for Bradley’s face and one for my own face. The next thing I need to do is calculate the Delaunay Triangles on my face and then Warp them so that they match Bradley’s face exactly. Delaunay Triangulation is a process that creates a grid of triangles that entirely covers Bradley’s face. Each triangle is made up of three unique landmark points on Bradley’s convex hull. Here’s what that looks like. The blue lines form the Delaunay triangles: Next, I’ll Warp each triangle from my face to Bradley’s face. A warp is a linear transformation that distorts the triangle so that its three corners fit the new face exactly. In the following diagram, a Delaunay triangle made up of landmark points 3, 14, and 24 on my face is warped so that it fits exactly on Bradley’s face and the three corners precisely match Bradley’s landmark points 3, 14, and 24: The really nice thing about this process is that each triangle warp is a linear transformation. The pixels inside each triangle can be moved with a super-fast linear matrix operation. There’s no linear relationship between the coordinates of my convex hull points and Bradley’s. If we tried to move all pixels directly, we would have to use a slow nonlinear transform. But by first covering Bradley’s face in Delaunay triangles and then warping each triangle separately, the whole operation becomes linear (and fast!). Here’s how you can perform Delaunay Triangulation and Warping in C#: I’m using a handy Utility class with a GetDelaunayTriangles method to calculate the triangles on Bradley’s face, a GetWarps method to calculate the warp for each triangle, and an ApplyWarps method to apply the warps to my face to make it match Bradley’s convex hull. The warpedImg variable now holds my face, sufficiently distorted to match Bradley’s convex hull: There’s one more thing I need to do. The tone of my skin is different from Bradley’s. So if I simply plonk my image on top of his in the selfie, we’re going to see a jarring color change at the edge of my image: To fix that, I’m going to use a very nice OpenCV function that can seamlessly blend one image into another and smooth out any color differences, called SeamlessClone. Here’s how you do a seamless clone in C#: The SeamlessClone method needs two things to do its magic: A mask to tell it which pixels to blend. I calculate the mask by taking Bradley’s convex hull and filling it with white pixels using the FillConvexPoly method. method. A center point where the color should be 100% my skin tone. Pixels further away from this point will get more and more of Bradley’s skin tone. I estimate the center of Bradley’s face by calling BoundingRect to get a bounding box around his face, and then taking the center of this box. Then I call SeamlessClone to perform the clone and store the result in the blend variable. Here’s what the final result looks like: You might be wondering why I need the convex hull in this process. Why not use all of the landmark points for calculating the triangles? The reason is actually very simple. Compare my face with Bradley. Notice how he is smiling and I am not? If I use all landmark points, the app will try to deform my entire face to match Bradley’s lips, nose, and eyes. It will spread my lips apart in an attempt to make me smile and show my teeth. The results are not pretty 😅 By only using the convex hull points, the app can distort my jawline to match Bradley’s, but it can’t touch my eyes, nose, and mouth. That means my expression stays the same in the new image and that looks a lot better. As a final step, I’ll apply an Instagram filter to smooth out the color difference even more: And there you have it: irrefutable proof that Ellen and I are BFFs! You can grab the complete source code from here: https://github.com/mdfarragher/ComputerVision_Bootcamp/tree/master/bootcamp_faceswap So what do you think? Have I inspired you to write computer vision code of your own?

https://medium.com/machinelearningadvantage/insert-yourself-into-any-picture-with-c-dlib-and-opencv-840427bef1b2

['Mark Farragher']

2019-04-06 14:06:55.038000+00:00

['Programming', 'Computer Vision', 'Csharp', 'Dotnet', 'Image Processing']

Recovery is a Commitment to Awareness

Photo by Mink Mingle on Unsplash To understand my commitment to awareness I have to start with all the time spent avoiding feeling. Like someone who’d grown up in a dark room not knowing what colors are, that’s how I was about my own feelings. Cut off from the neck down. Understanding feelings in theory, but never fully allowing myself to feel them. This blindness began long before my addiction took hold, it goes back to my early childhood. I was a sensitive child not allowed to feel. Sensitive people, (which I’m starting to believe is all of us) have it hard in this broken world. Crying, in my house, was seen as a nuisance. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” I would hear, when I was looking for comfort. I internalized that advice, and turned against my pain. It wasn’t until I started this journey towards awareness that I realized how cut-off I had become from my grief. I learned early that my emotional needs might not be met — either by an emotionally absent father, or a resentful and exhausted mother. Nor by a brother who in learning to navigate his own sensitivity would eventually shut me out of his young life. Or another brother who would leave when I was still a child. As the youngest, my voice wasn’t heard. And it wasn’t heard by my community. A small southern town, disowning of anything different or strange. It was no place for a queer young woman, struggling to figure out where her creative and sensitive soul could softly land. I remember a lot of rejection, of people just wishing I would conform, and when I didn’t — shutting me out. After graduating high school early, I vowed to leave and never come back. So what did I learn? I learned to armor up. I learned that feelings were dangerous. I learned that vulnerability led to pain. And I learned to drink. Instead of opening up to what was in me, and longing to come out, I stuffed it. I denied it for long enough, that I forgot. My identity changed. I became the girl who didn’t need anyone. The cold one. The one who could drop people and never look back. I was indestructible. I rejected people before they had a chance to reject me. When you’re armored, no one can get in. Even the ones that are good. Even the people you want to let in. When you’re in hiding, you’re safe, but you’re all alone. Johann Hari says that “the opposite of addiction is connection.” When I first heard that a few years ago, it made perfect sense to me. I remember the first time I got drunk and the falling away of that armor. I felt lighter. I wasn’t worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. It was such a relief. I distinctly remember a voice deep within me saying “I need this.” I did need that freedom, the voice was right. But I didn’t need a drug to get me there. It would take me almost 20 years to realize that truth. But I get it now. Now I have a commitment to my feelings, to my sensitivity, to my body. This space is where I’m going to start sharing that work. The path I took on that journey. The tools I found along the way. It’s my hope that you might find something here that helps you too. We can walk together.

https://medium.com/a-commitment-to-awareness/recovery-is-a-commitment-to-awareness-803fad051f5f

['Amanda O Bryan']

2020-12-08 19:36:29.477000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Addiction', 'Recovery', 'Psychology']

Treating Her Bad

50-word Story Treating Her Bad His bad past. Photo by Enzo B on Unsplash “The only thing I can think about is that I have treated her badly?” James said. The Man didn’t say anything and walked through the window. Then he waved to James to come over. They went through the other cracked door. A shadow came again. There was someone else there.

https://medium.com/illumination/treating-her-bad-d42514ce8540

['Agnes Laurens']

2020-10-11 03:48:11.817000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Writing', '50 Word Stories', 'Short Story', 'Psychology']

Apple and Google Join Forces to Track the Spread of Coronavirus

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

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

['Sarah Emerson']

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

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

3 signs of burnout and how to overcome them

Photo by Luis Villasmilon Unsplash Let’s start with a few questions: Do you constantly feel exhausted no matter how much sleep you get? Do you have a sense that nothing you do will make things any better? Do you find that you care less about things that are usually important to you? If your answer is yes to one or more of these questions then you might be suffering from burnout. It wouldn’t be surprising either. A study published last year found that 90% of participants reported feeling stressed “most of the time”. This was the case before the pandemic which we know is having a significant impact on us, and only adding to an already stressed and overworked population. If ‘unprecedented’ is the top word of 2020 then ‘burnout’ is definitely in the top 10. It’s even been recognised by the World Health Organisation who have classified burnout syndrome as an “occupational phenomenon”, describing it as “work-stress-induced emotional and physical exhaustion”. I can say that from my personal experience with burnout, it’s a horrible, debilitating and diminishing phenomenon. It rarely comes on its own, and likes to invite its cruel friends —like anxiety and depression — along to join it. What makes burnout even more worrying is that many of us don’t know that we’re suffering from it, even when we’re close to breaking point. To make matters worse, we’ve developed a toxic workplace culture in the UK where “solidering on” is celebrated, busyness is a status symbol and our self-worth is based on our productivity. This leads us to the reality we live in whereby, when we’re sick, we’re more likely to work through it, with one study suggesting that over 80% of 24 to 35-year-olds don’t take time off when ill. We can only imagine that this is worsened by the recent shift to full-time working from home, where our work and personal boundaries are easily blurred. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Since my most recent experience with burnout earlier this year, which resulted in me being signed off work for a few weeks after a panic attack, I’ve been on a mission to learn more about it, how to identify it and, most of all, how to recover from it. The first step to protecting ourselves or recovering from burnout is to shine a light on the key symptoms, so let’s start there. The 3 signs of burnout Throughout my research, there have been 3 symptoms linked to burnout that have come up time and time again, and they are: Emotional exhaustion Decreased sense of accomplishment Depersonalisation I’ll go through each of these one-by-one to share a bit more about what they are and how they show up from my research and personal experience. Emotional exhaustion This is described as the “fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long”. It can feel like we’re perpetually exhausted, no matter how much we rest. This was a huge one for me, and also the one that took the longest to recover from. I felt like I had been exhausted for years. This was surprising to me as I’m actually a pretty good sleeper — I’m usually in bed early (before 10pm) and I can get to sleep easily — but nothing seemed to shift my constant lack of energy. It’s clear to me now that I hadn’t really understood, or been aware of, the concept of emotional exhaustion. To me, exhaustion was very much a physical thing, something you get from working out too much or burning the candle at both ends. But now, this idea of caring fatigue really resonates with me. I often describe the moment I met my breaking point as like my mind was split into so many tiny pieces that there was nothing left. What I meant by this was that I was juggling way too many things that I cared deeply about, from client work, internal projects and leadership responsibilities, through to exercising, socialising and being a good friend/partner/daughter/[insert other roles and relationships I was juggling]. The result was that I had nothing left to give to any of them. The really scary thing about this particular symptom is that pretty much every system in our body is affected by our emotions. Emotions aren’t just fluffy, innocuous feelings trapped in our mind — they’re neurological events which means that emotions aren’t just happening in your brain, they’re also playing a role in your entire nervous system. When we get stuck in a long term negative cycle of emotions, like returning to a stressful job everyday, this starts to show up in our physical health, such as weakened blood vessels, digestive problems and even heart disease. This explains why I often felt like I had sore muscles when I was exhausted, even though I hadn’t worked out in weeks. Decreased sense of accomplishment This is the feeling that nothing you do makes any difference, or a deep feeling of pointlessness and futility that you can’t seem to overcome. This can play out as a heightened or constant level of self-doubt. You might feel that you’re losing confidence in your ability to do your job, even though you know what you’re doing or you’ve been doing it for years. You might also feel like you’re working harder and harder, but you still seem to accomplish less that you usually would. In a culture that values productivity so highly, and where so many of us determine our self-worth by how productive we are, if we feel that we’re becoming gradually less productive, this can leave us in a pretty hopeless and dark place. As a result, our self-belief starts to plummet. For me, this looked like becoming easily overwhelmed by tasks that I’d usually breeze through easily. It’s like my brain could not compute the simplest of tasks anymore. My job is very collaborative which is something that I love about it but, when I was at peak burnout, I found myself increasingly nervous about collaborating due to the risk that my lack of ability would be “found out”. This is a dangerous place to be as it’s an perfect breeding ground for shame. Followers of Brené Brown — the acclaimed author, speaker and research professor whose spent two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame — will know all about the threat of shame. Brené describes shame as the painful experience of believing we’re flawed, which leads us to believe that we aren’t worthy or that we’re simply not good enough. The reason shame is so dangerous is that it causes us to shrink, be silent, disconnect and disengage. As humans, we are built for connection and, without it, we start to lose ourselves. This is a slippery slope towards much more devastating conditions such as anxiety, depression and addiction. Depersonalisation The final sign is the sense that we’re losing who we are. It’s often described as an increase in cynacism and a decrease in empathy, caring and compassion. This can manifest itself as a growing feeling of detachment towards your usual personality and self. We might find ourselves saying all too often, “I’m just not feeling myself today.” This is a perfectly natural feeling when it’s felt from time to time, but if it lasts over days, weeks and months then this is something to dig into. In our day-to-day, depersonalisation often shows up as no longer finding joy in the things that we love. For example, you might usually be someone who enjoys working with people, but now you find yourself feeling irritated and angry towards them. I’m nodding my head enthusiastically as I type this — this was me all over. I’m a pretty sociable person, I love hanging out with friends and colleagues, having a laugh and getting to know people better. This is certainly not the case when I’m burnt out. In fact, it’s the last thing I want to do. To put it bluntly, every interaction was an effort and an inconvenience. One of my core values is empathy and this, to me, includes compassion and kindness. I try to cultivate these values in my everyday life but, when I was burnt out, it’s safe to say that these went out the window! The scary thing about this one is that it can happen so gradually and subtly over time that we don’t even realise it’s happening, or that it’s being caused by our environment. We can start to embody our personality change and believe this is really who we are now, and there’s nothing we can do to change it. For what it’s worth, we can change it. It is never too late to re-find ourselves and emerge out of the darkness as our true, whole selves. More on that in the next section… From burnout to brightness As I mentioned before, the first step to recovering from burnout is developing self- awareness from your ability to notice the signs of burnout and spot them in yourself. Let’s now move on from doom and gloom of what it feels like to have burnout and onto how we can tell it to do one. The good news is that the strategies we need to recover from burnout are actually pretty simple. However, the bad news is that if you were hoping for some crazy, magical revelation that you haven’t heard before then you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not to say that the strategies are easy, if they were then we’d all be doing them and I wouldn’t be writing this blog right now. Just because something is simple to understand doesn’t mean that it’s easy to put into practice. From my experience, I believe that there are 5 “cures” for burnout. These are what have been most impactful for me and they are: Sleep and rest Calm and stillness Healthy boundaries Time in nature Purpose and meaning As I did in the last section, I’ll go through each of these one-by-one and share a bit more about why I believe each one is so impactful. Sleep and rest If you saw this and rolled your eyes then, believe me, I’m with you. It sounds so obvious that it’s almost patronising. I get it. But the truth is the truth — and that is that we are a chronically sleep-deprived nation. Few of us prioritise getting 7–8 hours sleep like our life depends on it (which studies show that it does, with one suggesting that if you’re sleeping for less than seven hours a night, you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of smoking). And even when we’re so exhausted that we can barely keep our eyes open, we find that we still struggle to get to sleep due to our minds buzzing with to-do lists, stress and anxiety. So I understand that it’s not as simple as, “just sleep more”. The slower pace of life that this years lockdown forced upon us helped me to understand how sleep-deprived I was, and what rest really meant. It hasn’t been easy and I would estimate that it’s taken me upward of 3 months of practicing good sleep hygiene to finally get my energy back. For me, good sleep hygiene includes: Giving myself at least an 8 hour sleep opportunity every night Getting into bed around 9pm so that I’m in bed longer to meet the above Reading in bed for 30–45 minutes with a dimming night light Avoiding screens and blue lights at least an hour before I go to bed Drinking chamomile or calming tea in the evening Using a sunrise light rather than a sound alarm to wake me up so that I wake naturally Using a sleep tracker (I have a Fitbit) to track my sleep quality and see what works for me In terms of rest, I’ve benefited a hell of a lot this year from embracing my introverted side and allowing myself to not always be busy doing, socialising or producing. I’ve learnt the beauty and peace of being still, of allowing myself to be quiet and actually enjoy relaxing. In the past, rest and relaxation was a foreign concept for me. I think it’s fair to say that I felt significantly unrelaxed when I wasn’t being productive with my time, whether that was during the work week or at the weekends. I was perpetually busy. Hence my burnout. Obviously I haven’t had much choice but to chill the fff out but I now see that protecting time in my schedule to relax, nap, read, have a bath or just not be on the go all the time is an absolute must. Calm and stillness On a related note, practicing calm and stillness is about managing anxiety and emotional reactivity. I’ve learnt that it is massively linked to mindfulness. I used to believe that mindfulness was synonymous to meditation. They were basically the same thing in my mind. What I know now is that mindfulness is actually about having perspective and is the way in which we manage our emotions and impulses. Meditation is one way to do this but it’s not the only way. What’s worked for me is journalling and regular self-reflection. I’m quite a reflective person anyway but making this a more intentional practice has been incredibly powerful for me. Every Sunday, I make time to reflect on the week that has passed, considering what went well, what didn’t and why. I then think about the week ahead and set myself small, specific goals and consider what I need to do to make this happen and what might get in my way. It’s a quiet moment that I spend with myself every week. It’s not about giving myself a hard time for things I haven’t done. It’s acknowledging, questioning and looking forward. I’ve also got into more general journalling, using guided journalling books like ‘5 Minutes to a Mindful You’ and ‘The 6-Minute Diary’ which prove that even 5 minutes of calm and stillness each day can have a big and positive impact. Healthy boundaries Here we have another alien concept for me — you are probably noticing some themes here about the person I once was. When I talk about boundaries, I’m referring to little rules that we put in place, internally or openly, that protect our energy and wellbeing. For example, when we’re contactable, when we need alone time or even who we’re friends with. I now believe that boundaries are so important, so much so that I think we should be taught about them from an early age and through school. Even so, I’ve found that setting boundaries isn’t easy, and sticking to them is even harder. Often they involve saying no to people, sometimes those we love, and that can be tough. But the upside of having boundaries is not only do they protect our wellbeing, but they also improve our relationships and interactions, as we’re essentially sharing more of ourselves and how we best operate. These are the boundaries that I’ve developed this year that are most important to me: I’m strict about when I start and finish work so that I have time to myself before and after work. I don’t have any work apps (such as Outlook and Slack) downloaded on my phone so I’m only contactable when I’m “online” which basically means when I’m on my work laptop. I block out “focus time” in my work calendar which is time where I can get into a flow state without distractions, and I protect this time like it’s a client meeting. I always take a lunch break for at least an hour. I no longer book social meet-ups in the closest available gap in my calendar, I spread them out so that I always have time to relax each week. You’ll notice that a lot of mine are work-related and that’s because my stressors were heavily linked to my job, but boundaries don’t have to be work related. They could be with friends, family, romantic partners, hobbies, communities, or any other aspect pf your life that you feel needs them. Time in nature It’s well known that spending time in nature and making time to be outside in green space can benefit our mental wellbeing. It might be hundreds of years since we were living our best hunter-gatherer lives but our need for connection with nature hasn’t waned even as we’ve become more and more disconnected from it. Being in nature is basically in our DNA. I’ve found that when I make time to go for a walk in nature in the morning, I have a better day after that. I feel calmer and more reflective, rather than anxious or reactive. It’s a combination of breathing fresh air, feeling sun or wind on my skin, and taking a moment to see the expanse before me that being outside allows. Especially now that we’re in our homes for such prolonged periods, it can feel like we’re trapped inside many boxes. I live in a 2-bedroom flat in London which really does feel like a small box sometimes with few options to go to. I then spend my working day in another, even smaller box which is my laptop screen. My daily outside time is an escape from the boxes, and a time for me to check in with myself and the world around me. Purpose and meaning This last one might seem a little strange but it’s a biggie. For me, purpose is about doing things for a reason that is higher than materialistic gain. It’s a reason to get up in the morning and what helps us to go to sleep at night feeling grateful and fulfilled. However, when we lose our sense of purpose and meaning in our lives, it can send us into some really dark and uncertain places. We need our purpose to show us the light and bring us back to what’s important. This is even more important now as we’ve seen our normal life pulled from beneath our feet. We all need a sense of purpose to keep us going and to help us to see that there is still something worthwhile, evenwhen the noise of normality goes quiet. When I reflect back on my experience with burnout, I think that part of what led me to overwork was because I didn’t know what I was striving for. So I would work myself harder and harder, while burdened by perfectionism, in a desperate pursuit for meaning. The problem was that it never felt good enough. It’s been a big year for me in terms of “finding myself” (yes, I’m cringing too) and what’s important for me. Now that I’m clear on this, I feel much more at ease. I’m able to prioritise how I spend my time with clarity and confidence. It’s made it easier for me to say no to things that don’t align to my purpose and values. I have something to come back to when I feel that something isn’t right and question what might be conflicting with what I believe to make me feel this way To get closer to my purpose, I started by asking myself these 3 questions: What gets me up in the morning? When do I feel that I add the most value? What do I want to be remembered for? I also used an adapted version of the ikigai framework to help me narrow in further which you can see below: If you’re wondering what my purpose is, I’d say that it’s always evolving but what I’ve settled on for now is this:

https://natjpearce.medium.com/3-signs-of-burnout-and-how-to-overcome-them-d067f76ce81c

['Natalie Pearce']

2020-11-29 16:33:44.842000+00:00

['Health', 'Culture', 'Mindfulness', 'Wellness', 'Mental Health']

More Of The Violin Taste

350-Word Story More Of The Violin Taste Episode #6 Image by Bairyna from Pixabay Vivianne smiled when she had that violin in her hands. It felt so natural like she had done this for ages. As Vivianne smiled much more because of touching the strings better and better every time she tried playing a string. She saw her mother smiling too. That is what a mother always wanted for her child. Her child being happy. Maybe it is the spirit she has on her shoulders that she could afford one lesson, and then see what is possible for Vivianne. The teacher was also very nice, which is a bonus for children. not too strict and not too nice. David also saw that Vivianne has some talent. She and her mother need to do something with that talent of Vivianne. That must be cherished. He also saw that she loved playing the violin. “Your daughter is a very talented violinist. You should encourage her to stay playing the violin.” “Can I talk to you for a second, without my daughter?” David was surprised that she wanted to talk to him privately. Was that appropriate to feel something? He was young, but he might become her daughter’s teacher. That will give him some trouble. He might be single, there is also his child that gives him a hand full of issues. “Why without me?” Disappointed and with a sad face, she walked out of the room. her thoughts were that she was not allowed to continue playing the violin. A few tears came over her cheeks. She felt somehow disadvantaged that she was not allowed to listen to what was said. Wasn’t it right? Was she a bad violinist? When Vivianne was out of the room, Harriette turned towards the teacher. His eyes sparkled a little bit while he turned his whole body towards her. When he turned towards her, she felt a sparkle in her stomach. Why now? She didn’t want to feel this. She didn’t have any time for a relationship. She started to stumble upon the words. “Actually, I don’t have any money for violin lessons. So, I don’t know what to do.”

https://medium.com/illumination/more-of-the-violin-taste-8b9915aacb22

['Agnes Laurens']

2020-12-24 06:33:34.079000+00:00

['350 Word Story', 'Storytelling', 'Writing', 'Short Story', 'Music']

Clarifying the True Fatality Rate of Covid-19: Same as the Flu?

Clarifying the True Fatality Rate of Covid-19: Same as the Flu? [updated Oct] Comparing fatality rate jargons may lead to nowhere, but there are better metrics to grasp the health toll of Covid-19. Author’s note: Please see an update at the end of the article too. On 11 March 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told the U.S. Congress House Oversight and Reform Committee that the novel coronavirus — that causes Covid-19 — has a mortality rate of 10-times higher than the seasonal flu. Specifically, at the congressional hearing, the NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent. This [Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2] has a mortality rate of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.” 10 x 0.1% = 1%. In other words, Dr. Fauci reported that Covid-19 has a mortality rate of 1%, which he said had fallen from 2–3% after taking into account asymptomatic (i.e., symptomless) infections. But what did Dr. Fauci mean by mortality rate? In an editorial published on 29 February in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) — co-authored by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the CDC, and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, deputy director of NIAID — Dr. Fauci stated that influenza “has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%.” Therefore, Dr. Fauci refers to the case fatality rate (CFR) when he said, “The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent.” But he should have said the infection fatality rate (IFR). Why? The CFR is the total number of deaths divided by the total number of people that have the disease’s symptoms. In contrast, the IFR is the total number of deaths divided by the total number of people that carry the infection. The confusion between ‘case’ and ‘infection’ fatality rates (CFR vs. IFR) In contrast, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the flu has an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.1% or lower. Who is right? The WHO who said influenza has an IFR of 0.1% or lower, or The NIAID and CDC directors who said influenza has a CFR of 0.1%? In an article published August in the journal Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, titled “Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation,” Dr. Ronald B. Brown at the University of Waterloo in Canada shed light on this confusion. “A case fatality rate (CFR) is defined as the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases of the disease,” Dr. Brown said, “…while an infection fatality rate (IFR) is defined as the proportion of deaths relative to the prevalence of infections within a population.” The catch is that cases refer only to those with clinical symptoms of the disease. Hence, asymptomatic (i.e., symptomless) people are not considered as a case. Mathematically speaking, the CFR is the total number of deaths divided by the total number of people that have the disease’s symptoms. In contrast, the IFR is the total number of deaths divided by the total number of people that carry the infection, regardless of them having clinical symptoms or not. “IFRs from samples across the population include undiagnosed, asymptomatic, and mild infections, and are often lower compared to CFRs, which are based exclusively on relatively smaller groups of moderately to severely ill diagnosed cases at the beginning of an outbreak,” Dr. Brown continued. (Note that the mortality rate has its own definition: The total number of deaths per population of 100,000 persons. But people typically refer to the CFR or IFR when talking about mortality rate.) The WHO got it right, Dr. Brown said, in that influenza has an IFR of 0.1% or lower, not a CFR of 0.1%. Dr. Fauci reported that Covid-19 has a mortality rate of 1%, which he said had fallen from 2–3% after taking into account asymptomatic infections. And Dr. Fauci probably meant to say that Covid-19 has an IFR of 1% (not CFR of 1%) after having considered asymptomatic infections. The true fatality rate of Covid-19 To reiterate, Dr. Fauci said the Covid-19 mortality rate dropped from 2–3% to 1% after adjusting for asymptomatic infections. “The coronavirus mortality rate of 2–3% that was adjusted to 1% in Congressional testimony is consistent with the coronavirus CFR of 1.8–3.4% (median 2.6%) reported by the CDC,” Dr. Brown explained. Thus, among those who became symptomatic, Covid-19 is not any deadlier than the flu. This had led to the notion that lockdowns were not necessary as Covid-19 is just like the seasonal flu. “Furthermore, the WHO reported that the CFR of the H1N1 influenza virus is also 2–3%, similar to the unadjusted 2–3% CFR of the coronavirus reported in Congressional testimony, with no meaningful difference in mortality,” he added. “Evidence from the WHO confirmed that the approximate CFR of the coronavirus is generally no higher than that of seasonal influenza.” As follows, Covid-19 has an IFR of 1% and CFR of 2–3%. More recent data by the CDC and WHO, however, estimates that Covid-19 has an IFR of 0.65% and 0.5-1%, respectively. The flu has an IFR of 0.1% or lower and CFR of 2–3%. (Please also see the update below about this.) Thus, among those who became symptomatic (i.e., CFR), Covid-19 is not any deadlier than the flu. This had led to the notion that lockdowns were not necessary as Covid-19 is just like the seasonal flu. Overall, a higher transmission rate leads to more infections and then more cases and, eventually, more deaths. Now, the CFR alone is not as important. But such proponents seem to have been confused about the differences between CFR and IFR, as Dr. Fauci and others did. Among the total infection events (i.e., IFR), Covid-19 is still 6.5-times deadlier than the flu. This means that a person is more likely to become a case (symptomatic) when infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with the influenza virus. The main reason is that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus in which little preexisting immunity exists, so a lot more infected people will get sick. The true health burden of Covid-19 Even if the IFRs of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza might be the same, as some data may suggest, SARS-CoV-2 is more contagious with a basic reproductive number (R-naught) of 2.5. This means an infected person can pass the virus to two people or so, resulting in 2000+ infections after ten rounds of transmissions. The flu, by contrast, has an R-naught of 1.3, which equates to 56 infections after ten rounds. Further, SARS-CoV-2 has a longer incubation period, the period between infection and symptom onset, than influenza (approx. 5–12 vs. 2 days). This means that asymptomatic people can stay infectious for a longer time and, thus, more widespread silent viral transmission. The fact that Covid-19 kills more than flu is quickly evident by “the number of deaths that exceed what is seen in typical years.” Overall, a higher transmission rate leads to more infections and then more cases and, eventually, more deaths. Now, the CFR alone is not as important. Not to mention also that SARS-CoV-2 infections are more likely to become cases than with influenza. The fact that Covid-19 kills more than flu is quickly evident by “the number of deaths that exceed what is seen in typical years,” the academic journal Nature reported in September. In other words, deaths from Covid-19 are not deaths that ‘would happen anyway’. Source: Nature More info on excess mortality or deaths in 2020 vs. previous years: Source: ourworldindata.org. Similar data on other countries (e.g., the USA, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, etc.) can be found here. 14 September 2020 update/corrections on CFR An email asked for the specific source of the IFR and CFR of the flu, which is <0.1% and 2–3%, respectively, in this article. I then realized that Dr. Brown cited the IFR of the seasonal flu, but CFR of the Spanish flu pandemic. For the seasonal flu, the CFR is 0.1%. So, Dr. Fauci is right to say that the seasonal flu has a CFR of 0.1%, although he compared this CFR of flu with the IFR of Covid-19 (i.e., 1%). In this way, it is an underestimate when Dr. Fauci said that the mortality rate of Covid-19 is 10-times higher than the flu. Thus, the prior numbers I cited overestimate the lethality of the flu and discredited Dr. Fauci, which I sincerely apologize. 8 October 2020 updates/corrections on IFR The CDC has changed the IFR values of Covid-19 into age-specific estimates, which are now very low at 0.003% for 0–19 years, 0.02% for 20–49 years, 0.5% for 50–69 years, and 5.4% for 70+ years. But there seems to be no data on age-specific IFR of the seasonal flu. The WHO only stated that “the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower. For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1%.” How much below 0.1% is unclear. Admittedly, comparing mortality rates between Covid-19 and the seasonal flu may lead to nowhere. Perhaps we should look at other metrics instead, such as R-naught and excess deaths.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/clarifying-the-true-fatality-rate-of-covid-19-same-as-the-flu-8148e38b9ab5

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-10-09 02:35:43.478000+00:00

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

Two More Ways Covid Has Stolen Our Health and Happiness, and How We Can Fight Back

COVID has stolen so much from us. It’s taken our comforting routines, our sense of safety, and even smaller things that bring us pleasure, such as eating out, going to the movies, and getting together with friends. And if you’re like me, the loss of these things, combined with the endless fear and anxiety of catching the virus, has taken a major toll on your mental health. As a matter of fact, research points to the fact that some of our feelings of hopelessness and COVID-induced depression may be related to two everyday things that most of us took for granted pre-pandemic: smiles and hugs. The power of smiles For many of us, it’s never been harder to smile than right now. The extended presence of this pandemic feels like the world as we know it is falling to pieces, and what was often the cure for our gloom pre-COVID is no longer available: the uplifting smile of another person. It’s not just an old adage that smiles are contagious. It’s a scientifically proven fact. An article in Psychology Today states that “the part of your brain that is responsible for your facial expression of smiling when happy or mimicking another’s smile resides in the cingulate cortex, an unconscious automatic response area.” In other words, when we see someone smile, it’s extremely hard not to smile back. After all, attempting not to smile in response to this situation is like trying to override our brain’s natural tendencies. And think of all the automatic smiles we miss out on because we are surrounded by people whose smiles are hidden behind masks, masks that if gone would make us happier as well. For example, in the past, our co-workers smiled when they greeted us in the morning, our cashier smiled when we met them at the checkout counter, and our bank tellers, our doctors, and even our fast-food workers smiled at us in the drive-thru. But in our “new normal,” this is simply not the case, meaning all those reflexive bursts of happiness are gone. So less smiling faces directed our way means less smiling for us, and that very fact has a major impact on both our physical and emotional health. Debbie Hampton, author of Beat Depression and Anxiety by Changing Your Brain, states that smiling “releases feel-good transmitters, including dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin.” She then goes on to list all of the physical and emotional advantages that these hormones bring, benefits that are absent when we do not engage in the act of smiling. And the side effects of not getting enough of these “feel good” hormones? Higher heart rate and blood pressure. Lack of motivation. Dwindling self-confidence. Increased pain. And these are just a few short examples. The National Institute of Health reports research done on smiling by Jared Martin and Dr. Paula Niedenthal at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These researchers characterized all smiles as being one of three types: dominance smiles, affiliation smiles, and reward smiles. Dominance smiles are negatives smiles that convey a sense of smugness and superiority, while affiliation and reward smiles are smiles that show true happiness and increase social connections between people. After doing studies on the effects of these smiles, they found that those who received dominance smiles from others showed a rise in cortisol, often referred to as the “stress hormone,” but those who received affiliation and reward smiles saw a reduction in this hormone, thus proving that most types of smiles serve to counteract the damaging effects of stress. And in addition to the repercussions of limited “smile sightings,” this pandemic also robs us of another emotional and physical stress reliever: hugs. The benefits of hugs and human touch We’re told to stay six feet away from others. That means no pat on the back or high fives when we’ve done something great, but also means something much sadder: no hugs. We give or receive hugs to show compassion, to share moments of joy, and to convey unspoken feelings of love or understanding. And for most of us, these hugs bring both a needed emotional release and increased happiness. But once again, at the present, these emotional rewards cannot be experienced. In Well and Good, they list a number of advantages of those daily hugs that are now practically non-existent. Just as with smiling, they state that hugging reduces levels of cortisol. However, they also mention that lowered cortisol does more than relieve stress, it also benefits our immune system. The article cites research findings that conclude “people who experienced hugs more frequently were less likely to get sick and that even if they did get sick their symptoms were less intense.” So what does this mean for us? Less hugging means more susceptibility to sickness. And at times like these, a compromised immune system is especially dangerous. Hugging can do also do things such as reduce blood pressure and lower heart rate. For example, Healthline reports a study in which scientists had romantic partners do one of two things: hold hands and hug or sit in silence together. The hand-holding and hugging couples showed lowered blood pressure and heart rate, benefits absent from the distant couples who remained untouched. The bottom line: We can’t change the fact that most of the physical and emotional advantages of smiling and hugging will continue to be absent from our lives, but we can increase the opportunities to seize the benefits of these things by creating more joy and incorporating more touch in our lives with our immediate family. We can watch more funny movies together, play more games that induce laughter and smiles, and make more attempts to wrap our arms around those with whom we share a home. And let’s be honest, virus or not, we need to do more of these things anyway, don’t we? So let’s get to it.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/two-more-ways-covid-has-stolen-our-health-and-happiness-and-how-we-can-fight-back-2c8f57004df5

['Dawn Bevier']

2020-11-24 12:39:21.042000+00:00

['Health', 'Happiness', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'Psychology']

How to Impact Consumer Behaviour with a Help of Color?

The effect of color on user’s behavior can’t be overestimated, especially when it comes to web design. The virtual user can’t touch the product or service physically, therefore well-chosen colors and user-friendly interface based on user experience are the most powerful tools of online communication. Which colors will help to increase website conversion and the mobile apps popularity? Color psychology Studies show that it takes 90 seconds for a customer to form the opinion about the project and 90% of this opinion is influenced by the color. Two out of three consumers will make a large purchase only if they like its shade, and almost 93% of people primarily perceive visual information. That’s why so many people love infographics — it is much easier to perceive the same data visually: Creating a pen portrait of the target consumer Depending on the age, gender and impulsivity of actions users have different reaction on colors and shades. Age The optimism of the youth — young audience loves vibrant saturated colors. As for older consumers, you should be careful with bright colors — too vibrant can decrease the conversion. Mature users, often think garish bright colors repulsive. Men vs Women Color perception research shows that men prefer bright, contrasting colors, while women prefer softer shades. Both men and women like blue and green, but many women adore purple meanwhile, this color repels men.

https://medium.com/dayone-a-new-perspective/how-to-impact-consumer-behaviour-with-a-help-of-color-b85e50416854

[]

2017-10-06 11:51:46.257000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Design', 'Colors', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Conversion Optimization']

Why a 4-Minute Read is the Sweet Spot on Medium

Your Medium story can be short, long, or somewhere in the middle. And you should absolutely write your story to the length it needs to be. I’ve written and published poems to Medium, which are usually 1-minute reads (sometimes they’re as short as 40 or 50 words!). My stories about fiction writing and writing for Medium are typically 3-to-5-minute reads, with only the occasional outlier. I’ve also published short stories and personal essays and analyses of books that run anywhere between 7-minute reads and 15-minute reads. I’ve tried pretty much every length imaginable (well, maybe not a 60-minute read, but never say never!). To some extent, the length of your piece doesn’t necessarily prevent it from being a success. I’ve seen short 2-minute how-to pieces that have 1,000 or more claps. I’ve seen 39-minute reads that got 5,000 claps. I’ve seen it all throughout my many months writing for Medium. Don’t ever think that you have to write a 4-minute read every single time. Feel free to experiment with the lengths of your stories and see what works best for you.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/why-a-4-minute-read-is-the-sweet-spot-on-medium-b7ee4d43a245

['Brian Rowe']

2020-09-30 12:03:39.174000+00:00

['Success', 'Medium', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

How Startups Outsource Their Tech Without Going Broke or Getting Screwed

How Startups Outsource Their Tech Without Going Broke or Getting Screwed A takedown of the traditional technical build proposal Should you spend $50,000 to build out your tech? This is not as uncommon a question as you might think. As crazy as it sounds, quite a few entrepreneurs have access to that kind of money. Or at least they think they do. What most entrepreneurs don’t have is a technical background. Thus, most entrepreneurs are forced to rely on someone else to build out their tech. Not only that, most entrepreneurs are forced to trust someone else to build out their tech without charging them a fortune for shoddy work and layers of unnecessary billable hours. Here’s how to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Trap #1: Don’t spend money you don’t have Believe me, I’ve seen dozens of different ways for a $50K tech spend to evolve from “crazy idea” to “just might work,” whether it’s with credit cards, loans, friends and family, or the old standard of giving away 10% of the company to get an MVP built. In fact, a couple weeks ago, an entrepreneur asked me to review a proposal for $2.3 million worth of tech build — before the entrepreneur’s startup was even incorporated. I was surprised, but not shocked, and a little mad at the tech firm, whom I did not know. But ultimately, the fault was with the entrepreneur, in the sense that they asked for all the wrong things at the wrong time. When an entrepreneur has money, or access to it, or they believe they do, that problem can wind up hurting a lot of people, including the firm that agrees to build the tech. Trap #2: Don’t spend all the money you DO have Very few technical firms are sketchy, but most of them will build what you ask them to build. Most. Some are even altruistic. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with one of my tech-firm-founder friends: “I won’t take $50,000 from a startup if that’s all they have,” she said. “Because I’ll end up building beautiful tech for them and it’ll just sit there and do nothing because they don’t have money to spend on sales, marketing, even changes to the tech when they realize they’ve built something only half of their customers are using.” Think about all of your funding as a budget. Your tech should never be more than 50% of that budget — and then — that 50% should include your original spend to build, plus the costs of maintaining, supporting, upgrading, even wholesale changes to that build once it comes into contact with your customers. So your original spend to build should probably be something like 25% of your company budget. How do you work under that tight constraint? Trap #3: Don’t build everything at once Most of the tech proposals I see are out-the-door pricing for the build of an entire product. Then usually the firm either walks away or tacks on a program to support exactly what they built. This will get your startup to launch, but not much further. You don’t need a full feature set, but you need to deliver value. Most entrepreneurs design their product from beta all the way to version two and beyond. Me included. I design all kinds of infrastructure, administration, even reports and bells and whistles. This design is necessary, and the better-built products usually wind up coming from the better-designed products. But even the best design doesn’t need to be built all at once. Not every feature needs to be live the first time the product gets put in front of the customer. Without getting too much into Minimum Viable Product theory, what needs to be there is the bare minimum that gets the customer to experience the most value in the shortest time. That’s usually a subset of the full product. And since almost all technical architecture is open and flexible these days, your technical resource doesn’t need to validate every future feature or process. They just need to know what’s coming and how it’s designed so they don’t wall off that future functionality. You don’t need scale, but you need options. Building for a million users when you have no users is like spending a million dollars when you have no revenue. No matter how many customers you eventually plan to have, you don’t need accommodate all of them out of the gate. Again, we’re at a place where most technical tools and coding strategies have the flexibility to expand built in. So much like open feature design, you need open scale design. In other words, your technical resource should be smart enough and forward-thinking enough to not do anything that would prevent scale down the road. You don’t need to rebuild any wheels. The reason why there are multiple no-code options for building apps these days is because a lot of code has been packaged into reusable and universal chunks. A lot of those chunks are offered by third parties, more robustly and inexpensively than anything you and your technical resource can build. If there is a third party offering for some of your non-critical functionality, use that third party, at least temporarily. Focus your initial build on the technology that is critical for the customer finding value in your product. Trap #4: Don’t look for a provider, look for a partner. Now that you’ve got your design broken up and prioritized, this is a golden opportunity to vet whatever firm or individual is going to build your tech. Do they understand how a startup should operate? Do they get that you’re going to spend in small increments, go away and test, and then come back with changes? Are they willing to take the risk of inconvenience to their billing cycle for the reward of your success? You don’t need Agile, but you need to be agile The proposal I mentioned earlier was a series of a dozen two-week sprints, back-to-back, each for a different feature of the product. As is the case with Agile development, each two-week sprint would end with a review process that would trigger the next sprint. This is where I got a little mad. What exactly did that tech firm imagine would happen in those reviews? Actually, I knew the answer. The review would be a checklist with the entrepreneur to make sure the firm had built exactly what the entrepreneur asked for. This is for the tech firm to justify their next billing cycle. But it doesn’t matter what the entrepreneur thinks of the tech. What matters is what the entrepreneur’s customers think of the tech. The entrepreneur needs time to validate this. You need to manage the project. Never, ever pay for a project manager or any other kind of administrator that comes from the firm itself. The firm’s job is to build what you want and get it done on time. If you don’t trust them to do that, and if you don’t trust yourself to be able to manage that, hire a third party to manage the firm. Trap #5: Don’t go into the selection process uneducated If you’re buying a new or used car, you don’t necessarily need to know mechanical and electrical engineering up and down. But you should know what undercoating is and whether or not you need it. There are a million documents on the web that explain technology and what it does. Most of them are boring and complicated, but some aren’t. You should know, at a minimum: How cloud availability and SaaS works. What a tech stack is and what some of the differences are from stack to stack. The popular coding languages, databases, and backends and a little about why you’d choose what. How security, privacy, and backups work. You should always ask other entrepreneurs which firms they have used and why. You should always talk to the clients listed on the websites of the firms you’re considering. Trap #6: Don’t pay by the hour If you pay by the hour, you’ll always be questioning the firm’s methods, and whether you’re asking for something simple or complicated. You’ll subconsciously nickel-and-dime your product to death. Pay by the project, or better yet, pay by functionality. If you’ve designed your product thoroughly, even if it’s just words on paper, they’ll be able to price it out. This means you’ll be able to prioritize functionality for your customers, and you’ll be able to come back and make the inevitable changes to functionality as the product hits the market. Trap #7: Protect yourself I get this question a lot — How do you prevent the firm from taking your idea and your tech and doing it themselves. The answer is: You can’t. Make sure you’ve got an NDA in place with the firm, and make sure you own the source code and that you have unfettered access to it. A startup succeeds on their execution, not the idea, not the tech, and not the implementation of that tech. If you really think the technical firm can out-execute you on your own idea, or if you think they’ll just sell your tech to someone else, don’t do business with them. Like I said, there are plenty of good, altruistic tech firms out there. Hey! If you found this post actionable or insightful, please consider signing up for my weekly newsletter at joeprocopio.com so you don’t miss any new posts. It’s short and to the point.

https://jproco.medium.com/how-startups-outsource-their-tech-without-going-broke-or-getting-screwed-6960005a588

['Joe Procopio']

2020-08-24 14:16:06.031000+00:00

['Technology', 'Business', 'Productivity', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship']

Welcome New Writers

Dear new writers, Thank you for your joining ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, and Technology Hits. We are excited to meet you. Welcome to our publications. ILLUMINATION is a unique and significant publication with many writers and readers. Our uniqueness may be one of the reasons you choose us. ILLUMINATION is a diverse and inclusive publication covering 100 plus topics across several disciplines. You can write about almost anything as long as your stories meet Medium rules. We value your contributions because each new writer brings new perspectives and contributes to enhancing the breadth and depth of our publications. This diversity and variety delight our readers. Many readers made ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated as their front page. These two publications now followed by around 70,000 readers registered to Medium and many thousands from our external sources. We have just started our third publication for a specific audience. The purpose of this post is to notify new contributors joined ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated, and new Technology Hits. Your account should have the publications you entered. If you don’t see the publication in your profile, please leave a comment so that we can add your account again. Our goal is to help you succeed in Medium. You joined a significant group of publications making a noticeable impact on Medium. ILLUMINATION and sister publications growing rapidly and supporting 7,000+contributing writers . We grow rapidly with contributions from inspiring and engaging writers like you. We are proud to support different level of writers — aspiring, experienced, accomplished, and influential. You all play an important role in this platform. The strength of ILLUMINATION relates to cross-pollinating all types of writers from different professional backgrounds, skill levels, and writing goals. This unique mix of writers is an attractive value preposition to our readers, enjoying our stories covering multiple topics. Thank you for choosing our publications to host your stories. We’d appreciate your contributions to our readers. Our publications operate with an abundance mentality. We don’t compete with other publication. We collaborate with them. We don’t limit our writers. We give them flexible options to be successful. You are not exclusive to us. We encourage you to try other publications too. We also encourage our writers to create their own publications. If you have your special publication, we can help you promote them. We support your writing goals and show flexibility in raising your voice.New Writers for ILLUMINATION New writers joined ILLUMINATION today. Welcome:Michael Oxendine, Tandreia Santini, Archi jain, Jasmine Torok, Building Arks with Jason Clendenen, Ryan Cron,Loudupdates, April M. Hamm, Camellia, Nandita, Shinya Suzuki, Luciana Lambert, PJ Gabrielli II, Katlyn Gallo, Adam Rains, Carly Barrett, Andrew Katz, Laura Silverstein, LCSW, Vincent Cardella, Anna Tryc, Yoana Kircheva, Stephanie Love, Dr Kasey Lynn, Moni Vazquez, Amara Shein, OnlyForTheOne, Jakia Uddin, Jason Nguyen, Haider Jamal Abbasi,Thisali Wagalath, S.C., NITESH DHAMI, Anushka Choudhary, K P Vasudeva Rao, Mohammad Hassan, Hyrum Bradshaw, Cheshire Chaton, Eric J Davis, Genesee K. Vincent Cardella, Urmila Sardesai, Hani, Terry Ross, Laura Culberg, Smart Personal Finance, Elyse Wright, Minds of creators, George Blue Kelly, Chris Kong, Nadya Semenova,Christian B. Mbayabu, Vicente Quintero, Kushal Geesawor, Kiah Swenson, Tiffany Horan, KS Copeland, Calvin Lassiter,Jack MacDonald, Beyond The Blog, Joseph M. Learned, Lewiscoaches, Ariana Capasso, Shirley, Breneth Edwards,Dhrumilparikh, Rustom Ichhaporia, Sam Crespi #SHE, Brad Creech, Rose K. Charlotin, Seth Fleshman, Rabinder Kumar,ibukun sodipe, Qadir Abdus-Sabur, BAD BOY, Jair Ribeiro, Victor Kananda, TUSHAR PALANKAR, Marc Hadd, John M Smith, Alexa Le, Claudiu Cozma, Esh, Sahar J, Cathy Assoba, Massùod Hemmat, Mengan Yang, Alina Zhang,Nickmeader, Rice & Beans, Abdullah Nadeem, Neha Doshi, Rebecca María, Abhay Parashar, Khanfarhan, Inês Messias,Jellevanzundert, Beyond The Blog, Med Amme, Ren Powell, Joshua Keenan, Kaitlyn Holmgren, Shaishavi Patel, Kiran Yasmin, Welcome new writers joined ILLUMINATION-Curated today:Malky McEwan, April M. Hamm, anniewood, Dr Kasey Lynn, Terry Trueman, Malky McEwan, Christa Catana, Aliyan Shaikh, Marco Antonio, Christian B. Mbayabu, Alison Acheson, Mack Bason, Beyond The Blog, Deena Thomson, Jair Ribeiro, Marc Hadd, Massùod Hemmat, Lynette Clements, Welcome new writers joined Technology Hits today: Jasmine Torok, April M. Hamm, Marija Martincevic, B. A. Cumberlidge., Casimiro Designer, Isaiah McCall, Aliyan Shaikh, Beyond The Blog, Rohit Thakur, Jair Ribeiro, Marc Hadd, Selim Furkan Gul, Alex Koma, How to benefit our publications and become successful on Medium We want to provide you with the essential guides so you can produce joyfully. Our readers expect quality materials. Meeting this expectation is the critical success factor for you. Submit only your best work for our readers. Your stories must be the type of content that you want to read. Caption your [copyright-free photos] with source links. This is one of the most time consuming and stressful situation for our publication. Our editors are tired of writing a myriad of comments and wait for responses from writers. All photos must be caption with source links. We recommend using stock photos such as from unsplash.com. Do not submit plagiarized material. We only accept stories written by you. Medium does not accept plagiarism, and it is illegal in the industry. ILLUMINATION has zero-tolerance for plagiarized submissions. Our editors have expertise in detecting plagiarism by using different methods and various tools. Please see the attached article for our position and details. Initially, please submit only one story a day. Considering contributions from thousands of writers, it is not possible to cater to multiple submissions from each writer. We allow our prolific and experienced writers to submit up to three drafts within 24 hours. Since they submit high-quality materials, we don’t have to spend too much time on these types of submissions. Until new writers improve their writing skills and gain acceptance by readers, we recommend them to submit only one story a day. This restriction is for writers who cannot handle the fundamentals. The good new is that we are now using short-form stories. We allow additional three short-form stories per publication. Details are in this story. Please respond to your private messages. Medium allows communication between publications and writers only via private messages. If your private messages were turned off, you would not receive a notification. Please check your story for * sign, which indicates a private message. This sign can usually be on the upper part of your story. Editors may request you to fix an issue in your story. Please acknowledge and address the issue in a timely manner. We cannot hold stories for more than 24 hours in our queue. If no response is provided, we will return the story. Learn about the platform rules and expectations of your audience. We are working on a large and complex platform. I touched on the publication rules, but the platform rules are critical too. All writers must learn the rules of the platform and get to know their audience. You can find the details for these six items in the attached article. Publication Conduct Guidelines Please check these simplified the rules for new writers. In terms of platform rules, many new writers benefited from this story. This story focuses on fundamentals and some advanced topics for writers. Please review this quality checklist Please use this checklist before submitting your stories to ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated. When you submit quality content, your stories can be published faster and you can gain more readers. How to amplify your stories Writers need to take personal responsibility to create visibility for their content. One way of increasing visibility and reading times of your stories is to reach out to a broader audience by amplifying your stories meaningfully. We help you share your stories by creating collaborative tools and platforms. Collaboration is a critical success factor for Medium writers. Here are the simple guides to get you started. Amplify Your Medium Stories with Facebook Pages and Groups How to Get Started with Quora and Amplify Your Medium Stories How to Get Started with Pinterest and Amplify Your Medium Stories Amplify Your Medium Stories with YouTube Amplify Your Medium Stories with LinkedIn Groups You can join ILLUMINATION LinkedIn group from this link. Details for each item can be found in this story. Grow your network on Goodreads collaboring with 20 million members If you authored books, Goodreads can be an ideal place to create visibility. Technology Hits We have a new publication to extend our services and reach out broader audience. Writers have flexibility to share their stories among three publications to gain maximum visibility and readibility. Here is the initial invitation by Dr Mehmet Yildiz -Founder Featured stories on Technology Hits by Editor of Technology Hits Weekly editorial review by Karen Madej Reading list on Technology Hits Value propositions were articulated by three senior editors. The one by Tree Langdon By CR Mandler MAT By Liam Ireland How we help writers to amplify their stories We use various platforms and tools to amplify your stories. Daily Digest One way of sharing your stories with Medium readers is daily digest. Here is a sample to our latest daily digest. This daily digest can also be useful for writers to explore the stories of other writers in our publication. We recommend you share daily digest in your social media tools. For ILLUMINATION-Curated we create daily volumes. Here is one of the latest posts. We keep a link to all volumes in this story. Blogs We blog the daily digests and also replicate all stories to our blog site using Medium RSS service. Social Media We tweet your stories automatically and manually by several editors. Twitter Our Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/illum_official Facebook We have two Facebook pages and a Facebook group. We automatically post your stories. However, you can supplement with your posts. Instructions to participate are in this story. https://medium.com/illumination/amplify-your-medium-stories-with-facebook-pages-and-groups-606fdb4f7c85 Quora Quora is important for our writers. We share your stories but you can also share your stories in two Quora spaces. Details in this story: https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-get-started-with-quora-and-amplify-your-medium-stories-969f309b0967 LinkedIn We automatically post your stories to our Linked page and groups. https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13914581/ Pinterest Another creative distribution is using Pinterest. https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-get-started-with-pinterest-and-amplify-your-medium-stories-94435d586d51 Flipboard Esential References for Writers The following stories can provide guidance on use of publication and interacting with others. Process and Procedures for ILLUMINATION A Practical Guide for Writers About ILLUMINATION-Curated References about ILLUMINATION-Curated can be accessed from this single story. Writer bios from their pen We recommend you submit a story about yourself. You can find samples from this story. Six Reasons Writers Need Bios Interviews with writers Invitation to ILLUMINATION YouTube Channel Meet Top Writers on ILLUMINATION Meet Editors of ILLUMINATION Link Your Twitter Handle to Your Medium Account How to earn good money on Medium How to create viral stories on Medium Can you make $10,000 on Medium in a month? Writers Invited to Promote Their Publications Publications Owned by Illumination Writers Testimonials about ILLUMINATION Do you enjoy collaborating with others? Then we have three virtual clubs for your engagement. These clubs are fun and run on our Slack Workspace. 5,200 Medium Writers are collaborating in our Slack group. Here is essential information about our Slack Workspace ILLUMINATION Fiction Club ILLUMINATION Poetry Club Technology Hits — The TSEE Club Fiction and Poetry Bios of ILLUMINATION Writers Meet our editors Our editors work hard to help our writers succeed. They invest their precious time volunteering for smooth publishing of your stories. ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, Tree Langdon, Brian E. Wish, PhD, Dr Ron Pol, Dr Michael Heng, Dr John Rose, Paul Myers MBA, Karen Madej, Joe Luca, Dipti Pande, Kevin Buddaeus, Kate Maxwell, Arthur G. Hernandez, Bill Abbate, Michael Patanella, Aurora Eliam, CMP, René Junge, Geetika Sethi, Ahmed Jamal, Britni Pepper, Selma, Earnest Painter, Dew Langrial, B. A. Cumberlidge. Lanu Pitan, Agnes Laurens, EP McKnight, MEd, CR Mandler MAT, The Maverick Files, Sumera Rizwan, Liam Ireland, Tony Young, Jr., Neha Sandhir S, Desiree Driesenaar, Stuart Englander, Ntathu Allen, Thewriteyard, Haimish Mead, Maria Rattray Thank you for reading our bulletin. Please subscribe to our mailing list to stay in touch with our progress and get customized content for your writing and reading needs. ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, and Editor of Technology Hits To join our three vibrant publications, please send a request via this link. We will help you succeed. Please point out publication name with your Medium account ID in the request.

https://medium.com/illumination/welcome-new-writers-b9c5156448c

[]

2020-12-23 16:57:13.393000+00:00

['Writing', 'Reading', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Marketing']

Long-Covid Risk Factors, Symptoms, and Treatments: New Insights

Long-Covid Risk Factors, Symptoms, and Treatments: New Insights More than 5 initial symptoms predict long-Covid. And a drug just passed phase III clinical trial for chronic fatigue syndrome. Hand vector created by freepik — www.freepik.com As with any other systemic disease, Covid-19 may bring systemic complications that may not resolve so soon. We identify them as long-haulers, long-Covid, post-viral Covid-19 syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Importantly, a positive SARS-CoV-2 test is not important for long-Covid diagnosis. We understand what they look like and the probable causes. But how much do we know about its risk factors, namely, what traits make a patient more likely to develop long-Covid, and its potential treatments? Prevalence and cause The prevalence of long-Covid depends on the population studied. For example, a study in China detected residual lung abnormalities in 25% of discharged Covid-19 patients in a 3-month follow-up, of whom 31% still had gastrointestinal distress, 18% had headaches, 16% had fatigue, and 15% had dyspnea (shortness of breath). A study in Italy, on the other hand, followed 179 Covid-19 patients for two months. They uncovered one or two lingering symptoms in 32% of patients and three or more in 55%. Common symptoms were fatigue (53%), dyspnea (43%), joint pain (27%), and chest pain (22%). Other data from King’s College London that studied over 4000 Covid-19 patients found that 13% of patients had persisting symptoms for at least 28 days, of which over 90% had fatigue and headache. This study further discovered a few risk factors for long-Covid, as discussed below. Reasons for Covid-19 long-haulers, scientists believe, are due to the residual tissue damage or the aberrant immune responses that persist despite that the coronavirus may no longer be present, or both. More details here: Risk factors Two new preprints released in October have tracked a sufficient number of Covid-19 patients to identify the possible risk factors of long-haulers. While preprints have not gone through peer-review yet, these two are from research institutions with a good academic publishing record. The presence of more than five symptoms during the first week of illness predicted 16.3% of cases [of long-Covid]. Part I: King’s College London Researchers at King’s College London authored one of the preprints, titled “Attributes and predictors of Long-COVID: analysis of COVID cases and their symptoms collected by the Covid Symptoms Study App.” This study is led by Claire J. Steves, an honorary consultant physician in geriatric medicine and deputy director of the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, with over 70 published academic papers. This study followed 4,182 Covid-19 patients in Sweden, Great Britain, and the U.S. for several months. In the end, they found 13% of patients had symptoms lasting more than 28 days. This number was 4.5% and 2.3% for those suffering symptoms for more than 56 and 95 days, respectively. The study then pinpointed risk factors that all together could predict 76.7% of long-Covid cases. The researchers also tested their predictive model in another dataset of 2,472 Covid-19 patients, which proved their model’s accuracy and generalizability. Individual risk factors are ranked as follows: The old age of 70 years and above predicted 29.2% of cases. The presence of more than five symptoms during the first week of illness predicted 16.3% of cases. A high body mass index of 27.5 and above predicted 10.3% of cases. Horse voice symptoms predicted 4.1% of cases. Shortness of breath symptom predicted 3.8% of cases. Female sex predicted 3.7% of cases. In those aged 70 and above, fever, loss of smell, and comorbidities (particularly heart and lung diseases) were also predictors. Socioeconomic status was not a predictor. Lastly, the authors pointed out their study’s limitations, which include the dominance of females and those younger than 70 years. Data on race were also lacking, preventing risk factor analysis. And data relied on self-reports, which may not be as accurate as doctors’ assessments. Regardless, both studies identified more than five initial symptoms and shortness of breath as predictors of long-Covid. Part II: Helix The second preprint, “Long-term COVID-19 symptoms in a large unselected population,” is from Helix, a population genomics research center in California. This study used survey data from over 20,000 participants of the Helix DNA Discovery and Healthy Nevada Projects. But only 233 people had Covid-19, and most were not tested. Prevalence of long-Covid was 42%, 34%, and 24% after 30, 60, and 90 days, respectively. This study only found three risk factors of long-Covid: more than five initial symptoms, shortness of breath, and blood type A+. In contrast, sex, BMI, or comorbidities were not associated with long-Covid. Evidently, this study is weaker than the King’s College London study Dr. Steves led — owing to the smaller sample size while also using self-reports. Regardless, both studies identified more than five initial symptoms and shortness of breath as predictors of long-Covid. Subtypes and unique symptoms Another interesting finding from Dr. Steves’s study were the two subtypes of long-Covid. One type is the combo of fatigue, headache, and upper respiratory tract symptoms like shortness of breath, sore throat, persistent cough, or smell loss. The second type is a multi-system complication with ongoing fever and gastrointestinal symptoms. Although rare, science has recently described new and unique aspects of long-Covid ranging from symptoms of the heart, brain, peripheral nervous system, ear, and skin. Dr. Steves et al. also noticed a few symptoms unique to long-Covid. Using short-Covid-19 patients as a comparison group, these were cardiac symptoms like palpitations or tachycardia (6.1% vs. 0.5%), concentration or memory problems (4.1% vs. 0.2%), tinnitus and earache (3.6% vs. 0.2%), and peripheral nerve symptoms like prickling or tingling sensation and numbness (2% vs. 0.5%). These differences reached statistical significance (p<0.05), which means that results were not due to random chance. In a study published this month, Harvard Medical School scientists searched for cases of Covid-19-related skin symptoms in the American Academy of Dermatology and International League of Dermatological Societies databases. They identified 171 such cases from 31 countries. While most skin symptoms lasted less than a month, pernio, chilblains, or redness and swelling of feet or hands—also known as Covid-19 toes — persisted more than 60 days in six cases and more than 130 days in two cases. Although rare, science has recently described new and unique aspects of long-Covid ranging from symptoms of the heart, brain, peripheral nervous system, ear, and skin. Possible treatments At this point, the guidelines for Covid-19 long-haulers include proper sleep, nutrition, and mental health management. Slow and gradual pacing of physical activities is also recommended but should be avoided if symptoms worsen. According to an unpublished study of 1,600 Covid-19 long-haulers, the self-reported supplements that helped with symptom relieve were vitamin D (500 people), vitamin C (290), zinc (250), magnesium (259), B12 (228), multivitamins (184), turmeric (156), N-acetylcysteine (134), and others. While these are anecdotes, they make sense since proper nutrition is advice for long-Covid recovery. Self-reported prescriptions were heartburn or acid reflux medications (230 people), steroids (221), antihistamines (215), inhalers (196), aspirin (80), ibuprofen (74), and others. “Rintatolimod is the only drug to have completed successful advanced placebo-controlled clinical trials (Phase II/III) for ME/CFS and is approved for severe ME/CFS in Argentina.” Long-Covid is a syndrome similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Presently, there are no approved treatments for ME/CFS, but that may soon change. A phase III clinical trial of 75 sufferers of ME/CFS for 2–8 years was published a few days ago. And results found that an immunomodulatory called rintatolimod improved the exercise duration of 51% of patients. In contrast, only 17.6% of the placebo group saw improvement. That is nearly a tripled efficacy in terms of the number of responders. “Rintatolimod is the only drug to have completed successful advanced placebo-controlled clinical trials (Phase II/III) for ME/CFS and is approved for severe ME/CFS in Argentina,” the authors wrote, which may apply to long-Covid as well. “Covid-19 debilitated patients with “long hauler” post-viral syndrome would benefit from rintatolimod are topics for further investigation.” Rintatolimod is now being investigated for its antiviral potential against Covid-19 in Japan.

https://shinjieyong.medium.com/long-covid-risk-factors-symptoms-and-treatments-new-insights-555285d27698

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-10-31 09:42:21.673000+00:00

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

Custom Maps on react-native-maps And react-google-maps

Read the original article on Sicara’s website here. I recently worked on a React-Native mobile project that shows administrative divisions of countries in a colour depending on its crime rate. I found that many countries and cities provide freely their Geographical Data generated with specialized softwares known as GIS. Digging into data.gouv.fr, the french Open Data website, I bumped into a shapefile describing the french administrative divisions. Here’s what I learnt that will save you some trial and error time. What I worked with to render a map easily I had to show both a map on a mobile and web app. As we developed the mobile app using React Native, we used the airbnb’s component react-native-maps which revealed itself both simple to use and efficient. Here is a sample of a working React Native map component that draws polygons. import MapView from 'react-native-maps'; export default function Map(props) { render() { return ( <MapView> {this.state.polygons.map(polygon => (<MapView.Polygon key={polygon.id} coordinates={polygon.coordinates} fillColor='red' strokeColor='black' />), )} </MapView> ); } } Regarding the React web app, we inserted Google maps using the react-google-maps module. Here are few lines to generate a Google map. import React from 'react'; import { GoogleMapLoader, GoogleMap, Polygon } from 'react-google-maps'; export default function Map(props) { return ( <GoogleMapLoader containerElement={ <div style={{ height: '400px', }} {...props.containerProps} /> } googleMapElement={ <GoogleMap> {props.polygons.map((polygon, index) => { return ( <Polygon key={index} paths={polygon.coordinates} options={{ strokeWeight: 1, fillColor: 'red', fillOpacity: 1, strokeColor: 'black', }} /> ); })} </GoogleMap> } /> ); } New York boroughs drawn using react-google-maps (from the app SafeAround) What is a shapefile? Shapefile is a commonly used data format, mostly generated by free geographical softwares (known as GIS). ShapeFiles are actually not single files but a collection of many different ones, including generally: .shp : gathers the coordinates of each polygons : gathers the coordinates of each polygons .dbf : information about the shapes (name, area, …) : information about the shapes (name, area, …) .prj : describes the projection used (usually, coordinates are not provided using longitude - latitude) : describes the used (usually, coordinates are not provided using longitude - latitude) .shx : provides an index over shapes to find neighboring shapes : provides an index over shapes to find neighboring shapes .cpg : text encoding used (UTF-8, Latin-1, us-ascii …) How can I read shapefiles using python? You need only two libraries : pyshp and dbfread . You can print the data you have using import shapefile as shp from matplotlib import pyplot as p shp_file_path = ‘MyShapeFile.shp’ my_shapes = shp.Reader(shp_file_path).shapes() my_shapes_list = list(map(lambda shape: shape.points, my_shapes)) print('Number of shapes : %s' % len(my_shapes_list)) for shape in my_shapes_list: longitude, latitude = zip(*shape) p.plot(longitude, latitude) p.show() For example, printing the USA counties boundaries: You can then link each shape from the .shp to its metadata provided in the .dbf using the following code. The metadata in the .dbf are listed in the same order as their associated polygons in the .shp file. from dbfread import DBF dbf_file_path = 'usaCountiesShapeFile.dbf' counties_information_list = DBF(dbf_file_path, load=True, encoding='utf-8').records print('first county : %s' % counties_information_list[0]) Why do English coordinates not look like lat/long ? The standard latitude-longitude coordinates format is called WGS84 (World Geodetic System, created in 1984). However, you might encounter strange coordinates used in your ShapeFile. Even worse, most projections used are not a linear transformation of the longitude-latitude format! For example, you can find London wards here, but coordinates are provided using the British National Grid projection : they look like (530000, 180000). Don’t panic, The GitHub user profLewis provides a python function to help! It converts British National Grid projection (OSGB36) to longitude-latitude coordinates (known as WGS84). Same thing goes for French coordinates: the administrative sections ‘Iris’ are provided on data.gouv.fr using Lambert93, the official projection in Metropolitan France. Find here a python function to transform Lambert93 coordinates to WGS84. The United States’ system, GCS_North_American_1983, is a tricky one as it differs from WGS84 by about a meter. Where can I find the data? Here are some links to the data I used! Latitude-Longitude : British National Grid : France’s Lambert93 : If you look for other data, many countries have their own Open Data platform and provide geographical subdivisions! Opendatasoft.com listed 2600+ Open Data sources which you can explore in a map.

https://medium.com/sicara/using-open-data-shapefiles-to-draw-on-your-react-native-mobile-and-web-apps-maps-2b68a549c08d

[]

2019-12-05 10:30:50.262000+00:00

['React', 'Development', 'Python', 'JavaScript', 'Data Visualization']

It’s Like a Leaf, But Better

The field of chemistry has already had prior success in engineering artificial photosynthetic systems that can be used in tandem with carbon capture technology to turn carbon dioxide into usable fuels. The first photosynthetic biohybrid system was produced in 2015. The system developed at UC Berkeley used semiconductors and live bacteria to produce a photosynthetic reaction that would use solar energy to produce liquid fuels using carbon dioxide and water. At the time, it was predicted that if the technology improved, it may become the future of energy. The process involves catalysts harvesting solar energy to generate charge which is then transferred to bacteria. The bacteria use the electric charge from the catalysts to instigate a chemical reduction reaction that turns carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. Butanol, acetate, polymers, and pharmaceutical precursors were produced as a result of this experiment. Furthermore, it was found that this first artificial photosynthetic system had a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 0.38%, which is comparable to the efficiency of a natural leaf. The innovation didn’t stop there though. A year later at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, the chemical transformation of carbon dioxide into fuels was achieved using metal-nitride nanowires as a catalyst to overcome the eventual efficiency bottleneck that can occur when using conventional photocatalytic technologies. While the typical conversion process of carbon dioxide into fuel requires high temperatures, high pressures, and/or extremely reactive reagents, the metal-nitride nanowire photocatalyst developed allows the process to be completed more stably and efficiently, while also occurring at room temperature. The result: solar fuels generated using an efficient artificial photosynthetic system that can be used to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, bringing society closer to a net-zero future. UC Berkeley and McGill University aren’t alone in developing this groundbreaking technology. Just a few years later, another breakthrough came in the world of artificial photosynthetic systems. In a 2019 report published in the American Chemical Society journal of Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, the solar-to-fuel efficiency of an artificial photosynthetic (AP) system was evaluated. The study looked directly at how the AP system can capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and can then convert it into fuel using sunlight. The report concludes that a modern, fully integrated AP system could reduce the carbon dioxide levels in the surrounding air by 10% during steady-state operation, which makes it fourteen times more efficient than natural leaves. This report was analyzing a study conducted by the Department of Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois, who had successfully produced fuels using water, visible light, and carbon dioxide using artificial photosynthesis. Scientists conducting the study developed an artificial photosynthesis process that used the same visible green light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum used by plants during natural photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuel. The process used a plasmonic excitation of gold nanoparticles (used as a catalyst) to produce a rich, electrically-charged environment at the gold particle-carbon dioxide solution interface which is conducive to carbon dioxide activation. From there, an ionic liquid stabilizes the charged intermediates that formed on the surface of the interface which begins to facilitate a multi-step chemical reduction reaction coupled with carbon coupling. Multi-carbon chains can be produced, resulting in the formation of methane, ethylene, acetylene, propane, and propene. The University of Illinois chemists who conducted the study wanted to focus on creating liquid fuels because they are easier, safer, and more economical to store and transport than regular gasoline. Furthermore, liquid fuels are comprised of long-chain molecules containing more bonds than regular gasoline, giving them a higher energy density. While the goal of the study was to learn how to use catalysts to increase the efficiency of the chemical reactions undergone during the carbon dioxide-to-fuel conversion experiment, the chemists of the study agree that the hard work will begin when they start determining how they can scale up the process.

https://medium.com/predict/its-like-a-leaf-but-better-717689f7d1b7

['Madison Hunter']

2020-12-07 03:51:23.186000+00:00

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

Data Science Reading List for May 2020

Data Science Reading List for May 2020 This month’s Data Science reading list. Note: I am not affiliated with any of the authors in this article. These are simply books that I’m excited to share with you. There are no referrals or a cent going in my pocket from the authors or publishers mentioned. Enjoy! Welcome to this month’s reading list! I wanted to add some fiction in here to make an important point. I’ve noticed myself and lot of tech and data friends struggling to disconnect between work and other aspects of life. This change to remote work has been a shock for many of us. Working at a desk 10 feet from where you sleep, 10 feet from where you cook meals, and 10 feet from where you brush your teeth can be a real shock. Once quitting time rolls around it’s usually pretty healthy to completely disconnect from work. If you let work leak into every aspect of your life your work will quickly become your identity. While we as Data Science folks tend to be especially passionate about our work, there comes a time when it’s necessary to completely disconnect. We need to always take time to interface with our creative side. And you might be surprised, when you start taking more time away from your work, your focused work becomes higher quality. All this to say, don’t read too many business and technical books in your free time. If you’re only going to read one type of book — make it fiction! Read something fun. Engage your creative side. Whatever genre suits you, re-explore it. You won’t regret it. On to the list! Designing Data-Intensive Applications This is a terrific read for the Data Engineers and Software Engineers among us. There isn’t a ton of system thinking on the Data Science side. I would say pick this one up if you’re interested in learning more about how the data systems you use every day work. LINK Springer Released 65 Technical Books For Free Most people have had this link shoved in their face already… But in case you haven’t! Springer released 65 Statistics, ML, etc books for free a few weeks ago. It’s an awesome move on their part. So if you are looking for a particular reference book this is a great list to check before going out and making a purchase… LINK Monetizing Innovation Had this one recommended to me by a fellow founder. He had another founder recommend it to him who said his business’s pricing model was largely influenced by this book. I’m all about practicality when it comes to business books so I had to check it out. So far it’s lived up to my expectations. 225 pages of mostly value. Lots of diagrams and data-driven explanations for various pricing and product decisions. LINK Dune Dune is a book I’ve had recommended to me more times than I can recall. Hopefully it lives up to the hype. From family who read it decades ago to friends who read it recently, I’ve had it recommended time and time again. Started it last week. Read more fiction, people! And recommend me some fiction to read as well; I’ve fallen away from fiction in favor of business and technical books which is a shame. Let’s unlock our creative side and read more fiction! LINK

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-reading-list-for-may-2020-db02b406e00c

['Luke Posey']

2020-05-11 15:15:05.916000+00:00

['Startup', 'Books', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Reading']

Image Augmentation with Python

Augmenting the Images Now we can finally get started with the image augmentation. We will use PIL’s ImageEnhance method for this. ImageEnhance’s Contrast() , Brightness() , Sharpness() , and Color() all load the image; then, we can use their enhance() methods to enhance those properties by any factor we choose. We will use np.linspace to choose factors between 0 and 1.5, and np.random.choice to randomize those factors. The one-liner for doing this for contrast is: contrast = [np.asarray(ImageEnhance.Contrast(Image.fromarray(img, 'RGB')).enhance(np.random.choice(np.linspace(0.5, 1.5, 5)))) for img in orig] For each img in orig , we first load the image from the img array (specifying the color channel as “RGB”. Then, enhance the contrast by a random value from [0, 0.5, 1, 1.25, 1.5] ( np.linspace(0.5, 1.5, 5) will choose five linearly spaced values between 0 and 1.5). Finally, we save this image as an array within the contrast list. Let us see how the images look with their contrast tweaked: plt.figure(figsize=(9,9)) i = 0 for img in contrast[0:16]: plt.subplot(4, 4, i+1) plt.xticks([]) plt.yticks([]) plt.grid(False) plt.imshow(img) i += 1 plt.show() Contrast tweaked by a factor of 0.5 to 1.5 Images with an enhancement factor < 1 look greyer, while those with a factor > 1 are more saturated. Those with a factor = 1 won’t be any different from the original. To amplify the effect of randomness, we sequentially process the images for brightness, sharpness, and color, i.e., the output of one is the input of the other: brightness = [np.asarray(ImageEnhance.Contrast(Image.fromarray(img, 'RGB')).enhance(np.random.choice(np.linspace(0.5, 1.5, 5)))) for img in contrast] sharpness = [np.asarray(ImageEnhance.Contrast(Image.fromarray(img, 'RGB')).enhance(np.random.choice(np.linspace(0.5, 1.5, 5)))) for img in brightness] color = [np.asarray(ImageEnhance.Contrast(Image.fromarray(img, 'RGB')).enhance(np.random.choice(np.linspace(0.5, 1.5, 5)))) for img in sharpness] After all these operations, the images look like: After tweaking brightness, sharpness, and color We are just left with two more operations — flip and rotate. For flip, we will use cv2.flip() . It takes the image and a value between 0, 1 and -1. For 0, it flips vertically; for 1, it flips horizontally; and for -1, it flips both horizontally and vertically. We can randomize these values to randomize the flip, and we can also randomize choosing if the image will be flipped or not. The one-liner for this is: flip = [cv2.flip(img, np.random.choice([0, 1, -1])) if np.random.choice([0, 1]) else img for img in color] If np.random.choice([0, 1]) is 0, we don’t flip and return the input; otherwise, we flip depending on np.random.choice([0, 1, -1]) . Rotating is straightforward. We load the image from the image array and rotate it by as many degrees as we want. To avoid having to fill, we’ll be randomly rotating the images by 0 (no rotation), 90, 180, or 270 degrees: rotate = [Image.fromarray(img, 'RGB').rotate(np.random.choice([0, 90, 180, 270])) for img in flip] The final output after all these operations (along with the original images) looks like: We can then save these images in a separate “augmented” folder: import os for i, image in tqdm(enumerate(rotate)): directory = paths[i].rsplit('/', 3)[0] + '/augmented/' + paths[i].rsplit('/', 2)[1]+ '/' os.makedirs(directory, exist_ok = True) image.save(directory + paths[i].rsplit('/', 2)[2]) In addition to the steps we discussed, you can also add noise and blur to your image as a part of augmentation. These are described in my article on generating text CAPTCHAs in Python:

https://medium.com/better-programming/introduction-to-image-augmentation-in-python-1691cbf8901f

['Siddhant Sadangi']

2020-11-19 12:43:08.769000+00:00

['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Code', 'Computer Vision', 'Programming']

How AI Could Have Prevented the “Great Google Outage”

How AI Could Have Prevented the “Great Google Outage” The Black Mirror-esque Google outage. Still from Black Mirror. Google went down for millions, if not billions of people on December 14th, 2020. Using a Chromebook, I was locked out of my laptop, and couldn’t access any Google services on my phone. In attempts to recover my accounts, I was told that none of my Google accounts existed. As it turns out, the Great Google Outage impacted many countries. For many, this was a wake-up call to how dependent we are on Google. Without access to the Internet, it feels like that Black Mirror episode where people can be locked out of society at the click of a button. Why Outages Happen Outages are nothing new — it’s just surprising when it happens to a behemoth like Google. That said, Google suffered a 5-minute outage back in 2013, causing Internet traffic to drop by 40%. Most of the outage was solved in just 1 minute. Before then, one of the last outages was in 2009. There are many potential causes of outages, including: Server power supply failures. Hardware problems like overheating. External actions like malware. How AI Can Prevent Outages Google is an enormous network, with literally millions of servers around the world. It’d be impossible to have manual oversight into the status of these servers. At that scale, automation is needed to predict outages and monitor server status. Machine learning is great at finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Given historical server performance data, including a column on outages, you could train a machine learning model to predict outages, allowing companies to reduce maintenance costs and prevent these catastrophes. With automated machine learning tools like Obviously.AI, companies can build and deploy AI systems in minutes, rather than the months it would traditionally take. Google’s Great Outage could indeed be used by Google as “training data” to make predictive AI models more accurate. AI finds patterns in data, and with more historical data to look back on, it can more accurately find patterns. Binary Classification This is an example of a binary classification task in machine learning, as you’re predicting a binary outcome: Server live, or server down. This has been commonly used for tasks like predicting power grid outages, and the same concept applies to servers. Potentially predictive data attributes include processor usage, memory usage, disk read/write, latency, throughput, network bandwidth, and more.

https://medium.com/dataseries/how-ai-could-have-prevented-the-great-google-outage-3b493c1537d9

['Frederik Bussler']

2020-12-15 11:33:21.723000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Google', 'AI', 'Servers', 'Information Technology']

Tips for Startups From Peter Thiel

Tips for Startups From Peter Thiel 5 notable pieces of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future I recently decided to read the popular book by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters titled, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. While reading, I took some notes that I felt were important and needed to be shared. All quotes are taken straight from the book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. 1. Every Moment in Business Happens Only Once The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin will won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg wont create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Entrepreneurs and founders need to be different and create new things. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world had a new idea that the world needed even if people did not know they needed it. The most important part about this idea was that it was something new. What we should learn from the already successful founders mentioned above is that we should be discovering and creating new things to change the world. While it is easier to reinvent the wheel, creating a new method or significantly modifying the original method for the better is a much more lucrative and beneficial option for startups. Focus on creating new things that people may not know they want or need. These new technologies or ideas mixed with a startup also have the potential to reach the point of becoming a monopoly (discussed later), which if handled properly, will lead to extreme success. 2. Teamwork is Necessary for Startups Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better… It’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Having a solid like-minded team willing to put in the work to achieve a shared goal is essential to any startup, especially a startup in the early stages. No matter how much weight entrepreneurs want to believe they can carry on their own, it is still true that two brains are better than one. Peter Thiel wrote in his book, “it’s very hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team”. That being said, the types of people who inhabit your team are very important. You cannot work with just anyone. This team, especially in the foundational stage, must consist of trustworthy people who all work well together towards a mutual goal. 3. Build a Strong Foundation in the Beginning A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. A building with a weak base is doomed to crumble. Like most things, the same goes for startups: a startup with a weak base is doomed to collapse. Founders and entrepreneurs need to be very careful during the early stages of their startups because the wrong decision can ruin the company’s foundation and lead to failure. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation. One of the most important foundational steps for all founders is choosing who to begin building the company with. This includes choosing co-founders, board members and employees. As mentioned earlier, teamwork is essential to a startup’s success. Trouble between founders will never end well for the company. Peter Thiel recommends that co-founders know each other prior to starting the company and get along well together. Otherwise, differences between them could cause unwanted and fatal damage to the startup. The book also mentions that a company’s board should be kept small, such as around three members. Too big of a board and vital communication can be lost. Too small of a board and the board members could exercise their power and cause conflict. The beginning stages of any company are the most important. This was stressed throughout the book. A successful company will get a strong foundation secured before building up into the windy and often chaotic world of business. 4. Build a Monopoly All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape the competition. When I read this, I did not see it as a suggestion. Instead, I took it as a rule of the startup world. To reach the most success possible, a startup must position itself as a monopoly. Startups should aim for ruling a niche market with as few competitors as possible (preferably none), then progress and expand out from there. It is better to rule a niche market than to compete in a company-saturated market. Going along with this theme of creating a monopoly, Peter Thiel also mentions how monopolistic companies should act and present themselves: by denying their monopolistic traits, and appearing to be in a competitive market. Non-monopolists exaggerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets. Monopolists, by contrast, disguise their monopoly by framing their market as the union of several larger markets. Once a company is a monopoly, it is better to not present itself as one to avoid any negative attention. 5. Avoid Competition If you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most. Going along with the idea of creating a monopoly, founders should not aim to flood a vibrant competitive market, but should instead focus on finding a niche market with little to no competition. Not only could this lead to a monopolistic startup, but it takes the focus away from the competitors and places it on the customers, product(s) and the ultimate goal of the startup. Competition creates a war, and war is destructive and never has a true winner. As Peter Thiel put it, “war is a costly business” and it is simply not worth the stress and time for startups to focus on it. Instead, avoid the war and adversaries and focus on the inner workings of the startup itself.

https://medium.com/swlh/startups-and-building-the-future-23f5accedffd

['Aidan Wilson']

2019-10-29 08:01:03.570000+00:00

['Work', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Future', 'Productivity']

Essential Roles and Responsibilities of Successful Business Leaders

Essential Roles and Responsibilities of Successful Business Leaders Innovative Leadership is my research interest. I studied prominent traits that attract us to exceptional leaders. I have been researching leadership in various settings for several decades. In one of the leadership and business articles, I introduced “Remarkable Leadership Traits for Technology Executives”. My research revealed the difference between ordinary and distinguished leaders. In this post, I want to share 11 essential roles and responsibilities of exceptional business leaders. Learning these roles can provide useful insights to aspiring business leaders and entrepreneurs. You can find more of these stories on my News Break profile.

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/essential-roles-and-responsibilities-of-successful-business-leaders-c18640297b47

['Dr Mehmet Yildiz']

2020-12-28 15:54:04.796000+00:00

['Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Technology', 'Writing']

Robots, AI and augmented stupidity: Interview with Andra Keay

Andra Keay is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics — a not-for-profit coalition of robotics companies and startups supporting the innovation and commercialisation of robotics technologies. She advises a number of startups and is the founder of Robot Launch Pad — organising events bridging startup and robotics communities. We caught up with Andra to chat about the future of robotics and how entrepreneurs in the field can ensure innovation remains beneficial to human beings. How did you get into robotics? “I’ve been interested in all the geeky things since I was a child. Both my parents encouraged that a lot; their roles at universities meant that I got to play with computers and rockets and build equipment at a really early age. “But one of the things that happened all the time, was that people would express their astonishment that a girl was interested in things like rockets and robots. And after a while, that astonishment became more interesting than the things that I was doing. Andra and her brother as children “I studied theories of communication and what I would like to call human-robot culture, as opposed to human-robot interaction. Where human-robot interaction focuses on the psychological side of things, and it’s certainly a fascinating field, I realised that the one-to-one relationships are nowhere near as indicative of what’s happening in society as understanding the broader social shifts. “It’s not really a discipline as it were, but we have to ask ourselves (and this is the question that fascinates me): what is the 21st century going to look like as the most cutting edge technologies trickle their way through to mainstream adoption? “We’ve seen what the adoption of technology looked like in the 20th century and that’s not simply the internet or even computing; it’s technologies like the automobile and household appliances. “If we look to history, we can see a lot of great examples of what happens when a really disruptive technology is adopted. It’s not an immediate thing — as Roy Amara said, we often vastly overestimate the impact of technology in the short term but vastly underestimate the impact in the long term. “We fill the headlines with fear about robots and AI in the short term, but it’s probably longer term structural shifts in society that are really where both the potential for problems and the potential for great advances are. “One thing that’s clear, is that to solve a lot of the world’s serious problems (the ageing population, the increasing population and the fact that we need to double food production without having the ability to increase the amount of land that we use), we are probably dependent on technology because we haven’t been able to fix those problems yet. “We’ve really hit a saturation point. The ability to increase our productivity without using more manual labour; we’ve hit a saturation point there. We’re dependent on technologies now to increase productivity. We need to be in the upward spiral or we’ll be in a downward spiral; there isn’t really a static place where we can just exist comfortably. “One of the grandfathers of AI, Norbert Wiener, said that the future is not a comfortable hammock for us to lie back in and be waited upon by robot slaves; it’s actually an ever more challenging fight against the limitations of human intelligence. That’s really at the heart of my interest in robotics and AI. These are technologies that humans have developed and we developed them with our own strengths and weaknesses wrapped up in them.” You’ve spoken before about this tendency of technology to unconsciously reinforce stereotypes. How do we prevent this? “Well perhaps one of the first steps is awareness. That’s often an empty goal, because awareness without action is nothing. “I’ve been involved in the heart of the technologist scene, as it were, for a long time and I’ve seen that the majority of the people involved don’t believe that they are building technologies that are biased. We really need to lift the debate so that we can talk about the various ways in which unconscious biases, and indeed conscious biases, are replicated. “If anything, I think the current debate about Facebook and Twitter perpetuating hate speech is one of the strongest messages that we can get. It’s starting to shift a bit of the tone, from the Silicon Valley attitude of ‘we just build it, and it’s not our fault’ to thinking, actually, what we’ve built is something that we need to be responsible for. “The problem with trying to change technologies that are widespread in the world is very clearly laid out. If it is a public company, then you have a legal obligation to report to the stockholders who have a very short term interest based on financial returns on a quarterly basis. If you said ‘let’s reduce our advertising revenue so we can reshape who we answer to’, that’s not going to fly. Whereas companies that are not yet public, or companies potentially like Facebook or Google who have majority control by the founders, maybe they can still go against that shortsighted direction. “These are not so much problems with technologies but problems with the financial structures that support them. And that’s a lot to change. I do think that maybe it’s a problem of scale — we can create really good technologies that are fantastic on a small scale but that become inherently problematic once they become large scale. That said, one of the one of the things I believe is that if we can invent the problem, we can invent the solution.” What are your biggest fears about the future of robotics? “I think that we won’t end up with the really dysfunctional scenarios that people like to get scared about, like AI taking over the world or robots hurting us. Those things won’t happen, but I think the stupid short term problems definitely will. We’ve seen it happen where AI creates feedback loops that work on stupid things. “We’ve seen financial trading for example, that causes billion dollar losses rather than smaller, individual losses. The feedback loop gets exaggerated and the trades happen faster with automation and we end up losing billions of dollars. We’ll see more of that kind of augmentation of human stupidity because AI and robotics allow us to augment human ability, and human ability can be stupid. “We can also augment human bias. It’s in the field of gender that I see the most obvious problems happening. For example, an artificial intelligence like Microsoft Tay can get trained to hate speech. “We’ve seen in video games where the representation of women is highly objectified, sexualised and stereotyped. Well I think with robots, because we won’t want to see such sexualisation, it’s going to be a little more subtle, but we’ve already seen that the female-looking robots and female-voiced robots are being used for the most menial of tasks. They’re very supportive, and it’s very difficult at a time of #MeToo, at a time where women are standing up and saying ‘I’ve just discovered that I’m not being paid as much as my males peers and I’m supposed to be at the top of my field so I’m going to fight’ and yet we’re building technologies to pass on the message that the woman’s role is not to be assertive, but to be compliant.” Can you tell us a bit more about this notion of augmented stupidity and bias? “One example is of AI being used to ascertain benefit status for health benefits. There is potential during construction of any system for conflict of goals i.e. best benefits vs lowest costs. The hardest thing about augmented stupidity is to find out who is at fault. “We also have a problem with transparency in AI and in automation generally. Developers blame designers and designers blame commissioners, who blame the rollout and then everybody blames the person on the other end and says ‘well, they probably weren’t eligible for health care’. But its been found that people were being denied health care that they were legally clearly eligible for by systems that were skipping a few steps. Nobody took responsibility for checking this or working out what steps were being skipped. “This is one of the most obvious examples of the power imbalance perpetuating augmented stupidity. The onus is put on the individual to complain and say they don’t think this result is correct, and no one is auditing it. “To me, the two underlying problems with augmented stupidity — and the fact that it is, undoubtedly, rolling out everywhere — are that we are not putting effort into auditing and we’re not building and using transparent modules. “Much of our AI and robotics is being done using off the shelf components. We’re using computer vision libraries that are not developed in house, we’re using software bridges that are maybe open source and maybe commercial but they’re not developed in house, we’re using navigation packages, mobile bases, sensors. There are a lot of things going into these systems and lot of trust that the system is going to do what we think it’s going to do.” What are you most excited for in the future of robotics? “Well founders, on the whole, are not really engaged with the idea of building something that is going to be auditable, accountable and make the world a better place. But right now there is a certain sort of founder who does congregate around the newest technologies of the world and is driven by the idea of doing things to make the world a better place and who will persevere in spite of of lack of funding and in spite of technical obstacles. I am privileged to be surrounded by people like that. “That makes me very optimistic and hopeful about the future. And then I look a few steps down the pathway and I think our follow up is to talk about developing good design guidelines and helping governments talk about developing requirements for accountability. “We are starting to be accountable for the diversity of the workforce. I believe having a diverse workforce would inherently shift some of these problems. First, you’re developing the accountability framework and second, we don’t know if we’re maxing out all of the potential solutions that are available with the homogenous core group that we have in technology right now. If we have have a greater diversity in that group, we might have many more solutions on the table.” What companies are you excited about at the moment? “Willow Garage was an amazing open source research and development group in Silicon Valley. It was founded by a wealthy individual who was involved with Google and sold his own companies as well. He wanted to build the first personal household robot, and it turns out, of course, that’s a really big problem to solve! So instead, he developed a framework — the first robotics platforms that could be used by multiple Universities because, at that point, robotics research did not have any standardisation. “At Willow Garage they created the open source Robot Operating System which is now used by pretty much 100% of robot startups. They also developed the the best experimental robot, the PR2, and also the lowest cost open source robotics hardware platform, Turtlebot. “But the key thing is that Willow Garage was a magnet for all of the talented robotics people in the world. It was fascinating because it was not a research centre, as such. While it was doing research and open publishing it, the goal was to develop things that were for commercialisation. While Willow Garage itself folded 2 or 3 years ago, it spun off 8 or 9 companies, and beyond that, almost all of the exciting robotics companies being developed in the Valley have people that worked at Willow Garage at the heart of them. “Willow Garage has been a bit like Fairchild. It’s well known how 80% of the technology companies in Silicon Valley are Fairchildren, and that includes the venture capital firms as well. Willow Garage has had a similar impact, and if I look for an exciting robotics company, it’s almost 100% likely that someone from Willow Garage will be involved. “One company I’m excited about is Mayfield Robotics who developed Kuri which is just being delivering to houses this year, having launched at CES in 2017. I have one in my living room right now! There’s a really fast turnaround these days for robotics. “You also have Savioke that was founded by Steve Cousins and Fetch Robotics by Melonee Wise. Then there’s Kinema Systems, and a number of companies that Google purchased. I could go on. “There are people who may not be the founders but are a part of the core team who worked at Willow Garage, and for me, this is a really good indicator that they come from the coolest group of roboticists out there — roboticists that have a sense of purpose as well, to make the world a better place.” How will robots integrate with our day to day lives over the next 5–10 years? “I believe that robots train us just as much as we train robots, we work together, it’s a very collaborative process. Anybody who’s used voice commands or touch commands in their car, or on their tablets and phones will recognise that. “If we go into just about every bathroom (and I’ve been travelling a lot, so I’ve recognised that this is definitely worldwide), we expect to wave our hands to make things happen. I think it’s fascinating that the bathroom is the space in which this is happening. We don’t really talk about it much, but we’re training ourselves in haptic interfaces. “I think over the next 10 years, people are going to use haptic, gesture and voice commands and expect things to happen. For me, the question is, are we going to get that right or are we going to realise that there has to be a better way to control our devices and start to develop a new control technology? “For example, if we look down the track we might see something like an embedded or semi-embedded personal mic where we can tongue click our way through a menu. Or something that responds to our eyes, like AR or smart glasses or potentially in-home cameras that detect eye control with devices. Or perhaps we end up with a combination of the three things where you use a voice trigger or something to open a menu and then make selections from it by pointing and eye tracking where you point — the permutations go on! “I’m going to be really interested to see what interface technologies we develop over the next 10 years. Everything in our house can be part of a robot house, and I expect that to include at least one mobile device, call it our home robot. I’m hoping that we actually have a couple of robot arms in household use by then. I have seen people working on robots to do things like dishwashing and toilet cleaning and cooking and folding clothes. But it’s always an open argument; is it better for us to build an appliance that is a one stop shop for cleaning and folding and hanging our clothes, or should we continue to have the appliances we have and have some form of robot arm that takes things out and folds them or puts them away? What’s the most effective? We just don’t know.” We’d like to say a huge thank you to Andra for speaking to us. Check out svrobo.org for all things robotics in the Valley and follow Andra on Twitter @robotlaunch. If you’d like to collaborate on your next tech project, get in touch with Simpleweb today.

https://medium.com/simpleweb/robots-ai-and-augmented-stupidity-interview-with-andra-keay-41e77069f69c

[]

2018-04-18 08:59:12.710000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Robotics', 'Startup', 'Technology', 'AI']

Tomorrow Is Not for Sale

The Problem with Billionaire Syndrome Problems arise when a person’s desire to join the millionaire’s club becomes directly proportional to their desire to disconnect from a beggar. Let me call in another Medium writer to illustrate this problem further, Jessica Wildfire: “Billionaire syndrome happens when we start empathizing with the super-elite, and not the people they exploit. We let them teach us how to hate ourselves for being constantly broke. We crave to be more like them, so much that we fantasize about it. We make excuses for how they treat people. We learn to despise other people who don’t have money. We call them lazy, or toxic — or both.” Billionaire syndrome is a real dynamic in our society. “It’s easier to believe you can be a billionaire than it is to believe you can change the system that caters to them,” as Jessica explains it. The beggar is here today, in our faces, as are our friends who are struggling to make ends meet. We could be working together to fix the social problems that make most of us so uncomfortable. But we are not. We are focused on trying to avoid becoming one of the “unfortunate ones” in the future. This tells us a lot about our collective willingness to live in the present: it’s non-existent. It’s easier to believe you will not one day become a beggar than to empathize with the beggar and try to fight the inequalities that generate them. And here is a paradox, the more we try to escape the present by dreaming of an idealized future, the worst our collective future will become. Ailton Krenak. Image source: Wikipedia. From the Outside Looking In The title of this article, “Tomorrow is Not for Sale,” is a direct translation of an article that was published earlier this year by Brazilian philosopher Ailton Krenak, who won the Intellectual of the Year Award in 2020 for his contribution to democracy. Ailton is a Brazilian native Indian, who was forcibly separated from his tribe at age 9 and taken into our civilization. Since then he has been one of the most prominent leaders of the indigenous people’s movement in Brazil. Brazilian native tribes are some of the last remaining people whose way of life we can compare to those taught by Jesus, Diogenes, or Buddha. We should pay attention to them since they offer an outsider look into our society and shine a light on our vices. Ailton takes the occasion of the pandemic to remind us of our human condition, as an integral part of nature, susceptible to plagues, death, and extinction like any other species. His original article is a humbling warning to us, what he calls the “white men” as opposed to native Indians. What we call humanity is for him nothing more than silly child play, as he observes it from the outside: “It is as if we had several children playing and, imagining this childhood fantasy, they continued to play indefinitely. But as we become adults, we [must realize that] we’re devastating the planet, digging a huge gap of inequalities between peoples and societies.” We are so addicted to the money game that we lose sight of the essence of what it means to be human, alongside other human beings and nature. His call to action is urgent. We must end our arrogant, egotistical anthropocentrism if we are to survive as a species. It’s a message that rings close to Umair Haque’s warning: by the middle of the century if our civilization is to survive, our society will need to undergo a great transformation: “Our moral community [those that we care about] must include the fish who clean our rivers, the insects who turn our soil, the trees who give us air to breathe, the rivers that give us water to drink, the water that passes through us and becomes the rain and the river again. We must learn to care for them just as we care for our “own.” The time for petty human tribalisms is now past.”

https://medium.com/the-masterpiece/tomorrow-is-not-for-sale-6886ebdae4d5

['Daniele Ihns']

2020-12-13 11:39:56.664000+00:00

['Society', 'Politics', 'The Masterpiece', 'Future', 'Environment']

Recovered Covid-19 Cases Still Show Brain Anomalies 3 Months Later

Infection | Brain Recovered Covid-19 Cases Still Show Brain Anomalies 3 Months Later First data that neurological signs and brain structural changes persist in Covid-19. But can the brain self-renew with time? Image by rawpixel.com Science knows that the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, can replicate in human neurons and brain organoids. Brain damage and neurological symptoms are also not rare in Covid-19 cases. Whether such brain insults are long-lasting, however, remains uncertain. And a new study published August in The Lancet, “Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients — An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study,” that casts light on this topic. Persistent Neurological Symptoms In this study, researchers at the Huashan Hospital in China recruited 60 Covid-19 patients that had recovered for over three months (mean age: 44.10; 56.7% males) and 39 non-Covid-19 controls (mean age: 45.88; 56.4% males). Both groups of participants were matched in terms of age, sex, and the prevalence of smoking, alcohol consumption, and underlying comorbidities. During Covid-19, over two-thirds of these 60 recovered Covid-19 patients had neurological symptoms. Other common Covid-19 signs were fever (88.33%), cough (56.67%), and gastrointestinal distress (13.33%). Treatments used were antivirals (96.67%), oxygen therapy (61.67%), antibiotics (35%), and interferons (15%). And 78.33% of them had mild, 20% had severe, and 1.67% had critical Covid-19. Even mild and not-so-old cases of Covid-19 may suffer compromised brain functions that are long-lasting. Three months later, over half (55%) of these patients still had neurological symptoms. Only the frequency of mood alterations and fatigue decreased significantly (blue asterisks) from 41.67% to 16.67% and 26.67% to 6.67%, respectively. Other neurological symptoms (see figure; such as headache, impaired mobility, numbness, myalgia, memory loss, etc.) persisted for over three months. And the fact that 78.33% of these patients initially had mild Covid-19 is also concerning as it means that persistent neurological symptoms can affect mild Covid-19 cases as well. Blue asterisks (p <0.05) indicate statistically significant changes that are due to chance. No blue asterisks (p > 0.05) mean changes are not statistically significant. Source: Lu et al. (2020). Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients — An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study. The Lancet. Persistent Brain Structural Changes Next, the researchers used two brain imaging techniques: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that captures cortical brain areas as a whole and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) that detects microstructural brain changes. Results revealed that at three-month follow-up: Covid-19 patients had higher overall brain diffusivity and white matter volume — which further correlated negatively with memory loss — than non-Covid-19 controls. Covid-19 patients had greater grey matter volume (GMV) in the right cingulate, left Rolandic operculum, left Heschl’s gyrus, hippocampus, and olfactory cortices — which further correlated negatively with memory and smell loss, fatigue, and numbness — compared to non-Covid-19 controls. Among the structural brain changes, only cingulate gyrus correlated positively with Covid-19 severity during hospitalization. The cingulate gyrus is involved in attention, motivation, decision making, and learning. Put it another way; it also indicates that even mild Covid-19 cases may face persistent brain structural changes. Notably, all brain regions are examined except the brainstem due to technical limitations, which is unfortunate given that the brain’s cardiorespiratory centre resides in the brainstem. Other study limitations, the authors admitted, were the small sample size and participants recruitment from one hospital only. On the other side, the human brain displays a remarkable capacity to self-renew with time, such as following stroke or traumatic brain injury. Notwithstanding these caveats, this study showed that recovered Covid-19 patients had increased brain diffusivity and enlarged white and grey matter at three-month follow-up. These indicate the brain is undergoing heightened metabolic activities. Why? The academics posited that these are ‘functional compensations’ where the brain is trying to repair itself from the insults Covid-19 inflicted. “In this prospective study, volumetric and micro-structural abnormalities were detected mainly in the central olfactory cortices, partial white matter in the right hemisphere from recovered Covid-19 patients, providing new evidence to the neurological damage of SARS-CoV-2,” the study authors concluded. “The abnormalities in these brain areas might cause long-term burden to Covid-19 patients after recovery, which was thus worth public attention.” Can the Brain Self-renew? To sum up, this August study in The Lancet showed, for the first time, persistent neurological symptoms and structural brain alterations in Covid-19 cases. Also, note that the majority of participants in this study were middle-aged (mean age of 44) and had mild Covid-19. It seems terrible news; even mild and not-so-old cases of Covid-19 may suffer long-lasting poor brain functions. On the other side, the human brain displays a remarkable capacity to self-renew with time, such as following stroke or traumatic brain injury. “Although the central nervous system (CNS) has been considered for years as a “perennial” tissue,” explained neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge. “It has recently become clear that both physiological and reparative regeneration occur also within the CNS to sustain tissue homeostasis and repair.” Brain renewal is driven by neural stem cells in the hippocampus and subventricular zone that remain active for life, which catalyzes neurogenesis and neural outgrowth to other brain areas. Even the August study proposed ‘functional compensation’ at play in the brains of the recovered Covid-19 patients. Brain scans revealed increased metabolic activities and enlarged structures in those patients. Plus, those Covid-19 patients also showed less neurological symptoms at three-month follow-up. Perhaps, more time is simply needed for Covid-19 brain complications to pass.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/first-data-that-brain-changes-and-neurological-signs-persist-in-covid-19-4e204554c85b

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-08-14 14:43:05.546000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Technology', 'Future', 'Psychology']

When Nostalgia Backfires

When Nostalgia Backfires Does reminiscing help us or hold us back? Photo: Constance Bannister Corp/Getty Images The sight of her husband baking bread has become all too familiar over the past six months to Sophia Yen, a California-based MD. He’ll spend hours in the kitchen doing what has now become a family event, as their youngest daughter loves to join to pat and push the dough together. Meanwhile, the couple has taken a renewed interest in music they listened to when they were high school sweethearts, circa the mid-’80s. “Depeche Mode, Take on Me by a-ha, and Michael Jackson! We also just recently watched live readings of The Princess Bride and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It’s so stressful right now and these activities [give us some relief],” says Yen, who is the co-founder of a birth control delivery startup called Pandia Health. They harken back to the “good ol’ days,” she says. Yen and her family aren’t the only ones looking to the past for comfort right now. A study from KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, found a significant increase in nostalgic consumption of music on Spotify during shutdowns. Another study, from the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K., categorized the feeling of nostalgia as one of the wellness benefits of viewing nature via a webcam during a shutdown. A June 2020 paper from Clemson University strongly recommended people adopt nostalgia as a coping mechanism amidst the shutdown. The Clemson study went on to offer an array of nostalgia-based tips (or “paths”) to battle the corona blues, such as replaying famous sporting events, classic films, and notable concerts from the past; playing traditional board games with friends and family; or baking bread and making fresh pasta together. “[Nostalgia is] a reflection of a fairly stable, fairly knowable, and usually positive past, and that for a lot of people can help calm anxieties during the pandemic.” The modern definition of nostalgia is “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” “Nostalgia has a palliative impact,” says Gregory Ramshaw, PhD, associate professor at Clemson and co-author of the June paper. “It’s a reflection of a fairly stable, fairly knowable, and usually positive past, and that for a lot of people can help calm anxieties during the pandemic, when we are kind of looking at a fairly bleak future economically and socially.” Even long before the pandemic, science had already labeled nostalgia “a deeply social emotion,” something perhaps best experienced alongside others. “Many of the family nostalgic paths, for example watching old films together, or collective nostalgic paths, like seeing the Queen come out to carry out her duties in Great Britain, encourage getting together — ‘nostalgizing’ together,” says Ramshaw. But the original meaning of nostalgia may be a bit less warm and fuzzy: The word comes from Greek words “nostos,” meaning return to one’s homeland, and “algos,” meaning pain. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was actually considered a psychopathological disorder, with its sufferers being sent to the countryside to “heal.” In modern times, too, dwelling on the past can hurt. In her practice, Noel Hunter, PsyD, clinical psychologist and author of Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services, has observed that the majority of people struggling with the ongoing shutdown are people who are clinging to the past, wishing things would go back to normal and weren’t what they are. They try to cheer themselves up by remembering happier times of the past, which, Hunter says, can backfire. “Reminiscing turns to ruminating and generally just creates more misery as they blame themselves for setbacks and are not able to accept limitations. In doing so, they become angry, anxious, and depressed, with their brains literally fighting the present reality by trying to wish away what is,” she says. The antidote, Hunter says, is staying present: letting go of what we can’t change and finding ways to bring joy, pleasure, meaning, and purpose to the here and now. This, of course, is the idea behind mindfulness, the act of being focused on the present moment. “Buddhists have been telling us for millennia that focusing on the past or future too much can bring about great suffering,” says Hunter. But why are people like the ones Hunter is seeing in her practice experiencing negative effects that seem so counter to the body of research about nostalgia’s benefits? It may be that they’re not approaching the reminiscing with the right mindset. “An important component of nostalgia is that it doesn’t just encourage individuals to reflect and remember a particular event, but that it also reminds them how they felt at the time, so tapping into how they felt when younger helps to remind them how to perceive the future more positively,” says Sean Gammon, PhD, reader at the University of Central Lancashire and co-author of the June nostalgia study. Finding great pleasure in reminiscing and remembering fond times, but in balance, is not something Hunter is opposed to. “There is a reason why we keep pictures, videos, and mementos of past joys, and nostalgia in balance can be fruitful,” she says. The majority of people struggling with the ongoing shutdown are people who are clinging to the past, wishing things would go back to normal and weren’t what they are. And remember, Hunter suggests, that we’re creating memories now. “Ramshaw and Gammon’s paper says we should consider whether we are now creating our own future nostalgia,” she points out. That means we could eventually be grateful that we stayed present as best we could, and appreciated the best of what we have now, she says. “Humans have lived for tens of thousands of years through much, much worse, and have survived,” Hunter says. Back in California, Yen is juggling family life and career at home — it’s stressful, she says, but her company is doing well. The shutdown has strained her, nonetheless. “I may need to pitch an investor and all of a sudden my Zoom volume goes down or my video’s not working, professionally embarrassing me and endangering my ability to get money for my company. And then a child may be screaming in the background,” she says. Yet she isn’t overly wistful about pre-pandemic times, either: “I definitely wouldn’t want us to return to the time when we had to pull an all nighter every single week at MIT with my husband; we do not want to do that! If anything, we want to go forward,” she says. Still, experiencing nostalgia together with her family has proved to be a coping mechanism. They haven’t turned back the clock; they have just flushed bleakness out of their life by selectively picking out the memories they associate with happiness. Her husband will continue baking bread, and the whole family will go on enjoying her favorite childhood movies. “There is no black and white. Just gray,” Yen says while listening to a Cyndi Lauper song. “I think I’ll be nostalgic forever.”

https://elemental.medium.com/when-nostalgia-backfires-30b9e738d1a6

['Stav Dimitropoulos']

2020-12-23 06:32:58.262000+00:00

['Nostalgia', 'Health', 'Mental Health', 'Life', 'Psychology']

3 Simple ways to time Python code. Benchmark your Python code and figure…

Use cProfile with snakeviz Here is a great combo for a more detailed analysis. I recommend using this for complex code, as it’s great for finding potential performance bottlenecks. cProfile is a built-in C extension that gives you a set of statistics that describe how often and for how long various parts of the program are executed. This set of statistics is called a profile. snakeviz is a third-party Python library used to visualize these statistics in the browser and interpret them in a more user-friendly fashion. If you want precise timing of specific pieces of code, I would still recommend timeit, but for finding potential bottlenecks, this is the best option in my opinion. According to the docs: “The profiler modules are designed to provide an execution profile for a given program, not for benchmarking purposes (for that, there is timeit for reasonably accurate results). This particularly applies to benchmarking Python code against C code: the profilers introduce overhead for Python code, but not for C-level functions, and so the C code would seem faster than any Python one.” Note: You need to install snakeviz first! Run this script. cProfile will dump results to a file named results.prof : Use snakeviz to view the results in the browser by running this command: snakeviz results.prof Function call stack (starting from top) Statistics (see https://jiffyclub.github.io/snakeviz/#interpreting-results for more info) Just from the first image, we can easily see that the bottleneck() function takes the longest to execute, so it could indicate a potential performance bottleneck. And you can also see the underlying sleep() function that causes it to run for so long. We also get some additional statistics like the number of calls for each function in the call stack, which might be useful in detecting redundant calls that can also impact performance. Find out more about how to interpret results on GitHub.

https://medium.com/better-programming/top-3-ways-to-time-python-code-d46b37d418e0

['Stefan Delic']

2020-08-04 16:48:15.263000+00:00

['Python', 'Coding', 'Startup', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming']

Mapping Coronavirus with Python

Introduction The coronavirus, called Covid-19 by the WHO, is continuing to spread around the world. As of April 28, 2020, COVID-19 has infected more than 3.13 million people and killed at least 217,000 people worldwide. In this tutorial, we will learn how to map the virus spread using python libraries (Folium, Geopandas, Pandas, Numpy, hvplot, Matplotlib, kepler.gl) that can be helpful for data wrangling, and mapping COVID-19 data. Data Source There are a lot of COVID-19 datasets available such as Worldometer, Our World in Data (cumulative), and some other COVID-19 datasets from Google, Johns Hopkins University, European Union Open Data Portal. Worldometer provides up-to-date COVID-19 data[1]. Worldometer updates the total number of coronavirus COVID-19 cases on a daily basis. Our World in Data [2] provides a collection of the COVID-19 data together with a complete overview of data sources and more at this GitHub repository here. Let’s start web scraping COVID-19 data using python. Web Scraping Web scraping is all about the process of gathering information from HTML. There are some useful python libraries for extracting data from websites as below: #import libraries import os, sys import json import pandas as pd import geopandas as gpd import numpy as np from numpy import int64 import requests, io import urllib.request import folium from folium import plugins import fiona import branca from branca.colormap import linear from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import matplotlib.pyplot as plt Let’s define the URL and get the data. response = requests.get(url) url = ‘ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries' response = requests.get(url) Let’s check what we’ve got. data = response.content.decode(‘utf-8’) Website Scraping In order to clean the above messy data, we have to parse the content we get from the request. So, now we can define our HTML table parser object. I found there are some table parser functions available to get HTML table data. There is one table parser function I prefer to use as below: class HTMLTableParser: def parse_url(self, url): response = requests.get(url) soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, ‘lxml’) return [(table[‘id’],self.parse_html_table(table))\ for table in soup.find_all(‘table’)] def parse_html_table(self, table): n_columns = 0 n_rows=0 column_names = [] # Find number of rows and columns # we also find the column titles if we can for row in table.find_all(‘tr’): # Determine the number of rows in the table td_tags = row.find_all(‘td’) if len(td_tags) > 0: n_rows+=1 if n_columns == 0: # Set the number of columns for our table n_columns = len(td_tags) # Handle column names if we find them th_tags = row.find_all(‘th’) if len(th_tags) > 0 and len(column_names) == 0: for th in th_tags: column_names.append(th.get_text()) # Safeguard on Column Titles if len(column_names) > 0 and len(column_names) != n_columns: raise Exception(“Column titles do not match the number of columns”) columns = column_names if len(column_names) > 0 else range(0,n_columns) df = pd.DataFrame(columns = columns, index= range(0,n_rows)) row_marker = 0 for row in table.find_all(‘tr’): column_marker = 0 columns = row.find_all(‘td’) for column in columns: df.iat[row_marker,column_marker] = column.get_text() column_marker += 1 if len(columns) > 0: row_marker += 1 # Convert to float if possible for col in df: try: df[col] = df[col].astype(float) except ValueError: pass return df Now let’s try the above code to create a new data frame from the HTML table data. hp = HTMLTableParser() table = hp.parse_url(url)[0][1] # Grabbing the table from the tuple table.head(10) If we run the above code, we can get the result as below: We can see a few special characters (“ ”, “+”) to remove in the table. Let’s check the dataframe. #check bottom rows table.tail(10) There are some extra special characters ( .. ) in the dataframe. We need to remove the extra characters. We only need country data for mapping in this tutorial. So we can drop the extra top and bottom rows that we do not need for data processing. #Drop top buttom unwanted rows df= table.drop(table.index[[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7]]).reset_index(drop=True) #drop tail unwanted rows df.drop(df.tail(8).index,inplace=True) #drop new line ' ' charachter df.replace([' '], '', regex=True, inplace=True) df.replace([','], '', regex=True, inplace=True) We need to format the table before starting mapping. The special characters in the dataframe can be removed using a loop as below: # drop unwanted drop unwanted special characters using a loop for col in df.columns[1:11]: df[col]=df[col].str.replace(“+”, “”).str.replace(“,”, “”).str.replace(“N/A”, “”).str.replace(“ “, “”).str.replace(“ “, “”) All the extracted data is in text format and some column names are improper for data processing. We need to rename some column names. df1 = df.rename(columns={'Country,Other': 'CNTRY_NAME', 'Serious,Critical': 'Serious_Critical', 'Tot Cases/1M pop': 'Tot_Cases_1M_pop', 'Deaths/1M pop': 'Deaths_1M_pop', 'Tests/ 1M pop ': 'Tests_1M_pop'}) The final result is as below: Worldometer Coronavirus Table However, it is still not enough for data processing. We need to check the data type of each data frame column. Data Types The data type of each column is object in the dataframe. So we need to convert some data types to appropriate data types in the data frame. Type conversion is the conversion of object from one data type to another data type. #convert object columns in dataframe to numeric df1.fillna(0, inplace=True) df1.replace(np.nan, 0, inplace=True) df1.replace(np.inf, 0, inplace=True) for col in df1.columns[1:11]: df1[col] = pd.to_numeric(df1[col], errors=’ignore’) Let’s check it again: We can see that most of the data types converted to numeric, but some of them are float due to some empty column values. So let’s try again to convert them to integer data types. We can keep the float data type in the dataframe if it is in the correct data format. #convert float columns in data frame to integer df1.fillna(0, inplace=True) df1.replace(np.nan, 0, inplace=True) df1.replace(np.inf, 0, inplace=True) for col in df1.columns[1:11]: df1[col]=df1[col].apply(int) It can be seen that web scraping is hard. We need to identify incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate, or irrelevant parts of the data and then replace, modify, or remove coarse data in the data frame. df1.sort_values(by=[‘TotalCases’], inplace=True, ascending=False) df1.head(10) Cleaned Worldometer Table It seems the data is clean and nicely formatted. Now let’s start mapping. Mapping Mapping is creating graphic representations of information using spatial relationships within the graphic to represent some relationships within the data. It can be static or dynamic (includes animated and real-time web maps or interactive web maps). We need geospatial country data for mapping. The country dataset is freely available on ArcGIS Open Data Hub. url = " world = gpd.read_file(url) world.plot() # get country dataurl = " https://opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/a21fdb46d23e4ef896f31475217cbb08_1.geojson world = gpd.read_file(url)world.plot() Countries WGS84 (ArcGIS Hub) There is another option of downloading country shapefile data as below: Downloading Zipped Shapefile So far, we have prepared COVID-19 and country datasets for mapping. GeoPandas is an open-source project to make working with geospatial data in python easier. GeoPandas extends the datatypes used by pandas to allow spatial operations on geometric types. There are two ways to combine datasets in geopandas — attribute joins and spatial joins. In an attribute join, merging is based on a common variable. Let’s check the country data. It has country names (CNTRY_NAME) and geometry for mapping. So there is a common column name in both data frames. However, CNTRY_NAME of the USA and UK are different (“United States”,” United Kingdom” )in the world data frame. So let’s rename them before merging both data frames. world.CNTRY_NAME = world.CNTRY_NAME.replace({"United States": "USA"},{"United Kingdom": "UK"}) Let’s merge two datasets based on the common column “CNTRY_NAME”. Let’s check the data types of columns. corona = world.merge(df1, on='CNTRY_NAME', how='left') corona.dtypes The data type of some columns are not in the correct format. corona.fillna(0, inplace=True) corona.replace(np.nan, 0, inplace=True) corona.replace(np.inf, 0, inplace=True) for col in corona.columns[3:10]: corona[col]=corona[col].astype(int) corona.dtypes Let’s create a new geopandas data frame by merging these two datasets. df_world = pd.merge(df1, world, on=’CNTRY_NAME’) crs = {‘init’: ‘epsg:4326’} corona_gpd = gpd.GeoDataFrame(df_world, crs=crs, geometry=’geometry’) corona_gpd.head(5) Plotting Data Geopandas provides a high-level interface to the matplotlib library for making static maps. Mapping shapes is as easy as using the plot() method on a GeoSeries or GeoDataFrame. f, ax = plt.subplots(1,1,figsize=(12,8)) ax = corona_gpd.plot(column=’TotalCases’, cmap=’rainbow’, ax=ax, legend=True, legend_kwds={‘label’: “Total Cases by Country” }) ax = corona_gpd.plot(figsize=(15, 15), column=’TotalDeaths’, cmap=plt.cm.jet, scheme=’fisher_jenks’, k=9, alpha=1, legend=True, markersize = 0.5 ) plt.title(‘Coronavirus Total Death by Country’) We’ll now start converting above static maps to interactive maps using hvplot . import hvplot.pandas corona_gpd.hvplot(c=”TotalDeaths”, cmap=’rainbow’, width=800,height=450, title=”TotalDeaths by Country”) Interactive Plotting Let’s try to plot COVID-19 time-series data from Our World in Data. covid= pd.read_csv(' covid1 = covid.rename(columns={'location': 'COUNTRY'}) covid_gdp = pd.merge(world, covid1) crs = {'init': 'epsg:4326'} covid_gdp = gpd.GeoDataFrame(covid_gdp, crs=crs, geometry='geometry') covid_gdp.hvplot( c="total_deaths", cmap="YlOrRd", hover_cols=['COUNTRY', 'total_deaths'], hover_fill_color="grey", line_width=2, width=800, height=450, groupby='date', title="Covid-19 Total Deaths by Country/Date") # plotting time series datacovid= pd.read_csv(' https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv' , delimiter= ",")covid1 = covid.rename(columns={'location': 'COUNTRY'})covid_gdp = pd.merge(world, covid1)crs = {'init': 'epsg:4326'}covid_gdp = gpd.GeoDataFrame(covid_gdp, crs=crs, geometry='geometry')covid_gdp.hvplot( c="total_deaths",cmap="YlOrRd",hover_cols=['COUNTRY', 'total_deaths'],hover_fill_color="grey",line_width=2,width=800,height=450,groupby='date',title="Covid-19 Total Deaths by Country/Date") Covid-19 Timeseries Data Interactive Mapping It is very straightforward to add geometries (points, polygons, lines) from a GeoDataFrame to a map. This can be done using the additional python library Folium. It makes it easy to visualize data that’s been manipulated in Python on an interactive leaflet map. It enables both the binding of data to a map for choropleth visualizations as well as passing rich vector/raster/HTML visualizations as markers on the map. The library has a number of built-in tilesets from OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, and Stamen, and supports custom tilesets with Mapbox or Cloudmade API keys. Even Esri base maps can be added. Folium supports both Image, Video, GeoJSON, and TopoJSON overlays. For example: import folium #OSM Map m = folium.Map(location=[43.6532, -79.3832])#Toronto m OSM Map Esri basemaps can also be added as below: zoom_start=12, tiles=’ attr=’Ablajan or anything else...’) folium.Map(location=[43.6532, -79.3832],zoom_start=12,tiles=’ https://services.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/WMTS/tile/1.0.0/World_Topo_Map/default/default028mm/{z}/{y}/{x}.png' attr=’Ablajan or anything else...’) Let’s add COVID-19 data to the above map. #load gdf to map gjson = corona_gpd.to_crs(epsg=’4326').to_json() #embed map def embed_map(m): from IPython.display import IFrame m.save(‘index.html’) return IFrame(‘index.html’, width=’100%’, height=’750px’) map = folium.Map([43.783333, -79.866667], zoom_start=2) country = folium.features.GeoJson(gjson) map.add_child(country) embed_map(map) Let’s try to add a choropleth map with tooltips. def embed_map(m): from IPython.display import IFrame m.save('index.html') return IFrame('index.html', width='100%', height='500px') #add basemap map = folium.Map([0, 0], zoom_start=2, tiles=' attr='Esri ..., Ablajan or anything else...') # add iframe in notebookdef embed_map(m):from IPython.display import IFramem.save('index.html')return IFrame('index.html', width='100%', height='500px')#add basemapmap = folium.Map([0, 0], zoom_start=2, tiles=' https://services.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/WMTS/tile/1.0.0/World_Topo_Map/default/default028mm/{z}/{y}/{x}.png' attr='Esri ..., Ablajan or anything else...') gjson = corona_gpd.to_crs(epsg='4326').to_json() df3 = df2.set_index('CNTRY_NAME')['TotalDeaths'].dropna() colorscale = branca.colormap.linear.YlOrRd_09.scale(df2.TotalDeaths.min(), df2.TotalDeaths.max()) def style_function(feature): TotalDeaths = df3.get(int(feature['id'][-1:]), None) return { 'fillOpacity': 1, 'weight': 1, 'fillColor': '#black' if TotalDeaths is None else colorscale(TotalCases) } colorscale.add_to(map) colorscale.caption = 'Total Deaths by Country' country = folium.features.GeoJson(gjson, tooltip=folium.features.GeoJsonTooltip(fields=['TotalDeaths']), style_function=style_function) map.add_child(country) folium.LayerControl().add_to(map) # save map as html results =”C:\\Users\\Desktop\\map\\” map.save(os.path.join(results, ‘Total_Deaths_by_Country.html’)) embed_map(map) When we run the above code, the output will be: COVID-19 Total Deaths by Country The interactive map can be served as an HTML leaflet map on any website. It can be accessed here. Please note that there are some countries without data on the map. It indicates that some countries and the COVID-19 dataset were not merged correctly due to naming discrepancies between country data and COVID19 data. It seems the dataframe needs more cleaning. As COVID-19 datasets [3] become more accessible, we can use free open datasets in a clean format instead of web scraping and data cleaning. The above python scripts can be tested with Our World in Data (cumulative data), and some other available COVID-19 datasets. For example: # filter certain country covid_ca =covid[covid.location =='Canada'].sort_values(['total_cases'],ascending=False) covid_ca.head(10) covid= pd.read_csv(‘ https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv' # filter certain countrycovid_ca =covid[covid.location =='Canada'].sort_values(['total_cases'],ascending=False)covid_ca.head(10) COVID-19 in Canada The dataframe above (Our World in Data) includes the number of cumulative cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) worldwide for mapping. Interactive maps can be created easily by using a powerful open source geospatial visualization tool kepler.gl. For example: # keep wanted columns only covid_gdp=covid_gdp[[‘COUNTRY’, ‘TotalCases’, ‘TotalDeaths’,’NewDeaths’, ‘TotalRecovered’, ‘ActiveCases’,’Serious_Critical’, ‘geometry’ ]] import keplergl corona = keplergl.KeplerGl(height=500) corona.add_data(data=covid_gdp, name='Covid_19') corona.save_to_html(file_name='.\covid19_map.html') corona kepler.gl Interactive Map The above map can be accessed here. kepler.gl is capable of processing large scale geospatial data to create beautiful visualizations. It can handle a variety of maps, such as points, networks, choropleth, cluster map, heat map, time series maps and can be configured easily. Now that we have some ideas for mapping using COVID-19 data. It’s time to put this into practice. In this tutorial, we learned web scraping, data wrangling, plotting, and creating choropleth interactive maps by using python libraries Matplotlib, Geopandas, Pandas, Numpy, Folium, hvplot and kepler.gl . Web scraping and data cleaning rules (scripts) depend on your project. As we can see, different types of data will require different types of cleaning. Obviously, no matter how much we scrub the data, it will never be perfectly clean. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Please don’t hesitate to write comments and questions. References:

https://toarches.medium.com/mapping-coronavirus-b89880ecd400

['Ablajan Sulaiman']

2020-06-20 16:31:04.889000+00:00

['Python', 'Mapping', 'Folium', 'Coronavirus', 'Web Scraping']

A Huge List of Free Photos and Illustrations for Developers in 2021

A Huge List of Free Photos and Illustrations for Developers in 2021 Get free photos and free illustrations for your development projects, Medium articles, and more Image source: Adobe Stock You’re a developer with great ideas that you know how to turn into a reality, but you lack design skills. A good illustration or a representative image can illustrate the entire purpose of the product or service without a lengthy description no one wants to read. Thank god things have changed in the last decade or two. You don’t need to study design; you don’t need to hire a designer. You can find great free illustrations and photos on the internet. Here’s a list of my resources: free photos and free illustrations. The first few will be my favorite ones. I listed the following without any order.

https://medium.com/better-programming/a-huge-list-of-free-photos-and-illustrations-for-developers-in-2021-f63dc20e878c

['Jana Bergant']

2020-12-03 13:19:56.991000+00:00

['Programming', 'Design', 'Writing', 'Startup', 'UX']

Why Did I Quit Vue for React?

But, I Gave React a Try (Again) I didn’t tell you that before learning Vue that I tried React, but it was too brutal at first glance. My knowledge about how state management works and knowing more about ES6 language specifications has changed. I saw plenty of articles even people around me are talking about React, so I give it a try. And it worked. Enough to adopt the framework in my projects. Here is my point of view of the React's best benefits. 1. ES6 and TypeScript friendly Developers master classes, interfaces, and enumerations. This was why I was able to understand how React components work and integrate into an application. You can use ES6 syntax as well with Vue, but React is more well-designed than Vue. Look at how you have to do to register components in React: For VueJS, you pass an object to the Vue Component function: Therefore, modern React (in 2020) doesn’t involve class anymore, but instead functional component (and hooks). VueJs now offers TypeScript support. This support is not well polished like React using CRA (Create React App) with TS support in a single command. For Vue, we still need some third-party packages with custom decorators and features to create a true, complete TypeScript application, and the official documentation does not include all the information you need to get started. 2. JSX JSX is not evil. There are two schools: the pro-JSX, and the anti-JSX. I don’t like to take part in that conflict. JSX can be good or bad; it depends on how you want to work with your template. From my point of view, it is more logical for a developer to write JSX like: than the more HTML-ish way of Vue: It’s a matter of preference; I find JSX more powerful and flexible. 3. Getting hook by hooks I started learning and developing with the React component. The problem is that to create a single component as a React component class, it takes a lot of effort. Functional components let you use local states with hooks. It removes a lot of boilerplate and useless constructors. React Hooks simplify the use of state and other React parts like useEffect instead of componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate . Some developers like the OOP approach by staying with classes, others the functional approach. You can use both in a project! 🤙 4. Community Behind great projects are great humans. By experience, there is much more documentation, third-party tools, and modules for React than Vue. I sometimes struggled by looking for Nuxt issues and found lots of Next (React) topics. By looking at Github repos, the numbers speak for themselves. Or with their respective frameworks: Community leverage the reliability of your code by solving bug fixes quicker. Finding people with the same problem as you makes your resolution fast.

https://medium.com/better-programming/why-did-i-quit-vue-for-react-65315285fd90

['Alexandre Lion']

2020-06-04 11:41:37.340000+00:00

['React', 'Typescript', 'Front End Development', 'Vuejs', 'Programming']

INDUSTRIAL BUILDING DESIGN

What is industrial building design? To develop a built environment based on an undefined building typology. The structure functions on the business programming of the managing engineers. The area brief depends on the maximum and minimum space requirements per function unit. Industry: Industry, a group of productive enterprises or organizations that produce or supply goods, services, or sources of income. In economics, industries are customarily classified as primary, secondary, and tertiary; secondary industries are further classified as heavy and light. Secondary Industry This sector, also called manufacturing industry, (1) takes the raw materials supplied by primary industries and processes them into consumer goods, or (2) further processes goods that other secondary industries have transformed into products, or (3) builds capital goods used to manufacture consumer and non consumer goods. Secondary industry also includes energy-producing industries (e.g., hydroelectric industries) as well as the construction industry. Secondary industry may be divided into heavy, or large-scale, and light, or small-scale, industry. Large-scale industry generally requires heavy capital investment in plants and machinery, serves a large and diverse market including other manufacturing industries, has a complex industrial organization and frequently a skilled specialized labour force, and generates a large volume of output. Examples would include petroleum refining, steel and iron manufacturing, motor vehicle and heavy machinery manufacture, cement production, nonferrous metal refining, meat-packing, and hydroelectric power generation. Light, or small-scale, industry may be characterized by the no durability of manufactured products and a smaller capital investment in plants and equipment, and it may involve nonstandard products, such as customized or craft work. The labor force may be either low skilled, as in textile work and clothing manufacture, food processing, and plastics manufacture, or highly skilled, as in electronics and computer hardware manufacture, precision instrument manufacture, gemstone cutting, and craft work. Industrial Building Archetype Designed to house industrial operations and provide the necessary conditions for workers and the operation of industrial equipment. The modern revolution in science and technology, with its constant progress in the construction of industrial buildings andimproved construction technology, has resulted in an increase in the number of enterprises that do not pollute theenvironment. As a result, a new type of urban development, known as the industrial-residential area, has emerged. Contrasting in scale, appearance, and silhouette with standarddesign housing, industrial buildings become importantarchitectural highlights in urban development. Aesthetically, the quality of industrial buildings can be improved by distinctive interior design, sensible proportioninganddivision of enclosed areas, and harmonious choice of structural elements. Industrial buildings have an enormousand often negativeimpact on natural and architectural landscapes; and industrialregions often become alienated from the natural environment. One task of industrial architecture is thus maximumpreservation of the natural landscape and harmonious introduction of new industrial buildings into the landscape. The integration of industrial buildings is one of the most efficient means of reducing the estimated costs of constructing them. In largescale construction, most multistory industrial buildings have three to six floors and ceiling loads of 5to10 kN/m2.When land area is limited, industrial buildings may have ten or more stories. Modern multistory buildings usually have column networks of 6 m × 6 m, 9 m × 6 m, or 12 m × 6 m, and there is a tendency to use even more extended networks. The total width of multistory industrial buildings is usually 36–48 m. In multistory buildings designed for processes with strict requirements for air purity and temperature and humidity stability, technical floors are constructed for engineering equipment and supply lines; the supply lines may be located within the trusses of intermediate floors. There is a tendency tomakegreater use of multistory industrial buildings in industrial construction because of the need to economize on urban sites and lands suitable for agricultural use. wide spread standardization of design may serve as the basis for a transition to total prefabricated construction of industrial buildings from structures and elements manufactured in factory construction combines. Modern construction is characterized by a tendency to minimize the weight of structural members in order to reduce consumption of materials and the cost of construction and installation. In line with this, the reinforced concrete structural members used in industrial buildings are being improved through the use of high-strength concrete and concrete with light-weight aggregates. Metal structures are being improved through the use of high strength steel and aluminum alloys and thin walled rolled and bent sections. Improvement of metal structures is also related to the introduction of prestressed metal structures and the construction of light-weight industrial building systems that make use of thin sheet covered surfaces. SITE CONTEXT Bahadurgarh is a developing town near the outskirts of the capital city, Delhi. The town is rich with agricultural activities. There are several institutions present in its direct vicinity. Religious activities are followed in Hindu temples present in various corners of the town. MIE is an industrial hub joint with Delhi-Rohtak corridor. There is diverse variety of industrial work in this area To motivate the growth of institutional strength, if good job opportunities are provided along with aid to globalization; the town would boost up and all the agriculture activities and small to medium scale industries can be brought together to boon the growth of our nation. If a large scale industry is introduced which is energy efficient and produces low pollution; it can bring in people together in a healthy business relationship and can cast good income to existing culture and bring in outsiders which would lead to more development. Business Approach And Concept Client brief is tabulated on the basis of functions of the works to be delivered by the client with benefit of built environment to be provided by the architect. Purchaser brief is tabulated on the basis of all plausible outcomes of works that the client wants to deliver. Categories of zones are formulated on the basis of the proposed work environment and area requirements are derived. Area Statement CLIENT BRIEF PURCHASER BRIEF

https://medium.com/sunshineblessings/industrial-building-design-92b950e323ff

['Anushka Saxena']

2018-05-24 19:18:07.709000+00:00

['Architecture', 'Design', 'Industry', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Science']

Why I Write By Hand

This article has its genesis not in the digital domain, nor was it originally sprung forth by the tapping of keys, but its creation can be found on an old legal pad with a Pilot G-2 scratching the story into paper and giving it life. But why would someone want to write by hand when there are so many better options? Well there are some good reasons. I could tell you about the productivity aspects. Even though it takes longer initially, I find that over all I’m able to write more. I think this happens for several reasons. First, there are no distractions when writing by hand. Legal pads, at least the kind I use, do not have Youtube. This drastically cuts down on the amount of incursions to my concentration. The paper does not have breaking news nor does have notifications, but I must make a small confession, that doesn’t mean it’s entirely free of distractions. As I’m prone to doodling in the margins. Photo by author Photo by author Photo by author Photo by author As you can see, my attention sometimes waver. I will, from time to time, fill up the margins with doodles and drawings, but I like to defend by saying that it’s still helping release some creative energy and I’m doing it while writing and it doesn’t derail my writing day like an episode of The Witcher would. Additionally, the words often exist in one’s mind in a sea of chaotic energy. Often, when I sit down at the computer this doesn’t go away and it’s hard to just start typing. But, with a pencil or pen, the chaos goes away and my thoughts start draining out as if one pulled a plug. I this happens for a couple reasons. One, as I child we learn to write by hand, at least I did, there are probably kids that start typing right away now. So picking up a pen has that innate familiarity as that I was the first way I put down ideas. There’s also something to be said that writing by hand just seems to work better, this is established in the article, “5 Psychological Benefits Of Writing By Hand” by Josh Caryle. Working at the computer overloads our sensory system. The flickering of the screen, movement of the cursor, the temptation to the availability of any information in one click — all this dulls the ability to work. On the contrary, when there is only a sheet of paper and a pen in front of you, the brain does not receive additional stimulation and focuses its resources on a specific task. These are all good reasons to write by hand. But, I will make a confession, these are not the only reasons I write be hand. I think when you write by hand is when you feel the most like a writer. Give me a notebook and a pen, and suddenly I’m Ernest Hemingway writing a Parisian cafe. There’s no better feeling. It speaks to that little iota of pretension that every write has. Too often, writing is relegated to commercial tasks, and writing by hand can help it feel like the art that it is. When you type other than the click clack there isn’t the same feed back as an artist. Before I was a writer, I was an artist, and there was nothing better than watching a drawing or painting come to life. It’s the same when you write by hand. The ink flows and the letters appear and the page slowly fills until you can flip the page and after a few minutes there are pages and pages flipped over as the story grows. It’s magnificent. The tactile feedback. I have a particular affinity for cursive because it’s more fun to write watching lines morph into letters with just subtle shifts of direction is one of my favorite things to behold. If you haven’t done it. I encourage you to try it. Plus it just looks cooler.

https://medium.com/the-inkwell/why-i-write-by-hand-23e950bcd49c

['Matthew Donnellon']

2020-09-01 00:18:36.194000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Writing', 'Art']

32 Headline Tips Every Good Writer Needs to Know

17. Brainstorm at Least 5 Headlines It can be tempting to come up with one you think is incredible. But please, please never stop there. For any post, it’s ideal to write more than one headline. I like to write at least five — you’ll be surprised at how many creative, powerful headlines you’ll come up with when you get into the groove. Say you were writing about why social media is ruining your life, and that getting off it has been a great decision. Let’s use headline templates to brainstorm: Headline template: How To <Do Something> In <Short Time> Headline idea: How To Become Awfully Productive In 20 Minutes (Get Off Social) Headline template: It’s Time To <Do something people are usually reluctant to do> Headline idea: It’s Time To Delete My Facebook Account Headline template: <Number> Steps to Changing <Something significant> (It All Boils Down To This) Headline idea: 7 Steps To Changing Your Addiction To Facebook Notifications (It All Boils Down To This) Treat headlines like your first draft. Write uninhibited, never judging anything that flows from your fingers. Then, when you get stuck, write a few more. Use proven formulas. Play with power words. Think about what your reader wants, needs, feels, and believes.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/32-headline-tips-every-good-writer-needs-to-know-46852032676d

['Cynthia Marinakos']

2020-03-07 07:03:30.286000+00:00

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

Most Viruses Are Friendly and Beneficial to Us

Most Viruses Are Friendly and Beneficial to Us You have heard the bad, here’s the good Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash Most viruses have a pathogenic relationship with their hosts. They invade the host cell, take over its cellular machinery and release new viral particles that will spread out and infect more cells and cause illness. But they’re not all bad. Some viruses can actually kill bacteria, while others can fight against more dangerous viruses. So like protective bacteria (probiotics), we have several protective viruses in our body. Bacteriophages These types of viruses are found in the mucus membrane lining in the digestive, respiratory and reproductive tracts. Recent studies suggest that the phages present in the mucus are part of our natural immune system, protecting the human body from invading bacteria. Phages have been used to treat dysentery, sepsis caused by Staphylococcus aureus, salmonella infections and skin infections for nearly a century. Early sources of phages for therapy included local water bodies, dirt, air, sewage and even body fluids from infected patients. These days phages are genetically engineered. Individual strains of phages are tested against target bacteria, and the most effective strains are purified into a potent concentration. How phages were discovered Bacteriophages were discovered and named by Canadian-born doctor Felix d’Herelle while studying the feces of French soldiers suffering from dysentery in WWI. By filtering the stool samples, d’Herelle was able to isolate the bacteria Shigella that caused the illness. And, he noticed that in some places, the Shigella was being destroyed by none other than an additional virus. After testing the virus on himself, he used it to treat his patients. Despite this, the idea of injecting live viruses into patients made many doctors uncomfortable. By 1940, phages were superseded by antibiotics in the treatment of diseases. Today, phages have another important role in our world: as protectors of the water. Every liter of seawater is home to about 100,000,000,000 viruses. Add up all the liters of water in the ocean and that’s a whole lot of viruses! Luckily, marine phages make up part of this virus population. Phages destroy between 15 and 20% of nasty ocean bacteria each day, which prevents cholera and other harmful illnesses from spreading. Without phages, water-borne illnesses would wreak a lot more havoc. Endogenous retroviruses These viruses are generated within the bodies of animals, including humans. These viruses insert their genetic information into the DNA of the host. When the host’s cells divide, the DNA of the virus is also replicated, thus shaping our genes. One important endogenous retrovirus is HERV-W, discovered in 1999 by Jen-LucBlond among others. One of the genes of this virus produces syncytin, a protein essential for the bonding of cells in the outer layer of the placenta. In other words, without this retrovirus, we wouldn’t be able to carry children. In this way, we can thank viruses for the survival of our species! Latent (non-symptomatic) herpes viruses Help human natural killer cells identify cancer cells and cells infected by other pathogenic viruses. They arm the natural killer cells with antigens (a foreign substance that can cause an immune response in the body) that will enable them to identify tumour cells. This is both a survival tactic by the viruses to last longer within their host, and to get rid of competitive viruses to prevent them from damaging the host. In the future, modified versions of viruses like these could potentially be used to target cancer cells.

https://medium.com/predict/most-viruses-are-friendly-and-beneficial-to-us-31a723dccbea

[]

2020-12-27 19:27:14.261000+00:00

['Health', 'Fitness', 'Biotechnology', 'Life', 'Science']

Our Brains Struggle to Process This Much Stress

Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life It was the end of the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. That’s almost exactly what I told my psychiatrist at my March 16 appointment, a few days after our children’s school district extended spring break because of the coronavirus. I said the same at my April 27 appointment, several weeks after our state’s stay-at-home order. Yes, it was exhausting having a kindergartener and fourth grader doing impromptu distance learning while I was barely keeping up with work. And it was frustrating to be stuck home nonstop, scrambling to get in grocery delivery orders before slots filled up, and tracking down toilet paper. But I was still doing well because I thrive in high-stress emergency situations. It’s exhilarating for my ADHD brain. As just one example, when my husband and I were stranded in Peru during an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that killed thousands, we walked around with a first aid kit helping who we could and tracking down water and food. Then I went out with my camera to document the devastation as a photojournalist and interview Peruvians in my broken Spanish for my hometown paper. Now we were in a pandemic, and I’m a science journalist who has written about infectious disease and medical research for nearly a decade. I was on fire, cranking out stories, explaining epidemiological concepts in my social networks, trying to help everyone around me make sense of the frightening circumstances of a pandemic and the anxiety surrounding the virus. I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does. But even knowing I would eventually crash, I didn’t appreciate how hard the crash would be, or how long it would last, or how hard it would be to try to get back up over and over again, or what getting up even looked like. In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely. “The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic? By my May 26 psychiatrist appointment, I wasn’t doing so hot. I couldn’t get any work done. I’d grown sick of Zoom meetups. It was exhausting and impossible to think with the kids around all day. I felt trapped in a home that felt as much a prison as a haven. I tried to conjure the motivation to check email, outline a story, or review interview notes, but I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t make myself do anything — work, housework, exercise, play with the kids — for that whole week. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now? “Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.” It wasn’t until my social media post elicited similar responses from dozens of high-achieving, competent, impressive women I professionally admire that I realized I wasn’t in the minority. My experience was a universal and deeply human one. An unprecedented disaster While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty? “This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now. “I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster,” Masten says. “It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.” Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.” “How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the ‘new normal’ is indefinite uncertainty?” Understanding ambiguous loss It’s not surprising that, as a lifelong overachiever, I’ve felt particularly despondent and adrift as the months have dragged on, says Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota who specializes in “ambiguous loss.” “It’s harder for high achievers,” she says. “The more accustomed you are to solving problems, to getting things done, to having a routine, the harder it will be on you because none of that is possible right now. You get feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and those aren’t good.” That’s similar to how Michael Maddaus, MD, a professor of thoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, felt when he became addicted to prescription narcotics after undergoing several surgeries. Now recovered and a motivational speaker who promotes the idea of a “resilience bank account,” Maddaus had always been a fast-moving high achiever — until he couldn’t be. “I realized that my personal operating system, though it had led to tremendous success, had failed me on a more personal level,” he says. “I had to figure out a different way of contending with life.” That mindset is an especially American one, Boss says. “Our culture is very solution-oriented, which is a good way of thinking for many things,” she says. “It’s partly responsible for getting a man on the moon and a rover on Mars and all the things we’ve done in this country that are wonderful. But it’s a very destructive way of thinking when you’re faced with a problem that has no solution, at least for a while.” That means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction. “In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym. One of the toughest losses for me to adapt to is no longer doing my research and writing in coffee shops as I’ve done for most of my life, dating back to junior high. “These were all things we were attached to and fond of, and they’re gone right now, so the loss is ambiguous. It’s not a death, but it’s a major, major loss,” says Boss. “What we used to have has been taken away from us.” Just as painful are losses that may result from the intersection of the pandemic and the already tense political division in the country. For many people, issues related to Covid-19 have become the last straw in ending relationships, whether it’s a family member refusing to wear a mask, a friend promoting the latest conspiracy theory, or a co-worker insisting Covid-19 deaths are exaggerated. Ambiguous loss elicits the same experiences of grief as a more tangible loss — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but managing it often requires a bit of creativity. A winding, uncharted path to coping in a pandemic While there isn’t a handbook for functioning during a pandemic, Masten, Boss, and Maddaus offered some wisdom for meandering our way through this. Accept that life is different right now Maddaus’ approach involves radical acceptance. “It’s a shitty time, it’s hard,” he says. “You have to accept that in your bones and be okay with this as a tough day, with ‘that’s the way it is,’ and accept that as a baseline.” But that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, he says. It means not resisting or fighting reality so that you can apply your energy elsewhere. “It allows you to step into a more spacious mental space that allows you to do things that are constructive instead of being mired in a state of psychological self torment.” Expect less from yourself Most of us have heard for most of our lives to expect more from ourselves in some way or another. Now we must give ourselves permission to do the opposite. “We have to expect less of ourselves, and we have to replenish more,” Masten says. “I think we’re in a period of a lot of self discovery: Where do I get my energy? What kind of down time do I need? That’s all shifted right now, and it may take some reflection and self discovery to find out what rhythms of life do I need right now?” She says people are having to live their lives without the support of so many systems that have partly or fully broken down, whether it’s schools, hospitals, churches, family support, or other systems that we relied on. We need to recognize that we’re grieving multiple losses while managing the ongoing impact of trauma and uncertainty. The malaise so many of us feel, a sort of disinterested boredom, is common in research on burnout, Masten says. But other emotions accompany it: disappointment, anger, grief, sadness, exhaustion, stress, fear, anxiety — and no one can function at full capacity with all that going on. Recognize the different aspects of grief The familiar “stages” of grief don’t actually occur in linear stages, Boss says, but denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are all major concepts in facing loss. Plenty of people are in denial: denying the virus is real, or that the numbers of cases or deaths are as high as reported, or that masks really help reduce disease transmission. Anger is evident everywhere: anger at those in denial, anger in the race demonstrations, anger at those not physically distancing or wearing masks, and even anger at those who wear masks or require them. The bargaining, Boss says, is mostly with scientists we hope will develop a vaccine quickly. The depression is obvious, but acceptance… “I haven’t accepted any of this,” Boss says. “I don’t know about you.” Sometimes acceptance means “saying we’re going to have a good time in spite of this,” Boss says, such as when my family drove an hour outside the city to get far enough from light pollution to look for the comet NEOWISE. But it can also mean accepting that we cannot change the situation right now. “We can kick and scream and be angry, or we can feel the other side of it, with no motivation, difficulty focusing, lethargy,” Boss says, “or we can take the middle way and just have a couple days where you feel like doing nothing and you embrace the losses and sadness you’re feeling right now, and then the next day, do something that has an element of achievement to it.” “Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass.” Experiment with “both-and” thinking This approach may not work for everyone, but Boss says there’s an alternative to binary thinking that many people find helpful in dealing with ambiguous loss. She calls it “both-and” thinking, and sometimes it means embracing a bit of the irrational. For the families of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam that Boss studied early in her career, or the family members of victims of plane crashes where the bodies aren’t recovered, this type of thinking means thinking: “He is both living and maybe not. She is probably dead but maybe not.” “If you stay in the rational when nothing else is rational, like right now, then you’ll just stress yourself more,” she says. “What I say with ambiguous loss is the situation is crazy, not the person. The situation is pathological, not the person.” An analogous approach during the pandemic might be, “This is terrible and many people are dying, and this is also a time for our families to come closer together,” Boss says. On a more personal level, “I’m highly competent, and right now I’m flowing with the tide day-to-day.” It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s existence, but when you can’t change the situation, “the only thing you can change is your perception of it,” she says. Of course, that doesn’t mean denying the existence of the pandemic or the coronavirus. As Maddaus says, “You have to face reality.” But how we frame that reality mentally can help us cope with it. Look for activities, new and old, that continue to fulfill you Lots of coping advice has focused on “self-care,” but one of the frustrating ironies of the pandemic is that so many of our self-care activities have also been taken away: pedicures, massages, coffee with friends, a visit to the amusement park, a kickboxing class, swimming in the local pool — these activities remain unsafe in much of the country. So we have to get creative with self-care when we’re least motivated to get creative. “When we’re forced to rethink our options and broaden out what we think of as self-care, sometimes that constraint opens new ways of living and thinking,” Masten says. “We don’t have a lot of control over the global pandemic but we do over our daily lives. You can focus on plans for the future and what’s meaningful in life.” For me, since I missed eating in restaurants and was tired of our same old dinners, I began subscribing to a meal-kit service. I hate cooking, but the meal kits were easy, and I was motivated by the chance to eat something that tasted more like what I’d order in a restaurant without having to invest energy in looking through recipes or ordering the right ingredients. Okay, I’ve also been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, but Maddaus explains why it makes sense that creative activities like cooking, gardening, painting, house projects — or even building your own imaginary island out of pixels — can be fulfilling right now. He references the book The Molecule of More, which explores how dopamine influences our experiences and happiness, in describing the types of activities most likely to bring us joy. “There are two ways the brain deals with the world: the future and things we need to go after, and the here and now, seeing things and touching things,” Maddaus says. “Rather than being at the mercy of what’s going on, we can use the elements of our natural reward system and construct things to do that are good no matter what.” Those kinds of activities have a planning element and a here-and-now experience element. For Maddaus, for example, it was simply replacing all the showerheads and lightbulbs in the house. “It’s a silly thing, but it made me feel good,” he says. Focus on maintaining and strengthening important relationships The biggest protective factors for facing adversity and building resilience are social support and remaining connected to people, Masten says. That includes helping others, even when we’re feeling depleted ourselves. “Helping others is one of those win-win strategies of taking action because we’re all feeling a sense of helplessness and loss of control about what’s going on with this pandemic, but when you take action with other people, you can control what you’re doing,” she says. Helping others could include checking in on family friends or buying groceries for an elderly neighbor. Begin slowly building your resilience bank account Maddaus’ idea of a resilience bank account is gradually building into your life regular practices that promote resilience and provide a fallback when life gets tough. Though it would obviously be nice to have a fat account already, he says it’s never too late to start. The areas he specifically advocates focusing on are sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, connection, and saying no. “Start really small and work your way up,” he says. “If you do a little bit every day, it starts to add up and you get momentum, and even if you miss a day, then start again. We have to be gentle with ourselves and keep on, begin again.”

https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c

['Tara Haelle']

2020-09-10 14:52:42.417000+00:00

['Health', 'Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Anxiety']

Chore-Focused Wellness Practices Arrived Just in Time

Chore-Focused Wellness Practices Arrived Just in Time We’ve been through a real ~journey~ with housekeeping and mental health this year Photo: MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera/Getty Images Back on (checks notes) March 9, Elemental ran an excellent piece by writer and wellness-world expert Rina Raphael about how cooking, cleaning, sewing, and other old-school chores were being elevated as new forms of wellness: opportunities to take care of oneself and one’s space and practice mindfulness. As the pandemic progressed and eventually exploded throughout the country, many quarantiners found themselves even more drawn to these comfortingly repetitive actions—remember the flour shortage?—which, per research cited in Raphael’s story, “increase a person’s belief that they can manage a situation that is otherwise out of their hands.” Now, if you’re anything like me, the charm of housekeeping has ebbed and flowed depending on your level of frustration and despair about the state of the world — and I would love to never have to repair my own dishwasher ever again. Still, I hope the tidying up, baking, and general holiday-magic-making of the season (if that’s your thing) have provided some much-needed small joy and satisfaction during a difficult time. If nothing else, you know it’s going to feel damn good to vacuum up all those pine needles once you’ve said farewell to your tree. Revisit Raphael’s story about the therapeutic benefits of housework here:

https://elemental.medium.com/chore-focused-wellness-practices-arrived-just-in-time-bcc7c383a7bb

['Anna Maltby']

2020-12-28 06:32:40.882000+00:00

['Wellness', 'Health', 'Life', 'Housekeeping', 'Mental Health']

Now Is the Time to Discuss Order Fulfilment

What is Order fulfilment? Order fulfilment is the process of receiving and storing inventory to be sold online to consumers or B2B clients, during which orders are processed and delivered to each customer. The process starts when a customer places an order and concludes once they receive it by post or courier. What is the order fulfilment process? Here’s an overview of the steps involved in order fulfilment: Receiving inbound inventory — You send your stock to a fulfilment warehouse Storage of inventory — Your stock is stored awaiting online orders Order processing — this includes: Pick and pack / Kitting or light assembly of hampers or gift sets Shipping — At the carrier station each order is packed and despatched to your customer via an integrated courier partner Returns management — Orders are returned to a fulfilment centre location. So if a buyer wants to return a product, a 3PL partner manages the return transaction as well as quality, stock update or disposal These are the five key order fulfilment steps that ensure same-day fulfilment and outbound shipping to enhance your customer’s experience. Can order fulfilment companies integrate with my website? Yes. Any Warehouse Management Software (WMS), order fulfilment technology, is the bridge between your eCommerce platform and a fulfilment partner. Features include: Inventory management Order management Shipping tracking management Reporting functionality Most WMS can integrate with off-the-shelf versions of leading eCommerce platforms such as: Shopify Shopify Plus Magento Squarespace EKM WooCommerce BigCommerce Linnworks Other integrations include: Marketplaces — Amazon and eBay Carriers — too many to mention If you choose to outsource, you can integrate from a vast selection of ‘off-the-shelf’ eCommerce platforms, which can be done in a few clicks with no technical experience. Alternatively, a self-service solution means that you can import your orders through a client portal. How does the Order fulfilment Goods-in process work? A unique WMS account is created for every online retailing client. In doing so, your Third-Party-Logistic (3PL) partner can integrate and check-in barcoded products more efficiently, typically within 24–72 hours depending on seasonal demand. Once your stock is received, a barcode scanner identifies the correct product and storage location. This process ensures a fast, accurate and efficient order fulfilment process going forward once onboarded. How does the Order fulfilment storage process work? Each product is allocated a unique location in a 3PL warehouse with fast-moving products stored in easy to access bays and slower-moving goods on pallets or upper levels. The data collected during the goods-in process can automate and optimise space utilization, order picking efficiency in addition to batch tracing. Also, a WMS customer portal empowers online retailers to view stock, order status and tracking in real-time. The WMS pushes all data to your preferred eCommerce platform, like Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento. How does the Pick and Pack process work? The pick and pack process is a vital step in the order fulfilment process. Every day operatives print out order sheets within minutes of your customer placing an order online. Each order sheet contains the following information: Account — Your business and relevant customer shipping address — Your business and relevant customer shipping address Order details — Each product purchased, quantity and variant — Each product purchased, quantity and variant Location — The associated floor, isle and bay number for your products Experienced 3PL teams with WMS know-how can pick and pack with a 99.9% accuracy. Also, your inventory and order status is automatically updated once each order is picked, validated and shipped. Photo by Kumpan Electric on Unsplash How does the light assembly / kitting process work? Many online retailers sell hampers, subscription boxes or gift sets. As such 3PLs pre-assemble complex SKUs — a selection of simple SKUs — to create a new SKU, a bundle. A scheduled assembly process is planned by 3PLs with online retailing clients to meet seasonal demand, ranging from 200 to 25,000 kits a month. This enhances your value proposition by selling product-bundles at a reduced cost, due to fulfilment efficiencies, enhancing conversion as a result. How does the Order Fulfilment Shipping process work? Most 3PLs are integrated with carriers to automate the shipping process. When you convert a customer, orders are picked and validated, after which the shipping team owns the next step, to pack and despatch via a carrier network. At the shipping station, each order is allocated the most cost-effective and timely shipping service based on your requirements. A lean 3PL process ensures that 99.9% of orders are shipped the same day, traceable, affordable and fast. A good 3PL service provider can enhance your customer satisfaction, leading to loyalty and repeat online purchases. How does the returns process work? Reverse logistics can have an impact on your business. In fact, industry reports indicate that over 90% of online consumers become repeat buyers if returns are easy to do. Returns management is important and looks like this: Inbound — Evaluate goods for quality or damage before checking-in — Evaluate goods for quality or damage before checking-in Evaluate — Restock or quarantine — Restock or quarantine Action —Update stock or dispose Upon receipt, 3PL service providers notify clients about products that are unsuitable for re-sale, mitigating the risk of future returns. Some brands simply absorb all return costs and credit customers in good faith regardless of the dispute. What countries can my 3PL partner send my orders? Anywhere. Global shipping channels are available to all 3PLs. How much does an Order Fulfilment services cost? There are five cost points for order fulfilment, as follows: Inbound — To check-in, unpack and put-away goods Storage — The associated warehousing cost Pick and Pack — For fulfilment and/or kitting assembly Materials — This includes box, tape, label and filler Shipping — Need I say more? From a budget perspective, each cost point might look like this: Inbound — €20 to €30 per pallet Storage — €20 to €50 per bay per month depending on storage type Pick and Pack — The first pick tends to be €1.20 to €1.40 with each additional pick costing €0.60 to €0.70 Materials — Can range from €0.25 for an envelope or €0.70 to €1.00 or more for a box Shipping — Starting from €4 or €5 for domestic tracked and signed delivery Calculator by Author As a rule of thumb, your order fulfilment should look this: Domestic — €6 to €8 per order (higher for international) Financial — Anywhere between 8%–12% of revenue While there are various 3PL pricing models out there, they all tend to aggregate between the upper and lower limits above.

https://medium.com/illumination/now-is-the-time-to-discuss-order-fulfilment-c3f9e3d93387

['Paul Myers Mba']

2020-12-26 21:14:53.293000+00:00

['Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Future', 'Advice']

AI for Software Engineering — Industry Landscape (18/Oct/2017)

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Software Engineering (SE)” is a new emerging Industry. It is dedicated to making Software Development better, cheaper and faster. The Solutions (Companies/Products/Platforms/Researches) presented in the Landscape are divided into Categories by two Criteria: (1) Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) Phase and (2) Solution Readiness for the Market. Solutions inside a Category are ordered alphabetically. Read more about these Categories in the Initial Version of the Landscape. Below the Landscape Picture, you can find a list of Solutions with References to their Web Pages. If you have any Comments and/or Suggestions for the Solutions, Categories or their Mapping, please feel free to share them.

https://medium.com/ai-for-software-engineering/ai-for-software-engineering-industry-landscape-18-oct-2017-e45d5fb83c78

['Valentin Grigoryevsky']

2018-08-13 10:24:18.229000+00:00

['Software Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Software Engineering', 'AI', 'Landscape']

How I Trained My Mind to Cope with a Panic Attack

How I Trained My Mind to Cope with a Panic Attack In 7 Steps Photo by The Vantage Point on Unsplash I was standing, facing my boyfriend, in the 34th street subway station in New York City. The fluorescent lights shone above my head and subway cars darted left and right on the tracks around me. It was summer in New York City, so it was humid, sticky, and stuffy. Hundreds of people were squished into the narrow halls of the subway station waiting eagerly for the next train. Out of nowhere, I was struck with a hot flash, and my vision shifted, showing my world off-kilter. I broke out in a raging sweat and my vision wasn’t correcting itself. My knees shook and I couldn’t hold my own weight anymore. I fell to the ground as my heart beat with an intensity so frightful I was convinced I was dying. So convinced that I was dying, I muttered a goodbye to my boyfriend, as he cradled me in his arms on the filthy wooden bench to wait out whatever was happening to me. I looked at him desperately and told him to call 911 because I knew I needed help. Contrary to my belief, this was not a heart attack. It wasn’t until several weeks later that I learned what I had suffered was in fact a panic attack. But, how could I have a panic attack if I wasn’t panicked, I wondered. In that moment, preceding the episode, I wasn’t nervous or worried, or feeling particularly scared about anything. I had always thought you needed to be in a state of stress or anxiety in order to have a panic attack… I was wrong. This panic attack came out of nowhere and it came with a vengeance. It attacked so strongly and screamed at me so loudly that I was instantly awoken to the fact that my anxiety had gotten out of my control. Having just started graduate school and experienced a break up with whom I thought was the love of my life, I was understandably distraught but I thought I had been doing a good job of keeping my pot of anxiety from boiling over. This panic attack was literally a wake up call. I knew I needed to start taking control of my underlying anxiety, because ignoring it only worked as a coping mechanism for so long. Panic attacks are terrifying, and unfortunately they seem to be quite common. Although there is no cure or quick-fix solution to lessening the symptoms or reducing the occurrence of panic attacks, there are techniques that can help. In facing my panic attacks and anxiety in general I think the best thing I ever did for myself was seeking therapy. I am such a believer in therapy that I now recommend it to any and everyone. You don’t even need to have a diagnosis to benefit from a third party professional helping you out with your problems. I resisted the idea of seeing a therapist since I was 16. I think it’s because I wanted to be able to handle my problems on my own, and to prove my own strength in a way. Seeking therapy, to me, was surrendering to the fact that I needed help I couldn’t provide myself. But I’m so glad I did. And I think if you find the right therapist that practices the kind of therapy that is right for you, it will provide you some relief and help you to navigate this world with more ease. This article isn’t about therapy, however. It’s about shorter-term techniques I enacted to help me deal with panic attacks in the moment to buy myself some time before I could see a therapist. Since I’ve faced panic attacks head on, and have grown successful in fending them off and calming my body naturally, I want to share my experience. I have dabbled in self-experimentation and playing detective to my own or others’ medical problems from a young age. When I was younger, my ER-doctor father would consult me with challenging medical cases that needed a creative solution and I would ponder over them for weeks. I was obsessed with the scientific method, and this likely inspired my constant self-experimentation and academic pursuit of Epidemiology. Growing up, whenever I was faced with an ailment, it was a new challenge for me to solve. For example, in college I used to suffer horrible, debilitating migraines with auras. Yet, after testing out dietary modifications and discovering that vegetarianism reduced my migraines, I haven’t had a migraine since. Similarly, when I had my first panic attack at 22 years old, opposed to the idea of daily anxiety medication (another way of acknowledging that maybe I had a condition or needed help I couldn’t give myself), I instead decided to try different mental techniques at the onset of a panic attack, or for occurrences of heightened anxiety. With dedication to these techniques, I have now been panic attack-free for 4 years. As I’m not a medical doctor or a therapist, I can in no way properly endorse the techniques I’ve tried, but they’ve worked for me in combatting my anxiety and panic attacks and so if you are willing to try something different, then my advice is here. Since I had my first panic attack in a NYC subway station, I understandably was scared to revisit that setting where I could be susceptible to it happening again. Instead, I thought that if I could get myself to be ok and not nervous in a subway station, that I would win against anxiety. I took it on as a challenge and actually started to spend more time in subway stations. I’d sit on a bench and take the time to examine myself internally. How was my breathing? How was my heart rate? What was I thinking about? How was I feeling? Was I nervous? If so, what’s triggering me to be nervous? Immersing myself in the setting that had previously brought on a panic attack was risky. But I kept telling myself that a panic attack would not kill me, and I needed to understand why it happened. Evaluating my body and my mind while in the subway helped me to understand the way I was feeling in this environment. I understood my triggers, which was being in a cramped space and feeling claustrophobic and stuck. I also came to understand that I was over stimulated by the combination of people, lights and sounds. As I came to learn what was making me anxious, I felt that I had a better grasp on the anxiety, and that it was something that could be managed. It was like the anxiety literally shrunk from a large black cloud to something that could fit in the palm of my hand. It was a manageable size and I was bigger and stronger in comparison to it. After taking the time to learn and understand my nervous triggers, instead of avoiding these triggers, which would seem intuitive, I actually sought to immerse myself in them. I think this practice is somewhat akin to immersion therapy, but I felt stronger facing my fears head-on rather than avoiding them, and I felt like they had less power over me and like I was the one in control. Granted, facing the sources of my nervousness was not easy. I would still suffer from pre-panic attack symptoms while riding the subway quite often. I realized I needed to go a step further than just understanding my symptoms. When symptoms of anxiety and pre-panic attack, like feelings of hot flashes, band-like headaches, shallow breathing, increased heart rate, and flustered thoughts would set in, I decided I had to take myself somewhere else. Not physically, but mentally. I would close my eyes, and imagine myself on a wide, expansive, airy beach with soft warm sand and crystal blue waters. The ability to create this other world and imagine myself in it provided me with so much relief. I could transport from the bright, loud, crowded, sticky subway car to a place where I could catch my breath. Seeing this place in my mind allowed my body to follow suit and relax. My chest would open up so I could breath again, my heart rate would slow down, and my muscles would unclench. I was offered relief although physically in a place that caused me stress. Several months later, I was watching a war movie in a large dark theater, where the loud banging, flashing lights, and commotion of the movie simulated a situation similar to the subway station. I felt a band tightening around my head and thought it was just a headache coming on until my world tilted and I started hyperventilating. It all happened so fast, and again, I wasn’t actually nervous about anything. The movie itself got my heart pounding, but I had never been affected by a movie like that previously. I gathered the strength to remove myself from the theater and sit on a bench to collect myself. Luckily a friend was there to help me as I felt absolutely out of it. It felt like I had been hit in the head by a baseball bat and I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. Although the episode only lasted about 20 minutes I was exhausted for the rest of the night. It felt like I had just ran a marathon and weathered a storm so intense that I could sleep for days. This experience gave me further insight to my anxiety. It helped me to figure out that I get nervous in cramped spaces, not just subway stations. It helped me to figure out that I get triggered by bright lights, flashing, and loud noises, and not just those in the subway station. Although painful, the experience didn’t kill me and it provided me more information to understand my anxiety and the source of these episodes. Ultimately, by continuing to immerse myself (in doses) in the places that caused me stress, I was able to face that stress head on and, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I conquered it, but I did decrease it to a manageable level. And that was enough. It was enough to get me through the moment and the collections of moments that turned into days, until I could seek the professional help I needed. Overall, I would summarize my techniques for managing panic attacks in the following ways: 1. In the moment, sit or lie down. Look around you for: · 5 things you can see · 4 things you can touch · 3 things you can hear · 2 things you can smell · 1 thing you can taste This technique is called grounding, and it will help you to feel more in control of your environment. This is a good technique to help you in the moment, before you start to understand what triggers your panic attacks. 2. Visualize a safer space This technique is also a more in-the-moment technique, in which you close your eyes and imagine yourself in a space that doesn’t cause you anxiety, a space in which you feel comfortable and in control. For me, that space is an open, expansive place. Potentially a clear beach or a large field of dewy grass. Let your mind take you to that place. Once you feel like you are actually in that place, your mind will feel more relieved and you will notice that your body will relax too. 3. Be aware of your anxiety. Be a student to your anxiety and the environment you are in when you feel extreme nervousness or a panic attack coming on. Observe and take note of what situations might cause increased anxiety. What exactly is making you anxious, or what in your environment is causing you to feel certain ways? Try recording these observations in a notebook. 4. Understand your anxiety. Once you’ve become awake and aware of your anxiety, you can take steps towards understanding it. Try to address questions like why are these situations making you nervous or anxious? Answering a question like this might be rather difficult… and honestly you might not be able to understand it on your own. This is a place in the process where a therapist might be able to help you in finding relief from, or avoiding, panic attacks. Also ask yourself about the feelings accompanying or preceding the anxiety. 5. Sit with your anxiety. Once you are aware of your triggers and understand why you are triggered to feel anxious, try sitting with your anxiety. For me, this is incredibly painful. But that pain only lasts about 90 seconds, and once you’ve made it through, you’ll feel somewhat invincible. For me, it felt freeing. Knowing that I could sit with my anxiety and it wouldn’t destroy or kill me helped me to feel like I could mange it. 6. Embrace or Immerse yourself in your anxiety. This technique doesn’t work for everyone. Like I explained earlier, I personally saw my anxiety as a challenge to be addressed. Not everyone will have this mindset or see the need to approach their anxiety in this way, and that’s totally fine! By embracing your anxiety I mean going back to those situations that provoked panic, sitting with the anxiety, and fending it off. Doing so has helped me to re-frame my anxiety as something that I can control, rather than something that controls me, and as something that I have the power over. Feeling so provides relief and confidence that you can deal with more situations where you feel anxious. 7. Talk to a therapist. While there are techniques to deal with anxiety, seeing a therapist is what has provided me the most long-term relief with underlying anxiety. I have seen therapists that I don’t like, however, so it is important to do some research on therapists in your insurance network before choosing one or several to test out. Do some research to find therapists that specialize in the type of treatment you are seeking. There are many types of therapy, and some are better suited to different issues. In the past, I’ve tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and the process of diving into my childhood didn’t provide relief for my daily anxiety. It made it worse, actually. More recently, I’ve been seeing a therapist who practices Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is like a mindfulness-based approach to therapy that has helped me to live more easily and address my problems and feelings in the moment. It’s helped me tremendously over the past year or so and it’s the first time in my life that I’ve felt positively about my future. Finding a therapist that works for you can be an arduous process. You cannot benefit from a therapy if you don’t feel comfortable or like you can trust your therapist. You are, after all, putting in yourself in a very vulnerable situation, but one that will provide you so much relief through the process. Finally, I want to say that there is always hope. There is always hope for controlling your anxiety, and even if you are in a situation where you feel like you’ve surrendered to it, you can recover from it. I know that first-hand. It’s not easy helping yourself, or seeking the help you might need. If you don’t have the strength now, that is OK. As humans, we are not perfect. Some days are dark but without the dark days we don’t appreciate the light ones. Although anxiety might feel like constant dark days, there will be a light one or a light moment where you will discover that you are stronger than your anxiety.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/how-i-trained-my-mind-to-cope-with-a-panic-attack-f226d6b78e40

['Liz Worotyla']

2018-11-14 22:30:03.331000+00:00

['Health', 'Neuroscience', 'Mindfulness', 'Mental Health', 'Anxiety']

If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too

If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too Hustle culture isn’t doing you any favors Photo: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images LeBron James told the productivity guru Tim Ferriss on his show that he sleeps eight or nine hours each night. Sometimes 10. If the basketball star can’t get that stretch in at night, he’ll catch up with a two-hour nap. And it’s not just sleep that’s vital to James’ regime: As he chatted with Ferriss, you could hear some rustling in the background. His trainer of 15 years, Mike Mancias, explained that the athlete was applying ice to his knees. “Recovery never stops,” Mancias said. That’s the sentence to remember. “If LeBron plays 40 minutes one night, if he plays 28 minutes one night,” said Mancias, “we’re still going to keep recovery as our number one focus, whether that be in nutrition, whether that be in hydration, more flexibility exercises, stuff in the weight room. It’s a never-ending process, really. And I think that’s the approach that we must take in order for us to be successful.” James isn’t the only top athlete who’s obsessive about quality shut-eye. Usain Bolt, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Steve Nash also cite lots of sleep as crucial to their performance. It’s obvious that sleep is essential — not just for physically demanding activities like sports, but also for knowledge work and creative professions. But sleep, and the lack of it, isn’t the only issue. Rest and recovery are also key — and not just for professional athletes. We all know how tough it can be to host a long meeting, or how exhausted we are after hours of creativity. So, why are we so reluctant to give ourselves the time we need to recover? Sleep is still a hard sell It’s not just that we can’t stand the idea of working less in order to sleep more — it’s working less for any reason at all that petrifies us. This deeply embedded cult of busy isn’t something you can combat with a long vacation and a few pills. It requires a huge shift in societal attitudes and awareness. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors “worked” about 3 to 5 hours per day. Many people today could probably get away with less work than that to ensure their survival, yet we keep busting our backs. Work hours have barely changed since the 1950s, and have actually increased recently. Although sleep health in the United States has been improving, in 2018, a mere 27% of Americans reported getting the recommended seven to nine hours on weekdays, and only 10% claimed they prioritize sleep. Hustle culture is still alive and kicking, with Elon Musk admitting it’s often “no sleep or Ambien” and one in three Goldman Sachs employees feeling “utterly strung out” by their work at the bank. If sleep really is so central to success, then why is it so hard to get people excited about going to bed? Well, for starters, no matter how good it is for our bodies and minds, sleep feels like dead time. There’s no real way to multitask with sleep, no matter how hard we try. It’s not like running, where you can turn on a podcast and passively soak up ideas along the way. With sleep, you’re forced to single-task with no recollection of the time you put in — and that’s tough to swallow. The deeper problem Sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem runs much deeper — and it starts with the status of work in our modern culture. This has both cultural and technological causes. We invented machines to alleviate manual labor, but then applied that model to creative and intellectual labor as well. In his book, Rest, the researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains: The modern office was conceptualized as a machine for rationalizing and organizing intellectual labor, and it copied the working hours of factories. But the model has been an imperfect fit in creative industries, as it’s extremely hard to measure productivity and quality in creative and knowledge work. Eight-hour shifts, an open and transparent physical environment, clocking times — these all make sense for producing units of a tangible product. But for year-long projects to develop innovative business strategies? Not so much. Yet we still have the 40-hour work week, open offices, and time-tracking systems. Meanwhile, status-driven spending, increased parenting stress, compulsive use of social media, and long commutes keep our minds busy outside of work too — despite our domestic lives being increasingly automated, thanks to washing machines, kitchen appliances, and smart-home technology. If the purpose of civilization is to indeed make us more civilized, then it seems we’ve got it backwards. We’re either busy using computers for the wrong tasks, or we’re trying to act as computers ourselves in areas where that clearly doesn’t work, like thinking and creating. A framing of downtime I want to embrace Let’s go back to that moment in the chat between Tim Ferriss and Lebron James: “Recovery never stops.” Clearly, a good sleep routine is just one part of a much bigger picture: We must complement work with seemingly unrelated activities if we really want to deliver our best performance. Recovery is key, and it plays a larger role than passive recuperation. It’s active restoration. Just as James’ routine involves icing, hydration, and special exercises and stretches, we can all find ways to recover; pockets of rest to restore ourselves throughout the day. Taking breaks and having fun are as valuable to the creative or intellectual worker as sleep and nutrition are to the world-class athlete Resting is a “skill,” Pang argues in Rest, when he describes the problems with our modern attitude around work: I’ve argued that we should treat work and rest as equals; that we should treat rest as a skill; that the best, most restorative kinds of rest are active; and that when practiced well, rest can make us more creative and productive, without forcing us into a funhouse mirror of endless work and ever-rising expectations. A life that takes rest seriously is not only a more creative life. When we take the right to rest, when we make rest fulfilling, and when we practice rest through our days and years, we also make our lives richer and more fulfilling. That’s why taking breaks and having fun are as valuable to the creative or intellectual worker as sleep and nutrition are to the world-class athlete: Rest isn’t just the well of physical recovery, it’s also the spring of insight. How to live a restful life The psychological benefit of seeing rest as a skill or a habit to build, as opposed to a mere necessity, is that you’ll feel more in charge. Pang has several ideas as to how to make this mental shift: Pang’s “deliberate rest” concept suggests that by developing it as a mindset, “you’ll start treating work and leisure as two sides of one coin: living a good, happy, meaningful life.” Instead of seeing downtime as a forced retreat from the default of busy, you’ll start looking for pockets of calm everywhere. Recovery never stops, remember? Once you adopt this practice, it turns out you can rest in lots of situations. You can meditate on the subway or observe your fellow riders, rather than send emails or listen to a podcast on 1.5x speed. You can walk to your coworker’s desk instead of calling them, or simply look out the window from your desk and let your mind wander. All of this is rest — and it’s empowering. All you need to know World-class athletes like James learn to value a good night’s sleep early in their careers. They have to. Pushing their body to its physical limits has a price. Those in less physical professions may not feel the consequences of creative or intellectual work as immediately or explicitly, so to them sleep and other means of recovery might appear to be obstacles on the path to success. In reality, our biggest roadblock is our inability to let go of this idea. Sometimes the fastest way to gain new perspective and move forward is to take a step back, divert our attention, and let ideas sit. When we cling to our work too desperately, we’ll miss the very moments we most desire from it. Only if we embrace rest as one half of a balanced scale can we truly perform our best, think our best, and live our best life. That requires active relaxation, which might mean working fewer hours, taking more breaks, and cultivating a hobby purely for fun. But it also requires that we make rest a real habit and an attitude we carry within. To do that, we need to look for quiet moments — quiet thoughts, really — everywhere and all the time. If we manage to find them, we’ll build what we’d like to see when we look back in our old age: not a life full of work, but one full of balance. I’d like to think that’s what LeBron dreams about at night.

https://forge.medium.com/why-rest-is-essential-to-high-performance-975db3f68863

['Niklas Göke']

2019-08-06 21:13:50.742000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Live', 'Creativity', 'Health', 'Succeed']

Simon Sinek Says We Got Global Warming Wrong

Global warming has a marketing problem. We’ve learned the hard way that, unfortunately, people aren’t going to just jump on the environmental bandwagon because scientists said they needed to. That’s just not human nature. People need to be convinced, inspired, sold and left to feel like they’ve decided to act out of their own free will and self-interest. The majority of consumers care about how they’ll directly benefit from something. And social issues are no different. We’re just not that selfless — not on a global scale. We’ve done a poor job at marketing the climate crisis to selfish human beings. We’ve confused people with poor messaging and we’ve assumed that people’s better nature would lead them to act selflessly. Wrong. Sinek proposes two fundamental changes to our climate crisis messaging strategy: From global warming to climate cancer In 1975, US Scientist, Wallace Broecker, used the term “global warming” in a scientific paper, and the rest is history. The term became part of our global lexicon, and the results were… confusing. If it’s colder this winter than it was last winter, or if it’s unseasonably cold today, how can global warming be real?! “I’m telling you… those scientists are a bunch of liberal quacks.” People aren’t just ignorant. We’re bad at messaging. The problem was never just warming — it was about a disruption in the normal, habitable range of our planet’s climate. Or, as Sinek says, the problem isn’t global warming, it’s climate cancer. We need to communicate exactly what the problem is in a way that people will immediately understand and emotionally feel. People get cancer. They understand the concept. They feel the need to act. And they understand what almost always happens to a cancer patient when they fail to act: they die. There is a cancer in our climate. And if we don’t act, there will be death. But whose death? 2. From save the planet to save your family That’s Sinek’s second point. We’ve ignorantly believed that we could get humanity to act by telling them we need to save the earth, the animals, and some low-lying cities. But, by and large, people haven’t acted. We humans generally act in our own self-interest. Especially if it will cost us something. And healing climate cancer will cost us a lot. Instead of telling people that we need to save someone or something else, we need to warn people that they and their families are in danger. They need to know and feel the fear that failing to act will have on their own lives and those whom they love. It’s really not about the planet. It’s about us. As Sinek says, “The planet will survive no matter what. Life will continue with us or without us. What we have to do is save our species.”

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/simon-sinek-says-we-got-global-warming-wrong-22522b6d3484

['Michael Touchton']

2020-09-05 12:32:05.037000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Environment', 'Climate Action', 'Psychology', 'Climate Change']

Three Lessons I Learned Writing a Children’s Book

1. Children’s Books are an Incredible Art Form There is a difference between art and everything else. If it’s art, then it’s worth studying. It’s worth learning about. It’s worth watching or viewing over and over again. If it’s not “art” then why bother? There is a difference between my home videos and my favorite film. I’m the only one interested in videos of my kids, but millions are interested in the best films. Maybe my years studying film, both in college and attending film school, had distorted my view of art. I only studied what everyone else said was the best. I watched 48 of the 53 Hitchcock films (that’s all I could find). I binge watch directors I like: Kurosawa, Kubrick, Gilliam, and others. It’s because they create “art” while everyone else is just making movies. For years I discounted children’s books. As a new dad, I wasn’t impressed by the books people bought for our kids as gifts. They seemed too simplistic. Too childish. One was a list of textures. Another was a book version of peek-a-boo. I wondered how much creativity it takes to create those kinds of books. I kind of settled into my opinion that the best books — works of true art — wouldn’t be available to my children until they were much older. I was wrong. I now realize that there are incredible artists creating amazing art — for children. I just didn’t see what was right in front of me. As I wrote my own story, I realized that a short story is often harder to write than a long one. I had to think so carefully about every word choice. Even though my book for children is short, the editor I hired marked up my first draft like it was a bad term paper. Then I started having conversations with illustrators. One woman I spoke with told me she had always wanted to be a children’s book illustrator. That was her dream. She was a brilliant artist. She was intentionally creating art for children with her gifts. I started speaking with friends who had kids — many of them had favorite children’s books. They were passionate about some of the books. I was seriously missing out on some great works of art — children’s books. I learned I needed to stop judging the form of the art and start enjoying some of the brilliant works of art that are being created for children. 2. Selling Joy Is One of the Best Things You Can Sell Why would someone buy my book? That’s the question that I had to answer if I were actually going to write and sell a children’s book. I didn’t have a good answer initially. I just knew that I had to write the book. Thirteen drafts later, I had a draft ready for illustrations. No one had read the manuscript except for my wife and two editors. It was time to send this creation out into the wild. I sent a copy to one of my best friends. I asked him to read it to his five kids and see what they thought. I waited patiently, as my own children were the only kids who had heard the story. Would other kids laugh? Would they like it? Later that night, I received a message (copied nearly verbatim). Just read it to the kids… GREATTTT JOBBB!!!!! Hysterical laughing… asked kids do you think this could sell… split second two oldest said “yes!” During it my wife was shouting… gross… what is this… I said Mashni wrote it… she was like what you are kidding… I said nope… she was like what?!?! lollll And then he ended with this statement that changed how I viewed the book: Thank you for giving me 30 minutes of pure laughter with my kids. In that last statement, I found the answer to why someone would buy my book. I was not selling a book anymore. I was not selling physical paper or a Kindle file. I was not even selling a story. When you sit down to read my story, you will laugh. Your kids will laugh. The laughter will last longer than the book. What was I selling? I was going to sell 30 minutes of joy with a child. What is that worth? How much would someone pay for that? I know that for me and my own children, it is priceless. In a world where no one knows what life will look like in a year or even a month, those moments of joy are the best parts of life. I’ve thought for years about different types of businesses I could start and different products I could sell. Right now, though, I’m not sure there is anything else I would rather be selling. By writing CinderToot, I learned that selling joy is one of the best things you could ever sell. 3. Inspiring Kids Is Honorable I soon asked other people to read the manuscript. At a family gathering, I read the story to my nieces and nephew. I could barely finish as they interrupted with laughter. I learned something new about writing a children’s book, though, from my niece that day. After I finished the story, she disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back into the room, she had her own paper and pencil and started writing. I asked her what she was doing, and her response floored me. “I’m writing my own version of CinderToot. I want to write my own children’s book, like you.” I did not understand how my crazy idea would change my own life, but I did not expect it to change anyone else’s life. I almost teared up as I realized that listening to my story inspired her to create something of her own. I learned that telling my stories could inspire young people, and we need that inspiration more than ever. What I Learned I’m only limited by my imagination now, and not by the worries of what others will think or how they will react. I am excited to take what I’ve learned and apply it to the next book. Children’s books are an incredible art form. Selling joy is one of the best things you can sell. Inspiring children is honorable. I can’t wait for the lessons I will learn from the next book and others after.

https://medium.com/curious/three-lessons-i-learned-writing-a-childrens-book-f7379b28eca9

['John Mashni']

2020-11-26 00:10:32.160000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Books', 'Self Improvement', 'Children']

Habitat & Biodiversity

This enabled the DRC to map the optimal areas suitable to cultivate the African oil palm. It was possible thanks to tracking and finding an array of suitable measures: Temperature ranges (24–28°C), rainfall per year (2000–2500mm), soil types (high clay content, or loam and silt dominated soils), and soil constraints (flat areas to lessen the effects of erosion and fertilizer runoff). Created map showing the pilot REDD+ projects (yellow) that aim at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation; created among protected areas and indigenous lands while taking into account palm oil cultivation suitability. However, these optimal or highly suitable areas also cover large intact forests, home to a rich biodiversity and many indigenous groups. Indeed, the question of finding suitable areas for cultivation becomes a multi-faceted problem where many other factors determine which parts should be cleared for palm oil cultivation. Mathieu Shamavu poses for a photo with the orphaned gorillas Nkakazi and Ndeze. Photograph: Mathieu Shamavu/AP Many mammal species would no longer find their homes. Apart from humans, the Gorilla, the Pan, and even the Okapi. Naturally, the ecological diversity doesn’t stop at mammals and efforts for conservation are much needed as poaching, illegal forest clearance loom over an ever decreasing natural habitat. The palm oil cultivation story can be found as a scrolly report with interactive maps and notes. It is alarming that the human use of many ecosystems is too great a burden for the forces of nature to be able to heal itself. As a consequence, the previously described habitats will change fundamentally. This ranges from change in the diversity of organisms to changes in their interactions. Forests are being converted into agricultural land, oil palm plantations are displacing tropical rainforests, and the fate of more soil is being sealed. This leads to stress on the invisible threads that connect each organism in an environment. When organisms are deprived of survival conditions, their ability to adapt to different conditions is overtaxed. The effects of the changing global and regional climate contribute to this phenomenon. Although about 11 million species have been described by biologists, it is likely there are many more unknown species, particularly in the oceans and the large rainforest areas. This is even more so the case for microbes that live out of sight. Scientists estimate that we’ve only discovered one tenth of all species on Earth. A question comes to mind: How many unknown species have already been affected by the effects of global and regional climate? In the oceans, research is difficult as everything is naturally dynamic and ocean exploration is challenging. Learning about the deep sea and the large rainforests is today made easier by technology. Years ago, people could only marvel and wonder at the secrets of these habitats. While rainforest exploration has been limited by the challenges of hot and humid conditions, the dense canopy cover, the remoteness, and the sheer diversity of species; in the oceans, underwater diving has been limiting human exploration. However, unmanned vehicles could enable long term exploration of the depths to gather and collect data to better understand living organisms that contribute to the exchange of matter. The example of mapping data that pertain to finding suitable palm oil cultivation areas and their visualization helped bring forth a greater understanding for conservation and land use planning. On a larger scale, this train of thought could help unravel the world’s critical ecosystems. Indeed, every data point matters, from part to whole on the threads of a much larger spiderweb.

https://medium.com/nightingale/habitat-biodiversity-64d7e0b997f8

['Georges Hattab']

2020-01-21 14:01:01.509000+00:00

['Environment', 'Mapping', 'Design', 'Nature', 'Data Visualization']

Reality, Augmented? How to Drive Adoption of What’s Next

Reality, Augmented? How to Drive Adoption of What’s Next If new mediums take off only when they fundamentally change our everyday life, what are the daily implications of augmented reality? What are some principles for the adoption of new mediums? On the prospects of augmented reality, opinions vary widely in my conversations with fellow investors, designers, and technologists. Many investors consider the space “many years away,” “un-investable,” “not practical,” and “far from certain.” At the same time, the designers and developers building the platform and authoring products for the space believe it is “inevitable,” “transformative,” and poised to change our everyday life as we know it — sooner than we think. Since the best investors are most persuaded by present trends (rather than potential future trends), it is no surprise that augmented reality may be a bit far off to elicit excitement. Until it is clear which platforms (Apple, Google, Microsoft…perhaps even start-ups like Magic Leap) will dominate this new medium, it is difficult to invest with confidence. But among the most knowledgeable designers and technologists in the space, there is no question. So what can product teams do to accelerate adoption — for AR specifically and new technology in general? First, always “show not tell,” with the use of prototypes and presumptive visualizations. Just putting something out there can solicit a ton of feedback and accelerate progress. And then consider a set of general principles for the adoption of new behaviors and products. In the spirit of a prototype being worth a thousand meetings (or too verbose medium posts!), my team developed a short video to explore how our everyday actions will be enhanced — and in some ways transformed — as augmented reality is broadly adopted. Have a look: Of course, setting a vision that drives alignment — as imperfect and rough as it may be — is just the first step. To really drive adoption in the first phase of a new product or medium, there are a few principles I think about a lot: Novelty Precedes Utility : Transformative and mission critical technology tends to be used for more lighthearted and fun purposes in the first inning. This principle is especially true for consumer products but even applies to the enterprise. I recall my team at Behance being on HipChat and using the first version of Slack to share GIFs and jokes. The rest is history. For an emerging medium like AR, it is no surprise that games and other fun novelties (like lenses in Snap and Instagram) are the first applications. Don’t misinterpret these applications as the limits of a new medium, they are merely the kindling. : Transformative and mission critical technology tends to be used for more lighthearted and fun purposes in the first inning. This principle is especially true for consumer products but even applies to the enterprise. I recall my team at Behance being on HipChat and using the first version of Slack to share GIFs and jokes. The rest is history. For an emerging medium like AR, it is no surprise that games and other fun novelties (like lenses in Snap and Instagram) are the first applications. Don’t misinterpret these applications as the limits of a new medium, they are merely the kindling. Outfit The Artists : Artists are best equipped to socialize (and help us appreciate) the edges of life — whether it is policy, technology, fashion, or culture in general. Artists are dreamers and risk-takers. To showcase what’s possible in a new medium, outfit artists with authoring tools and make them interoperable with the tools they already use — and the content they’ve already made. This is a crucial part of the strategy we’re taking at Adobe with products like Adobe Aero, which enables people to build interactive AR scenes with 3D objects and bring their PSD’s into AR — expanding the layers to create depth, etc. : Artists are best equipped to socialize (and help us appreciate) the edges of life — whether it is policy, technology, fashion, or culture in general. Artists are dreamers and risk-takers. To showcase what’s possible in a new medium, outfit artists with authoring tools and make them interoperable with the tools they already use — and the content they’ve already made. This is a crucial part of the strategy we’re taking at Adobe with products like Adobe Aero, which enables people to build interactive AR scenes with 3D objects and bring their PSD’s into AR — expanding the layers to create depth, etc. Invest In Reference Apps : Just as the original apps on the iPhone (1st party (Apple) apps) set the bit for developers on how to build and design their own apps, the design and functionality of the early apps for a new medium are super important. Early developers will leverage the early UI/UX decisions you make and coast on any familiarity established by the early reference apps. On a related note, beware of creativity that compromises familiarity — the early days of adoption are all about familiar patterns. : Just as the original apps on the iPhone (1st party (Apple) apps) set the bit for developers on how to build and design their own apps, the design and functionality of the early apps for a new medium are super important. Early developers will leverage the early UI/UX decisions you make and coast on any familiarity established by the early reference apps. On a related note, beware of creativity that compromises familiarity — the early days of adoption are all about familiar patterns. Obsess Over The First Mile : Ironically, most product teams only spend the last mile of their experience building the product thinking about the first mile of the customer’s experience using the product. This is especially ironic given the fact that the only part of the product every customer experiences is the first mile! I’ve written quite a bit about crafting the first mile of product experience, and why, as my friend Dave Morin likes to say, “the devil’s in the defaults.” For new products and mediums, nail the onboarding. : Ironically, most product teams only spend the last mile of their experience building the product thinking about the first mile of the customer’s experience using the product. This is especially ironic given the fact that the only part of the product every customer experiences is the first mile! I’ve written quite a bit about crafting the first mile of product experience, and why, as my friend Dave Morin likes to say, “the devil’s in the defaults.” For new products and mediums, nail the onboarding. Engage The Right Customers At The Right Time: If you have the luxury of doing so (start-ups can, big companies cannot), engage the cohort of willing and forgiving customers first — before aiming to engage every customer you can find. The old “take any customer you can get” adage is short-sighted, because the customers you have at different stages of your business impact how your product evolves and how your team prioritizes. Of course, for augmented reality in particular, the prospects are dependent on hardware, advances in artificial intelligence, and software. But I believe we’re getting closer on all three fronts, and the approach we take to drive customer adoption can very much accelerate the whole space. Augmented Reality is particularly interesting to me because of its potential to bridge the physical and digital worlds — as opposed to constrain us to one or the other. For millennia, we lived solely in the physical world. Then we invented a digital world and for the past 25 years it has increasingly entranced us. With smartphones, we see people all the time looking down at their screens and ignoring the physical world around them. It’s concerning, and I believe AR done well will synthesize the physical and digital worlds and enhance our interactions with both. In some ways, it could bring us back to a balanced way of living in the physical world despite being in the digital era. As a result, I’ll bet that screen sales will look a lot like traditional camera sales as immersive experiences and devices go mainstream. Less “screen time” as we know it today may be a good thing.

https://medium.com/positiveslope/reality-augmented-how-to-drive-adoption-of-whats-next-2e96216d329a

['Scott Belsky']

2019-11-14 20:39:14.804000+00:00

['Design', 'Augmented Reality', 'Product Management', 'Creativity', 'Future']

Best Machine Learning Books — Free and Paid — Editorial Recommendations

Best Machine Learning (ML) Books — Free and Paid — Editorial Recommendations For the past year, we have looked at over 8,371 machine learning (ML) books [1], and we have picked what we consider to be the best paid and free books on ML in terms of technicality, ability to explain complex subjects, depth, and verified reviews. Nowadays, we know that machine learning and its applications have become inevitable [5] for most (if not all) businesses. Hence, there is a surge of proficient machine learning engineers. We know that machine learning can be intimidating if you are just starting your career in this domain. Therefore, if you plan to move into the scientific field of machine learning, you may find yourself overwhelmed with the wide variety of books related to machine-learning available online. In this article, we will list some of the best books on machine learning. These books are frequently used in university courses and recommended by professors and industry experts. Disclosure: Our editorial team at Towards AI writes authentic and trustworthy reviews and may receive a small compensation on products we select to support Towards AI’s efforts. For this article, as an Amazon Associate, Towards AI may receive a small commission from qualifying purchases made from it (at no extra cost to the buyer). For feedback, questions, or concerns, please email us pub@towardsai.net.

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/best-machine-learning-books-free-and-paid-ml-book-recommendations-40c9ab30b0c

['Towards Ai Team']

2020-12-02 14:51:16.543000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Innovation', 'Future', 'Education', 'Science']

You’re Not Lazy — Self-Isolation is Utterly Exhausting

After voluntarily entering self-isolation three days ago, I’ve come to a startling discovery. Working from home, barely seeing people, meetings over Skype and phone, very little human contact… I have been voluntarily self-isolating for the better part of three years of my life. I’m an introvert who runs her own businesses from home, and I really thrive on working alone and not having a lot of human interaction throughout my workday. And up until now, I’ve been exceptionally content with that arrangement, each day for the last several years. Since the coronavirus outbreak, and Canada going into voluntary self-isolation as a country, the only real change is that my husband is now also working from home. He’s in his basement office, I’m on the top floor in my everyday office. We occasionally cross paths in the kitchen during a workday. What I’m trying to say is that outwardly and logistically my life has not changed AT ALL since the coronavirus outbreak. Everything for me should be business as usual. And yet, everything has changed. I’m an anxious mess. I’m exhausted all the time, focusing on work is harder than ever before, and I feel more drained than I have in years. That is why I am here to tell you, friends and readers who are now working from home and beating yourselves up for feeling exhausted or unproductive all the time, no, you’re not lazy. What you’re feeling is entirely normal, and completely reasonable. And here’s why:

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/youre-not-lazy-self-isolation-is-utterly-exhausting-df4695377db2

['Gillian Sisley']

2020-04-18 19:59:39.252000+00:00

['Society', 'Mental Health', 'Remote Working', 'Psychology', 'Work']

This Is What It’s Like to Eat Your Last Meal and Think About Never Waking Up Again

This annual trip to the hospital started in 2015 when I felt a little off. I saw my doctor and he told me it was nothing and to take vitamin pills. My girlfriend at the time told me to get a second opinion. I refused for six months until, finally, she forced me to see her family doctor. The new doc’s advice was similar: “it’s probably nothing. But…” Whenever you see a doctor be careful of the “but.” They always have something else to say and their goal is to keep you calm. The but in my case was that the doctor wanted to send me to hospital for a guided tour around my insides. Most people wouldn’t care too much. For me, I’m petrified of hospitals and medical procedures. Going to hospital is like standing on the edge of a cliff face with no harness, while a tornado twirls around a few feet away. This means I have to prepare my mind. Here is a list of things I do to face one of the scariest moments of my life: No phones or social media Phones and social media create stress. I can’t deal with my hospital reality and serve my phone master. So, phones go off and social media goes unanswered. At best, social media posts get scheduled. But content creation stops before hospital out of respect to what might happen if anything goes wrong. You won’t be looking at your twitter account on the last day of your life; you’ll be thinking about those you love. Christmas movies for joy reminders The thought of santa and presents under a tree equals joy. It takes me back to childhood. It helps remind me of the pleasure of giving rather than receiving. It’s a pure time of year. Everything makes sense. You sit with family, be grateful for what you have, and eat a meal. Each year the table of relatives gets smaller as people pass away. One year you have grandma, and next year you don’t. Christmas used to be for religious folks. Now the universal language of Christmas is joy. You can be an atheist and use Christmas as an excuse to be grateful and feel joy. It turns out gratitude and joy are excellent right before hospital, too. So, I watch Christmas movies leading up to hospital to put me in state. Injecting calm into the mind Hospital equals fear. The opposite of fear is calmness. The good news is you can manufacture calmness in your life when you need it most. I manufacture calm like this: Deep breathing Getting sunshine Audio in my ears that tells me everything is going to be okay. (I choose Tony Robbins’ voice.) The superpower of overpreparation Two days before hospital I go into lockdown. I start to overprepare so that on the day of hospital I don’t have to do anything or stress about a single thing. Overpreparation helps alleviate stress. I pack my backpack with everything I might need while in the hospital. I take lots of water, comfortable clothes, headphones for calming audio, and tissues. One thing I don’t take is time. Time in the hospital moves differently. When you’re fearful time either slows down or speeds up. For me, my thoughts speed up, but an hour feels like 12 hours. Looking at the time makes me more nervous. I start mapping out in my mind what time I get dressed into my scrubs, then what time I meet the nurse to undergo a health check, then the scary moment when the anesthetist comes into the room and tries to explain to me what is going to happen, even though I’d do anything not to know. You have a lot of time to live. But time in the hospital feels different and it should. Hospital is where you go to repair your body from all the damage you and the world throw at it. Absolutely no 9–5 work whatsoever 9–5 work stresses me out the most. Already, my work colleagues are trying to schedule meetings right after I get out of hospital. It’s for this reason that I refuse to engage in any traditional work leading up to the hospital. Thinking about customers while I contemplate the beauty of consciousness destroys my happiness. The work phone gets left far, far away in a distant galaxy. The work laptop’s battery is run down to empty so that it can’t dare boot up on my hospital day. It sounds drastic. But in a world that is always switched on, it is increasingly hard to switch off — even for a hospital moment.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/this-is-what-its-like-to-eat-your-last-meal-and-think-about-never-waking-up-again-d4ef09d74c15

['Tim Denning']

2020-12-23 20:02:10.168000+00:00

['Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing']

Facebook Is Circling the Wagons, Not the Drain

Facebook Is Circling the Wagons, Not the Drain Is it possible that the platform of the future might actually be *gasp* useful? Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash Jared A. Brock’s popular story extolling Facebook’s demise presents a believable, well-documented case for the social media giant’s terminal condition. He almost had me convinced. He’s right about those under the age of 18. They aren’t scrolling or even trolling. Half of the millennials bailed on Facebook for social purposes years ago. Gen X and the Boomers are still there. But as Jared surmised, 2021 will see millions exit the newsfeeds, where people spent 2020 in fierce word battles with strangers over their far left or right views. What he’s missing is that it may only be the newsfeed these people are shunning. They may stay for the groups and possibly for business pages, their own as well as those of local businesses. Facebook is banking on the group dynamic carrying them forward. Think back over the past year’s commercials. They entertained viewers with kazoo groups, ex-pats in Korea, and rock buggy enthusiasts reminding us there’s a community or three for almost everyone. Hootsuite estimated that there were over 10 million groups in 2019, a number that is certain to have expanded with the pandemic. The financial sustainability of this approach remains to be seen, however, since group owners rarely spend to promote their groups and their discussions remain free of sponsored content. The first whiff of in-group advertising could send members scattering into the ether. Jared may also be overlooking a key demographic: rural Americans of all ages. Let’s break down the types of groups and pages that have the potential to keep Facebook relevant in the coming decade, including the one group category with the potential to generate almost painless revenue.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/facebook-is-circling-the-wagons-not-the-drain-ab4763a2d0c2

['Melinda Crow']

2020-12-03 14:02:21.476000+00:00

['Facebook', 'Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Ideas', 'Society']

3 Steps to Run Better and More Effective Meetings

Meetings take a big chunk of our time. Yet, unlike with personal productivity, little is done to optimise them fully. Why? For two reasons: We often are not in control of setting the meetings. Even if we are in control, no one taught us how to run valuable and energising meetings. According to Forbes, about 55 million meetings happen each day in the United States alone. And due to poor planning and poor execution, most of our get together feel like a waste of time: pointless distractions from the real work. With so much of our time sucked into daily meetings, not taking care of optimising them lead to the biggest productivity loss in our organisation. That’s what Mamie Kanfer Stewart, author of Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings, seeks to address in her book. According to her, great meetings have three stages that are well defined: before, during, and after the meeting. If you are a manager, an executive, or a worker who seeks to promote a better meetings culture, this three-stage process can help you fix poor meeting habits and get the most out of your teamwork.

https://medium.com/swlh/3-steps-to-run-better-and-more-effective-meetings-250a6cee76fb

['Younes Henni']

2020-12-04 12:58:15.671000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Teamwork', 'Productivity']

5 Quotes by Rick Riordan to Make You a Better Writer

Rick Riordan (born in 1964) is the hugely popular author of the Percy Jackson series and the Heroes of Olympus series. Here are five of his quotes about writing to inspire you! 1. There are days when I’ll write for 15 minutes and have to give up and move around, and I’ll write another paragraph and give up again. On other days I get intensely focused on the process, sit down at 8 A.M. and won’t get up until 8 P.M. Doesn’t it make you feel good to know someone as popular as Rick Riordan occasionally has a bad writing day where he has to give up after fifteen minutes or after a paragraph? We get these images in our heads that to be a bestselling author you have to write thousands and thousands of words every single day from 8am to 6pm, but you know what? Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact every successful writer has a different approach to their work, and every successful writer has had days when they can’t get through a single sentence and when they feel like frauds. Not every day of writing is going to go great, but the road to becoming a successful writer starts with showing up every day. See where the work takes you. Do your best. If you can only get down 500 good words for the day, that’s still a huge accomplishment. Don’t think it’s anything less. If you want to have the occasional inspired day where you work from 8am to 8pm like Riordan sometimes does? Then go for it! There’s no wrong way to write as long as you’re getting some new words down for the day. 2. For me, writing for kids is harder because they’re a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid’s not going to do that. They will drop the book. As a young adult author, I think about this all the time when I’m working on my latest novel, especially during the revision process. Although you should tell your story the way it needs to be told and not alter it necessarily to suit the needs of your audience, you should absolutely look for sections that might read slow and then ask yourself what needs to stay and what possibly can go. It’s absolutely true that adults will stick with you longer than kids, but nobody will stick with your book if they find it to be boring. There are a lot of books out there, and your reader will only stick around if they believe you know what you’re doing as the author and they believe you’ve got an engrossing story to tell that won’t let them down. You have to bring it every time, whether you’re writing for kids or adults. You need to grip your reader from the beginning and never let them go. 3. All of my characters tend to be montages of different people I’ve met: little bits and pieces of their personalities put together. I tend to create characters in this manner too, although sometimes I’ll create an original character out of thin air that really doesn’t feel like any person I’ve met before. Sometimes you want to challenge yourself to get creative with your characters, with how they see the world, with what they’re passionate about and want out of life. It gets dull to write the same kind of person over and over, and it can get tiresome to just think about people close to you in your life you can pick and choose details from. However, if you’re stuck on what the characters might be like in your latest story, it doesn’t hurt to think about people you’ve met in recent months and see what traits you might be able to use for a story. Sometimes you’ll bump into a person who already feels like a character in a story, so you kind of have to put them into a fictional world. But use your imagination, too. Don’t just transplant somebody into your story using every specific detail about their appearance and physicality and voice and way of speaking. Be like Riordan and use a montage of various people you’ve met in your latest character creation. That will probably be of more use to you in the long run. 4. I’ve always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write. Now let’s talk about writing series, which Riordan is of course used to, with his hugely successful Percy Jackson series, as well as some other series he’s penned in the last few years. The man pumps out one escapist book after another that kids and adults alike love to read, and one of the reasons they love to read Riordan’s work is that he often writes series. Instead of stand-alone novels, which can be satisfying in their own ways, series offer readers the opportunity to spend time with characters they love for long periods of time. Series, with occasional exceptions, are what truly sell in the world of books. And for any of you looking to find success, there are worse ways to do so than to write a series. Keep in mind you have to be smart in your approach. You need to find a story that could potentially be a series of three or more books, and you want that story to be so compelling you’ll have the motivation and desire and interest to stick with it and with those characters for many books. I’ve written two trilogies in my life, and both were absolute blasts to write. I was, however, perfectly happy to conclude the stories in the third books, and I haven’t ever attempted a series that went beyond book three. Having said that, Riordan is absolutely right in that the second book is often the hardest one to write. Book one is hard because you have to establish everybody and make the ending satisfying for the reader just in case they choose to not continue to another installment, but book two is extra hard because now you have to give the readers something they liked before but also take them someplace new. Even more difficult, you have to in many ways top what you did before and at the same time compel your reader by the end to go onto a third book, possibly a fourth or fifth book. When you’re writing a series, book one is important but in some ways book two is even more so because that’s really where you hook the reader to continue… or you don’t. 5. It’s always hard to wrap up a series. The longer I spend with the characters, the more they become like friends. As I said, I enjoyed writing two young adult trilogies, and I especially had fun with those third books knowing they were the definitive end. But it can be hard to reach the end, as Riordan says, because you’ve spent more time in that world and with those characters. When you write a single stand-alone novel, those characters live with you for a long time, but when you write a series, those characters are with you for years, sometimes decades. Many authors write in a series they love, and they never stop writing it until they die, only for someone else to pick up the mantle and continue writing more books in that world. I totally get that. If you love writing a series and after awhile those characters become real and almost family to you, and readers out there are loving the series and want you to produce more books, why not just keep going? If there are more stories to tell, and there’s not necessarily a clear endpoint, why not write thirty books in a series or more? That’s kind of the dream for me, really. Although I will always want to write the occasional stand-alone book, my dream is finding that perfect series I could write for decades that readers adore and want me to never stop. Whatever place you are in your writing life, don’t be afraid of writing a series if you have an amazing idea for something that could exist long beyond a single title. Remember that in the world of traditional publishing, it’s best you only write the first book and try to sell that, rather than write five books in a row and then try to sell the entire series. In the world of self-publishing? All bets are off. Write ten books in a series if you want, and if they become successful, keep going. Whatever you do, don’t write a series only for the money, in a genre you think is popular but you don’t care for that much. Your readers will sniff that out right away. Instead be passionate about what you write, whether it’s a stand-alone or a series, whether it’s a story written for kids or adults, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

https://medium.com/read-watch-write-repeat/5-quotes-by-rick-riordan-to-make-you-a-better-writer-ce41fb8c21de

['Brian Rowe']

2020-05-28 11:01:01.118000+00:00

['Business', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

An Experiment in Creating a Writing Income Stream on Amazon

I had an epiphany recently. My daughter told me that she’d read that short-reads do well on Amazon. Especially in Kindle Unlimited. And that made sense to me. Amazon is basically a giant search engine. In fact, I realized, writing for Kindle Unlimited is very similar to writing on Medium. Only there’s the whole search engine thing. People search for what they want to read on Amazon, where on Medium we basically read what we’re served up. The pay system is similar: a subscription-based model where writers are paid for page reads. Only, we can also sell our work directly, earning a royalty. Of course there are limitations. Amazon isn’t a blog. Medium is. But it’s possible to build a body of work there that helps with audience building and creates an income stream. And that writers have a little more control over than they do writing on Medium. I’m still a fan of Medium. I think it works well as a blog, so far. It’s volatile, though. Changeable in a way that’s disconcerting to me. Without much transparency, all of a sudden things are different and that affects my income in a way that is very frustrating. So, I have a theory that I’m excited to test. I think that expanded blog posts — 5000 words or less — posted on Amazon as ebooks could become a decent income stream. I’m going to experiment with that over the next year. Here are the parameters of my experiment so far: My goal is to publish at least one non-fiction short to Amazon every week. My books will be 5000 words or fewer. (Book isn’t really the right word.) I think that posts that are deep dives that answer a specific question will do best, so I’ll focus on that. I’m going to start with blog posts I’ve already written and work on expanding and deepening them. I plan to use SEO and try to write titles and use keywords that people will search for on Amazon and on Google. I’m going to focus on writing about writing and productivity at first, but I’m excited to expand beyond that eventually. I’m committing to trying this for a year. My first goal is to earn $100 per month within 90 days. I’m starting a focus group in a couple of weeks of Ninja Writers who interested in trying this experiment as well. If you want to be notified when that starts and how to join, click here. One thing we’ll be doing, very soon, is experimenting with challenges. I’ve been developing a system for planning, writing, editing, and publishing these shorts that can be repeated over and over. I’ll update you on how it’s going. The best way to keep in touch about it is to join my email list by clicking the link above.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/an-experiment-in-creating-a-writing-income-stream-on-amazon-b204a2311fe1

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-10-05 04:48:49.711000+00:00

['Amazon', 'Medium', 'Blogging', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

The Pre-Writing Work That Will Make Blogging So Much Easier

There are 13 days left before the writing part of the Blog-Your-Own-Book Challenge starts. I’m going to give you homework tonight that you might hate me for now, but you’ll really thank me for it later. First, a story. I’m a novelist. Before my first novel was published, I wrote three novels that were not. I was a straight-up pantser when I wrote those books. I was sure plotting would eat my story’s soul. That it would make it impossible for me to write my book the way I wanted to. After my first novel was published, my editor did something that changed the way I write forever. She asked me to send her a synopsis for a novel I hadn’t written yet. And she expected it by the end of the month. I had to learn to plot. Fast. I did and the result was a book that A) was the best thing I’d written up to that date and B) I was able to write in one quarter of the time I was used to taking. One quarter. I’ve plotted every book I’ve ever written since then. I’ve never looked back. The PSST Framework is Like Blog-Post Plotting All of that is to say that I use a framework for my blog posts for the same reason I plot my novels. It’s faster. It’s so much easier. And, it turns out, it’s actually pretty fun. I like thinking about my blog posts and imagining what they might be. PSST stands for Premise, Story, Subheads, and Take-away. I actually have a page in my Rocketbook that I used a Sharpie on to make a form that I literally fill out before I write each post. The PSST page in my Rocketbook. Photo: Author I use a Frixion pen to fill out the form for every post. A little water erases it, but leaves the Sharpie template. If I end up not actually writing my post that day or I want to create a bunch of PSST forms for posts, I just take a picture of them. Like the one above, which is for a post I didn’t actually write. Yet. The parts are so simple. Let me break it down for you. Premise Premise is just a ‘p’ for ‘working title’ — because I thought PSST Framework was cute. Just write what your post is about in a few words. Don’t be cute or clever. Think newspaper headline. You need to be able to look back on your post framework and know what you were wanting to talk about. This is a good exercise, too, because simple, clear, concise titles do well for blog posts. Story I firmly believe that every every blog post should start with a story. In the first ‘S’ box on my form, I write a sentence or two about which story I’ll tell in that particular post. I write enough to remind myself of the story I want to tell, but really only a few words. I don’t spend too much time here and I pretty much never second guess myself. If I get ready to write and a better story comes to me, I write that one instead. But most of the time, my instincts are pretty good. I bet yours are, too. We’re storytellers. Trust that. Subheads This is pretty much the body of your post in a series of sentences. Just think about what you want to say about your premise. It helps me to ask myself ‘what is the first thing some one needs to know’ and then I ask ‘and then what’ until I reach the end. Take-Away Your take-away is the way you end your post. What do you want your readers to take from it? What do you want them to do after they read your post? How do you want to change them? Your Homework Okay, so a few days ago I asked you to come up with your 31 posts for your BYOB Project. In the next 13 days, before August 1, I want you to use the PSST framework on each one of your 31 posts. It shouldn’t take you too long. It takes me less than ten minutes to use the framework on my own posts every day. I’m actually using Dabble to keep track of and plan my posts. I created a system there for managing all my PSST work on every post in one place. You can read about that here. You can also download a PSST Framework worksheet here.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/the-pre-writing-work-that-will-make-blogging-so-much-easier-e189c0688397

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-07-19 03:06:38.109000+00:00

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

It’s Not ‘Writer’s Block’ — It’s Emptiness.

The phrase ‘Writer’s Block’ looms over all of us who dare to pick up a pen or tap out sentences on our computers. It suggests that we, the writer, have hit an impasse — we’ve strained too hard, or squeezed out every inch of creativity we had, with nothing left. Well, I have a confession to make… I don’t think writer’s block exists. Recently, I read the fantastic Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. In it, she talks about so-called ‘writer’s block’, and describes it like this — “If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door. The word ‘block’ suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty…” In the classic The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron also describes it not as a ‘block’ but as a ‘drought’ — “In any creative life there are dry seasons. These droughts appear from nowhere and stretch to the horizon… our work feels mechanical, empty, forced.” There it is again: emptiness. It’s time to refuel. Acceptance first, action second The issue, much of the time, is that we are taught that all creative people — truly talented or capable writers — must always be writing. This ridiculous notion ensures we place pressure on ourselves to always be producing something (and normally not just ‘something’ but ‘something good’). The reality is, nobody is like this. Back to Lamott, and her wise words: “The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things… but if you accept the reality that you have been given — that you are not in a productive creative period — you free yourself to begin filling up again.” As creatives, there is the notion that the act of creation is essential to our being. That means demanding creativity at any and all moments from ourselves, in order to keep proving (to ourselves or others) that we are, in fact, the ‘real deal’. The notion of acceptance, as Lamott describes it, doesn’t generally factor in. Gentleness isn’t really a trait associated with ‘genius’ and if we’re honest, that is what many of us aspire to be. The entire concept of ‘genius’ comes round to hurt us, more than help. Freeing ourselves to simply be who we are — creatives, yes, but also many other things — acknowledges the fact that we will require more than our creativity to keep us going. We might need to nurture other parts of ourselves. Because while our creativity is important and is likely essential to many of us, it cannot be everything. Some people enjoy being workaholics, or are very dedicated to one aspect of their lives. But that doesn’t have to be you, and your creativity will likely benefit from a little diversity, a little gentleness, and a little openness. It starts with acceptance: you might not be in your most creative phase right now. That’s okay. Free yourself by acknowledging this honestly and openly. Give yourself the chance to address it. Read widely, and embrace your uniqueness Part of the problem with the idea of ‘writer’s block’ is that it suggests you have moved as far as you can, and now your path is being obstructed. If only you could jump the hurdle and continue moving forward in that unendingly direct and efficient forward momentum! It says we should be moving in that linear motion at all times. What does this even mean in the context of creativity? When we hear stories about famous writers who did supposedly work in this mythically perfect fashion, it can create a blank in us. For me, it was the story I heard about Tolkien. As a young woman who adored Lord of the Rings, I had heard that Tolkien simply sat down at his typewriter and churned out the epic, all of it coming clear and easy to his fingers. I doubt that this story is at all true. But it didn’t matter: I was influenced. If I can’t also sit down and execute a string of perfect sentences, plot and character emerging naturally at first attempt, then I must not be a ‘real’ writer. I must be a fraud. In Francine Prose’s essential Reading Like A Writer, she says: “Some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own — a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.” Creativity isn’t linear. It isn’t ‘efficient’. There is no one way to ‘do’ creativity. Obviously, there isn’t just one kind of writing. You could read any number of books, different and wonderful in equal measure. And you probably already do! Returning to the love of reading here is important — if we are empty, we need to refuel. We can refuel by finding inspiration. We can find inspiration through admiration. It might be time to try new books, to try new forms of writing, new writers, to listen to new voices. And Prose’s final sentiments are the ones I try to remind myself of: there are many, many rooms in the house of art. Perhaps my room will be a little different. Honing in on the one method to acquire the status of genius is so entirely problematic and narrow-minded as to disqualify all other attempts at creation, all of which are likely valid and helpful. Don’t try to get into Tolkien’s room. Go out and discover, then return to your unique place in the vast landscape of creativity. No perfectionism, just play In a period of emptiness, releasing perfectionism is going to be top priority in allowing you to find that unique place that is yours alone. Feeling empty, you are likely not going to do your absolute best work in these times. So, it’s time to just shake things loose, and see what happens. One reason we believe we get ‘blocked’ is due to perfectionism having the final word over everything we try to create. It helps to kill off any of those burgeoning ideas we might well have to struggle with, incubate, and toss around for a while, before they make any sense to us on the page. Back to Julia Cameron, who says — During a drought, the mere act of showing up on the page, like the act of walking through a tackless desert, requires one footfall after another to no apparent point… What do we do? We stumble on. Cameron of course pioneered the idea of the Morning Pages — three pages written first thing every morning, with no clear purpose or intention. Just whatever comes to mind. Personally, I’ve tried, and I find it incredibly wearying. Instead, I write down dreams and random things that come to me in the night, and then leave it. If it’s not three whole pages, that’s fine. But it still serves the purpose of starting me off — of getting my brain going, and accepting that I don’t need to be writing pure prize winning glory first thing in the morning. Or indeed any time of day. Cameron’s idea here is the important thing. We stumble on. Just get to the page, and try to see what happens. Even if it’s stream of consciousness, drivel, boring, or whatever other negative word your brain can conjure up. And for good measure — The time in the desert brings us clarity and charity. When you are in a drought, know that it is to a purpose… To write is to right things… A path will emerge. I like this a lot. To write is to right things — we have to work through it. Throw something onto the page and see what sticks. Forget about declaring anything your magnum opus. Jeff Vandermeer’s very colourful and fun Wonderbook adds — “Different forces are at work today with regard to the imagination. Modern ideals of functionality and the trend towards seamless design in our technology have taken the very human striving for perfection and given us the illusion of having attained it (which, ironically, seems very dehumanizing). In this environment, some writers second-guess their instincts and devalue the sense of play that infuses creative endeavours…” Personally, I’d argue this tendency goes back much further than the modern day and the impacts of technology — it’s imbedded in ancient Western aesthetic ideals, from the desire to create ‘perfect’ and eternal structures in cement, through to today. Vandermeer, however, rightly suggests play as the most important thing we can allow the mind to engage in, as it “leads to making the connections necessary to create narrative.” This is a rather prosaic way to put it, but it’s true. Without the chance for the brain to spark, where will we get our stories? We need the chance to form connections, to turn things over in a new light, and to let the mind work its own magic. That brings me to my last point… Rest is not optional Your brain needs a minute to just figure things out. Let the process happen. Give yourself time to recharge. If it’s refuelling that we need to do, it’s going to be hard to feel excited or inspired by anything we might engage with if we are, in fact, exhausted. We should all know by now what the benefits of a proper sleep and rest are. We need down time and actual sleep for cognition, concentration and productivity. So start with actual sleep. Are you getting enough of it? Is it of a good quality? Then move on to the next stage: creative rest. This means you are going to part your work in progress, any pressure being applied, and even your determination that things must be finished ASAP. It’s time to start crocheting, painting, drawing, dancing, reading, singing, cooking, and any other damn thing you need that is not doing your writing. Rest your brain for a while. Let your characters take care of themselves in the background. They’ll be fine. Do some combinatory play. In the words of Einstein, it is the “act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another”. Opening is what we want here — release, relaxation and ease. This is the antidote to stress, pressure, tightness, perfectionism, and emptiness. You’ll be on your way again, soon Finally, trust that you will refuel in time. Ask yourself: if I never published, or never had a reader, or never achieved what I wanted, would I have been happy, anyway, to be a writer? For me, the answer is yes. Even if nothing ever comes of it, I trust now that writing is a part of my life. Even if it all goes nowhere. I don’t care about that, I just love to write. That means I’ll find a way to keep on doing it, even if I’m empty, lost, whatever. I’ll take a break, I’ll ease back, I’ll refuel, and I will, eventually, come back to the page.

https://medium.com/swlh/its-not-writer-s-block-it-s-emptiness-fb3f7c2bcfe1

['Christina Hope']

2020-04-07 04:12:53.807000+00:00

['Creative Process', 'Mental Health', 'Creative Writing', 'Creativity', 'Writing']

When You Say “Hey Buddy, I Made It”, Make Sure Your Shadow Is There To Cheer With You

People keep telling me “It’s too difficult to be genuine”. I think I know the reasons. Life is harsh, which is pretty clear. The number of problems that we have to deal with keeps growing as we grow up. They are tuition fees, where to live, what to eat, how to support your family and beloved ones, how to have a car, how to get promoted, how to be a millionaire, and so on… People believe that they have to adjust, change themselves, and live their lives with different faces in order to properly communicate with other people, to cope with many aspects of life, and to seize gold opportunities. Then they lose their own selves in the end. For me, admitting that “I lost myself already” is positive to some extent because it means at least you know who you were, who you should be, and who the real you are. That is, you are aware that how much you have changed, no matter what it is, good or bad, there is a little regret in your words, because it is always better to be yourself in every decision to get what you want, and also great to have everything in your life built by your true self. Do you know what is worst? You let go of yourself to become another one. You were born unique. Are you something special or outstanding? It doesn’t matter, you are a unique one. Even though you resemble someone, your personality is similar to someone, or people cannot stop compare you with someone else, only you know what makes you different, and whether it is manifested or not depends on you. However, you choose to become another person, to make others believe that you are another one for what you’re chasing. And then you are them, they are you, nothing different. Do you know why it is bad? Because you chose to do it. Every night, you lie down exhaustedly because being another one is not easy and all the emotions that you express are not for you, which just makes you stuck. Personal desires and goals are the most precious things that need to be respected. It is wonderful if you never stop striving for those things in your life, even you have to trade your ego for it, as long as you’re happy with your choice. However, what will it be like if all your rush and your changes don’t pay off? You fail to gain what you want. Does that mean you lose everything including yourself? After all the failures, no one is beside you even your shadow. Many people out there are day in day out battling with their life, they wish they could be true to themselves once to make decisions, to follow what they’re destined to be. It’s all about your choice. Once you make your decision, you’ll find ways to make it work. I choose to be genuine in everything I do. I think my life would be miserable if I didn’t live authentically, and fight for my life philosophy. You only live once, why don’t you find ways to express the true you. I met people in my life accidentally. They just come and get to know me. They stay to be friends, and important ones of mine because of who I am. I have never chosen or forced anyone to stay with me or leave me, I just keep myself being sincere and genuine. That’s how I met great people and awesome friends. That is also how I write; I’d like to create content that expresses myself most honestly. Ideas come to me naturally, but sometimes I still get stuck in explaining myself and making them easy to understand. At that time, I would close my eyes, focus deeply, and feel what I truly think about the topic, I then carefully select words that best demonstrate me, although they’re not the finest. There are definitely disadvantages to a lifestyle that always stays true with words and actions (please don’t hurt other people by being yourself, it’s another realm), but I believe that what I will achieve will be great and worth it because when these contents touch the heart of readers, they will stay. They stay because they gradually get to know me, who has similarities and common feelings with them, and they’d like to know more and pick up more valuable experiences from me. Stay true to yourself, do things genuinely, make decisions, and live a life of who you are. This sounds dreamy but not delusional at all. Just think about it, if you can feel how great your life could be, why don’t give it a go. Choosing to be yourself or become another person is not an easy choice, do what you think is worth it.

https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/when-you-say-hey-buddy-i-made-it-make-sure-your-shadow-is-there-to-cheer-with-you-a5eadbf73a81

['Tung Vo']

2020-12-24 15:30:31.738000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Motivation', 'Mental Health', 'Inspiration']

Your Genes May Determine Your Covid-19 Risk

In the early throes of the coronavirus pandemic, two brothers in the Netherlands fell sick with Covid-19. They were young — 29 and 32 — and previously healthy. But both brothers developed severe symptoms and, at the end of March, were admitted to the intensive care unit. Within days, the older brother couldn’t breathe on his own and needed ventilation. His younger brother came down with an unusually high fever and eventually died from complications of the disease. A physician took note of the cases and contacted Alexander Hoischen, PhD, a geneticist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, who set out to investigate why these brothers were so unusually affected. Sure, it could have been a coincidence, but Hoischen thought it was also possible that the brothers shared a genetic trait that compromised their immune systems. “If you look at all the men hospitalized from Covid-19, it’s extremely unlikely that that happens to such young individuals, and then it happened twice in the same family,” Hoischen tells Elemental. “That was extremely remarkable to us.” Days later, a second pair of brothers landed in separate Dutch hospitals. Both men, just 21 and 23 years old, also had difficulty breathing and were put on ventilators. CT scans revealed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had ravaged the younger brother’s lungs. After more than a week in the hospital, both brothers were discharged. When Hoischen learned of the second pair of brothers, he was even more convinced that there was a genetic component to the young men’s severe disease. Over the course of the pandemic, it has become clear that certain factors — being elderly, male, obese, or a racial or ethnic minority — raise a person’s risk of developing severe Covid-19 and dying from it. Having an underlying chronic condition like diabetes, heart disease, or high blood pressure also significantly increases the likelihood of death. These factors can explain many cases of severe Covid-19 — but not all. What’s so puzzling about the coronavirus is the wide spectrum of symptoms associated with it. Why do some people get a mild cough or no symptoms at all, while others go into respiratory failure? Why do many feel better within days, while others struggle to recover for weeks or months after infection? And why does a healthy person in his 20s succumb to a disease that spares the vast majority of people his age? A person’s genetics could play a role. To learn more, scientists all over the world have been scanning huge genetic datasets, collecting DNA samples from Covid-19 patients, and analyzing their genomes in hopes of finding genetic signatures that explain why some people develop very serious symptoms. Academic researchers and biotech companies have come together to form the Covid Human Genetic Effort and the Covid-19 Host Genetics Initiative, international consortiums that are pooling together data from thousands of patients in dozens of countries. Meanwhile, consumer genetics companies 23andMe and Ancestry are scouring DNA data from millions of customers to look for genetic links. The results of these studies could help researchers develop new treatments or repurpose existing drugs to treat Covid-19 alongside other therapies. They could also lead to genetic tests that could predict someone’s Covid-19 risk. Genetic traits that predispose a person to more serious symptoms could even guide vaccine distribution. People with these traits could be prioritized for a vaccine, when one becomes available. “It’s not unprecedented for people to have genetic differences that make them more or less susceptible to infection,” Catherine Ball, PhD, chief scientific officer at Ancestry, tells Elemental. “There will most definitely be a genetic component associated with disease severity… However, the degree to which the impact is seen is yet to be determined.” Perhaps the most well-known genetic trait associated with immunity is the sickle cell trait, which is most common in people from Africa or those of African descent. Carriers of sickle cell disease — those who have one sickle cell gene and one normal gene — are protected from malaria infection. But people who inherit two copies of the sickled gene from each parent develop sickle cell disease, a chronic and painful blood condition. Another genetic trait with an effect on immunity is a specific mutation in the CCR5 gene. This subtle genetic change provides protection against HIV by blocking the virus from entering immune cells. Only about 1% of northern Europeans carry two copies of the mutation; one copy does not prevent infection. Researchers have also identified single-gene mutations, known as inborn errors of immunity, that weaken the immune system. While some undermine the body’s ability to fight all infections, others may affect a person’s risk to a specific pathogen, like influenza or Epstein-Barr virus. Now, early research is revealing that a subset of people with severe Covid-19 harbor similar single-gene mutations that seem to have a big impact on the course of their disease. These mutations are likely rare in the general population. For others, a combination of several genetic variants and other risk factors, like preexisting conditions, may explain some extreme cases. “There will most definitely be a genetic component associated with disease severity,” Joseph Petrosino, PhD, chair of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, tells Elemental. “However, the degree to which the impact is seen is yet to be determined.”

https://elemental.medium.com/genetics-could-explain-why-some-people-with-covid-19-get-sicker-than-others-d8b28aa915b1

['Emily Mullin']

2020-11-11 19:41:03.367000+00:00

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

Is It Worth to Invest In Mobile E-commerce Application: Benefits and Challenges

There is no denying this fact that mobile app development technologies have revolutionized the way we live and handle our business. With the evolving trends of mobile apps and their increasing popularity, developing an Ecommerce mobile app for your business has become an urgent need of an hour. With 90% of mobile time spending on mobile apps and using approx 30 mobile apps each month, it is safe to say that consumer behaviour has been drastically changed over the last few years. In addition, mobile apps have not just brought everything at your fingertips but also made it far easier with the integration of the Voice search commands. To buy anything right from shopping groceries to clothes, booking movies to flight tickets, all you need is the mobile app. In fact, with the rapidly increasing usage of such technologies to perform various tasks, it is predicted that mobile commerce will be accounting for 73% of the global eCommerce market share by 2021. However, if you are one of those who still believe in the fact that investing in an eCommerce mobile application is just a financial burden on your business, then you need to first understand the concept of eCommerce mobile application and its reasons why businesses need a commerce mobile app? Let’s get into the deep of this post: What is an Ecommerce Mobile Application? Ecommerce mobile application is a potential platform for all size businesses which enables them to promote, sell and buy products and allow them to get connected with the new customers. Since it adds a great convenience of shopping, therefore, more and more people are making online purchases via mobile apps. However before you make a decision to build an eCommerce mobile app, it is worth to understand the commonly used convincing models of eCommerce apps, as mentioned below: Business To Business (B2B) mobile eCommerce apps are aiming to sell products and services to enterprises. The interactions are carried out between two companies with the help of mobile apps and generating a great opportunity for you to earn potential income through B2B applications. For example: if you manufacture and want to promote your product or service range, then B2B apps can provide you with a platform to pitch the enterprises who are interested in your service. Moreover, the increasing demand for B2B apps is expected to drive the market to $140 billion by 2023 and 70% of all B2B queries are expected to be smartphones in 2020. Business To Customer (B2C) is one of the most popular types of app models as it helps in conducting interaction between certain companies (online stores like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart) and the end-customers who are willing to make final purchases. Moreover, most enterprises choose to go with this type of app model as it enables you to sell products and services directly to the end-customers, add a variety of products, and integrate limitless online stores on this portal. Stats and Facts to Understand the Importance of Having Ecommerce Mobile Application Before you decide which eCommerce mobile app model you need to proceed with, it is important to analyse the market to get the best ROI. In addition, being up-to-date with the current state of the e-commerce market is not just important for the online business owners, but also for the businesses which are still in-store based. Let’s have a look over the current state of eCommerce statistics to understand how the world’s commerce continues to move online at a steady rate. According to the report of Statista, the number of global digital buyers will jump from 1.32 billion to 2.14 Billion in 2021. According to the latest market report, the revenue of the eCommerce market is projected to reach $2,411,638m in 2020. And the number of users is expected to amount t0 4,658 million in the eCommerce market by 2024. With the impact of a number of factors including cheaper smartphones, internet subscription plans, increasing spending power and more in between 2020 to 2024, Turkey, Argentina, Indonesia and India are expected to be top countries for highest retail eCommerce sales with the CAGR forecast of 20.2%, 16.3%, 15.4% and 13.1% respectively. According to the survey report, 95% of retail sales will take place online by 2040 and generate great value to the retail economy. In The Nutshell: Hopefully, with these stats and facts you have understood the increasing demand for eCommerce mobile app development solutions in 2021. In addition, the above figures and survey reports are clearly portraying the declining popularity of bricks and mortar stores in contrast to online stores. So, now let’s assume that you are ready to hire a mobile app developer but still you might be scratching your head with the question of what you will get from the eCommerce Mobile application? Let’s find the answer below… What does Your Business Will get From the E-commerce Mobile App? If you look at the market trends of the last few years, you will find an undeniable fact that mobile applications have brought a great change in the market. Gone are those days when people went to the local shops with the list of items in hand as mobile eCommerce apps have taken over those local stores by simply adding the comfort of ordering the products with one tap. Apart from that, here are the reasons why you need to invest in eCommerce mobile app development? 1. Mobile Apps Are The Preferred Choice of Shopping There is no denying the fact that using mobile apps are far easier than browsing websites. Since everyone uses mobile phones these days which makes it very easy for the customers to access online shopping stores by simply downloading the eCommerce mobile app. In fact, 75% of the apps are used once after being downloaded. The reason being users don’t have to remember complicated URLs and log in every time they visit your site. Moreover, the speed of browsing applications is far faster than browsing eCommerce websites. The faster loading time of the apps always deliver a better user experience and leave your customer with a satisfying shopping experience. 2. 24*7 Accessibility Can Improve Customer Engagement With the increasing competition in every business domain, mobile applications can help you stay connected with your customers 24*7. And according to the studies, it is revealed that most consumers across the world spend 90% of their time on mobile phones and applications. So having your eCommerce mobile app will not just help you expand your business but also ensures your 24/7 availability to the customers which ultimately improves the engagement with your customers. 3. Increase the Transparency of the Services Gone are those days when websites were considered as the face of your brand. Nowadays, with the increasing usage of mobile applications, these apps have started to act as the presenting face of your business on the internet. The transparency provided by the eCommerce mobile application offers a great point of relief to the customers in many ways. 4. Great Source Of Income No matter what kind of mobile app model you choose to develop in 2021, mobile eCommerce apps can be a sole and additional source of income. Since eCommerce mobile applications provide a broad choice of products and services on a single tap, therefore customers find it far easier to make a purchase in your e-shop. 5. Boost Customer Loyalty When a customer visits a website, they usually check the business details of the company. However, when a customer downloads your app, it means that a customer is already interested in your products and services. So all you need is to adopt the right loyalty program to turn your visitor into a potential customer. 64% of retailers say that their loyalty/rewards program is the best way to connect with consumers. 6. Offering New Marketing Opportunities You may provide world-class services and product lines, but what if it has no buyers? That’s where a reputed mobile app development company can help you build a perfect estore that not only enables you to get connected with the new customers but also promotes your brand. In addition, careful monitoring and analyzing the traffic of your app, you can easily optimize the consumer’s behaviour and be able to determine when they are less likely to buy your products. 7. Building a Strong Relationship With Customers This is something that is quite challenging to achieve with the website. Sure, you can keep your customers updated with the via email about your new products or seasonal sales, but that this channel lacks to build a strong connection with the users as a mobile app can build with the push notifications. Push notifications are both instant to access and keep reminding your brand to the users. In addition, such alerts work as a personal communicator between your brand and customers that automatically seeks the attention of the shoppers when they receive an app alert at the right time. In the Nutshell: Undoubtedly, eCommerce mobile apps can help you expand your business to the next level and enable you to reach a wide range of customers. And there are various mobile app development companies that can help you build a highly functional and efficient app for your business. However, now the question is, what makes these apps highly useful, engaging and impactful? What are the Common Features Making Ecommerce Highly Demanding in 2021? The eCommerce apps like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay and more has become a big shark of the industry. It is not just because they provide great comfort of shopping the desired product through a smartphone, but also these apps integrated with the huge list of features that makes it a wonderful choice for the shopping in 2021. Let’s look over the must-have features in an eCommerce app: Shopping Cart , allows buyers to instantly purchase multiple items at the same time with just a single click without leaving the shopping page. All you need to ensure that your app is built beautifully and allow customers to access the features without facing any complexity. , allows buyers to instantly purchase multiple items at the same time with just a single click without leaving the shopping page. All you need to ensure that your app is built beautifully and allow customers to access the features without facing any complexity. Push Notifications are playing a crucial role in engaging your customers with app and encouraging them to shop at the right moment. By leveraging this feature, you can notify your users about the sale, new products, and offers to help them stay tuned with your app. are playing a crucial role in engaging your customers with app and encouraging them to shop at the right moment. By leveraging this feature, you can notify your users about the sale, new products, and offers to help them stay tuned with your app. Social integration of the eCommerce app will help customers to easily share the reviews and products between their social media accounts and increase your brand visibility on other platforms as well. of the eCommerce app will help customers to easily share the reviews and products between their social media accounts and increase your brand visibility on other platforms as well. Product Catalog can make a great difference in the app traffic. The high quality products and a huge choice of items can keep your users engaged with your app longer and may provide the best shopping experience. can make a great difference in the app traffic. The high quality products and a huge choice of items can keep your users engaged with your app longer and may provide the best shopping experience. Search Filters enable users to sort desired items in a quick time frame and allow users to buy what exactly they are looking for. enable users to sort desired items in a quick time frame and allow users to buy what exactly they are looking for. Order History can help users track what they have ordered in the past and allow them to reorder the products from history without browning the huge catalogue once again. can help users track what they have ordered in the past and allow them to reorder the products from history without browning the huge catalogue once again. Multiple Payment Options enable customers to make payment through credit card, debit card, PayPal, and many more. Some Additional Features of Ecommerce Mobile App - Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbots and Voice Assistants The emergence of AI chatbots and voice assistants can take your user experience to the next level by providing 24*7 customer support and privilege of using voice commands to search anything on the app. You can hire mobile app developers to build this feature to offer a highly interactive guide to the users while they are purchasing any product online. - Emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) What exactly the product will look on you after purchase is the biggest concern of the online buyers. But with the integration of the AR technology, you can virtually try products like jewellery, wallpapers, eyewear, beauty products and more. This technology actually creates 3D rendered images of the different products to give you real-life shopping experience. In case you are finding it complicated to understand, then it is better to leave the task with the software development company. - 24 Hour Delivery and Return Policy This is where you can win the trust of the buyers by ensuring them to get full return of the money if they didn’t like the product. With easy order replacing, instant payment making, hassle-free order returns can give surety to the users to buy any product from your app fearlessly. How Much It Cost to Develop an Ecommerce Mobile Application in 2021? Now the last point, how much does it cost to develop an eCommerce mobile app? I’m sure, after determining all the market stats, features and benefits of using an eCommerce mobile app, you are curious to know the cost of app development. Well, there is no straightforward answer to this question but on an average, the starting price of developing a feature-rich mobile commerce app can be between $15,000 to $25,000 and it can go to any expensive price depending upon your app development needs, features, the complexity of the app, choice of a mobile app development team, their location and choice of the operating platform. Conclusion If you are a retailer and still working with the physical retail shop and are thinking of migrating to a digital platform, then an eCommerce mobile app can be your ultimate solution to overcome the market challenges. Your presence on mobile apps will not only help you get connected with the users instantly but also allow you to identify new business opportunities and assist in expanding your business to the next level. I have concluded everything in this blog that helps you understand why you need an eCommerce mobile app and what features can make it successful and how much does it cost you to develop. Still, if you are in a doubt, then it is worth hiring a mobile app development company to discuss your business needs in person.

https://medium.com/quick-code/is-it-worth-to-invest-in-mobile-e-commerce-application-benefits-and-challenges-3bc2d869864e

['Sophia Martin']

2020-11-20 10:46:05.505000+00:00

['Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'Mobile Apps', 'Ecommerce', 'Startup']

Let go of these things for a happier 2021

by: E.B. Johnson We are moving into another year, and with that comes the expectation of both change and improvement. That requires that we take some action, though, and make a mindful and concentrated effort to improve the things that held us back in 2020. Are you ready to make 2021 better than the last? Even as chaos continues to swirl, you can find happiness. You’re going to have to let go of some bad habits first, though, and commit to your right to thrive. We can’t hold on if we want to move on. This year was one that was filled with tension, chaos, and pain. As soon as we seemed to be on an upward trajectory, life often hurled us back down again. It was a challenging year and one that asked us to dig deep and re-discover the best of ourselves. Though we grew through this year, we look to the future with the expectation of smoother sailing and brighter shores. To get there, though, we need to let go of the negativity we adopted this year. We can’t hold on to 2020 if we want the year ahead to be better. We need to let go of our fear and stop following bad friends and toxic partners to the edge of our sanity and happiness. All of us were pushed to the brink this year. It’s time to learn that there’s no time like the present to make the most of what we have and what we want. Let go of the pain and let go of the hesitation. It’s time to leap in the name of a future which is authentically yours. The things you need to let go of in 2021. We can’t go into 2021 holding on to all the negativity that’s been left in our hearts this year. It’s time for us to take some personal responsibility and build lives that are authentic and sustainable, but that’s first going to require us to let go of the toxic habits that held us down in 2020. Bad friendships Did you waste a lot of time this year feeding into bad friendships? Consider your closest confidantes. When things went wrong this year, who was there for you? Who expected you to be there for them? Did you spend a lot of time on the phone, listening to everyone else’s problems (while no one asked you about your own)? This new year is a great time to stop feeding friendships that don’t feed your soul Heartless employers We have all spent so much of our lives contributing to the wealth of heartless employers that continue to hurt us and the planet. It’s time for us to start making plans which allow us to each create our own wealth in 2021. Want to start a business? Have a great idea for an app? It’s time to go for it. Likewise, look for better ways to meet your needs by using brands which are kinder to the environment and more equitable with their employees. Shop local and black-made. Skip out on the big names (except where necessary). Clout chasing Our society has become one that is obsessed with clout. It’s arguable that we’ve undone the very fabric of our own society, chasing “likes” and edgy posts on social media. In 2021, we need to focus on putting down the phone. We need to stop chasing likes on social media. It’s time to spend more time in the real world, and it’s time to fall in love with the real you (or become someone you can fall in love with). Pressing refresh With the COVID-19 pandemic and the turbulence of the American political cycle, this year had us glued to the news like never before. That’s not always a good thing, though. For the new year, we need to put the endless news cycles, political scandals, and the force-fed tickers on pause. They’re putting you on edge and they are detaching you from your humanity. Instead of feeding their fear, we have to get our hands dirty, get involved with our local communities, and get things fixed ourselves. Toxic relationships Toxic relationships have no place in our futures; especially not if we intend on being happy, fulfilled, and whole. No matter who the toxic person in your life might be, you need to shed them from your life if you truly intend on building a life that is centered around your joy. A life lived on our own terms is a powerful thing, and it can be ours in 2921. We first have to make room for fulfilling relationships and experiences, though. Fear following This year was a scary one. From lockdowns to full-on riots, change was the theme of the year, and in that change was a lot of soul-shattering fear. While the year ahead doesn’t necessarily look more peaceful, we still have to find ways to rid ourselves of our fear. This fear holds us back, keeps us small, and prevents us from standing up for the future we’re trying to build. Improving our lives requires that we stop letting fear be the primary motivation and dictator of your life. Self-loathing In the western world, we’re generally taught that we’re never quite good enough. We’re taught to loathe ourselves, and that gets reinforced through marketing messages and negative internal narratives that prevent us from building fulfilling lives. Holding on to all this self-loathing is getting us nowhere but broke and unhappy. It’s time to love who we are and embrace our right to a happier, more self-determined 2021. How to do it. Telling yourself you’ll get rid of these negative factors is one thing, doing it is another. Our lives don’t change if we don’t take action. If you’re really serious about making next year better than the last, then reconnect with your sense of self and commit to living in line with every aspect of your truth. 1. Enhance your sense of self We all got a little lost this year, and we all found ourselves questioning who we are and what we want. If we had time for anything, it was reflection — and that’s a powerful thing at any stage in life. As the new year looms ahead, it looks like we’re going to get even more time to sit and think about who we really are. Now is the time to enhance your sense of self and get back to the core of your future aims and joy. Reconnect with who you are on both a physical and emotional level. Who are you to the world? Who do you consider yourself to be right now in this moment? While we are always changing, we should also be seeking to become a better version of ourselves. Who do you want to be in 10 or 20 years? How do you want to feel about yourself? Rebuild your self-confidence. You have to believe in yourself if you’re going to make changes in your life, and you have to believe in your right to thrive. Fall in love with whom you are and commit to creating a life that is both fulfilling and rewarding in whatever arena you decide to build it in. The more you believe in yourself, the easier it will become to adapt to the challenges life throws your way. The more you believe in yourself, the easier it will be to embrace change. 2. Figure out your authenticity Authenticity is everything when it comes to building a life that is both joyful and fulfilling. We can find our happiness in someone else’s definition of what success looks like. We alone know what it takes to fill that sense of longing within us. We know what our happiness looks like, and we know what it wears. Instead of chasing everyone else’s expectations of us, we need to use 2021 to pursue our own hopes of life. Who do you want to be? When you look back over your life, how do you want to remember yourself and the life you built? By the time it comes to the final finish line, you will be the only one standing there looking back over everything that was and the decisions that you made. Figure out who you are and stand beside that person proudly in the new year. One of the most important lessons we could walk away with after 2020 it is that life can change in an instant. Stop waiting for someone else’s happiness and get serious about living in line with your own. Pinpoint your morals, your values, and everything that you want your life and your relationships to be. The time for the real you to thrive is now. 3. Build a support system As humans, we are social creatures and we thrive on the deep and lasting connections which we make with others. It means a lot to have someone to talk to; someone who makes you laugh, or is able to improve your mood or belief in self. Support systems matter, and they can be invaluable when it comes to improving our lives throughout 2021. Cultivate more loving, supportive friendships for yourself. Create a network of strong, confident individuals that you can rely on for trustworthy advice and compassionate care when things get challenging. Look for people who want the best for you and look for those who see you for who you really are. Your life is within the realm of your control, and it comes with a limited amount of space in it. Rather that filling that space with people who hurt you and take advantage, fill that space with light and love. Put up walls between the toxic and build bridges between those people with whom you really connect on deeper, truly meaningful levels. 4. Invest in yourself There will be a lot of people reading this who think things to themselves like, “How could I possibly create something that’s mine? How could I possibly learn to change my own life?” It all comes down to embracing your humanity and the core of what you are. We are all capable of learning, and we all have talents to offer the world. We have to invest in ourselves to learn and uncover these skills, though. This year, make an investment in bettering yourself across the board. Boost your education through online classes. Find something that interests you and get a certification in it. Enhance your knowledge and unlock new avenues of opportunity for yourself. Re-engage with your passions. Find new hobbies that allow you to connect with your joy. Look for new interests which drive you to discover more of the world and more of yourself. The more you invest in yourself, the more the world will want to invest in you. Once you know what you are worth, there’s almost no right door that won’t open to you. 5. Stop settling for unhappiness At some point, we have to make the decision to create the life we want. We can keep listening to all the surrounding negativity, or we can decide to take action and go for it. Are you ready to stop settling for unhappiness? Are you ready to manifest the future that was always yours to begin with? The new year is a clean slate, and what better time could there be to seek self-determination? Understand that life doesn’t always go the way you want it to. That doesn’t mean you can’t find happiness in it. Commit to seeing the silver lining in life. Commit to finding your joy even in the midst of uncertainty and change. This year taught us a lot of lessons, but it certainly taught us the beauty in the simple moments. You can keep fighting against the chaos of the world, or you can accept it and incorporate it into your plan. How are you going to change the way you see things in 2021? Our emotions are within our control. We choose how we want to respond and how we want to react to any given situation. Are you going to remain afraid and unsettled? Or are you going to reach for your joy no matter what comes next? The choice is yours and yours alone. Putting it all together… We are coming to the end of another year and looking ahead (perhaps more than usual) to the start of a new year. 2021 seems filled with possibility, and it is. In order to take advantage of those opportunities, though, we’re going to have to shed the negative things that held us back in 2020 and get committed to making a life we value and adore. Enhance your sense of self and find effective ways to rebuild your self-esteem. The more you believe in yourself, the easier it will be to stand up for your boundaries and the things you want in this life. Figure out your authenticity and build a life that aligns with your values and your morals. Build a support system you can rely on and fill it with people you can trust; people who want the best of you and who see the best in you. Invest in yourself. Want to start a business or take charge of your life? Learn how to do it and make a bet on your ability to thrive. Stop settling for unhappiness and commit to making 2021 a better year than 2020 ever was.

https://medium.com/lady-vivra/let-go-these-things-2021-4cab7c1351c2

['E.B. Johnson']

2020-12-30 08:04:48.040000+00:00

['Nonfiction', 'Psychology', 'Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Self']

Not Everyone Will like Your Writing

Not Everyone Will like Your Writing And some of your Medium stories will flop. And some people will make more money than you. And life is unfair. Learn to live with it. I’ve been writing on Medium for 8 months, and I feel like it’s a privilege to have gained an audience, and an honor to be able to say I have regular readers. I’m grateful for every view, for every clap, but whenever I see the same readers popping up on my notifications over and over again, I’m especially touched. That said, I know not everyone likes my stories, and I know not every one of my stories is a hit. Sometimes, readers jump to the response section to tell me how much they think I suck, and sometimes, my stories will “die” at 25 claps. Yes, I have over three thousand followers, I regularly contribute to one of Medium’s largest publications, I get curated fairly often (a little over half of my stories published in May were curated), but some of my stories still struggle to reach 10 fans. Let’s break down these two “issues,” shall we? The impossibility of being universally liked is a lesson from kindergarten. From the moment that first kid pushes you on the playground, or that clique won’t let you be a part of their little gang, or that girl won’t let you sit next to her during recess, you learn: not everyone will like you. And if your teacher is a good teacher, and your parents are good parents, they will teach you that not everyone has to like you, and you have to learn to live with it. (These days, I think they just put the kids together and force them to get along, but in my time, we were still allowed to have personal preferences as to whom we considered our friends, and were taught to stand up to bullies ourselves, but I digress.) The fact is that not even Harry Potter is universally liked (let’s give Jesus a break), so how can I expect to be? That’s why it doesn’t bother me when I receive comments from people who dislike my writing. If nothing else, it helps me with that whole thick skin situation everyone keeps saying writers should have. Moving on. When I joined the Medium Partner Program, my rationale was: “let’s see if I can make $50 bucks in a month. And if it doesn’t pay off in a month or two, I’ll move on to the next thing.” I started posting almost every day (20 stories in the first month), and I was very fortunate to have one of them go viral, with 60K views and over one thousand fans up until today. Let’s just say I got considerably more than “just $50 bucks” that first month, and I haven’t yet found a reason to quit Medium. I may not have found a reason to quit the platform, but I have had plenty of reasons to worry about Medium’s future as a whole, and my future as a small part of its ecosystem. I’ve gone two weeks without having a single story curated, despite posting something new every day. I’ve watched my daily views drop from 2.5K to 1.5K and wondered how they could continue to go down despite the fact that I kept posting daily, and if that meant it was the end for me. After having a story go viral and reach over one thousand fans (see above), I had to see many stories flop, including one that flopped so hard it got exactly ONE fan: To this day, I have 56 stories with less than 10 fans, and 47 stories with over 100 fans. When I look at stories with over 200 fans, that number drops to 26. I’ve been posting on Medium for 8 months, I wrote over 200 stories in that time, and only 26 of them have 200 fans or more. All other stories are somewhere in between, but more than half of my stories have less than 50 fans. More than half. That to me means only one thing: I can’t count on success. All I can do is try my best, knowing full well I’ll have to see a lot of stories flop so that a few can succeed. It’s like they say in economics, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Until April, my curation rate had been at around 30%. In April, I saw that number drop to 26% — that was when I had my 2 week curation “drought.” I could have raged against the algorithm, against the curators, against other writers who were posting viral content that was overshadowing mine. I could have complained I was being censored. I could be jealous of how much other writers were making and suggested Medium capped earnings at some arbitrary number I pulled out of a hat. I didn’t do any of that. It turns out I understand the kindergarten lesson that not everyone has to like me and what I do. It turns out seeing other writers make more money than I make inspires me to try to get there someday. I don’t believe they need to fail, or be capped, so that I can succeed. It turns out I understand the “past performance is no guarantee of future results” principle, and that every day on Medium is a new day. A new day to write and share stories about things that matter to me, to earn what’s mine, day after day, not to feel entitled to some result or another just because. Instead of raging against the platform, I went back to the drawing board. I asked myself, “what am I doing wrong? How can I do better?” My strategy had always been to write honestly about what I care about, and that hadn’t changed. I realized, however, that I had been trying to post too often, which sometimes caused my writing to feel more forced than natural. I actually had better results when I posted less, which meant I should write only when I felt I was most inspired. In May, the adjustments I made to my writing process paid off, and my curation rate shot up to 51%. As for earnings, I earned in May only U$100 less than in April. Considering May was a 4 week pay period and April had been a 5 week pay period, I saw that as a huge victory for me. The answer to getting distributed and to earn, it turned out, was in my hands all along. I’m very happy with what I have accomplished on Medium, and I don’t plan to stop posting here anytime soon, but I’m ready to leave if it ever becomes unsustainable, or not worth my time. As I have adapted to Medium before, I’m ready to adapt out of Medium if necessary. I see success on Medium as something I have to earn every day, with every new story, not as something I get comfortable with and take as a given. I’ve said it three times by now, but I’ll say it one more time, louder for those sitting in the back: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Every time I publish a story, I have high hopes for how far it might go, but I don’t know how far it will go. I can’t know. All I can do is hope. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on Medium is that there’s no use in raging against the system. Every second I spend angry that someone else’s garbage post was curated while one of my babies is being ignored is one second I’m not using to write the next post that might go viral. Every time I think it’s unfair that another writer is making more money than I’m making, I’m jeopardizing my own future earnings. If I ever get to the same level, will I still cry “unfair?” I don’t think so. I’d rather put my head down and work than try to frame everything that’s not going my way as “unfair.” And I strongly advise you to do the same.

https://medium.com/sunday-morning-talks/not-everyone-will-like-your-writing-3226f6fcebc

['Tesia Blake']

2019-06-13 12:55:41.296000+00:00

['Writing', 'Medium', 'Productivity', 'Creativity']

Is Technology Neutral?

Technology is all around us. It is at once so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, and in other areas so remarkable as to grab the world’s attention. From ceramic cups to nuclear weapons; from the springs in your mattress to immersive virtual worlds; from paper and pencils to intelligent algorithms—technology runs the gamut from background noise to something like magic. But even the background technologies were once like magic. Cups and springs might not make for much conversation today, but life would be profoundly different were they were never invented. Perhaps AI, virtual reality, and other developing technologies will follow a similar path. One philosophical conundrum at the heart of these developments is the question of moral value: Can we say that a technology is good or bad, or are they neutral? Are our values embedded in the technologies we build or are they valueless until someone decides what to do with them? It might seem trivial, but the answer to the question will impact how we regulate technology and who is responsible for the consequences of how it’s used. As we blaze forward into the realms of intelligent computers, brain interfaces, and biohacking, the significance of these moral questions grows. Let’s take a look at the arguments. Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People A significant argument in favour of technologies being neutral is the Value Neutrality Thesis—no moral valence can be ascribed to a technology, it is only when someone uses that technology that any value can be found. Here are the main points: 1. Values Are Hard to Detect Joseph Pitt, in his article “Guns Don’t Kill, People Kill,” argues that for technologies to contain or embody values, those values should be identifiable, but this is rarely the case. He uses the example of a university football stadium. It might be a source of prestige or pride, a symbol of everything good about the university, it might represent the dreams and aspirations of the students. But all of those values are values of the people, not the stadium itself. “They may see the stadium as symbolizing their own values, but that doesn’t mean the values are in the stadium.” Consider how an alien would look at a knife they found floating in space—would they identify the same values as us? Would they find any values at all? How should they even begin to look for them? How about a member of a small tribe in the Amazon jungle who comes across an iPad—what would they see in it? Would they ascribe the same value to it as a programmer in silicon valley? 2. Different People, Different Values Tools only have value when they are possessed by a creature with values, and so are dependant on the value system of that individual. In this system, if the person or context changes, the values also change. If a student who plays football at the stadium suffers a devastating leg injury which ruins their future prospects, the value they ascribe to the stadium could take a dark turn, despite no physical alteration to the stadium or any change in the values of other students. When a new technology is introduced to a population, though it might have been developed for a specific purpose, its value is dependant on the function and purpose that each individual discovers. If the value of our tools is dependant on the system they’re in and the minds which interpret them, how can we say the tools have any values embedded in them? Shouldn’t those values remain consistent? 3. Value Depends on Use It is the outcomes, consequences, and results of our actions that are open to valuation, not the tools which we might rely on. A knife is just a knife, a neutral object, it is not until someone uses it to peel a fruit or stab someone in the back that any moral value can be applied. This argument focuses on the perspective of the end-users. Their desires, needs, and goals determine how the tech is used, which determines its value. This perspective also suggests the end-users are responsible for the ethical use of technology. We can’t blame guns for shooting people, even if they make it easier. Guns are neutral, people aren’t. To summarise: Technology is a tool — we use tools, tools don’t use us. We ascribe our own meaning to technologies, irrespective of the reasons for their existence. We are in control, we are free to use our tools how we want to, it is our choice. And for those who make poor choices, they are responsible for their actions. Now the counter-argument: When All You Have Is A Hammer, Everything Looks like A Nail “I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” — Abraham Kaplan Arguing against the value neutrality thesis are those who believe that our values and assumptions are baked into everything we design and build. Rather than focusing on the freedom people have in how they interpret and use the tools, this perspective looks more closely at the designers and the designs, how the features of those designs influence people, and why our ability to identify the values isn’t necessary. Here are the arguments: 1. Technology is Intentional Unlike the somewhat haphazard selection processes seen in evolution, technology is willingly and consciously fashioned. It is conceptualised and considered before ever becoming a thing. Each new creation is built to satisfy a need, fulfil a purpose, to be useful. It is our values which determine the technology — and the values the designers expect are held by their future users. While the users’ actual values will determine how the tech is used, the fact the technology only exists because of our values makes them inseparable. 2. Decisions Reveal Values Every decision and selection process will reveal our values. Whenever we pick a default option or display some information over other information, we have made a value judgement. It is impossible to display everything equally, therefore there is always bias (what does this say about how I ordered this article?). Making the buy now button more predominant, writing the terms and conditions in obtuse language, using red over blue in your brand identity, are all decisions that reflect values. But just because they reflect values, doesn’t mean people will identify or share those values. 3. Not All Values Are Seen Sometimes the values are very explicit — such as labelling a product as “environmentally friendly” or “parental advisory recommended.” Whether you use the passcode feature on your phone, it is clearly designed for security. Why your remote control has an EPG button might be lost on you, but there’s a reason it’s there, and the reason reflects the values of the designers (or what the designer expects are the values of the users). Whether people can identify the values or not, doesn’t mean the values aren’t there. Consider for a moment the reverse of an alien finding a knife out in space — imagine that we found an alien device floating in space, something that was clearly designed and not random space debris resulting from natural processes. Beyond wanting to know who built it, surely we would be very interested in what it is and what it’s for. While it will be an incredibly difficult task to find the purpose given we can’t comprehend the mind that designed them, the technology must have been designed for a reason, and that reason would suggest values. 4. Limited Range of Use Technology is directional — it adds choices or improves processes which point in a certain direction. There might be many different uses for guns — we could use them as paperweights or doorstops — but most of us know this is not the reason we have them. Guns were developed for a specific purpose, and we generally use them in accordance with that. The range of possible uses is not infinite — we can’t use one to drive down the road or watch a movie. Other uses are possible though not ideal — perhaps you can cut an onion but a knife would be better. The limited range of ideal uses suggests where the inventor’s values lie — a gun is great at killing or putting holes in things. If you need to puncture something from a distance, you pick the gun before you pick the doorstop — unless your doorstop is a gun. 5. Eventually Frames Reality “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan The longer a technology has been around, and the more widespread it is, the less it will be thought about and the more likely it will blend into the background, to become the norm we refer to when we talk about how things are. When we get too used to how things are, it takes greater effort to see how things could be different. When we get too used to what something does, it takes a more creative mind to see it in any other way. Here are two lines of research relevant to this argument: Functional fixedness, which highlights the struggle of finding uses for objects outside of the way they’re traditionally used. And the Einstellung effect, which describes the process of learning how to solve a problem using one method, but then failing to realise when a better method is available. In each case, we get stuck in a particular thinking pattern or frame of mind. We go through the effort of learning, and then what we learned becomes automatic and rigid. This is not to say we cannot think creatively and break free from those patterns, but as tools and their uses become more common and familiar, it gets more difficult to see them any differently. To summarise: Technologies are developed by people for people. Our values determine what is created and how it is used, and its use is at least influenced by its design, if not fully dependant on it. While people can use tech creatively beyond its original purpose, there is a narrow band of possible functions which suggests the original purpose and therefore the values. As time passes and familiarity grows, the technology and it’s function become so ingrained to be barely thought about, let alone questioned. The Burden of Responsibility We are not helpless slaves to technology, we are decision-makers and we value our freedom of choice. However, people often make poor decisions while being unaware of what factors influence them. While each individual can and does decide how they want to use certain technologies, on a collective level technology nudges us in directions that are not value-neutral. If we call technologies neutral, we are relinquishing the creators of any blame in how those technologies alter the world. But then we need to ask if any company or individual should be praised for their inventions. How could designers be worthy of praise but not of guilt? And if we are to say that they are free of both, it is worth asking what role they have. In 1986, Robert J. Welchel wrote in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine: “This moral neutrality is based upon viewing technology purely as a means (providing tools for society to use) with the ends (the actual usage of technology) lying beyond and outside the realm of engineering; this position also assumes that available means have no causal influence on the ends chosen. If technology truly is only a means, then engineering is a second-class profession since we are the mere pawns of the real power brokers. We buy our innocence at a tremendous cost: To be innocent, we must be powerless.” Deciding that creators are culpable and that technologies are embedded with values doesn’t make it any easier to figure out what technologies embody good values. For that we have to collectively agree on what values are good and set a standard for what we consider a violation of those values, then we can decide how to respond to those violations. A significant roadblock here is our inability to predict the future. If no designer, inventor, or company is capable of predicting all of the future benefits and costs of what they build, how can they possibly ensure they embed good values? But this is an old philosophical problem — if we can never predict all the consequences of our actions, how can we tell the good from the bad in any domain? This problem does not stop us from making ethical choices in other areas of life, why should it stop us here? We must find the best explanations or predictions we can, using the information we have. If we pay attention to how different technologies progress, and particularly to their consequences, we can learn from our mistakes and make better decisions. Our current way of life is so closely intertwined with technology they could be considered one and the same. It seems absurd to think we can go backwards and untangle much of it, but we can be more careful in how we weave future technologies into our lives. This is important, as future technologies are likely much more powerful and consequential than today’s. When intelligent machines make their own ethical choices, it will make no sense to say that technology is neutral, and it will make it tremendously important to align our values.

https://medium.com/understanding-us/is-technology-neutral-39d5b445b315

['Sam Brinson']

2020-11-17 16:01:15.616000+00:00

['Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Society', 'Future', 'Philosophy']

Unveiling The Secrets of Navratri

Spirituality | Religion | Inspiration | Wellness Unveiling The Secrets of Navratri The story behind the 9 pious nights Credits — Image from iPhone Geetika Sethi The Navratri Special – Part 1 Do you wish to Fast this Navratri and give yourself the gift of Purification; purification of your Body, Mind and Soul? Our deep-rooted culture has a solid underlying logic behind every Indian festival and other than just having fun while celebrating them, there are many scientific reasons as to why that is done during certain times of the year. Just like how the Navratri – which means ‘nine nights’ – has many stories in our scriptures explaining why it is celebrated twice a year along with a proven scientific reason too. As per Hindu scriptures, the Navratri marks the beginning of the two seasons – Summer and Winter and those 9 nights are the time for the seasonal change. Since this seasonal change is natural, our age-old Ayurvedic and Naturopathic systems of healing health state that eating foods like garlic, onion, meat, grains and eggs etc. continuously at all times make us prone to catching all kinds of energies. Energies that are not good, not just from the surroundings but even by absorbing those very energies that were present in what we ate. They say that at times, especially during season change since our body’s immunities always lie low and when we eat high-energy foods, we make ourselves susceptible to catching seasonal diseases. So how do we treat this problem? Did you know that everybody – every single person – requires purification a minimum of twice a year to maintain a perfectly healthy body balance. So I feel that because of this concept, came up the Navratri fasting so that we could cleanse our systems. Credits — Credits — Image from iPhone Geetika Sethi The Navratri Special – Part 2 So basically, the scientific logic behind these fasts and the main reason is to enable the person to benefit from Detoxification, Mindfulness and Self Control. During the Detoxification phase as we give up certain foods for 9 days, our bodies start to detoxify. We cleanse our system and lighten ourselves by eating easily digestible foods like fruits which clean our digestive system and vegetables that build it. In this way, we prepare our digestive and immune system for the upcoming season. So those who fast are doing the perfect thing by taking care of themselves as it’s only during fasting that our internal organs get rest and thus start to heal and recover from their daily work stress. But for those who can’t fast, do yourself a favour by trying to not eat any heavy foods which you feel slow your digestion or cause you to discomfort like meat, eggs, chicken, spices, grains etc for these 9 days to give your system a part-time break. Now coming to Mindfulness, which is a wonderful thing and enables you to think clearly while putting your mind at ease. Fasting twice a year lightens your entire system, keeps your mind fresh and doesn’t allow you to develop brain fog. This happens because during fasting when your digestive system is at rest, your mind works at a faster speed from the fresh and positive energies it gets from all your intakes – physical, mental as well as spiritual – giving you clarity of thought. Lastly, it’s all about Self-Control which is indeed the gut of fasting. This is the toughest because when you try to stop yourself from eating what you are accustomed to, you are trying to break an ongoing pattern that you’ve been following all through. And if you can succeed at this, you can succeed anyhow because by doing this you will develop an amazing discipline that leads to strengthening your will power and building solid self-control, making you the true ruler of your mind. So this Navratri, let’s all do this Purification Feasting Fast. Credits — Credits — Image from iPhone Geetika Sethi The Navratri Special — Part3 Do you wish to Celebrate the upcoming pious days of Navratri eating the yummiest foods and feasting to your fullest? Do you wish to feel fit by cleansing your body and mind? Are you ready to shed your weight – off your mind and body? Well, you got confused and read the last one again, thinking you read it wrong? Not to worry, as you didn’t read it incorrectly and nor did I write it that way because ….. It’s a special healthy healing food plan that I have to offer which despite being really tasty will make you shed kilos, drop inches as well keep you calm and refreshed. So if you want to Heal your Body, Mind and Soul this Navratri, follow My F.A.N Clan’s special plan. Credits — Image from iPhone Geetika Sethi Feasting Fast — 6 day Navratri Plan Day 1 Waking Up — Fresh Tender Coconut B’fast — Fox Nut Milk Pudding with dates Snack — Fresh Orange Juice Lunch — Sago Rice Pilaf + Buttermilk Snack — Sweet Potato Salad Dinner — 2 Buckwheat Flour Roti+ Bottle gourd Before Bed — Milk with Organic Jaggery Powder+ Turmeric

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/unveiling-the-secrets-of-navratri-f5c8a3f406a0

['Geetika Sethi']

2020-10-17 11:35:20.279000+00:00

['Spirituality', 'Wellness', 'Writing', 'Religion', 'Health']