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Mental Note Vol. 24 | Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!
We just wanted everyone to know how much we appreciate everyone and how thankful we are for all our readers and writers here. We wouldn’t be anywhere without you, so thank you all for bringing informative, vulnerable, and important pieces that destigmatize mental illness and mental health.
Without further ado, here are ten of our top stories from last week, all of which were curated:
“Just as the capacity to love and inspire is universal so is the capacity to hate and discourage. Irrespective of gender, race, age or religion none of us are exempt from aggressive proclivities. Those who are narcissistically disordered, and accordingly repress deep seated feelings of inferiority with inflated delusions of grandeur and superiority, are more prone to aggression and violence. They infiltrate our interactions in myriad environments from home, work, school and the cyber world. Hence, bullying does not happen in isolation. Although there is a ringleader she looks to her minions to either sanction her cruelty or look the other way.”
“Even though the circumstances that brought me here were sad and challenging, I’m grateful for how this program has changed my life for the better. I can’t help but imagine what life would be like if everyone learned to accept their powerlessness over other people, prioritize their serenity, and take life one step at a time. We’ll never know, but I’d bet the world would be much happier.”
“The prospect of spending a horrible Christmas, locked in on a psychiatric unit, was one of the low points of my life. For weeks, the day room was festooned with cheesy decorations and a sorry pink aluminum tree. All of our “activity” therapies revolved around the holidays. We baked and decorated cookies. We fashioned quick-drying clay into ornaments that turned out to be too heavy for the tree. Crappy Christmas carols were background torture. It was hard to get pissed off at the staff because they were making the best with what they had.”
“Although I hate to admit it, even if my ex had never betrayed me, I still wouldn’t have been happy. I had set him up for an impossible job — to define me and make me whole. If I cannot find peace and contentment within myself, how could anyone else do it for me?”
“On a personal note, significant feelings of loss and sadness can still flare up from time to time. That’s only natural; it’s no reason for self-critique. No matter how resilient we purport to be, we are all emotionally vulnerable human beings. Besides, we aren’t talking about some conceptual loss that we can just mechanically compartmentalize away — we are talking about the loss of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers.”
“The next six weeks will be hard as cases continue to explode and government leadership remains nonexistent. I can’t control any of this. The only thing I can do is take deep breaths, remain vigilant when it comes to limiting exposure to the virus, and let lots of stuff go. I may always be a hypochondriac, but now that I recognize the beast, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to tame it.”
“From anecdotal news reports and informal surveys, there is evidence that for some of us, this pandemic-imposed isolation is a boon rather than a trial. One study on mixed emotions showed that those with lower emotional stability (“moody” personalities) are actually better at responding to uncertainty.”
“Every day I wish in my heart and soul that I didn’t have ME/CFS. Unfortunately, I do. It’s a result of a virus I had; 10–12 percent of people who experience a serious infection go on to develop ME. I’ve visualized life without CFS for over a year now; I can smell life without it, I can taste it. It’s in the smell of the lavender fields that I can no longer run through. It’s in the taste of the meals from my favorite restaurant that I can no longer walk to. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s in the potentialities; all the things I could be doing, as a twenty-four year-old, that I can’t. I cannot cross the chasm between the potential and the reality. And that’s nothing to do with manifestation.”
“Whether it’s cabin fever, redundancy, loss, or general Covid anxieties, this year has caused us to be exposed to more uncertainty than ever. Uncertainty creates unease and feelings of stress. Some of us may have taken this year as one to motivate — plan dream trips, and prepare and be inspired for what the future could bring. For the rest, it has caused us to become irrational, emotional, and reserved.
“To be more self-compassionate is a task that can be tricky because we always want to push ourselves and do better. Without realising it, this can lead to us being self-critical which can have damaging consequences.
It’s important to notice these times when we are harsh because we can easily turn it into self-compassion, which is linked to a better quality of life.”
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!
— Ryan, Juliette, Marie, and Meredith | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/mental-note-vol-24-969b6a42443f | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-12-26 03:38:10.479000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Health', 'Psychology', 'Science', 'Neuroscience'] |
Your Brain On Coronavirus | Your Brain On Coronavirus
A guide to the curious and troubling impact of the pandemic and isolation
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
The coronavirus pandemic frustrates and confounds epidemiologists and immunologists, even after months of study. It frustrates politicians and public health officials dealing with mask non-compliance. It frustrates everyone stuck at home, whether they lost their job or adapting to Zoom.
After exposure to the virus, it first enters the lungs, using host machinery to replicate. The virus itself is just a genetic sequence enclosed in a protein and lipid coat. It binds the ACE2 receptors on lung cells, with a spike protein located on its protein-lipid coat. This receptor, attached to the virus, trafficks into the lung cell. Here the virus hijacks the machinery of the cell to replicate, damaging lung tissue and spreading throughout the body.
The ACE2 receptor, expressed in many regions of the body, is vulnerable to further entry of these viral particles. The ACE2 receptor regulates blood pressure, nutrient absorption and inflammation. These pathways converge and mediate brain health and disease.
The novel coronavirus perplexed us for many different reasons. A large majority of people who get it don’t display any symptoms, while some display symptoms for many months and others require ventilators to breathe. It is unclear whether someone infected with coronavirus retains long-term immunity.
Also, troubling findings implicate this disease in the induction of stroke and the worsening of mental health. The realization that there are likely long-term complications of coronavirus infection is worrying, as millions of people may require expensive coverage for this new pre-existing condition.
Those of us lucky to avoid being infected become more socially isolated and lonely. Many studies report the worsening of mental health symptoms, especially in frontline workers, nurses and doctors. These professionals are more prone to burning out and require extra care.
COVID-19 and Stroke
The cells in the brain require a disproportionate amount of energy to function. When deprived of oxygen, even for minutes, the cells begin to die, leading to a variety of debilitating sensory, motor or language deficits depending. When there is blood loss to a specific region of the brain, cells cannot use oxygen to generate energy. If there is a clot in an artery, fresh oxygen cannot travel to any regions primarily supplied by that blood vessel. These events, classified as ischemic strokes, cause lifelong disability in some of those afflicted.
Early findings in patients found abnormal clotting in blood vessels. Vessels around the lungs or even arterial blood-flow to the brain is interrupted. Thus, individuals infected with coronavirus who suffered abnormal blood clotting as a result, were at higher risk of stroke.
In June of 2020, researchers published a report of neurological symptoms in the New England Journal of Medicine. While they did not report common symptoms of having a stroke, they showed other strange brain-related features. Of thirteen COVID-19 patients who underwent brain imaging, three of them showed signs of an ischemic stroke. A subset of eight of these patients showed other types of inflammation, while eleven presented with a lack of blood flow to the frontal areas of the brain.
Though a preliminary observational study, it suggested that the coronavirus impacted blood clotting and flow to the brain. Several studies since identified swathes of patients suffering from ischemic strokes or brain/vascular inflammation. Another study reviewed the current state of evidence, concluding that 41% of patients suffering from neurological symptoms after COVID-19 infection, suffered from strokes. Larger studies however, are needed to decipher how common this is among all those infected with the novel coronavirus.
Depending on which region of the brain loses oxygen, stroke may manifest as a broad range of symptoms. If cells die in an area of the brain responsible for motor movement, it later manifests in unilateral or bilateral difficulties with movement. Other common symptoms involve fatigue, challenges with balance or walking, partial paralysis, pain or inattention to one entire side of the body. It prevents individuals from doing the things they do in their daily lives, such as dress themselves or go to the bathroom independently.
COVID-19 and Psychiatric Disorders
Photo by Jonathan Rados on Unsplash
Either through neuroimmune signalling or by directly entering the cells of the brain, COVID-19 also contributes to psychiatric symptoms and disorders. It is unclear what role it may play in their pathology, but it may worsen existing conditions or as a contributing factor in its development.
One study compared individuals afflicted with the novel coronavirus to those in quarantine or the general public, finding elevated rates of depression (29.2%) in those with COVID-19. Another small study reported increased post-traumatic stress symptoms in these patients.
Individuals already living with psychiatric disorders reported a worsening of symptoms in two different studies. Several other studies reported depressive and anxious symptoms worsened among essential workers.
Another study surveyed >2000 individuals in Denmark, finding a reduction in overall psychological well-being measures during the pandemics. This study also reported that women were more negatively affected than men.
Additionally, it recognized that many older adults living in adult-care communities during shelter-in-place orders experience loneliness and depression. A study of older adults in San Francisco found that they showed increased rates of loneliness and depression.
We must do our best to check-up on our friends and loved ones. We are all affected differently by the pandemic, so it is important to recognize that the rates of anxiety, depression and stress-related disorders may arise.
COVID-19 Long-Haulers
Thousands of individuals initially infected with COVID-19, the long-haulers, continue to suffer symptoms many months later. On average, these individuals are women around the age of 44 who are otherwise healthy. Their infections were classified as mild severity because they could recover at home.
Facing stigma and in need of a community, several groups sprouted up to support each other. Originally disbelieved, they rallied to raise awareness of their predicament within the medical establishment. It should no longer be sufficient to classify individuals infected with COVID-19, who don’t require a hospital stay, as mild.
A few different studies report that most individuals affected with COVID-19 suffer from symptoms months later (Italy, UK, Germany). Intriguingly, many long-haulers did not produce high-levels of coronavirus antibodies. Many individuals experience pain, fatigue and many other debilitating symptoms.
These symptoms are consistent with disturbances in the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for many automatic physiological functions like breathing or heart-rate but also influence fatigue. Preliminary physiotherapy involves reconditioning the nervous system of patients so that they may regain some of these functions. In his article, Ed Yong states: | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-the-pandemic-affects-our-brain-and-mental-health-ae2ec0a9fc1d | ['Simon Spichak'] | 2020-09-23 22:10:17.126000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Neuroscience'] |
Mind Your Nose | Mind Your Nose
How smell training can change your brain in six weeks — and why it matters.
By Ann-Sophie Barwich
When it comes to training your brain, your sense of smell is possibly the last thing you’d think could strengthen your neural pathways. Learning a new language or reading more books (and fewer social media posts) — sure. But your nose?
That’s because the olfactory system is one of the most plastic systems in your brain. Neuroplasticity describes how the brain flexibly adapts to changes in the environment or when exposed to neural damage. Stimulating the brain strengthens existing neural structures and further adds fuel to the brain’s capacity to remain adaptive, thereby keeping it young. And your smell system is particularly adept at repair and renewal. (Olfactory cells have recently been used in human transplant therapy to treat spinal cord injury, for example.)
One reason for the olfactory system’s adaptive responsiveness is that it undergoes adult neurogenesis. Humans grow new olfactory neurons every three to four weeks throughout their entire life, not just during child development. (These sensory neurons sit in the mucous of your nose, where they pick up airborne chemicals and send activity signals straight to the core of the brain.) If it weren’t for this ongoing regeneration of sensory cells in your nose, we would stop detecting smells after our first few colds.
Neural plasticity weakens as we grow old — and so does our sense of smell. Olfactory performance decreases around the age of 70 as the regeneration of olfactory neurons slows down. Yet this process of regeneration never stops entirely. Training your nose helps slow down that decline and offers a great way to increase your brain’s plasticity. That said, increasing your sensitivity to odors in the environment does not always sound desirable. Smell usually comes with negative connotations: that whiff of urine in the metro, that overpowering literal skunk, or that trail of body odor from the person walking in front of you. But paying more attention to the smells around you also has benefits, and not just for a greater enjoyment of food aromas and neighbors’ gardens.
Recent studies show that olfactory abilities correspond with differences in cortical areas involved in smell processing in the brain. Johannes Frasnelli, an olfactory scientist at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, explained: “We did some studies where we saw that there is a link between the structure of certain brain regions-like the thickness of the cortex and the thickness of the gray matter layer in certain brain olfactory processing regions-and the ability to perceive.” Frasnelli and his colleagues found that people with better perceptual capacities had a thicker cortex. When they looked at people who had lost their sense of smell, they also saw a reduction of cortical matter in areas involved in odor processing.
That raises the question: Could you change the structure of your brain simply by smelling things? In 2019, Frasnelli’s group discovered that undergoing as little as six weeks of intense olfactory training results in significant structural changes in some regions of the brain (namely, the right inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral fusiform gyrus, and the right entorhinal cortex).
Participants were given three tasks with a cognitive component.
The first task was a classification task. Participants had to organize two simple odor mixtures by ordering each from lowest to highest concentration. The second was an identification task. Participants were presented with a target odor blended with a citrus scent in a specific ratio (4%). Then they were given the same blend in different ratios and asked to order them according to quality (more citrusy or less?). Lastly, the detection task: Was the learned target odor present in a range of 14 samples of different odor mixtures or not?
This entire exercise was undertaken each day for 20 minutes during the six weeks. Responses were monitored and evaluated on speed and accuracy.
Such intense olfactory training led to a general improvement in olfactory performance. Plus, the increase of olfactory skill was not restricted to the training exercises but also transferred to other olfactory abilities-abilities that had not been tested as part of the training. These perceptual tests included: the detection threshold of an odor, accuracy in odor discrimination (same or different?), cued odor identification (which of these four descriptors is correct?), and even free odor identification (identifying an odor without cues!).
Increasing insight into what the nose knows, and how it communicates with the brain, has broader implications-even philosophical ones. Old (yet still prevalent) cookie-cutter views of the mind coax us to believe that our senses are passive-indifferently picking up signals in the world that are then processed by the brain. Perception, in such views, is a process separate from cognition. Highly plastic systems such as olfaction present us with a much more intriguing and interwoven picture of the mind: Training your nose’s performance (just like other cognitive capacities) fundamentally shapes what you perceive by rewiring the system.
Your senses are far from being impartial transmitters; what you are able to perceive in the world ultimately hinges on the depth of your cognitive engagement with it. In other words, your mind does not emerge apathetically as a product of some remarkable, intricate molecular twists performed by the brain. The mind is enhanced by what you can train your brain to do. Just like strength is a result of muscle training, cognitive training of the senses is the bodybuilding of the brain. | https://medium.com/neodotlife/mind-your-nose-f0b097d533bb | [] | 2020-10-10 20:17:37.132000+00:00 | ['Biotechnology', 'Neuroscience', 'Brain', 'Wellness', 'Science'] |
The 4 Purposes of Dreams | Passionate about the synergy between science and technology to provide better care. Check out my newsletter: scienceforreal.substack.com 📰
Follow | https://medium.com/science-for-real/the-4-purposes-of-dreams-fc6719090e75 | ['Eshan Samaranayake'] | 2020-12-21 16:05:19.524000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Neuroscience', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Science'] |
Surviving a Rod Through the Head | You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? Phineas Gage. The railroad worker who survived an explosion that involved an iron rod piercing through his left cheek and out of his brain and skull.
Yeah.
I know.
You’re probably wondering “yeah, alright sweet. What about him?” Well, let’s just say that he was a really popular patient for the field of neuroscience (Cherry, par. 1). And what I found the most interesting about this tragic event was the science of his behavior afterward.
For those of you who don’t know much about Phineas Gage, let me fill you in with the help of my research.
Phineas Gage, 25 years old, was a railroad worker in Vermont. One day, at work, he was using an iron rod to handle explosive gun powder. As he was using the iron rod to handle the gun powder, an explosion suddenly occurred. The iron rod then went through his left cheek and brain. Fortunately, he survived and was able to talk and walk after the accident (Cherry, par. 2–3).
Why did people say that Phineas Gage was a “different person” after his accident? It actually has to do with neuroscience.
The iron rod went through his brain, in particular, it went through the frontal lobe of his brain. Does this mean that the frontal lobe of your brain has to do with the kind of person you are? To answer this question, we have to understand what the frontal lobe in our brain is responsible for.
Our frontal lobes are responsible for many things. Some of them are higher-order thinking, personality, and decision making. This explains why people who knew Phineas Gage said that he was a totally different person after the accident. Since the iron rod went through his frontal lobe, it means that his personality and thinking, as a whole, completely changed, making him seem like he was a whole different person due to the way he started acting.
This accident and the treatment of Phineas Gage actually played a big role in the field of neurology. His case helped scientists better understand the role of the frontal cortex of the brain (Cherry, par. 16–17).
Bibliography
Cherry, Kendra. “The Famous Case of Phineas Gage’s Astonishing Brain Injury.” Phineas Gage’s Astonishing Brain Injury, Verywell Mind, 3 Oct. 2019, www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244#targetText=The%20rod%20penetrated%20Gage's%20left,be%20seen%20by%20a%20doctor. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/surviving-a-rod-through-the-head-2e5d74db978 | ['Rishav Sinha'] | 2020-02-26 00:01:01.576000+00:00 | ['Brain', 'Health', 'Development', 'Psychology', 'Science'] |
Mentally, Young Adults Are Suffering Most From COVID | Mentally, Young Adults Are Suffering Most From COVID
“When it comes to having a painful feeling, the only way out is through.”
Photo created by the author on Canva Pro
“Young individuals reported higher acute stress and depressive symptoms than older respondents, suggesting that despite being most deadly for older populations at the time of our data collection, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have had widespread impacts across populations.” — Holman et al., Science Advances 2020
It’s no secret that COVID-19 and the pandemic have been detrimental to people’s mental health. However, the group that’s suffered the most from COVID-19 is young adults, who have had the biggest mental toll from COVID. Holman et al. found that 62.9 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds reported an anxiety or depressive disorder, and a quarter found they were using more than alcohol or drugs to cope with their pandemic stress. The researchers found that a quarter of the age group “seriously considered suicide” between mid-March to mid-April.
The conclusion from those findings is that young people are suffering most mentally from COVID. Unfortunately, I don’t find these findings that surprising. I know a lot of people struggle with COVID. I’m struggling with COVID, and I’m in that age range of 18- to 24-year-olds — and I experience that phenomenon as much as anyone in my age range.
But Claudia Wallis at Scientific American reports on more than just the mental health of youth mental health during COVID. A report from the CDC in August found that incidences of anxiety symptoms tripled and depression quadrupled in a representative sample. And the most affected are people who had pre-existing mental health issues, people of color, and low-income individuals, so the vulnerable individuals in society are more vulnerable during the pandemic.
Interestingly enough, Ettman et al. found that Asian individuals saw an almost fivefold increase in depression, and some psychiatrists who talked to Wallis attributed that to racism and slurs related to the Asian-Americans. As an Asian-American, the pandemic is forcing me to confront anti-Asian racism in a way I’ve never done so before. According to Holman et al., young people may have been more depressed because:
“[They] may have had more disruption in life events: graduations, weddings, the senior year of college and of high school. All those transitions were disrupted, as well as school and social connections, which we know are very important for young people.”
And the researchers also found that increased exposure to media coverage about the coronavirus led to more distress. Sensationalist reports lead to more anxiety and depression, and clearly the lack of social connection also disproportionately affects young people. Psychologist Logan Jones stresses that much of the reporting these days keeps people hooked on the news cycle, and keeps people addicted to the news. As such, Jones emphasizes the importance of keeping boundaries.
“Consuming too much of this kind of news, whether actively or passively, can be very toxic, and what you hear has an impact on your mood,” Jones says.
The CDC also states that the mental health of young adults has been impacted socially, emotionally, and mentally. They attribute these mental health concerns to the trauma faced at a developmental age, and all hands are on deck for parents, caregivers, and other adults to support children and young people. Part of that trauma is a result of changes in routines, employment, and educational challenges, a loss of security and safety, and missed significant life events.
As a teacher during COVID, almost all of my students say they want to return to the physical school building during COVID. They report being more lonely and isolated, and can’t wait to return to see their friends and teachers again. My school is emphasizing more relationship-building activities and prioritizing mental health during lessons more than adhering to a curriculum as a result.
Takeaways
Well, the problem is difficult and can seem negative, but what can young people do to tackle mental health concerns during COVID?
The CDC states that to fight stress during COVID, young people need to recognize and address fear, stress, and behavioral changes during COVID. Health concerns are certainly a priority for young people as well, and excessive worry and sadness leads to trouble paying attention, trouble concentrating, and trouble focusing on activities.
It is also important for young people to stay socially connected. Staying socially connected through video chats, Zoom, and phone calls is also a solution.
But honestly, we’re all doing the best we can, and it’s very important to recognize that as we go through our days. Whatever we’re going through is valid and reasonable, and above all, normal.
For me, what’s helped my mental health is spending time with my girlfriend and my friends within reason, limiting how much I doomscroll, and get enough sleep. I try to exercise and maintain a fitness challenge, but what works for me certainly won’t work for everyone.
Unicef emphasizes that it’s important to feel your feelings instead of trying to resist them, as well. According to Dr. Lisa Damour: | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/mentally-young-adults-are-suffering-most-from-covid-5f690c81c897 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-11-19 15:27:36.001000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Nonfiction', 'Coronavirus'] |
How to Turn Your Popular Blog Series Into a Bestselling Book | How to Turn Your Popular Blog Series Into a Bestselling Book
Thoughts from someone who’s done it five times
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Every serious writer’s dream is to see their name on a bestselling book — one that people eagerly read, review, and tell their friends about.
Is that your dream?
It can come true. Your words can reach further and do more good than you ever imagined.
You’re already here on Medium writing for the masses. Maybe you have a blog, too. I’ll bet you’ve noticed it’s infinitely easier to get traffic here than it is on your own property.
Why is that?
When it’s your own place, you have to invite people to come. They won’t necessarily see you when they’re surfing the web, looking for content like yours. The keywords might bring your site to the top if you’ve done your homework and bought a few (or a lot of) ads. If you’ve got a hefty budget to spend before you make a dime, that can be a great way to go.
But what if you don’t?
Hope for those on a limited budget
When you first start out, you’ve got a big dream. You know your story is good. You know it can change people’s lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s truth or fiction. The truth is, even fiction has a bit of truth in it. If it didn’t, it would be fantasy. We need things to make sense, even in a made up world or we can’t follow what’s happening, much less believe it enough to read it.
I write nonfiction, most of the time, so what I share here will come from that perspective. If you’re a storyteller, there are still principles here you can use to promote your work. So stay with me, okay?
The beauty of writing on a platform like Medium is you don’t have to spend a dime to get paid. You do have to spend time — and we all have some of that. Here’s how you’ll spend it:
Brainstorming ideas
Refining those ideas into drafts
Editing your writing for prime time
Sharing a bit on social media, your own work and the work of others
You can cash in on community when you contribute something valuable to it. The more valuable it is, the more likely others will read it, comment on it, and share it. When you do the same for others, some will want to pay you back.
Generosity is the key to growth.
Write to learn what people want
A book is an ambitious project.
Some say it takes a year or more. Others say you can write a book a week. I’m not sure I advocate either of these approaches.
I say writing a book should take long enough for it to be effective. Depending on your subject and how much time you have, that could take three months or nine months. If you know a lot up front, the process will be shorter. If you have to do a lot of research, budget that time in.
So what makes a book effective? How do you answer that question?
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
First, your book is effective when it satisfies a reader’s need.
What do your readers want? If you have a following, you already know, don’t you? They probably want a few things like:
Entertainment
Information
Hope
An escape
Chances are, they want a mix of these things. As you blog, invite your readers to talk to you. Use that feedback to discover what’s missing in their lives that they want more of. Then you can take on the responsibility to provide it to them.
If they feel the need strongly enough, they’ll buy.
Second, your book is effective when it fills a gap.
Don’t just write another leadership book because people buy a lot of them.
The same goes for romance, historical fiction, writing advice, or whatever your speciality is.
Give them something they can’t get anywhere else.
How do you figure out what’s missing?
Read a few other books, preferably the bestsellers. What do they cover? How well do they do it? What might you do even better than this author?
Scan the reviews. Is there something people want that the book doesn’t cover? Is there something people complain about that you can make irrelevant in your book? Read the most popular reviews, positive and negative. Make notes. Then use what you learn to make your book shine.
Talk to people who’ve read these books if you can. Ask them what they liked about them, and what they didn’t. What do they wish the author had covered that he didn’t? What did the author include that they think should have been left out?
Feel free to reward those who help you with a free copy of your awesome book.
Third, test your material in blog posts and refine it in the book.
Before you write your draft in silence and refine it for your book, why not test it with the people who already read your content?
You’ll learn a lot this way:
Whether your readers think your idea is as good as you do
What questions they have about your content
How clearly and persuasively you’re making your points
Wouldn’t you rather know this before you spend a year in front of your desk writing your masterpiece? Better to let it walk in public first before it runs on the digital presses.
If you’re worried people might not buy your book when they can read it online, here’s a bit of insurance to nudge them forward — include some surprises in the book that they can’t get anywhere else.
Also, you don’t have to transfer it word for word if you don’t want to. You’ll probably need to add some transitions so it all flows together. This will become clearer as you work through your blog series.
By the time you’re done, you’ll have a book that already took a test drive before you hit publish. There’s no guarantee you’ll be the number one bestseller, but you’ll sure have a better shot than you will with a book you write on speculation.
When you already have a following, at least some of them will be eager to buy your book on day one.
Photo by Kenny Luo on Unsplash
Finally, it’s not all about you
There are so many people trying to sell something now it’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I know, I’m asking you to be one more of them.
You can set yourself apart by focusing on service. Sure, you’ve gotta get paid. We all need to eat. You soften the blow when you provide more value than what it costs to get that value. People are already spending money on books, courses, and the like. They buy when they believe what they’re getting is more valuable than the cash in their pocket.
When you test drive your book on your blog, you can establish value as you go. Each post should add to the overall value of the total package. With all that going for you, you’ll have no guilt. Marketing won’t feel so slimy. You know your book is good, and you can stand behind it with honest pride.
Make it about them and they’ll make your dream come true.
Do that and I’ll see you on the bestseller list! | https://frankmckinley.medium.com/want-to-turn-your-blog-into-a-book-6360e4b1d670 | ['Frank Mckinley'] | 2020-01-28 03:36:58.566000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Marketing', 'Productivity'] |
Dr Faisal Dar — Pioneer of Liver Transplantation in Pakistan | Dr Faisal Dar — Pioneer of Liver Transplantation in Pakistan
Dr. Fasial Dar is the pioneer of liver transplantation in Pakistan. He works at Shifa International Hospital, Islamabad where he conducted the first ever transplant in 2010 of a 9 year old boy. Recently, along with his team he has successfully completed 200 transplant surgeries in Pakistan.
Fatima Arif: Give us some of your personal background; your family and education background.
Dr. Faisal Dar: I was born in Faisalabad; but due to my father’s death when I was very young; my family decided to move back to our native village, Kotla Bhalot, in
Kharian, District Gujrat. There I completed my basic education from a local school, leading to Matric and F.Sc from Kharian Cantt.
My MBBS is from Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore. After that I completed my FCPS (surgery): Fellow of College of Physicians & Surgeons from Pakistan. Then I went to Ireland for my FRCS (Surgery) Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. This was followed by Fellowship in Liver Transplantation/Hepatobiliary & Pancreatic Surgery from Kings College London School of Medicine, UK. Additionally, I am also a Fellow of European Board in Transplant Surgery (FEBTS — Transplant Surgery).
FA: When did you decide to become a doctor, was it a personal choice or like the majority here your parents idea and how did you decide to opt for this specialty?
FD: My family wanted me to join Pakistan Army; becoming a doctor was my own choice. Since I qualified the merit list for medical college; so it was easy to convince my family to let me follow my calling.
Surgery was my passion since the start and that is why after completing my house job I decided to go for my fellowship in general surgery. After completing my training and exams I went to UK for further specialization in 2003. At that time there was no liver transplant and hepatopancreaticobiliary surgeons in Pakistan and considering the huge need for this facility in our country I decided to opt this specialty.
FA: Share your journey of how the liver transplants started and what is the procedure whereby patients are selected?
FD: The first liver transplant in humans was done in 1963. Liver transplant went through two decades of evolution and scientific work, and it was only in 1983 when liver transplant was accepted as the standard treatment for liver failure. Since then huge number of liver transplants are carried out across the world. Living donor liver transplant (in which a healthy individual donates a part of his liver to his beloved one) started in early 1990’s; the techniques and procedures got matured by 2000, and now living donor liver transplant is the standard accepted options for patients with liver failure in countries where donations after brain death does not exists.
After completing my training at King’s College Hospital, London, I decided to come back to Pakistan and start liver transplant program in my country. I was lucky to get good colleagues and tremendous support from the management to get the basic work done before we could do our first liver transplant on 30th April 2010 at Shifa International Hospital, Islamabad. Personally it was a very happy and emotional moment and a great honor for me as a doctor to be the pioneer of liver transplantation in Pakistan.
Patients go through an extensive assessment process to determine their candidacy for liver transplant. In short any patient who’s liver has failed either due to a chronic disease (like hepatitis B & C, autoimmune liver diseases etc.) or suffer from acute liver failure (due to hepatitis E, A or other viruses, drugs or toxins) and patients who have developed liver cancer can benefit from liver transplant. Patients who are unfit to go through such a major operation (due to severe heart or lung disease) or patients who have advanced cancer are not considered for liver transplant because they will not benefit in short or long term from liver transplant.
FA: How are patients who can’t afford the procedure included in the process and how is there funding secured?
FD: Liver transplant is one of the most complex operation in the medical field. In order to conduct a liver transplant there are some minimal standards that need to be followed by the hospital. Without these basic set standards and the highest level of skill set it is not possible to do a liver transplant successfully. Someone has to bear the cost of the operation. At the moment majority of the patients pay out of their own pocket. Some are funded by the insurance companies, some by the Government and some by different NGO’s.
Pakistan is a beautiful country. Its natural beauty comprising of landscapes, deserts, rivers, planes and the mighty mountains is matchless. The people of Pakistan are loving and caring, known for their hospitality.
FA: What is the future you see for Pakistan’s medical community in terms of the latest treatments and technology?
FD: Technology is not a big issue as the world has become a global village and access to technology has been made easier. The most important factor is the human resource. Pakistan needs expat doctors to come back; transfer knowledge, techniques and train the future generations to the latest available treatments in the world.
FA: Share one inspiring story that you came across over the period of your career that had a lasting impact on you?
FD: The story that had an impact on me and is close to my heart is from our first liver transplant at Shifa International Hospital. The patient, Muhammad Yasin, a 9 year old boy who was in a need of liver transplant. He was the only son after seven daughters, and none of the family members had a matching blood group for them to donate a part of their liver to save his life. It was his 21 years old cousin; Humaira; a university student who volunteered herself to go through an operation to save her cousin’s life. The courage of this young girl, the bond of the family and the faith they had on us was amazing. It has been three years down the line both, Yasin and Humaira are living a normal life.
FA: Pakistan faces brain drain, specifically in the medical field. What is your take on it and in your opinion what is the solution to this problem?
FD: Personally, I think Pakistani doctors need to go abroad to get exposure to the Western world, that not only enhances their medical knowledge, but it grooms them. Furthermore this exposure adds to their confidence while at the same time teaches them better patient care procedures.
However, I also believe that these doctors after improving their skills should come back and serve Pakistan. A lot of responsibility also lies on the Government to improve the public sector hospitals and to redefine service structure for doctors. If our hospitals are upgraded and the doctors are offered decent salaries, I think a lot of doctors will prefer coming back home.
FA: What is your message to the international community about Pakistan, where you would like to change at least one stereotype about the country and its people?
FD: Pakistan is a beautiful country. Its natural beauty comprising of landscapes, deserts, rivers, planes and the mighty mountains is matchless. The people of Pakistan are loving and caring, known for their hospitality.
Our youth is really talented and determine to work for a better future. There are macro level issues, like corruption, bad governance and terrorism that are the obstacles in the materializing of the country’s true potential. I hope to play whatever role I can to help our younger generation break these shekels and realize their dreams. | https://medium.com/storyfest/dr-faisal-dar-pioneer-of-liver-transplantation-in-pakistan-e6f373cb0ea | ['Fatima Arif'] | 2019-02-28 06:01:04.914000+00:00 | ['People', 'Storyfest', 'Health', 'Pakistan', 'Storytelling'] |
Sunlight — The Natural Supplement For Our Mental Health | Sunlight — The Natural Supplement For Our Mental Health
The science behind how the sun is related to our mental wellbeing
Photo by Rampal Singh on Unsplash
Yoga, meditation, binaural beats, aroma therapy. All of these are our attempts at improving our mental health. More than ever, this generation has spoken out about mental health issues and have taken considerable steps in order to try and improve our mental health.
Yet, amongst the many techniques that seem to be popular, it’s surprising that being under the sunlight isn’t something that everybody does.
After all, it’s completely free and can be done easily (at least when it isn’t winter).
Sunlight and Serotonin
Experts often associate exposure to sunlight with the release of serotonin. And this has been proven by science.
A study conducted to find the relationship between serotonin, sunlight, and the season found that the rate of serotonin production is directly related to the prevailing duration of bright sunlight. At the same time, as the luminosity of the sunlight increased, the rate of serotonin production also rose rapidly.
Furthermore, it has been reported in Times that autopsy studies found higher levels of serotonin in individuals that passed away in summer than those who did in winter. This difference in serotonin level was attributed to the differing amounts of sunlight available between the two different seasons.
So… exposure to sunlight is associated with the release of serotonin. But what does that have to do with mental health?
Serotonin (also known as 5-hydroxytryptamine) is actually a neurotransmitter and is known as the natural ‘feel-good’ chemical. This is due to its role as a natural mood stabilizer and its ability to reduce the symptoms of depression.
As such, by increasing the rate of serotonin production, sunlight acts as a natural mood booster, allowing one to feel happier while reducing the negative effects that are often associated with depression.
In fact, in 2018, a study conducted by Chinese researchers found that moderate exposure to sunlight correlates to an improvement in memory and motor learning in mice. While humans might function differently from mice, this study suggests that a similar relation could be happening for us.
Additionally, results from another study also suggested that exposure to sunlight is associated with the cognitive decline one experiences. In this study, the researchers found that individuals with a decreased exposure of sunlight experienced a higher probability of cognitive decline. This was especially true for individuals with existing depression.
Sunlight and Melatonin
Apart from serotonin, sunlight plays a key role in the release of another chemical — melatonin. However, instead of being produced when it is sunny, melatonin is produced when it is dark. The lower the light intensity, the more melatonin secreted.
While serotonin is a feel-good chemical, melatonin is the natural hormone that promotes sleep in our bodies. As it becomes dark, our body secretes more melatonin in order to prepare us for sleep. This means that melatonin is essential to help us regulate our sleep cycles.
However, there is evidence that suggests that shift workers who work through the night (and as such, are less exposed to sunlight) produce less melatonin. Without this sleep producing hormone, one could possibly experience insomnia and low quality sleep from sleep disturbances.
As quality sleep is key to maintaining a healthy mind, exposing yourself to sunlight can help encourage your body to create melatonin, allowing you to get a good night’s rest (and an improved mental state).
Furthermore, normal melatonin secretion is key to maintaining our bodies’ natural circadian rhythm. As a disruption of the natural circadian rhythm is known to increase the risk of depression, going under the sun to maintain healthy levels of melatonin production could be key in helping you keep depression at bay.
Lack of Sunlight Leaves You SAD
With sunlight playing key roles in the creation of serotonin and melatonin, a lack of sunlight can actually lead to a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).
SAD is actually a form of depression that typically affects individuals during the winter seasons (explaining the lethargy and helplessness you might feel when winter comes). While sunlight is not the only factor, it is suggested that SAD primarily affects individuals in winter as one is less likely to be exposed to strong sunlight. And this points to the importance of sunlight exposure. In order to help reduce the possibility of SAD (especially when it isn’t even winter yet), try your best to expose yourself to natural sunlight as much as possible. Who knows, that might just be the key to helping you keep illnesses like SAD at bay.
Sunlight and Vitamin D
Apart from serotonin and melatonin, sunlight plays a key role in helping our bodies synthesize vitamin D. A fat-soluble vitamin, vitamin D promotes calcium absorption (strengthening your bones) while also supporting the immune system.
A lack of vitamin D in one’s body actually increases the risk of osteoporosis, jaundice, and cardiovascular diseases. As physical well being is tied closely to one’s mental health, getting a healthy dose of vitamin D helps protect your mental wellness by maintaining your physical health.
Besides physical health, vitamin D also has a surprising role in mental health as well. Researchers have found that when one has a vitamin D level of below 20 nanograms per millimeter, the risk of depression is raised by as much as 85 percent when compared to individuals with vitamin D levels of more than 30 nanograms per millimeter).
Studies done also suggest that there is a casual relation between taking vitamin D supplements and an improvement in symptoms for those who suffer from depression. As few foods offer vitamin D naturally, going out into the sun might be the best (and easiest) way to help your body get enough vitamin D.
But How Much Sunlight is Enough?
Of course, we’ve all heard warnings that tell us not to go out into the sun. As sunlight is made up of ultraviolet (UV) rays, experts often warn us about prolonged exposure to strong sunlight.
After all, UV rays damage our skin cells, promoting the formation of blemishes and wrinkles while increasing the risk of skin cancer.
However, Dr. James O’Keefe, a cardiologist who studies the relationship between vitamin D and cardiovascular health, believes that we are evolved to be in the presence of direct sun exposure, claiming that having some direct sunlight helps benefit our health greatly.
In fact, WHO has published guidelines regarding the amount of sunlight exposure we should have. With the beneficial effects of sunlight exposure, WHO suggests getting 5–15 minutes of unblocked (e.g. no sunscreen, no long sleeves) sunlight on our face, arms and hands 2–3 times a week.
With more and more of us spending an increased number of time indoors, going out for occasional sunlight exposure can greatly help improve your mental health.
Of course, as UV rays can still cause your skin harm, do keep your direct sunlight exposure short and avoid periods with strong UV radiation (e.g. noon). If you are going to be out in the sun for an extended period of time, protect yourself with sunscreen. And for those with skin conditions, it might be good to ask your doctor for advice before heading out to bask in the sun. | https://medium.com/wholistique/sunlight-the-natural-supplement-for-our-mental-health-7f59d5fa4492 | ['Jerren Gan'] | 2020-12-16 10:47:37.171000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Wellness', 'Science'] |
Occam’s dice | Occam’s dice
Distrusting biological metaphors
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.’”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Simplicity is powerful. Economists seek minimal models to describe market fluctuations, and our greatest mathematicians use the guiding light of elegance to discover their next great truths. But is this preference a fundamental reflection of nature’s workings, or an aesthetic one? Occam’s razor — positing that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one — is particularly abused in biology. As Eve Marder has long argued, biological systems are equipped with redundant strategies and contingencies that confound the interpretation of even the most tightly controlled biological experiments. Even the idea of probing a “controlled” biological system merits careful reflection. By controlling for variables, we stray from reality, instead describing an abstract, manipulated system, and often still failing to account for the hundreds of cellular mechanisms we don’t yet know about. (Take, for example, surprising work from Didier Stanier and colleagues, who recently reported that knocking out a gene with CRISPR leads to the expression of homologous genes to compensate for the loss.) In a debate held a decade ago, Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis argued about the role of symbiosis in evolutionary theory. An exasperated Dawkins asked: “why on earth would you want to drag in symbiogenesis when it’s so unparsimonious and uneconomical?” Margulis replied: “because it’s there.” Parsimony for parsimony’s sake is not parsimonious in the biosciences.
It’s important to recognize that our formalization of biology is fundamentally historical — philosophers like Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Bachelard, and others have argued that biology has been primarily technology (rather than hypothesis) driven. The ideas of biology are inextricable from the technology that produces them. As Rheinberger put it: “phenomena and instrument, object and experience, concept and method are all engaged in a running process of mutual instruction.” Our resultant understanding of nature is dominated by our choice of experimental system, which includes our instruments, the model organism, even the culture wherein a discovery is made: the knowledge generated is, in some very real ways, as contingent as the processes it describes. We fit discovered phenomena with simple handles — reduced, for practical purposes, to a sort of currency to be exchanged between labs, resorting to pale metaphors when communicating the natural mysteries.
It’s clear why we do this. It’s in part a heuristic shortcut, making things easier to wrap our heads around. We want to understand nature — we, being individual humans, not as the vague “human collective.” We therefore seek truths comprehensible to a single intellect; and so, as the parable goes, we’re searching for our keys under a streetlamp. Even so, it seems so inherently obvious, so inarguable that true things should be simpler things. The instinct to discover the rules of nature is older than man: the nervous system is biology’s greatest prediction algorithm, and it dutifully learns patterns whose knowledge might enhance its chance of survival (science being the formal application of this impulse). Thus, human thought is underpinned by an unconscious aesthetic laid down in the nervous system itself.
Studies suggest we naturally tend to find satisfaction in simplicity, in learnability (often through repetition)— in that which is easy to process. In music, for example, the most universally enjoyable songs lie somewhere between tedious simplicity (like the worst of pop) and unpredictable entropy (like some modern composers). We’re just acting after our nervous system’s modus operandi when we seek learnable patterns. Maxims that appear to be self-evident — e.g. something along Occam’s logic, “a simpler explanation is better” — may only appear to be so because they’re rewarded within the system that evaluates them. That is, they’re self-reflective: the nervous system, itself effectively a simplifying model of its environment, seeks to uncover patterns that render its existence more manageable. It’s evaluating a reductive internal model against its own implicit function. The mind is a causality inferring machine: the impetus to ascribe linear causal relationships is inbuilt to our nervous system. Armed with this hammer, the whole messy universe looks like an elegant nail.
Of course, ultimately, what we want to do with science is to uncover what Dawkins has referred to as “economically expressed rules.” We are interested in the objects of life primarily because they point us to the process of life. We don’t count the color bands of a beetle for the sake of knowing this fact, but because our understanding of rules often emerges from collections of observations — in the beetle’s case, for example, untangling the logic of developmental programs. But is there even a clear boundary between biological object and process?
For example, it’s often said that biological entities perform computations (we’ll ignore, for the time being, the fact that no one can agree what is meant by computation): the organism an object, and computation its process. In doing so we suppose a separation between software and hardware, algorithm and data. But organisms are also the result of computations: cells can be thought of as “testing hypotheses” during the development of an embryo, for example. Both evolution and nervous systems are the results of computations becoming embodied in the architecture of their computers. Even in machine learning, as Sunderhauf et al. recently argued, “there is a spectrum — rather than a dichotomy — between programming and data.” Indeed, the success of machine learning, despite its inelegance, underscores the fact that simplicity isn’t necessarily a useful goal.
Evolution has never (until, perhaps, soon) operated by reason, but rolls of a die. The resultant systems are rife with feedback loops and interdependencies. Neuroscientists too often conflate observational studies with causal explanations of behaviors, but a description or manipulation of what neurons or networks are active during a behavior is not the explanans of that behavior. ‘Necessary and sufficient’ doesn’t work the way neuroscientists usually use it. Thirty years ago, Randolf DiDomenico and colleagues proposed that we avoid making causal claims in individual papers, and instead build them from multiple studies using various techniques and approaches. Given the sheer complexity of these networks and amount of data we’ve generated, this is increasingly beyond the scope of individual human intellect. All this is to say: think hard about what it is you wish to show with your studies. Be humble in your claims. Pragmatism may be a more holy grail than Truth. Or, as Hemingway (perhaps apocryphally) advised: kill your darlings.
Want more? Follow us at The Spike
Twitter: @kellybclancy | https://medium.com/the-spike/occams-dice-258aace751c4 | ['Kelly Clancy'] | 2018-08-22 14:55:56.262000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Science', 'Neuroscience', 'Psychology', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
To Quickly Build Trust, Tell Your Origin Story | Photo credit: Leo Leung
People want to know why you do what you do.
If you’re an entrepreneur, your investors, customers, and employees want to know why you founded your company. Apply for a job, and recruiters ask about your career path. If you’re a freelancer, everyone is curious about how you got started.
Why do we crave origin stories? Because they reveal character. Superman is a good guy because his planet exploded, his parents sent him to Earth, and the Kents raised him to fight evil. Steve Jobs became a trusted CEO, in part, by bouncing back from failure. My dad thrived as a home builder, but only after terminating a partnership with a prominent colleague whose practices he found unethical.
In other words:
Your origin story helps people decide whether or not to trust you.
How to Craft a Powerful Origin Story: The 5 Essential Elements
In strategic messaging and positioning engagements with CEOs, as well as business storytelling workshops for teams, I’ve helped hundreds of people construct origin stories. The best instantly convey not only trustworthiness, but also traits like commitment, persistence, and curiosity.
So what makes a great origin story work?
At the heart of every great origin story is a single event that forever changes the course of the teller’s life. Typically it arises out of failure or disappointment; sometimes it’s an unexpected discovery. Very frequently, another person illuminates a new way forward.
Can you pinpoint the event that set you on your current path? (Yes, we all have one.) The event doesn’t have to be life-changing in the “I won the lottery” sense (though congrats if that happened). It just has to reorient you towards what you’re doing now.
Once you’ve identified your event, construct your origin story around it using the following five components, and tell it in this order:
1. Once upon a time…
How was your life before the life-changing event? Most importantly, what did you want back then? Share relevant details: How old were you? Where did you live? When did this happen? (No, you don’t literally have to start with “Once upon a time…”)
For example, here’s the “Once upon a time…” for my origin story:
Back in the dot-com years, I was living in Manhattan, struggling to fund my startup. It was not going well. One VC attached a hand-written note to his standard rejection letter: “Andy, I rate every business plan I receive on a scale of one to 10. Yours is a one.” At the bottom, he wrote, “P.S. Not a compelling story.”
2. “Then one day…”
Next, describe your life-changing event. If possible, tell this section as a scene with details that the listener can sense (visualize, hear, smell, etc.). Again, here’s mine:
One day, I’m walking up Broadway, when I notice a huge sign in the window of a Barnes and Noble. The sign says, “For anyone who wants to tell a compelling story,” and it’s pointing to a book about screenwriting. I buy the book.
3. “Because of that…”
What relevant events were then set in motion? What obstacles did you have to overcome? Basically, describe what happened next:
That night, I read the book from cover to cover. It’s written in the language of feature films (three act structure, etc.), but much of it seems to apply to telling the story of a startup. I rewrite my pitch and send it to a new batch of investors.
4. “Until finally…”
What was the turning point — the moment when you really committed to the new path? It’s especially effective to reflect here on how you changed and what you learned:
After receiving the revised pitch, several investor groups invite my team to their offices, and four months later we have a term sheet from a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm. The numbers, the team — all remained same. The only thing that changed was how we told our story.
5. “So now…”
Last but not least, describe what you do now, and connect it to the story.
So now I help leadership teams craft strategic messaging and positioning, which is really just their story — the story they use to power fundraising, sales, marketing, recruiting, and product. I also teach storytelling workshops for teams. And I can trace it all back to my failed pitch.
Swap Origin Stories with Others to Quickly Build Stronger Relationships
Once you’ve drafted your own origin story, tell it a few times to see what works. That’s not to say you should introduce yourself to strangers with “Once upon a time...” But if you’re embarking on a relationship with someone new — a customer, a prospect, an investor— and they ask, try it out. Pay particular attention to where they lean in.
Also, ask others to tell you their origin stories. Listen closely, and you’ll quickly learn about their character, values and desires, which can be helpful in all sorts of relationships.
As one woman in my recent General Assembly workshop said after swapping origin stories with a classmate: “There’s something about sharing these stories that makes me feel instantly connected.” | https://medium.com/the-mission/want-trust-share-your-origin-story-78db82157cca | ['Andy Raskin'] | 2016-07-06 19:45:00.648000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Personal Development', 'Startup', 'Marketing', 'Storytelling'] |
Four Exercises to Strengthen Your Writing | A few months ago, I wrote an article sharing several writing exercises from famous authors.
Just as pianists practice scales to strengthen their skills like rhythm and timing, writers can sharpen specific skills through deliberate practice.
Since publishing that original article, I’ve been searching for more creative writing exercises, and I discovered four more gems that I’m excited to share with you today.
Struggling to write effective dialogue? Or craft vivid descriptions? Or maybe you’re facing writer’s block?
These creative writing exercises will help you overcome those obstacles.
Let’s dive in.
(Please note that links to books on Amazon might be affiliate links which means I’ll earn a small commission if you buy through the link with no extra cost to you. Thank you!)
The George R.R. Martin Exercise for Writing Effective Dialogue
At the Neuchâtel Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland, an interviewer asked fantasy writer George R.R. Martin what qualities are needed to be a good writer.
Among several pieces of advice, Martin stressed the importance of having “a good ear for dialogue and the way people actually speak … the individuality to give each character his own method of speaking.”
Easier said than done, right? Lucky for us, Martin went on to share a writing exercise that can help you sharpen your dialogue skills:
I sometimes teach writing classes. And there are various exercises you can give to students. One of them is to describe a half dozen different characters. Write a speech for each of these different characters without a name tag. Just say, “Here’s a priest, here’s a soldier, here’s a housewife”… Invent whatever you want. Write a speech for each of them in which…they don’t give their name…just make each speech sound different from the other so you can instantly know just from the words this is the priest speaking, this is the prostitute speaking… If they all sound the same, you have a problem. They should sound different.
A bonus tip: make sure to read your dialogue out loud. That’s a fantastic way to test whether your conversations sound authentic.
The Dani Shapiro Exercise for Banishing Writer’s Block
Ever sit down at your computer to begin writing a new short story or a new personal essay, but instead you find yourself having a stare down with the blank screen? You may type a few lines, but after several minutes you delete everything. You just can’t seem to find the right words to continue.
New York Times bestselling-author Dani Shapiro has the perfect writing prompt for you. In an interview, she shared two words that instantly help banish writer’s block,
My favorite prompt is based on a book that was published a long time ago by a writer named Joe Brainard, and the title is ‘I Remember’…In the book every single sentence begins with the phrase, “I remember.” …When I give that exercise at retreats, I look out from where I’m sitting at a sea of people, and not one of them hesitates. Those are extremely evocative words. I mean, try not to finish a sentence that begins with “I remember.” And so what I suggest to people to do is to just begin — have a special notebook, begin with the words “I remember” and write a sentence. Drop down a line, begin with [“I remember”], not trying to connect memories. If you think about the way memory works, it doesn’t work in a narrative line. It doesn’t connect. We don’t tell ourselves stories in our heads. We have these disparate memories that don’t connect. And when we allow them to be associative and to bounce one off the next, it creates all sorts of interesting material. People almost invariably find memories that they didn’t know that they had, or they make connections that they didn’t know they had. So it’s a good springing off point.
You can use this prompt to spark ideas for anything from blog posts to short stories. I share more strategies for fighting writer’s block in my article here, and I share tips for getting ideas for new blog posts in my article here.
The Robert McKee Exercise For Writing With Originality
Robert McKee’s screenwriting workshops have earned him an international reputation. His screenwriting students have included over sixty-five Academy Award winners and two hundred Emmy Award winners.
I’m currently rereading his wonderful book Story where he deep dives into everything that you need to know to write powerful stories. In one chapter, he discusses the importance of originality in storytelling and how clichés make our writing shallow and boring. He writes,
The source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone: The writer does not know the world of his story… As they reach into their minds for material, they come up empty. So where do they run? To films and TV, novels and plays with similar settings. From the works of other writers they crib scenes we’ve seen before, paraphrase dialogue we’ve heard before, disguise characters we’ve met before, and pass them off as their own… Knowledge of and insight into the world of your story is fundamental to the achievement of originality and excellence.
But how can we come to know the world of our stories better?
Here’s one exercise McKee provides:
Lean back and ask, “What would it be like to live my character’s life hour by hour, day by day?” In vivid detail sketch how your characters shop, make love, pray — scenes that may or may not find their way into your story, but draw you into your imagined world until it feels like déjà vu. While memory gives us whole chunks of life, imagination takes fragments, slivers of dream, and chips of experience that seem unrelated, then seeks their hidden connections and merges them into a whole. Having found these links and envisioned the scenes, write them down. A working imagination is research.
The Brian Kiteley Exercise for Writing Unique, Sensory Descriptions
Finally, let’s end with an exercise that will help us write unique, sensory descriptions so our writing comes alive.
The ability to describe something vividly is an essential skill for every writer to master, no matter whether you’re a blogger, novelist, or copywriter. Vivid descriptions transform your paragraphs from vague and boring to engrossing and memorable.
In his book The 3 A.M. Epiphany, author Brian Kiteley shares a collection of “uncommon writing exercises” that can help you transform your fiction.
Here’s one that gives a unique approach for writing evocative descriptions:
Synesthesia, according to M.H. Abrams in ‘A Glossary of Literary Terms’, is a description of “one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on.” Here is an example of synesthesia from Bruno Schulz’s Street of the Crocodiles: “Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower; the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water.” Schulz describes a change in color by means of a musical term. Writers consciously and unconsciously employ this peculiar method to convey the irreducible complexity of life onto the page. …Use synesthesia in a short scene — surreptitiously, without drawing too much attention to it — to convey to your reader an important understanding of some ineffable sensory experience. Use sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell.
In my short story “The Island”, I played with synesthesia when I described the aroma of a pastry baking in an oven: “It smelled of sunlight and warm breezes rustling the branches of island trees.”
Make sure to check out this article where I share three more techniques that will help you write vivid descriptions.
The Takeaway
In my original article where I shared five writing exercises, I also shared this quote from Ray Bradbury,
I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice.
These four exercises are a fantastic way to give your writing skills and imagination a workout.
You can use the exercises when you’re feeling stuck and are looking for a writing prompt to trigger your inspiration. Or you can use them when you want to spend time sharpening your skills in order to take your writing to the next level and inspire your readers. | https://medium.com/copywriting-secrets/four-exercises-to-strengthen-your-writing-c183f0c0119e | ['Nicole Bianchi'] | 2020-06-01 15:50:56.250000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Writing', 'Fiction', 'Books', 'Creativity'] |
Facing Three Fundamental Coronavirus Fears | 1. Since immunity to the novel coronavirus may not last long, doesn’t the virus need to be eradicated in order for the pandemic to end?
Humans generally become immune to a pathogen after immunization or recovery from an infection. Depending on the particular disease or vaccine as well as host characteristics such as the age and health of the individual, immunity can last a lifetime or may be short-lived. Moreover, immunity is not an ‘either/or’ process. Our immunity to different pathogens doesn’t just suddenly switch off. Instead, it wanes over time.
It is true that a person’s immunity to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, probably only lasts a few months to a few years. It is also true that outbreaks of two other coronaviruses earlier this century, SARS and MERS, were indeed contained, although not technically eradicated. However, the other four known human coronaviruses, HCoV-229E, -NL63, -OC43, and -HKU1, are considered endemic. These viruses, which have been around longer than the other three, are continuously circulating through the population and typically cause no more symptoms than the common cold.
Interestingly, there is historical evidence that the four endemic coronaviruses were likely the cause of pandemics, or at least epidemics, in the past. Of course, this would have been long enough ago that people didn’t know what a coronavirus was, but humankind managed to recover anyway. These older coronaviruses now permeate among the population. People often become exposed at a young age, and, as with SARS-CoV-2, the vast majority of children have no symptoms or a minor respiratory infection. Even though immunity to these viruses diminishes over time, because they are endemic and continuously circulate through the population, every few years our immune systems are again exposed and receive a refresher course on how to kill the virus.
With possible exception to geographically isolated locations like Iceland and New Zealand, SARS-CoV-2 is on a path to becoming endemic like its older endemic coronavirus siblings. In fact, since March, for most regions containment has no longer been a strategy for managing SARS-CoV-2 as it was during the previous SARS and MERS outbreaks. SARS and MERS have a higher fatality rate than Covid-19, and it is for that very reason they were able to be contained. Since patients infected with SARS and MERS were more often symptomatic, generally developed more severe symptoms, and had a shorter period of time between exposure and the onset of symptoms, cases were recognized sooner, contacts were more easily traced, and further spread was prevented through quarantining.
“The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly, and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control with testing and contact tracing.” — Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC Deputy Director, 6/29/20
While contact tracing and quarantining strategies remain important during the Covid-19 pandemic, they are aimed at protecting vulnerable groups and reducing the overall transmission of the virus rather than ultimately containing or eradicating the virus. At this point eliminating SARS-CoV-2 worldwide is essentially impossible. Fortunately, however, as was the case with the four endemic coronaviruses, eradication is not a requirement for the pandemic to end. | https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/facing-three-fundamental-fears-about-the-coronavirus-261ba270f402 | ['Bo Stapler'] | 2020-08-11 19:37:46.296000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Science', 'Wellness', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
For Creatives, Silence Isn’t Always Golden | As an architect and the author of a book about the psychology of creative space design, I have long wondered why contemporary creatives cluster so willingly in noisy coffee shops. Granted, there’s scientific research that caffeine fuels the imagination, but doesn’t the surrounding din interfere with their ability to think creatively such that no amount of chemical stimulation can compensate for the distraction?
Certainly, many eminent creatives from the past shunned clamor. Consider Marcel Proust. To remark that the French writer was sensitive to auditory interference would be an understatement. The man was positively neurotic about it. He treated the bedroom in his Paris apartment where he wrote like a sensory deprivation chamber — shutters closed, drapes drawn, the walls lined with sound-absorbing cork. It wasn’t enough. He wore earplugs too.
Anton Chekhov was similarly beset by hypersensitivity to sound. So was fellow obsessive Frank Kafka, who described his condition in his signature surreal style by saying that “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ — that wouldn’t be enough — but like a dead man.” Sadly, by the time he got his wish, it was too late to do anything about it.
The correlation between high-level inventiveness and difficulty in filtering out sensory inputs is understandable, given that open-mindedness is a hallmark of the creative personality. The problem for off-the-chart geniuses like Proust, Chekhov, and Kafka was that their minds were a bit too open. Everything got through. Hence the extreme measures they took to avoid being immobilized by incoming stimuli.
Fig. 1: Optimal noise levels for creative processing compared to other conditions. After Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu, and Amar Cheema (2012). Illustration by the author. From My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation.
Then again, most of us aren’t Marcel Proust. According to research data from 2012, people generally reach peak performance under moderately noisy conditions — 70db (decibels), to be precise. It just so happens that this is roughly equivalent to the chatter in a typical coffee shop or restaurant on a relatively busy day (Fig. 1).
As to why this is the case, the scientists who authored the study offer a theory:
We theorize that a moderate (vs. low) level of ambient noise is likely to induce processing disfluency or processing difficulty, which activates abstract cognition and consequently enhances creative performance. A high level of noise, however, reduces the extent of information processing, thus impairing creativity.
Translation: silence isn’t as golden as it sounds. Absolute noiselessness tends to focus our attention, which is helpful for tasks that entail accuracy, fine detail, and linear reasoning, such as balancing our checkbook or fixing a Swiss watch. It’s less supportive of the broad, big-picture, abstract mind-wandering that leads to fresh perspectives and a creative work product. On the other hand, excessive noise overwhelms our sensory apparatus and hinders our ability to properly process information at all. In between lies the sweet spot — noise not so loud that we can’t hear ourselves think, and not so quiet that we can’t help but hear ourselves think.
Living room and fountain details. Bellevue, Washington. Architecture by David Coleman Architecture. Interior design by Elizabeth Stretch for Stretch Design. Photography by Paul Warchol.
There’s a caveat to the data, however: the noise has to be white. For the record, the technical definition of white noise is noise containing multiple frequencies with equal intensities. More colloquially, the phrase refers to a constant background noise, especially one that drowns out other sounds, and which takes the form of meaningless or distracting commotion, hubbub, or chatter.
Why is it important that the noise be white? Because otherwise you’re prone to tune into and attempt to discern the source and meaning of the sound, which diverts too much of your conscious attention from your task to be a useful tool for diffuse thinking.
How to Make Noise When There Isn’t Any
How can we creative mortals who don’t care for the smell of coffee, lack the funds to construct an oceanside villa, or live in urban environments where trees are scant benefit from the finding that a particular type and level of noise can promote insights? Here are a few options to consider:
Get the app. Yes, Virginia, there really is an app for everything. Use the search term “noise” to bring up dozens of sound generating programs in your smartphone’s app store. You’ll also see a broad selection of metering apps for measuring decibel levels at home.
Some of the app companies operate websites that let you download audio files of white noise soundtracks onto your computer or play them directly through a browser. A couple of my favorite sites include Raining.fm, which offers tracks simulating — what else? — downpours, rolling thunder, and heavy thunderstorms, and Coffitivy, which specializes in — what else? — coffee shop buzz.
Living room. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Architecture and interior design by Richard Davignon and Doris Martin for Davignon Martin Architecture + Interior Design. Photography by Eymeric Widling.
Get or hack a sound generator. Another option is to purchase a desktop appliance designed to emit white noise. They’re smallish devices, typically placed on night tables and in babies’ rooms to help occupants fall asleep. For an architectural solution, think about installing an indoor or outdoor fountain — few things in life are as pleasantly hypnotizing as the mellifluous whoosh of water descending onto water. Price points run the gamut from low-cost store-bought products to sky’s-the-limit custom installations.
DIY contrivances also abound; consult the Internet for guidance.
Let in or keep out external noise. City dwellers and people who reside along busy highways might have a ready-made noise machine right outside their window: road traffic. Open your windows to varying degrees or use sound muffling, such as drapery, to see if you can calibrate ambient noise to fall within the optimal range.
A less cacophonous strategy for harnessing exterior sounds would be to park yourself on a bench or beach that lies within earshot of ocean waves. It’s like having an always-on fountain, only bigger.
Listen to music. Like noise, music can have a positive effect on idea formation, while affording the listener far greater pleasure than the usual restaurant ruckus. But music is a huge subject in itself, and so must wait for another article! | https://medium.com/the-creative-mind/for-creatives-silence-isnt-always-golden-16e1697ea489 | ['Donald M. Rattner'] | 2019-10-28 20:01:02.360000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Psychology', 'Interior Design', 'Design', 'Creativity'] |
This 10-Minute Routine Will Increase Your Clarity And Creativity | “Your subconscious mind works continuously, while you are awake, and while you sleep.” — Napoleon Hill
Your subconscious never rests and is always on duty because it controls your heartbeat, blood circulation, and digestion. It controls all the vital processes and functions of your body and knows the answers to all your problems.
What happens on your subconscious level influences what happens on your conscious level. In other words, what goes on internally, even unconsciously, eventually becomes your reality. As Hill further states, “The subconscious mind will translate into its physical equivalent, by the most direct and practical method available.”
Consequently, your goal is to direct your subconscious mind to create the outcomes you seek. Additionally, you want to tap into your subconscious mind to unlock connections and solutions to your problems and projects.
Here’s a simple routine to get started:
Ten minutes before going to sleep:
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” — Thomas Edison
It’s common practice for many of the world’s most successful people to intentionally direct the workings of their subconscious mind while they’re sleeping.
How?
Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish.
Ask yourself loads of questions related to that thing. In Edison’s words, make some “requests.” Write those questions and thoughts down on paper. The more specific the questions, the more clear will be your answers.
While you’re sleeping, your subconscious mind will get to work on those things.
Ten minutes after waking up:
Research confirms the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is most active and readily creative immediately following sleep. Your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections. Creativity, after all, is making connections between different parts of the brain.
In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin, former chess prodigy and tai chi world champion, explains his morning routine to tap into the subconscious breakthroughs and connections experienced while he was sleeping.
Unlike 80 percent of people between the ages of 18–44 who check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up, Waitzkin goes to a quiet place, does some meditation and grabs his journal.
In his journal, he thought-dumps for several minutes. Thus, rather than focusing on input like most people who check their notifications, Waitzkin’s focus is on output. This is how he taps into his higher realms of clarity, learning, and creativity — what he calls, “crystallized intelligence.”
If you’re not an experienced journal writer, the idea of “thought-dumping” may be hard to implement. In my experience, it’s good to loosely direct your thought-dumping toward your goals.
Consider the “requests” you made of your subconscious just before going to bed. You asked yourself loads of questions. You thought about and wrote down the things you’re trying to accomplish.
Now, first thing in the morning, when your creative brain is most attuned,after its subconscious workout while you slept, start writing down whatever comes to mind about those things.
I often get ideas for articles I’m going to write while doing these thought-dumps. I get ideas about how I can be a better husband and father to my three foster children. I get clarity about the goals I believe I should be pursuing. I get insights about people I need to connect with, or how I can improve my current relationships.
To be sure, you’ll need to practice this skill. It may take several attempts before you become proficient. But with consistency, you can become fluent and automatic at achieving creative and intuitive bursts.
Conclusion:
“A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.” — James Allen
Mental creation always precedes physical creation. Before a building is physically constructed, there’s a blueprint.
Your thoughts are the blueprint of the life you are building one day at a time.When you learn to channel your thinking — both consciously and subconsciously — you create the conditions that make the achievement of your goals inevitable.
You are the designer of your destiny. This simple routine will help you crystallize where you want to go, and how you will get there. | https://medium.com/the-mission/this-10-minute-routine-will-increase-your-clarity-and-creativity-7ce61b11c2f9 | ['Benjamin Hardy'] | 2020-09-21 20:10:38.871000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Motivation', 'Startup', 'Life'] |
The Ted Talk That Changed My Life | The Simplest Form of Mindfulness Is Also the Most Effective
Most of us are cognitively aware that our bad habits are, well, BAD. The challenge is that our prefrontal cortex (front section of the brain) that is responsible for this awareness is the first to go offline when we get stressed. When this brain center logs off, we start to feel ‘numb’, give in to our stress, and fall back onto negative habits.
Let’s go back to the 3 pillars that form a habit one more time. You experience a trigger. You respond with a behavior. You receive a reward.
Say you’re battling the urge to have that fourth slice of pizza. You’ve already experienced the trigger that’s telling you, “Yes, this is a great idea…you’ll feel so good after”. What if we took a split second here to pause before caving in? What if we were to use curiosity as a tool to disrupt the cycle? Here’s what it looks like:
You feel a trigger that spurs temptation. Instead of caving in, you pause for a moment and get curious. Ask yourself…what’s going on? Why am I feeling this way?
From here you have two possible routes, both of which are a step in the right direction. The first path is that you still give in to your bad behavior, but with a heightened state of mindfulness. The act of caving in feels much less satisfying. You become consciously aware that the reward is just a guise covering up the reality that you’re in an endless loop of going nowhere.
In one of Brewers’s studies, a subject involved with smoking admitted that mindful smoking, “smells like stinky cheese, and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!”. This paper eventually reveals that mindfulness training may confer benefits greater than those associated with current standard treatments for smoking cessation. No money, drugs, or therapy required.
The second route is when things get really exciting. This is when you experience the trigger, but you’re now inherently aware that this is a poor choice and you take a halt.
This is how you move from knowledge to wisdom. We’re all cognitively aware that bad habits aren’t good for us. Curiosity bridges the gap to allow us to be mindful of this, even when we’re stressed out or ‘in the act’.
When you start to implement this curiosity technique into your behaviors, bad habits simply become less enchanting. You start to wise up and realize that you don’t need to give in to every trigger that comes your way. An amazing bonus to this mindset is that curiosity in itself is rewarding. Being mindful amidst your stressed-out state will deliver the prize that you were initially seeking from your ‘drug’ of choice. It may not be as powerful of a hit, but over time, your brain will realize that it’s the one you need.
This is a rewarding, sustainable, and life-changing way to think about human behavior. Will it solve all of your problems instantly? Absolutely not. Many addictions are as much physiological as they are psychological. At times, it may be necessary to get professional help. Regardless, this is a powerful tool for initiating an important conversation with yourself. It is one that empowers you to ditch the dissociation and start attacking your bad habits head-on. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/the-ted-talk-that-changed-my-life-a79e591783bf | ['David Liira'] | 2020-12-11 23:20:21.853000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Health', 'Wellness', 'Science', 'Psychology'] |
How to Make Your Day Job Support Your Art | Gather around kids and let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, people grew up and got one job that paid all of their bills, let them save some money, and was enough to do big things like buy a house and put their kids through college.
Once upon a time, that was just what happened. It’s sometimes called the American Dream, but it was just reality. Weird, I know. For the rest of this post I’m going to talk about a day job, but what I mean is whatever income streams you’ve cobbled together to pay for your life.
And even weirder if you’re an artist of any kind who has it in their head that you’re supposed to figure out how to make your art give you that kind of life.
The idea that your art has to be the kind of pillar of your financial life that that barely even exists in the corporate world anymore is a dream killer.
You aren’t a failure if your art doesn’t let you quit your day job.
One more time for the people who really need to hear it.
You aren’t a failure if your art doesn’t let you quit your day job.
And that day job? It will suck a lot less if you can wrap your head around the idea that it’s serving your art.
Seriously. If you can make yourself believe that the idea that showing up for your 9-to-5 is part of your art, it will change everything.
It will knock your day job off its pedestal and it will relieve your art of the pressure to pay its own way. And it will crack your brain open so that the idea of building a living around your art, instead of feeling like a failure if your art doesn’t pull in enough money all by itself, can take root.
Start by prioritizing your art.
If you have a regular job, chances are there are hours in your day that you don’t have control over. That’s okay. We ALL have hours during the day we don’t have control over.
Even full-time artists who earn a living with their art.
Get a calendar though, an agenda of some kind, and schedule your art like it’s important enough for you to show up for. If you wouldn’t blow off working for someone else, don’t blow off working on your art.
Here’s the deal: you don’t have to put eight hours a day into it. But I bet you can find an hour a day, five days a week. Start there. Write it in and protect that time like there’s a boss who will dock your check if you don’t show up.
Think outside the 9-to-5 box.
Brainstorm how you can make your day job work around your art, instead of the other way around.
Are there income streams you can build that will let you work fewer hours?
Can you find work that will free up more of your emotional and physical energy for your art?
How about focusing on finding a job that pays more per hour so that you can make the same money in fewer hours, and open up time for your art?
Is there some aspect of your art that you can turn into an income? Think about teaching, blogging, freelancing.
Instead of fitting your art into your day job, shift your thinking so that you’re building a life around your art.
Build an audience.
A couple of years ago I set up a little corner of a shared booth at a tiny local comic con to spread the word about Ninja Writers.
I was surrounded by artists of all stripes. Writers. Comic book creators. A girl who made tote bags out of Doctor Who and Star Wars fabric. A man who sat in his booth all day and drew superheroes.
I sat there with my little poster promising to give away a $25 Amazon gift card to one of people who gave me their email address — and I realized that literally no one else around me was collecting email addresses.
A few passed out postcards or bookmarks with their website addresses. Those disappeared into bags full of similar ephemera. I talked to as many as I could and tried to encourage them to collect email addresses from the people who were stopping to talk to them.
I handed out my business card and told them that I’d be happy to help them learn how to build an email list if they emailed me.
It didn’t work. The few people who did take my business card didn’t use it to contact me. I haven’t heard from any of them.
Artists need audiences.
It doesn’t matter what your art is. Writing, painting, sculpture, theater, making TARDIS tote bags. If you are an artist of any kind, you need an audience.
I can tell you from experience that even having some big producer of your art get involved does not guarantee you an audience. Ask anyone whose had a film flop, an art show fail to result in sales, a restaurant go bust.
Ask me sometime about how being published by Penguin worked out for me.
Artists need audiences, and no one else will build them for us. When you are ready to make the move to making some of your income from your art, you’ll need people who care about what you’re doing.
The one thing you can do is start building an email list. Get a free MailChimp account. Or just start writing names and emails in a notebook. Send everyone two emails a month. In one talk about cool shit you’ve come across that you think they might like. In the other talk about what you’re working on.
Make a habit of asking everyone if they want to join your list. It’ll feel weird at first, but you’ll get used to it.
Your day job is the first investor in your art.
True story.
If you have a day job that pays your bills, then it’s paying for your supplies, it’s putting a roof over your head, it’s feeding you. Maybe it’s paying for you to take some classes so you can learn to be a better artist.
Seriously. Your day job is like having patron. Sure you have to work for it. You have to put in the time to get the pay check. And maybe that sucks. I’ve had jobs that really, really sucked. I know that place.
When you have a day job like that, sometimes the only thing that helps is shifting your mindset.
Instead of: I can’t be a writer because I have to work 40 hours a week at this shitty job that I hate and it sucks all my creative energy.
Try this: I spend 40 hours a week at a shitty job that I hate, but it pays for me to spend 20 hours a week writing.
Or even better: I’m grateful for this day job that pays my bills so that I can be a writer.
Give your art a break.
The best gift you can give yourself as an artist is to stop expecting your art to support itself. Especially if you’re still learning.
Maybe your art will earn a living someday. It’s unreasonable to put that burden on it when it’s still a baby venture and you’re still learning how to create it.
I know so many writers who put everything inside them into writing a book. They shine it up and send it off to agents — as they should. And when rejection comes — as it always will — they are crushed. Absolutely devastated.
So devastated that sometimes they just stop writing. What’s the point if it’s never going to make money? Obviously, if this one book failed then they suck and they just aren’t really writers anyway.
Don’t do that to yourself. Please.
Embrace your day job. It has one job. Paying your bills. Let your writing (or whatever your art is) off the hook. Just create. Practice. Take in the masters. Learn to be better.
Come back and talk to me when you’re ten books in about whether or not you should pack it in. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-make-your-day-job-support-your-art-2529d75e8375 | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-09-22 21:16:07.226000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing'] |
Exploring New York City Restaurants | By Rashida Kamal and Vivien Ngo
Enigma’s latest project Food for Thought provides an interactive interface to explore health inspection data for restaurants across New York City. We dug a little deeper into the relationships between these inspection scores and how popular restaurants are with New Yorkers to highlight a few hidden gems, as well as the places to avoid.
Click an image to play with the full-sized interactive map!
Methodology
Each map contains geocoded Yelp data on restaurant ratings and prices and restaurant inspection data from Enigma Public. Data analysis was done using Pandas, and histograms were made with Matplotlib with Adobe Illustrator for touching up. Restaurants shown with a “?” were inspected but did not receive a letter grade; for our analysis we used the violations score from the most recent inspection even if a grade was not issued. The interactives were designed by Enigma’s previous data journalism fellow, Rashida Kamal, and the maps were updated with June data by Vivien Ngo. Lots of thanks to Peter Henderson for his help!
Originally published at www.enigma.com on July 19, 2018. | https://medium.com/enigma-engineering/exploring-new-york-city-restaurants-3998e5147fac | [] | 2018-07-19 18:57:03.254000+00:00 | ['New York', 'Data Visualization', 'Public Data', 'Dataviz', 'Engineering'] |
A Social Worker Offered Mormon Lingo to Me When I Was in Crisis, Told Me to Think Happy Thoughts, and Hung Up on Me — While I Was Still in Crisis | A Social Worker Offered Mormon Lingo to Me When I Was in Crisis, Told Me to Think Happy Thoughts, and Hung Up on Me — While I Was Still in Crisis Rhett Wilkinson Follow May 26, 2019 · 3 min read
I called a crisis line. You may say it was tragically less than helpful. In fact, it only made the situation worse. The issue was created by a social worker on the other end of the Utah County Crisis Line.
(United Way of Utah County)
Immediately after telling her I am considering killing myself, this person talked about “the other side.”
I’m not against talk about heaven, but “the other side” comes ripped from language used in culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Which still would not be bad, except that she is not speaking organically. Not from the heart. When I was suicidal.
Further, she did nothing more than parrot what the system she is in fed her.
And that’s what she had to offer above anything else when I wanted nothing more than to die.
Then she went on to talk about thinking positive thoughts. I do know social work well enough that least to know that simply thinking positive thoughts doesn’t help anyone depressed, let alone suicidal. And in fact, that patients should be encouraged to grieve. (Not to say that she said nothing about medications or even exercise, let alone yoga.)
(Perhaps this photo expresses Latter-day Saint culture well.) A crisis worker offered Mormon lingo immediately after I told her I was considering killing myself and proceeded to give an idea prevalent in LDS culture about thinking “positive thoughts.”
Another example of her just parroting an idea fed to her by culture, instead of doing the work of life-saving.
So then I got at these ideas. I said that I had compassion for how she was handling the call since her thoughts are not her own since she is part of a cult. Her response?
Hang up.
On someone who may kill themselves?
And she said she has been a social worker for 15 years.
How often, then, did she miss out on helping folks in real pain? How much did she simply drop the ball? Has she fallen short for years?
Perhaps this is why the recording to start the call to the Utah County Crisis Line emphasizes that the social workers are volunteering.
Perhaps, though, even those not getting paid should be kept from life-saving circumstances if they are going to drop the ball so bad.
The Utah County Crisis Line has a tagline of “Let us be your lifeline.” Hopefully at least not this lady any longer.
—
Even if you no longer affiliate with the Latter-day Saint (ex-Mormon) church but enjoy sociality with family and friends as before, you can still find social settings organized by the Utah Valley PostMormons. There, you can find your people. And of course, if you don’t enjoy those relationships like before, the many UVPM events that happen each week can be even life-saving.
Led by wonderful people, UVPM is also for folks who just are struggling with it or are “never Mormons” seeking a break from the predominant culture. Find their events on Facebook and Meetup.
—
For more articles like this, please support The Seer Stone at the Hero’s Journey Content Patreon page. | https://medium.com/the-seer-stone/a-social-worker-offered-mormon-lingo-to-me-when-in-crisis-told-me-to-just-think-happy-thoughts-e1fa033160e0 | ['Rhett Wilkinson'] | 2019-06-19 14:08:11.660000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Utah', 'Psychology'] |
An Effective Five-Step Process for Writing Captivating Headlines | You’ve spent hours pouring your heart and soul into a blog post.
You’re writing about an important topic that you’re sure will help readers, and you want to convey your message as effectively as possible.
So you’ve edited each paragraph until your eyes ached from staring at the computer screen. You’ve crafted a compelling introduction that will entice readers to keep reading, and your conclusion is powerful with a memorable final sentence.
Unfortunately, however, all of this time and effort will go to waste if no one reads your article.
Often, there’s only one way to get people to read: you must craft a headline that is so irresistible it draws people like a magnet to click on your piece.
People’s social media feeds are flooded with a constant stream of articles and online content. If you don’t have an attention-grabbing headline, your post won’t reach the potential readers it could help and inspire.
But don’t worry!
In today’s article, I’m sharing my five-step process that will help you write captivating headlines so your target audience reads your valuable blog posts.
Let’s dive in.
(Please note that links to books are affiliate links which means I’ll earn a small commission if you buy through the link with no extra cost to you.)
1. Craft a one sentence synopsis
When I begin working on a new writing project, the very first thing I do is write up a one-sentence synopsis of what my piece will be about. I do this no matter if I’m about to write a blog post, a personal essay, or even a short story.
The one-sentence synopsis gives me a clear understanding of the main point of my piece and the message I’m trying to express to my readers. It acts as a guide so I don’t end up running off on tangents and going down rabbit trails.
And often it can be tweaked to become a perfect title for the piece too.
For example, for this article my synopsis was: “My five-step process that will help readers craft captivating headlines.”
I tweaked that sentence to get my headline: “A Powerful Five-Step Process for Writing Captivating Headlines.”
Now, as I said, I don’t only use the one-sentence synopsis for blog posts. I recently wrote a personal essay titled “What a Museum Security Guard Taught Me About Art.” That title came straight from a one-sentence synopsis I’d crafted too.
In my article here, I dive deeper into how to craft a one-sentence synopsis and share five different formulas that can help you write yours.
Let’s now see how to go about tweaking your synopsis in order to turn it into a powerful headline.
2. Identify Your SEO Keyword
My second step when crafting a headline for a blog post is to identify the keyword that I want my blog post to be categorized under in Google searches.
In blogging parlance, this is called “search engine optimization” or SEO. If you have a blog and don’t bother at all about SEO, you probably won’t end up reaching readers who might have found you through Google.
Even if you’re not worried about SEO, choosing a clear keyword will help people better understand what your piece is about and help you avoid titles that sound like clickbait.
For example, compare the difference between titling your piece “This One Habit Changed My Life” (sounds a bit like clickbait) or “How Journaling in the Morning Changed My Life”. “Journaling” would be your keyword for that title.
Here’s how to figure out what keyword to use for your piece:
Take a look at your one-sentence synopsis. What is your piece about?
Is there a word you use multiple times in your piece to refer to your topic?
What terms might someone be searching for in Google to find your piece?
Search for blog posts similar to yours. What keywords are used in the titles?
3. Tweak Your Headline to Include Specificity, Curiosity, and Power Words
Once I’ve crafted my one-sentence synopsis, written my blog post, and then pinpointed my keyword, I write up a quick first draft of a headline to work with.
Let’s take, for example, the blog post I wrote about my two different journaling methods. A rough draft of a title might have looked like this: “A Peek At My Two Journaling Methods.”
That’s not very compelling, right?
It’s time to tweak that headline to make sure it stands out and entices people to click to read the article.
There are three ingredients that copywriters use to write effective headlines: specificity, curiosity, and power words.
First, specificity makes your headline focused and compelling. In his classic book Scientific Advertising, copywriter Claude C. Hopkins explained why “specificity” is persuasive:
“…[A] man who makes a specific claim is either telling the truth or a lie. People do not expect an advertiser to lie … The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific.”
Now, you’re probably not selling a product in your blog post, but you most likely are trying to convince your readers of an idea or to take a certain course of action. Specificity will increase your credibility.
For example, instead of writing, “I Lost Weight on a Low Carb Diet”, you could write “How I Lost Five Pounds in Two Weeks on a Low Carb Diet.”
That word “how” indicates your blog post is going to share a specific process you followed. The numbers make your headline sound truthful.
Of course, you’ll lose your credibility if the body of your post doesn’t deliver what the headline promised. If your headline promises to share a specific process, make sure you do so in the body of your post.
Here are ways to make your headlines specific:
Start your headline with a number (for example, “5 Steps to Quickly Memorize Any Piano Piece”)
Start your headline with words like “who, what, why, when, where, or how” (for example, “How to Make A Perfect Pan Seared Steak Every Time”)
Use specific words like “This” or “These” (for example, “This Powerful Strategy Will Boost Your Productivity”)
Use specific numbers in the body of your headline (for example, one of my most popular posts on Medium is “How to Make Your Writing Captivating with One Simple Technique”)
Specificity also piques readers’ curiosity, which is the next ingredient for strengthening your headline.
If a headline arouses a person’s curiosity, they’re probably going to keep reading. So make sure you don’t just summarize your piece in the headline.
For example, I’m not piquing someone’s curiosity if I write a title like this: “Keeping a Journal Will Make You More Productive”.
Compare it to this one: “5 Reasons Why Keeping a Journal Will Make You More Productive”.
Finally, take your headline to the next level by using power words.
Power words are words that trigger an emotional response. They might be a strong adjective or adverb or a more descriptive verb.
For example, instead of writing, “increase your productivity”, you could write, “boost your productivity” or even “supercharge your productivity.”
In my headlines, I use words like “compelling” and “captivating.” A food blogger might use words like “refreshing”, “tasty”, or “delicious.”
When you evaluate your headline, ask yourself if you could include a vivid adjective or a more emotional verb.
4. Convey a benefit to the reader
Lastly, your headline should appeal to the reader’s self-interest. It should promise them something in return for the time they spend reading.
David Ogilvy, known as The Father of Advertising, is said to have stated,
“The headlines that work best are those that promise the reader a benefit.”
A benefit could be anything from entertaining someone to teaching someone to inspiring someone to helping someone solve a problem.
What is the benefit you’re offering to a person for reading your blog post?
Will you help them solve a problem? Earn money? Save money? Increase their productivity? Expand their knowledge? Become smarter? Happier? Avoid danger?
Maybe they will learn a quick and effortless method for accomplishing something? Or discover a secret or a strategy?
Depending on the type of blog post you’re writing, you might want the promise in your headline to be very clear or perhaps more subtle. For example, my personal essay’s title “What a Museum Security Guard Taught Me About Art” was focused on me rather than on the reader. However, it did promise that I was going to share the security guard’s wisdom with them.
But when I wrote the headline for my blog post about my journaling methods, I wanted the benefit to be very clear. I decided to go with “Two Journaling Methods to Boost Your Productivity and Creativity” rather than “Two Journaling Methods That Boost My Productivity and Creativity.” The latter is not as powerful at hooking the reader.
5. Write Multiple Headlines
Even the best copywriters in the world usually don’t write a captivating headline right off the bat. In the book Tested Advertising Methods, expert copywriter John Caples says he writes between twelve to twenty-five headlines before choosing the best one.
Sometimes I will change the headline of a post after I’ve published it if I notice that it isn’t getting a lot of clicks.
So experiment and tweak your headlines as much as you can. Write out a list of different headlines you can use for your piece.
Headline formulas are a fantastic way to remind yourself to include all of the essential copywriting elements covered in steps 3 and 4. You can find these formulas in copywriting books or in countless articles online. Here are several examples:
How to Start____When____ (For example, “How to Start a Side Hustle When You’re Broke”)
(For example, “How to Start a Side Hustle When You’re Broke”) Why____Makes You____ (“Why Reading Makes You a Better Writer”)
(“Why Reading Makes You a Better Writer”) [Number] Mistakes People Make When____ (“10 Mistakes People Make When Saving for Retirement”)
(“10 Mistakes People Make When Saving for Retirement”) The Ultimate Guide To____ (“The Ultimate Guide to Going Low Carb”)
(“The Ultimate Guide to Going Low Carb”) [Number] Lessons I Learned From____ (“5 Lessons I Learned from Waking up at 5am for 30 Days”)
(“5 Lessons I Learned from Waking up at 5am for 30 Days”) [Number] Strategies That Will Help You ____ (“7 Strategies That Will Help You Improve Your Writing Skills”)
Once you’ve written the final version of your headline, evaluate it and ask yourself, “Is this headline clear and easy to understand? And does it make me eager to read the article right this minute?”
You can also run your headlines through the Coschedule Headline Analyzer to see if there are ways to tweak them to make them more powerful.
The Takeaway
In his book How to Write a Good Advertisement, copywriter Victor A. Schwab writes,
“The headline is like a flag being held up by a flagman alongside a railroad track. He is using it to try to get the immediate attention of the engineer of an approaching train so that he can give him some kind of message…The message on the flag…must be persuasive enough…to compete with all the other distractions of life. It must capture attention. And it must offer a ‘reward for reading’.”
If you follow the five-step process in this article, your headline will act just like a bright red flag waving down your readers so you can share your important message with them. | https://medium.com/copywriting-secrets/a-powerful-five-step-process-for-writing-captivating-headlines-50f939d6166a | ['Nicole Bianchi'] | 2020-02-08 17:08:51.054000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Productivity', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity'] |
Loss Aversion — how fear influences customer choice | Loss Aversion — how fear influences customer choice
Why the possibility of loss is one of the most potent psychological principles in marketing
Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash
Have you ever experienced FOMO — the “Fear of Missing Out”?
It’s a form of social anxiety that makes people scared they’re being left out of exciting or interesting events. It’s usually triggered by posts on social media, where it looks like the whole world is having fun without you.
If you suffer from FOMO, you’re not alone. A recent study found that 70% of millennials experience the fear of missing out regularly.
There’s a profound psychological principle behind why people experience FOMO.
It’s called Loss Aversion, and it can be a powerful design mechanism for guiding customer choice.
Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash
What is Loss Aversion?
First identified by Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, Loss Aversion is a psychological principle that says people will go to great lengths to avoid losing.
In fact, the psychological pain of losing is twice as powerful as the pleasure of winning.
Because it’s so powerful, Loss Aversion features heavily in cognitive psychology and decision theory. It’s also one of the most effective tactics for getting customers to buy (the other being Social Proof).
A customer’s hatred of losing can take lots of forms, each with fascinating applications.
How information is presented can dramatically impact what decisions people make
“Losses loom larger than gains.” — Daniel Kahneman
Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash
For example, a study was conducted to see if framing cancer treatments using Loss Aversion could improve surgery opt-in rates.
The research team hypothesized that opt-in rates were related to how the options were framed.
To test this hypothesis, doctors presented patients with two options. Each framed surgery as a potential gain or a possible loss — the results were staggering.
Surgery framed as a gain: “The one-month survival rate of surgery is 90%.” Surgery framed as a loss: “There is a 10% chance of death in the month post-surgery.”
When framed as a gain, 84% of people chose surgery. But when framed as a loss, only 50% opted in.
This simple application of Loss Aversion increased surgery opt-ins by 54%.
Ownership creates emotional bonds that people don’t want to break
This principle is known as the Endowment Effect. It’s a psychological principle that falls under the Loss Aversion umbrella.
In “Predictably Irrational,” Dan Ariely describes this effect through the lens of Duke University basketball.
Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash
If you’re unfamiliar with Duke basketball, all you need to know is the Duke-UNC game is the biggest of the year. And that it takes place in an area of the country where basketball is a religion.
To score tickets to this game, students have to camp out for weeks. They then enter a lottery for a chance to win tickets.
Ariely reached out to students who won tickets and those who entered the lottery but didn’t win. Both had invested the same amount of pain, sacrifice, time, and effort to enter the lottery. But some had won, and others hadn’t.
Would this affect how each group valued the basketball tickets?
The results were interesting. Students who were not successful in the lottery said they’d pay an average of $170 for a ticket.
But the students who did get a ticket? When asked how much they’d sell their ticket for, they asked 170% more for their ticket — about $2,400 on average.
The question is — why were the owners asking so much for their tickets?
The answer? Emotion.
According to Ariely, once someone owns a product, they begin fantasizing about their future experiences. Once they create these “pre-memories” of the game, ticket-holders don’t want to lose out.
So these students wouldn’t only be selling a ticket. They’d be losing out on potential memories, emotions, and good times.
The lesson — the more emotions associated with a product, the more people value it. | https://medium.com/choice-hacking/loss-aversion-how-fear-influences-customer-choice-605bbb13feb5 | ['Jennifer Clinehens'] | 2020-11-25 15:46:38.580000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Business', 'Creativity', 'Psychology', 'Startup'] |
The FDA Banned These Chemicals — and They’re Still Everywhere | The FDA Banned These Chemicals — and They’re Still Everywhere
Antibacterial compounds are no longer in your hand soap, but they’re in your floors, your walls, and in your body.
Just about two years ago, activists who work to reduce environmental contamination from hazardous chemicals were feeling pretty cheerful. After a struggle that had lasted decades, they’d persuaded the Food and Drug Administration to ban a slate of antibacterial chemicals from soaps and bodywashes in the United States.
The rap on the chemicals — especially the best-known and most common ones on the list, triclosan and triclocarban — was that hundreds of pieces of scientific research revealed they did more harm than good to humans and to the environment. Mouse studies suggested that these bacteria-killing compounds might affect hormone production and damage the microbiome, and they appeared to contribute to antibiotic resistance. Moreover, cleansers with these chemicals were no better at killing infectious bugs than plain soap and water.
The ban on triclosan and triclocarban was an achievement, given that the FDA had been mulling it over since 1974. But it was only a partial victory. Triclosan and triclocarban are still dosed into the carpets we walk on, added to the household plastics we handle every day, and blended into the caulk in our bathrooms and the paint on our walls. They are routine ingredients in fabrics and plastics — and thus in floor wax, air-conditioning coils, kitchen tools, and kids’ toys. Like a phone call in an old horror movie, triclosan and triclocarban are coming from inside the house.
Unlike hand sanitizers and soaps, all these products fall under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rather than the FDA. And the EPA has so far shown no signs of cracking down on their use.
“There are thousands of products outside of the FDA’s regulatory reach that pose similar exposure and health threats,” says Rolf Halden, director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, who began researching triclosan in 2002. He estimates that more than 2,000 common products sold in the United States still contain the compounds.
Like a phone call in an old horror movie, triclosan and triclocarban are coming from inside the house.
Why dose your walls and carpets with antibacterials? To protect the objects themselves from attack by bacteria and mold, says Mae Wu, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped bring about the FDA ban by filing a lawsuit against the agency in 2010. “It’s impregnated in all these products as a preservative.”
It might seem like a good thing to have walls that don’t harbor bacteria and spatulas that gunk won’t grow on. The problem, Wu said, is that the antibacterials don’t stay bound up in the materials they have been added to. As those household products wear and decay, the compounds escape and find other things in your house to cling to. “It ends up in household dust,” she says. “It’s coming off your bathroom caulk, or off the mousepad you just bought.”
It’s … everywhere
Last year, Halden and more than 200 other scientists detailed the ongoing threats related to these disinfectants in a scientific paper that has come to be known as the Florence Statement, for the location of the conference where it was drafted. The statement cites almost 170 pieces of research in order to document the persistent hazards of triclosan and triclocarban. The compounds flow into wastewater, pile up in sewage (and contaminate crop fields when sewage sludge is used as fertilizer), persist in the soil, accumulate in aquatic plants, and collect in the flesh of fish and livestock.
What’s more, a range of studies in the United States and in other countries have found traces of the chemical in human blood, urine, and breast milk. Over several decades, experiments in animals and observations in people show that in addition to interfering with hormone production, triclosan and triclocarban disrupt the endocrine system, damage heart muscle, affect the growth of fetuses, and may increase allergic reactions in children.
The compounds flow into wastewater, pile up in sewage, persist in the soil, accumulate in aquatic plants, and collect in the flesh of fish and livestock.
They may also contribute to one of the world’s most pressing health threats. Microbiologists have long suspected that triclosan’s ability to kill bacteria might create the same risks as the overuse of antibiotics. That is, a low or diluted dose might kill only the vulnerable bacteria, permitting bacteria that have developed defenses against the compounds to flourish and dominate. When that happens with antibiotics, the drugs became less and less useful as resistant bacteria take over. Antibiotic resistance kills an estimated 23,000 Americans and 700,000 people around the world each year.
In 2016, Halden and researchers from Harvard and the University of Oregon demonstrated that these disinfectants could make the problem of antibiotic resistance worse. They took samples of dust from indoor public spaces at their universities and subjected them to tests to reveal both the genetic and the chemical contents of the dust. The more triclosan there was in the dust, they found, the more antibiotic resistance bacterial genes the dust also contained. It suggests the disinfectant was influencing which bacteria survived and died. The alarming possibility: Triclosan may be changing the environmental microbiome and enriching it with bacteria that are potentially dangerous to human health.
Other recent work demonstrates how these compounds may be affecting animal microbiomes, setting up the possibility that they could do the same to us. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts fed triclosan to mice, so that they developed a blood concentration equal to what many humans already carry. Those antibacterial loads devastated the mice’s gut microbiomes, the mix of bacteria that help digest food, synthesize vitamins, and communicate to the immune system. The team reported in June that the mice that were fed triclosan experienced inflammation that could predispose them to other gut problems. In mice that had been engineered to have the equivalent of inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer — conditions that many humans have — triclosan made those illnesses worse, with more cellular damage and larger tumors.
This precise effect had never been shown before. “We think our study suggests triclosan has previously unknown health risks,” says Guodong Zhang, the paper’s senior author and an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
To remove disinfectants, apply consumer pressure
Despite these emerging risks, it’s not at all clear that regulation of triclosan and triclocarban will change in the near term. The EPA last evaluated the chemicals in 2008. The agency usually reviews chemicals on a 15-year cycle but began another review of triclosan early, in 2013.
Since then, of course, the government has changed hands, and so has leadership of the agency. Trump’s pick for EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, resigned in July after several ethics controversies, and the agency is currently headed by an acting administrator, a situation in which the EPA is unlikely to take any big steps. A spokesperson told NEO.LIFE that the agency expects to complete its review next year.
Some manufacturers are quietly changing their products’ formulas to phase out the problem chemicals without advertising they have done so.
With further policy changes unlikely, advocates hope the market will speak instead. Arlene Blum, the executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute in Berkeley — which won a multi-year battle to get toxic flame retardants removed from fabrics — thinks the way to reduce disinfectant use lies in targeting big purchasers such as car manufacturers, home builders, and huge retail chains.
“It’s really hard for the government — EPA, the FDA — to move quickly, but manufacturers and retailers can,” she says. “It’s not hard to motivate big buyers and trade associations when money is on the line.”
There is a precedent: Over the past four years, most poultry producers in the United States stopped routinely feeding antibiotics to their birds, largely because of consumer pressure from individuals and from big institutional buyers such as school systems and medical centers.
And there are subtle signs of change. The advocacy group Beyond Pesticides maintains a list of consumer products that contain triclosan and triclocarban. In some cases, the group says, manufacturers are quietly changing their products’ formulas to phase out the problem chemicals without advertising they have done so. Other manufacturers are explicitly embracing triclosan-free products: Halden is working with the Healthy Building Network, a research nonprofit that advocates for green and sustainable construction, to guide architects and materials manufacturers toward choosing components without these compounds.
If manufacturers stop adding triclosan and triclocarban to their products, the compounds in the environment now will slowly break down and disappear. As long as these chemicals aren’t replaced with some equally risky compound, the damage done by these antibacterials could finally become a thing of the past. | https://medium.com/neodotlife/the-fda-banned-these-chemicals-and-theyre-still-everywhere-8b9a05b9fb46 | ['Maryn Mckenna'] | 2020-07-13 21:51:08.655000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Environment', 'Wellness', 'Microbiome', 'Science'] |
Can This Toxic Question Please Just Go Away? | There’s a debate that anyone who has spent any amount of time thinking about being a writer has come across. (I’m going to go out on a ledge an say anyone who has thought about being any sort of artist has come up against this debate.)
Should we write because we must or should we write for money?
The must side is so earnest. Writers who insist that they write because they have no choice. It’s write or perish. And having readers is incidental. Money actually diminishes their must-ness.
The write for money side can be cold. They never write for free. They only write to their market. They hustle out work with shocking speed. They have the bottom line in mind at all times and being paid what they’re worth is the most important thing.
It’s enough to make me scream.
Look. You don’t have to choose.
You can be an earnest writer who feels honestly moved to be a storyteller — and still want to be paid for your work.
And you can want to earn money and still fully believe that you must write or die.
I’ve been writing pretty much every day since the sixth grade. I’m 47, so we’re talking about a habit stretching back more than thirty-five years.
I went to battle with my high school so that they’d let me take a creative writing class my senior year instead of AP world literature. My undergraduate work was in creative writing and I have a MFA.
The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be when I grow up is a writer.
Would I write, even if I wasn’t being paid?
Yeah. I would.
In fact, I have. I sure wrote a lot before I was ever paid for it. And I paid a lot for the privilege of learning how to do it better.
But guess what? I like being paid for my work. And I’m so sick of the insinuation that there’s something wrong with learning how to treat writing like what it is: a business.
It isn’t leveled at me very often —or at least, not that I notice. I’ll admit to being not super sensitive to the accusation when it’s thrown my way. It doesn’t matter to me any more than if someone screamed hey, you’re really tall at me or omg, your hair is so brown.
Okay. So I am. So it is. And yeah, I’m a professional writer who gets paid for her work. Readers matter to me. I get excited about them. So, the accusation, when it does come, rolls off.
But I see so many newer, less experienced writers gutted by the idea that if they aspire to a career as a writer they’re some how not real writers.
So, in case you need it . . .
You have permission to get excited about the business side of writing.
You have permission to celebrate earning a pay check for your writing. (Here’s a hint for you — almost all of the time, the must-ers aren’t getting a pay check. The must argument makes them feel better about themselves. And whatever, okay. But you don’t have to let it bring you down.)
You have permission to build an email list and learn about running a small business and conduct yourself like a professional.
Will I feel sorry for you if you professionalize writing to the point that there’s no room left for art or generosity? I really will.
Will you look like a tool if you take a public stance against ever writing something you’re not paid for? Yep.
But those are your choices.
And on the flip side . . .
You have permission to write for free. You even have permission to never once, in your whole life, give a thought to being paid for your work.
You have permission to write something just because it feels good, without any thought at all toward how you’ll monetize it.
You have permission to treat your writing like art and never think about it as a business.
Will I feel sorry for you if you’re never able to let yourself turn your art into your career? I will, if you’re miserable in your actual career and I think you could be a professional writer, sure.
Will you look like a tool if you get up on your high horse about not caring about being paid for writing? Oh, yes.
But, those are your choices.
What you don’t have permission to do is tear someone else down.
You do you. Try to give other people the space and grace to do them.
Even if what they do isn’t the way you do things. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/can-you-write-for-love-and-for-money-665fbd8ae6a9 | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-07-25 14:50:21.352000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Art', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Writing'] |
This is sloppy and hides intent if you ever reference it more | These similarities below are the skills and tools that both roles use. Mainly used by both are the programming languages and tools that help to deploy a Data Science model. Depending on the company, a Data Scientist could expect to work more on deployment, or the same could be said about a Data Engineer.
Most importantly in Data Science, is the ability to communicate. You will most likely have to work with a Product Manager or stakeholder to go over weaknesses in the business before you even look at the data in your company and start your Data Science model building process.
This is also the case in higher education, where even choosing a college has become a matter of life and death. We have moved from a time when colleges were a community’s lifeblood — providing jobs, culture, and diversity of thought and experience — to a time when many college campuses have become Covid hotspots, bringing rising infection rates and fear to the communities they once enriched.
Now if you need to reference the name later, you will be doing so via a named variable vs. an index value. This works well for response data that you’ll likely know the structure of. As long as the person’s information is always in the same order, you can destructure and assign everything over and over again to avoid using index values.
Using the ** operator on the dict as you’re passing a dict to the function allows you to unpack all of the arguments successfully (instead of accidentally passing the dict object itself). Although this method does add another variable and a separate data structure, it improves overall readability when there are a larger number of arguments. Moving the function call around or referencing multiple calls to the same function with the same (or slightly tweaked) arguments now becomes infinitely easier and requires less overall modification.
If you pass a class to dir, it will list all of the attributes for that object. This includes the names of its functions. By filtering for a prefix, suffix, or included keyword in the string name, we can group the functions of this class into different categories. This allows us to “pick up” new functions whose names include a keyword and either call them all or perform other logic with them later on in the code.
Although certain formats of this indentation style might technically be allowed in PEP8, I personally do not enjoy looking at heavily indented function arguments. You are forced to move your eyes all the way over to the right, some IDEs don’t play nice with this indentation, and using this style inhibits future extensibility.
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If you’re using an API that requires an API key, please keep that key a secret. If you’re not planning on uploading your code or hosting your project publicly, you should be fine, but if you are going to upload it to GitHub or host it live then take these steps to keep your API key secret.
We have moved from a time when colleges were a community’s lifeblood — providing jobs, culture, and diversity of thought and experience — to a time when many college campuses have become Covid hotspots, bringing rising infection rates and fear to the communities they once enriched.
There are lessons to be learned for organizations, leaders, and individuals. For Champlain College, all that we learned from the pandemic this fall helps to fuel our optimism about the future. The following lessons are ones we will take forward in defining what 2021 looks like on our campus:
Then when you want to use this environment variable in your code, refer to it using process.env.REACT_APP_API_KEY instead of a string containing your API key. Don’t forget to also add your .env file to your .gitignore.As covered earlier, APIs are a great tool to understand and implement. This article has set out to provide an overview of what APIs are, examples of popular APIs, and a brief tutorial on how to make requests. I hope that this article has been helpful, thanks for reading!https://medium.com/dataseries/hiding-secret-info-in-python-using-environment-variables-a2bab182eea — This is a great tutorial blog post on using environment variables in Python.
The coronavirus pandemic has transformed us from a nation that shunned discussions of death to one that receives daily mortality reports. In the face of unimaginable loss — of friends, family, jobs, and freedom — many have adopted a “hospice mentality,” a state of mind where our best days are behind us and the future is bleak.
In your project folder, create a file called .env (a file where we can store environment variables). In this file on the first line, you’re going to want to type REACT_APP_API_KEY= and then paste your API key. No quotes, no ;
Using the ** operator on the dict as you’re passing a dict to the function allows you to unpack all of the arguments successfully (instead of accidentally passing the dict object itself). Although this method does add another variable and a separate data structure, it improves overall readability when there are a larger number of arguments. Moving the function call around or referencing multiple calls to the same function with the same (or slightly tweaked) arguments now becomes infinitely easier and requires less overall modification.
For skills, these are used to query data, clean data, apply transformations, prepare data for Machine Learning algorithms, and visualize both exploratory data analysis and results of the Data Science model. Data Scientists often use platforms like Jupyter Notebook as well (or other similar ones) to perform research, including both code and comments, with a nice way to visualize and organize their work in progress.
As covered earlier, APIs are a great tool to understand and implement. This article has set out to provide an overview of what APIs are, examples of popular APIs, and a brief tutorial on how to make requests. I hope that this article has been helpful, thanks for reading!
When I started my presidency at Champlain College in Burlington, VT on July 1, our students had been sent home and the pandemic ravaged the country. Leading a college through a pandemic during a time of economic upheaval, social unrest, racial injustice, a divisive political landscape, and a climate crisis, has been the greatest test of my professional career. Yet I believe the true test of a leader is finding ways to pivot in an uncertain world and meet challenges with innovation and creativity.
Even as we approach a year of the pandemic with no end in sight, I feel optimistic about the future. And, I am not alone. A survey commissioned by Champlain College Online about career prospects, Covid-19, and the election found 66% of responders felt positive about the future. That positivity also translated into action, with two out of three respondents taking steps to improve their career prospects.
What are some of the key skills and concepts that define the role of a Data Scientist? There is plenty to discuss, so I will include some of these that I have personally worked with or have seen across several job descriptions. A Data Scientist can be defined in different ways, with differing opinions, but to me, I believe a Data Scientist is a person who employs the use of data and Machine Learning algorithms, to solve business problems efficiently. Therefore, with this definition, I will speak to the respective skills that tie in.Before we start, let’s acknowledge that these roles vary from company to company. That being said, there are still general themes to each specific role of Data Scientist and Data Engineer that differentiate them. Simply put, the skills and tools of each role can see plenty of overlap, but the concepts and goals differ greatly. I will be discussing in more detail the skills, concepts, similarities, and differences between the two positions. Please read below for a discussion on Data Science and Data Engineering; what makes them similar, and what makes them different.These concepts below are ones to keep in mind as Data Science is not just code and programming, but a role that helps to solve business problems. Efficiency and saving money go hand-in-hand, and they are especially prevalent for Data Scientists. These are useful for any role, but for Data Science, the goal is to automate a process from the benefit of a Machine Learning algorithm. In turn, this model will save money and time. You will need to know how the specific algorithms work so that you can also optimize for the best algorithm. Statistics is important to know, especially when you are A/B testing and setting up experiments for a product.
In this example, let’s assume we have the class above containing a large number of functions. Some of these functions serve a special purpose and should be dynamically accessible. We want any special function that we add to this class to be immediately picked up by the rest of our code so that it begins working right away. One way to accomplish this is simply by using dir on the containing class. | https://jafarhaxor.medium.com/this-is-sloppy-and-hides-intent-if-you-ever-reference-it-more-9998f80b85be | ['Jafar Arif'] | 2020-12-10 16:25:46.023000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Science'] |
Don’t Be a Writer, Be an Entrepreneur Who Writes | Don’t Be a Writer, Be an Entrepreneur Who Writes
The world isn’t short of great writers, it’s short of great entrepreneurs who write
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
An entrepreneur who writes is different from a writer. Being an entrepreneur means your true passion lies in using your wits to make money. Writing is your weapon of choice. A writer’s passion, by contrast, lies in the craft itself.
A quick multiple choice question can reveal which one you are.
Is making money from your writing more important than being a great writer?
a) Yes, definitely.
b) No, being a great writer is more important.
c) I’d like to have both equally.
Got your answer?
Here’s the twist. It doesn’t matter what you choose. Writing and blogging is so competitive you have little choice but to adapt and evolve into an entrepreneur. If writing is more important, treat the entrepreneurial side of things as a necessary evil that helps facilitate your passion.
Plan like an entrepreneur
An entrepreneur views writing as a means to an end. Not the end itself. Being an awesome writer helps, but it’s not the most important aspect of a writing based business/side-hustle.
As with any startup, writing a blog post requires an investment in planning and research. A single blog post requires a business plan. Yup, you read that correctly.
A reminiscent post about how your sibling used to blow their nose and wipe it on you (that’s just a hypothetical example) doesn’t need a business plan. I’m talking specifically about money posts intended to carve out your own slice of the pie, make money, or contribute to the foundation of your writing empire.
Here’s a quick overview of what a blog post business plan contains.
Blog post business plan from How to make money blogging on SME Pals.
Like any entrepreneur starting a business you need to know:
How much time and effort is required.
What financial costs there are.
What gaps or angles exist.
What obstacles exist.
Who the competition is and what they’re doing right (and wrong).
How much traffic there is.
Who your audience is.
How much money you can make (depending on the type of affiliate relationship, product or service you’re offering).
How to make that money.
How long it will take to start making money.
…
For me, the most valuable part of putting together a business plan is the market research — more specifically, competitor analysis. Competitor analysis is wildly useful for bloggers. It illuminates the tactics successful competitors use to win market share and earn revenue. If you want to be the best, learn from the best.
Competitor analysis illuminates the tactics successful competitors use to win market share and earn revenue.
Most of all, and I can’t stress how important this is,
A blog post business plan will tell you whether or not your idea is viable and worth pursuing.
Don’t waste time on content you have already shown to have insufficient earning potential. Find something else. Explore new topics. Move on.
Download a free blog post business plan template I put together here.
Write like an entrepreneur
Here’s where writers and entrepreneurs who are writers join hands. At this stage, the better you are at engaging and captivating an audience, the better you’ll do.
Here are some handy tips I’ve found to work well for money-content.
Win the title
Titles are hard!
You have to juggle three things at once in a single, short sentence:
Use target SEO keywords Accurately describe the content Spark intrigue
Take time over the title. It is absolutely critical to the success of your post.
A title is to a blog post what an elevator pitch is to a startup.
Wired wrote an article about what a difference clickable headlines make.
The difference between a good headline and a bad headline can be just massive. It’s not (in the ballpark of) a rounding error. When we test headlines we see 20% difference, 50% difference, 500% difference. A really excellent headline can make something go viral.
Adapt and fine-tune the title as you go. Hold off until it’s ready to go out there and captivate people. The title is often the last thing I work on — once I fully understand the content and purpose of the article itself.
Draw ’em in description
Make the description a promise of something greatly valuable for the reader.
A blog description must inspire readers with an exciting promise of value.
Along with the header, the description is about the only chance you have to convince visitors to click thru. Don’t waste it on a dry, boring description.
To do this properly you need to understand who’s going to be reading the article and what they need to know.
The description isn’t about the content; it’s about the reader.
Gripping section titles
Gripping. Is. Key.
Make sub-titles and headers gripping. Never, ever let go of the reader’s attention. Not for a second. Like the description, sub-headers should inspire and intrigue, pulling readers along. Gary Korisko gives us this great quote.
The four main ingredients of great sub-headers are curiosity, surprise, personality & emotion.
Pitch perfect
This is one aspect of writing I struggle with the most. Often, writing about topics in which I have a lot of experience causes me to lose the audience quickly. Avoid assuming too much or too little knowledge. Both are equally adept at turning readers off.
The better you understand your audience, the easier it is to pitch content in a way that keeps them captivated.
Captivate ‘em
Always maintain your energy and enthusiasm while writing. Take regular breaks to keep your mind fresh. Write when inspiration strikes.
Find a method that works for you and do everything in your power to avoid slipping into a mediocre, run-of-the-mill voice that allows readers to drift away (without a conversion).
Format for skimmers
Formatting plays a big role. Spacing, structure, fonts & layout all make a big difference in how easily readers digest and retain information.
Above all else. Be concise & clear. According to Hubspot,
73% of visitors skim rather than read the blog post thoroughly.
Formatting is a way to break up content in a way that entices readers to keep going. Especially people who are starting out with a cursory scan of the article to see if it’s worth their time.
Cite experienced influencers & experts
Don’t look at blogging as something you do alone.
Blogging is a collaborative effort and diverse perspectives add value.
Gathering input from influencers in your niche is incredibly important for a bunch of reasons.
Experts know stuff (you don’t)
Relationships you build with influencers are valuable
Influencers can increase your reach and buzz
Influencers help you build trust & authority with your audience
Out of all these points, really the most salient and immediately valuable one is that including quotes and inputs from great influencers helps turn them into evangelists for your article — when it comes time to publish like an entrepreneur.
Influencers who have contributed to your article are more likely to mention or promote it.
Publish like an entrepreneur
Planning and creating content, together, should only constitute around one-third of your total investment in a piece of content— both in terms of time and money. That’s more or less how things tend to pan out for me. Maybe more, maybe less depending on your unique topic, network and reach.
Planning and creating content, together, should only constitute around one-third of your total investment in a piece of content.
I tend to publish money-pieces to my own blog because I want it to generate income for some time to come. Publishing a piece like this on 3rd party platforms arguably provides greater initial reach and a higher chance of ranking in Google search. It also comes with some potentially serious downsides.
Many big publisher will happily take your content and publish at an off-time where it quickly disappears from the front page without so much as a ripple. If that happens, it’s all for nothing. At least if it’s on your own site, you can continue to promote it and write guest articles citing any useful stats, facts and figures to keep a stream of traffic trickling along.
Whatever you choose, it’s time to start marketing. As I like to say,
It doesn’t matter what business you are in; the business you are in is marketing.
To wit, the folks at GrowthBadger had this to say about marketing and promoting your blog.
70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they are active or very active promoters of their blogs, compared to only 14% of lower-income bloggers.
Make the news
Part of the business plan, back when you first started conceptualizing the article, would identify and integrate news media opportunities in some form or another. There should be at least one (preferably more) hook. Either:
Include newsworthy content (original research, current trends, novelty, conflict, etc) in the post Create news that cites your blog post
Interest stories are a great way to go — especially if it cites your new article in some way or another.
Create a newsworthy story by talking about other people, organizations or businesses doing incredible things.
Include local content if local media coverage is important. Interview people. Do Research. Offer a prize. Offer a scholarship. Do whatever it takes to be able to pitch something unique and interesting to reporters and journalists covering your beat.
Just. Be. Newsworthy.
I wrote an article highlighting the best new business ideas coming out of U.S. universities. That’s newsworthy because it a showcases up and coming entrepreneurial talent bubbling away at American colleges. Also, it has nothing to do with me.
Pitching a great story to the right media often results in a bit of coverage that can go a long way.
10 best new business ideas from university entrepreneurs posted to USA Today.
Getting into the news requires a slightly different set of writing skills. Namely, press releases. At some point you’ll need to learn how to hook journalists using attention-grabbing headlines and give them everything they need to make their news article easy and compelling for their readers.
You can check out a press releases templates, including a few practical tips here.
Influence the influencers
Having worked hard to collaborate with a whole bunch of experts and influencers, it’s now time to put those newfound contacts to good use (apart from the, hopefully, great quotes and info they contributed to your piece).
Put together a personalized pitch for each person you mentioned or collaborated with. Here’s a quick template that should do the trick for someone you only mentioned (but don’t necessarily know personally):
Subject: Congrats! You’ve been mentioned in my latest article.
Hi [name],
I really learned a lot from your piece about [title] and mentioned it (with a link) under [sub-topic] in my latest article [title][link].
I’d love it if you would consider contributing an additional insight for this article?
It can be as long or short as you like. I will of course cite and link your contribution. If you can also share a link to a head-shot that would be great.
Thanks,
David
The purpose of this outreach is primarily to thank them for being awesome enough to include in your post. Next, you want to tell them you’ve already given them great coverage (without asking for anything first). Finally there’s an offer to contribute more — requiring them to at least take the time to look at your article.
This is significantly more effective than any of the hundreds of emails I get on an ongoing basis asking me for coverage in one of my posts. Instead of asking for something, reach out to share what you’ve already done for them (not a promise to do something, if only they…).
Influence any influencer with an easy 3-step process. Offer. Engage. Pitch.
Alternatively, if they collaborated with you, the outreach email might look more like this:
Subject: I’ve added your awesome insights!
Hi [name],
I added and linked your contribution. Thanks so much. I’m super happy with it.
Check it out at [title][link].
I’ve also followed you on [social network] and [2nd/3rd/etc social network] to keep up to date with what you’re working on. Feel free to drop me a line if I can help out or contribute in any way.
If you love the article please consider linking or mentioning it.
Thanks,
David
In this instance you are thanking them for being awesome. Letting them know that you’ve become a fan and are following them. Offering to work with them and collaborate on future projects. Requesting a link or a mention if they really like the article (their name is on it already so it’s far more likely they will at least share it around).
Cast a wide net
Initially, if the article is self-published, it’s likely not going to drive much traffic — unless you have a huge audience and/or a good relationship with Google’s first page rankings.
Spend some time exploring related content. It could be drilling down into more depth, new research, finding opposing views, or whatever. Get new content up and about that links back to your article from other blogs and sites.
Draw on your newfound experience and knowledge to write and pitch fantastic guest articles to related blogs, websites & media.
Don’t stop
An article is never really finished. There will always be new opportunities for marketing and promotions to explore. Opportunities to add and update the article with great new content. Opportunities to unearth new opportunities.
It’s up to the entrepreneur in you to find clever new gaps to exploit, build new partnerships to generate more revenue, or simply decide to move on to the next exciting article. Sometimes it’s nice to sit back and watch earnings build up passively over time.
Like this
Passive earnings from a single blog post.
Decide to promote via social media. Or don’t. Try paid advertising. Or don’t. Learn new tricks from people who are dominating. Or blaze your own trail. The sky really is the limit when it comes to the business of content. That’s what interests me the most.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and an article will out-earn your expectations handsomely. It happens now and then. Dumb luck definitely plays a role. Make sure you’re in the game long enough by being smart about everything you publish. In the long run, it’s way more profitable to make your own luck. | https://medium.com/swlh/dont-be-a-writer-be-an-entrepreneur-who-writes-61ff86af4f0b | ['David Mercer'] | 2020-08-28 15:29:50.267000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Startup', 'Marketing', 'Blogging'] |
What Should Systems Neuroscience Do Next? Voltage Imaging | What Should Systems Neuroscience Do Next? Voltage Imaging
The firing and the wiring at the same time
Credit: Pixabay
The best thing about being a neuroscientist is that neuroscience never stands still. Barely a week passes without some new major result, a sparkling technological breakthrough, a provoking theoretical idea. And the sheer complexity of brains means the questions available are practically infinite. So even if your specific corners of brain research have briefly slowed their breathless pace, there is always more to learn. Always new questions to tackle. Indeed, there are whole regions of the mammalian brain whose mysteries have barely been probed, and which will no doubt turn out to be crucial for our understanding. My money’s on the zona incerta, the globus pallidus, and the septum. Exciting times.
The worst thing about being a neuroscientist is that neuroscience never stands still. Barely a week passes without some new result, breakthrough, or theory that you don’t have time to read; that ends up filed for later, destined never to be opened; or to be skimmed and not assimilated. And the sheer complexity of brains means the questions available are practically infinite. So even if you’re lucky enough that your specific corners of brain research have briefly slowed their breathless pace, there is always more to learn. Always new questions to tackle. Indeed, there are whole regions of the mammalian brain whose mysteries have barely been probed, and which will no doubt turn out to be crucial for our understanding. Worrying times.
Paradoxically, this best and worst of all possible worlds in mind research is created by mindless churn. Of doing whatever can or could be done next. Not what should be done next. So, hubristically, I thought I’d plant my feet against the torrent and take a stab at separating the should from the could. A series of occasional pieces that set out to answer the question: what should systems neuroscience do next?
In this first piece, we start with the very definition of systems neuroscience. It is at heart the study of the activity of multiple individual neurons, of the messages they are sending. Everything we see, do, or think in the moment is through neurons sending spikes to each other. So a clear priority for systems neuroscience is to make the best recordings of the output of the most neurons, and with as much metadata about those neurons — where they are, how many there are, what type they are — as possible.
We have two mainstream ways of recording the output of individual neurons: insert electrodes to record spikes, or image calcium fluxes in the neurons’ bodies as a proxy for spikes. Both have unique strengths, both are constantly evolving in the white-heat of technology (and cash), but both have problems that are solved by the other. So our first “should”: we should find a recording method that combines the strengths of both. The great news is that we already know the answer. The answer is voltage imaging.
And if we get it solved, voltage imaging comes with a massive bonus prize, something neither electrodes nor calcium imaging can buy us: live connectomics. | https://medium.com/the-spike/what-should-systems-neuroscience-do-next-voltage-imaging-9bfa5d6a4df9 | ['Mark Humphries'] | 2019-12-30 20:32:09.324000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Psychology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Science'] |
Why Writing Online Is Different | I published my first article in November 2014. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had fun. Ironically, the only way to keep this fun around long-term was to consider writing the most serious job I’ve ever had. So I committed.
Now, over four years later, nothing is the same. Except that part. The fun’s still here. I even have a slightly better idea of what I’m doing. But writing online is different from anything I’d ever imagined or associated with that word.
Here are 3 lessons I rarely see others mention, but that helped me get to now.
1. People aren’t waiting to change their perspective. You have to do it for them.
No none walks around saying: “I wish someone changed my mind about productivity.” That’s not how humans work. We’re intensely focused on our day, ourselves, our next task at hand, zipping through everyday life with tunnel vision. Browsing the web and reading online are no different.
If anything, we hope to bump into ideas that confirm our worldview, not challenge it. This onus lies entirely on you, the writer. People don’t just underestimate it but, often, abandon this challenge altogether, going the easier route of telling people what they know they’ll want to hear.
This works for a while, especially when you’re just beginning, but it gets old really quick. Readers don’t know they’re driven by these biases, but from feeding them, even subconsciously, they still get bored. And that’s a feeling they know. So they move on.
What they might not know they want — but need — is an idea that cracks their perspective. A tiny fracture, just big enough for them to raise their eyebrows. To blink twice. To scroll up again. Presenting this idea is what I try to do in most of my headlines. The article is just the fulfillment center.
The line between offending people and making them think is infinitely small. But learning to dance on it is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn.
2. The only agenda that works is to have no agenda.
That sounds weird. Of course I have an agenda. Everyone does. I want dollars. Followers. Views. However, the single greatest way to maximize all of those in the long run is to not care when you’ll get them and in what order.
Because that’s the only way you’ll be free to overwhelm the platforms you write on with generosity, consistency, and genuine care. It’s not about you. Great work never is. The sooner you can act that out, the earlier you’ll take off.
What does the host want? What do readers want? What does the platform want for its readers and what do readers expect for giving their invaluable time and attention to this place? Notice how absent you are from all these important questions. I know it’s counterintuitive, but it’s also liberating.
No one cares about what you want, but then you also don’t have to care about your own mess-ups. You can just try again. Whatever you do, if you start from integrity and maintain it above all else, you’ll never be in a rush to get yours.
Because you’ll know it’s coming to you. Maybe not tomorrow and definitely not today. But it’s coming — and you’ll know what to do with it once it does.
3. Change before you need to or you’ll adapt too late.
If you were to browse through my entire history of articles, you’d think it’s a collection of writing from at least five different people. Everything changes, all the time. Style. Voice. Content. Vocabulary. Structure. Formatting.
Sometimes, it’s me reaching the next level. Sometimes, it’s me adopting a trend early. Most of the time, however, it’s me experimenting on purpose. Changing for the sake of change. To set trends, rather than wait for them.
At first sight, this is a stupid strategy. Why give up what’s working? Why mess with a winning team? It means I’m alienating my fans. Or forcing them to grow with me. I’ll lose the people who just got here and I might not win over those who are about to. But it also means I’m staying true to myself.
Who wants to be one-dimensional? Who actually is? No one. Consistency of character is a myth. Just like content that confirms our views, it’s attractive on the surface, but boring and inauthentic underneath.
If you embrace your contradictions and allow them to flow freely, you still won’t get every shift in context right each time, but you’ll learn to keep an open mind. It’ll be easier to write more game changers (see #1) and reduce friction when you have to adapt (see #2). Most of all, it’ll keep writing fun.
And isn’t that what we truly want? | https://ngoeke.medium.com/3-lessons-from-4-years-of-writing-eff24b1b6d78 | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2019-04-05 06:46:33.957000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Creativity', 'Art', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing'] |
Your Brand is What People Expect From You | Your Brand is What People Expect From You
Here’s what you can do about it
Photo by Nadine Shaabana via Unsplash
When people first meet you, they don’t know what to expect.
So they start judging you by your name, your profile picture, and the title of your blog post.
If you’re a writer, people will probably meet your words before they meet you.
What are your words saying to them?
I’m a nice person.
I know what I’m talking about.
I have a B.S. in History.
Of course, you can’t just say those things and expect us to believe them or be impressed. It’s better for you to prove it and let us draw these conclusions ourselves.
When we read your words, we’re after something. Maybe we’re bored and we want you to give us a distraction. Maybe we want an edge and we need your advice to raise our status. Or maybe we are interested in what you’re talking about and you happen to share our worldview.
You won’t automatically have our trust because we agree with you. But it’s a nice start, and perhaps the best route to get trust quickly.
The best way to gain trust is to keep showing up.
I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. There have been times in my life when my freelance work sucked all my time away. When that happens, I feel like I can’t be as generous with my words.
When you disappear, people forget.
Who was that guy who was so good? Yeah. What happened to him?
Hey, have you heard about this new writer? He’s hot. He knows stuff I never dreamed anyone could know. It’s like he can read my mind.
It’s amazing how fast that can happen.
Show up. Every day if you can. At least once a week. Find a regular rhythm and stick with it. And if you really want to dig deep, write twice as much as you think you can.
But what if it isn’t perfect?
It never will be, so quit worrying.
Your best today won’t be your best next week, next month, or next year. It’s your responsibility to push yourself. Stretch a little every time you write. Dig a little deeper than you did last time. Write something that scares you a bit more. Take a stand, and don’t back down.
In a world with millions of voice vying for attention, it’s the bold and committed that stand out.
Be you, always.
You have some control over what we expect.
It’s your choice to deliver the same thing again and again. Or maybe you ruffle our feathers a bit each week. You’ve got more room to play around in the beginning. But as your audience grows and gets more familiar with you, you need to be consistent.
What will your message be?
How will you deliver it?
Will your personality be friendly or businesslike? Will you challenge our assumptions? Will you draw us a better map? Will you take something confusing and break it down so we can understand it?
Being you means you do online what you’d do in real life. Spot the trends if you like, but approach them with your own style. When you’re fake, everyone will know.
Don’t chase dollars. Chase change. How will you leave your reader better than you found her?
In time, your audience defines your brand.
You set the first impression.
Your audience sets the expectation.
Wait a minute, you say. You just said I set the expectation for people.
You do, at first.
Then once it’s set, people expect you to live up to it. Mess that up, and years of trust can be lost in a moment.
So tread carefully.
If you want to change your message because that’s your conviction, go for it. Don’t do it because the trends say you should. If you get in the habit of chasing the latest thing for attention, you might as well chase the wind.
Here’s the part of the market you should pay attention to.
What does your audience want from you? If your message meets a need a lot of people have, that’s probably not going to change overnight.
Take writing for example.
For generations, the way to make it as an author was through books. If you published one or more, you were somebody. But you had to compete for the opportunity. You’d probably get rejected most of the time. Because publishers need to make money, they bet on what they thought would sell.
Today, anyone can write and publish a book. So, the problem the previous generation of writers faced is flipped. It’s a lot harder to get noticed in the market when your book is one of millions of choices.
So, writers blog and make money instead. Books are now email magnets and manifestos. If you have a large following, you can command a higher price for your work. Otherwise, price low and be glad to get your message out so you can charge more later.
If you don’t like the expectation you’ve set for your market, work to raise it.
There’s nothing stopping you.
It will take work. You’ll lose some people along the way. But you’ll gain more who are devoted to the same thing you are. It doesn’t take a huge audience to make it. It just takes an audience that is pleased enough to tell other people about you.
Be authentic. Serve others first. Be generous. The more people you can, the better your future will be.
Now go build a brand that matters.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +406,714 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here. | https://medium.com/swlh/your-brand-is-what-people-expect-from-you-9ec346dd6a0e | ['Frank Mckinley'] | 2019-01-03 14:06:01.862000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity'] |
The Only Book About Writing You’ll Ever Need | Writing
The Only Book About Writing You’ll Ever Need
I’ve read it 10 times
Six years ago, I sort of forgot how to write. I’d been publishing on the internet for a little over a year — that first, embarrassing, thrilling, bringing-a-laptop-to-parties year (I’m fun at parties) — and I’d run out of things to say. What used to be casual, fast, easy breezy bloggy beautiful, had become… slightly boring. Slow. I’d have an idea, stare at my laptop for an hour, Command-Tab over to Gmail, and then walk four blocks to buy an overpriced panini.
So, I did what I always do: I walked into a bookstore feeling vaguely depressed, and left with something to read.
I know you just want the name of the book, so here you go: Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s sort of a weird book, to be honest. It contains no paragraphs, just sentences stacked on top of each other in austere columns. (The whole thing sort of reads like a poem.) And yes, it’s about the mechanics of putting words together, but it’s also about other things: thinking, noticing, mapping the mess inside your head. Also, trusting yourself — something I have a difficult time doing.
There’s a lot of writing advice out there: books, articles, quotes from dead people. Most of it isn’t actually about writing. It’s about scheduling (wake up at six!), preparing to write (take good notes!), having ambition (write every day… at six…), or envisioning what it will feel like to finally be done writing. Most people don’t talk about the messy, often boring, sometimes excruciating and other times exhilarating process of staring at a computer and eating stale mixed nuts as you form thoughts into words.
In this book, you’ll find no tips for outlining, brainstorming, scheduling, or pitching. Nothing on a thesis statement, a topic sentence, an introduction, or conclusion (spoiler: good ideas need no introduction, or conclusion!) Nothing on rituals or waiting for fictional characters to whisper in your ear. No fantasies about having a cabin in the woods with a big dog and a chunky sweater and a blank Moleskine. In fact, there’s nothing in here about ~inspiration~ at all, nothing about waiting for the ideas to “just flow.” (They never just flow. Sorry.)
My whole life is just going to be me rereading this book. It’s sort of like I got really religious somewhere in my twenties, and this book is my Blogging Bible.
What you’ll find instead are practical, even curmudgeonly, tips about grammar, rhythm, and making individual sentences. Short ones, mostly. For example:
Keep sentences small. They’re easier to work with that way.
If something doesn’t feel right, there’s a problem with one or more of your sentences. Listen to that feeling. Try to pinpoint exactly which word or phrase is triggering it. Naming exactly what’s wrong, in grammatical terminology or otherwise, will come later.
Understanding a word’s etymology will teach you how to use it. Words contain imprints of their histories.
The subject of a sentence should appear as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible.
You don’t have to “grab” anyone with the first line of your story. Just write a simple sentence that says what you want it to say. It’s harder than it sounds! And also very effective, if done well.
“A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, the relentless exploration of possibilities, the effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”
Noun phrases (“the realization that…”) almost always sound clunky and dead. Try rewriting them as verb phrases (“realizing that…”).
Prepositions are difficult to get right, even for native English speakers.
A reader’s experience has nothing to do with a writer’s. A sentence that reads “naturally” or “conversationally” to a reader may have been painstakingly assembled by a stressed-out writer who wishes they could sound more natural or conversational.
Toward the end of this book, the author diagnoses exactly what’s wrong with about 50 isolated sentences written by his students. It’s sort of ruthless, but fascinating. Most of these sentences sound almost okay, though you can feel something slightly amiss. Hearing Klinkenborg (what a name) pinpoint the specific problems in each one — from an awkward metaphor to a misplaced pronoun — is therapeutic. It’s sort of like Dr. Pimple Popper, but for dangling modifiers instead of giant cysts. I recommend reading the book just for this section.
Here’s a theory: Some people (i.e. me) procrastinate and never end up publishing anything because we’re fixated on the bigger Thing — the Novel, the Post, the Feature, the Investigative Whatever. We’re distracted by our intentions and our aspirations. But unless you’ve somehow acquired a ghostwriter, none of those bigger Things are possible until you make sentences. It’s tedious, but crucial. A wall is made of bricks. A story is made of sentences.
I still forget how to write sometimes, but whenever I do I know where to turn. This book calms me down. It reminds me that writing is slow and difficult because it’s a technology humans invented to communicate with each other thousands of years ago — not something we do “naturally.” We have to be taught to write. And we have to practice. (There’s an interesting part in the middle where Klinkenborg debunks our mistaken assumption that writing is “natural.” We think it should flow, easily and conversationally, thanks to a false analogy with talking. But talking and writing are very different, as anyone who’s tried to read a podcast transcript will tell you.)
Most of all, this book encourages me to listen to what I actually think before trying to shape those thoughts into words. It’s also taught me a lot about rhythm, beginnings, endings, nerdy things like participles, and clarity. These lessons don’t just apply to writing. They also apply to thinking and living.
I just finished reading it for, I think, the 10th time. (I know.) And right after I finished, I started back at page one. My whole life is just going to be me rereading this book. It’s sort of like I got really religious somewhere in my twenties, and this book is my Blogging Bible. There I am, on a Saturday in the middle of a pandemic, sitting in my apartment practicing my new religion: figuring out what I’m trying to say. | https://medium.com/creators-hub/the-only-book-about-writing-youll-ever-need-bc6edf2ec802 | ['Harris Sockel'] | 2020-10-29 06:18:00.527000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Writing', 'Productivity', 'Writing Advice', 'Creativity'] |
Brick by Brick: Build a multi-page dashboard | CODE AND DOWNLOADS
The code for this series can be found at this Github repo. The application is run from Jupyter notebook. There are .py (Python) files that will contain code for the layout and data manipulation. I used, and highly recommend, Visual Studio Code for working with these as there are a number of handy extensions available for formatting that is particularly helpful to build the HTML DOM structure which we will accomplish with this article.
INSTALLATIONS
Follow along the instruction in this Medium article to set up and run the Dash app server from Jupyter notebook. The notebook in Github also lists the packages used as well as their versions to help you get going.
STRUCTURE
The Title bar declares the dashboard to be a Rental Analysis Dashboard. It will contain an icon to brand our dashboard. Beneath the title, on the left hand side, we create a navbar containing filters. For now these are generic dropdown lists containing three choices, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly. We will be using various types of filters as the project matures. The filter area is being defined in this scaffolding.
To the right of the filter pane is the chart area. I have split this up into four rows. The first row will be reserved for KPIs/gauges or cards with summary information to provide “at a glance” key aggregations.
We will follow that up with maps, line and bar chats to analyze the data from various angles. This will be the graphing area.
And finally at the bottom is the narrow band of page navigation links.
Folder structure and files
We will use Bootstrap to have a responsive dashboard page. To style the various HTML components and to use Bootstrap’s CSS, we create a folder called assets in the root of the app directory. We will also create a folder called data down the line that will contain all the data we gather in CSVs from the Inside AirBnB website. For Dash to recognize this folder structure, note that creation of the app includes __name__ in the constructor.
Important: Why you need to include __name__ in your Dash constructor.
There are other elements that we will store in the assets folder such as the icon and logo images. Once this folder structure is followed, retrieving the assets is performed with a call which depends on the image file being present in the assets folder. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/brick-by-brick-build-a-multi-page-dashboard-37912dd7d9e6 | ['Simi Talkar'] | 2020-12-16 17:28:39.014000+00:00 | ['Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Dashboard', 'Plotly', 'Visualization', 'Data Analysis'] |
Tech Execs Face Congress: 9 Big Takeaways | Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg beamed into a congressional hearing via video chat today to face 4+ hours of questions about whether they abuse their dominant positions in the market. Spoiler: they said everything’s cool.
By Chloe Albanesius & Michael Kan
The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook faced the House Judiciary Committee virtually today, where they fielded questions about whether their respective tech companies take advantage of their dominant positions in the market to enhance their bottom lines.
Spoiler: They all said they don’t.
As you’d expect, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered rosy assessments of their platforms during opening statements. But the limited time each member of Congress got to ask questions didn’t allow for much additional explanation from the CEOs, many of whom are used to answering questions with winding speeches full of Silicon Valley platitudes.
Members on both sides of the aisle had bones to pick with the CEOs. The Democrats largely focused on the antitrust issues at hand: whether Amazon keeps its third-party sellers on a tight leash; if Google favors its own products in search; whether Facebook’s acquisitions served only to thwart competition; and if Apple’s fabled walled-garden approach persists.
Some Republicans did, too, but a few veered off course to quiz the execs on pet projects: Google allegedly discriminating against conservatives; Google pulling out of the Pentagon’s JEDI project; and why a certain member’s campaign emails keep ending up in his father’s spam folder.
The four-hour-plus hearing covered a lot of ground, and some topics were more interesting than others. Here are some of the highlights.
Facebook
Facebook-Instagram: Illegal Merger or a Savvy Dealmaking?
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) accused Facebook of breaking antitrust laws by acquiring Instagram back in 2012 because it knew Instagram posed a potential threat to its hold over the social media market.
“In your own words you bought Instagram to neutralize the competitive threat. This was an illegal merger at the time of the transaction,” Nadler claimed, citing internal documents provided by Facebook. “Why should Instagram not be broken off into a separate company?”
Zuckerberg acknowledged he saw Instagram as a competitor, but only in the mobile-photo sharing space. The FTC also scrutinized and approved the acquisition in 2012. “I think with hindsight, it probably looks obvious that Instagram would’ve reached the scale it has today, but at the time it was far from obvious,” he said, citing other top platforms of the time, like the now-defunct Path.
According to Zuckerberg, Instagram’s success is largely due to Facebook’s investment. “I think this has been an American success story,” he added.
Nadler disagreed. “Rather than compete with [Instagram], Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anticompetitive acquisition that the antitrust laws were designed to prevent. This should have never happened in the first place,” he said.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Photo by Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images)
Are You Threatening Me?
Nadler and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, (D-Washington), both brought up Zuckerberg’s negotiations with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom ahead of the merger.
“In a chat you told Mr. Systrom that Facebook ‘was developing our own photo strategy, so how we engage now will also determine how much we are partners versus competitors down the line,’” Rep. Jayapal noted. “Instagram’s founder seemed to think that was a threat. He confided in an investor at the time that he feared you would go into ‘destroy mode’ if he didn’t sell Instagram to you.”
Zuckerberg denied it was a threat and characterized his email as a negotiating tactic. “I think it was clear this was a space where we were going to compete in, one way or another,” he said.
Preventing Imminent Risk of Life
Twitter was not present at today’s hearing, but its policies came up nonetheless. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, asked Zuckerberg why it had temporarily banned Donald Trump Jr. this week for sharing a COVID-19 conspiracy theory. Zuckerberg noted that it was Twitter, not Facebook, that took action against the president’s son. But Zuckerberg explained why the move was probably the correct one.
The video shared by Trump, Jr. featured a doctor who said that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID-19, which it does not. So while Facebook allows discussion around trials for drugs or personal experiences with experimental drugs, it does not allow people to definitively state that there is a cure for a disease when there isn’t one, Zuckerberg said.
“In general…we do not want to be the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg continued. But if “someone is going to go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to clear COVID and that statement could lead people to take a drug … we think that we should take that down. That could cause imminent risk of life.”
Later in the hearing, Pichai agreed with that line of thinking when Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, asked why the video in question was also removed from YouTube.
“We believe in freedom of expression and there’s a lot of debate on effective ways to deal with COVID. But during a pandemic, we look to local health authorities [and] the CDC for guidelines around medical misinformation and [how it] might cause harm in the real world,” Pichai said. | https://medium.com/pcmag-access/tech-execs-face-congress-9-big-takeaways-5c6a06ecb921 | [] | 2020-07-30 12:05:09.891000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'Business', 'Google', 'Facebook', 'Amazon'] |
End of preview.
Data source
This data has been collected through a standard scraping process from the Medium website, looking for published articles.
Data description
Each row in the data is a different article published on Medium. For each article, you have the following features:
- title [string]: The title of the article.
- text [string]: The text content of the article.
- url [string]: The URL associated to the article.
- authors [list of strings]: The article authors.
- timestamp [string]: The publication datetime of the article.
- tags [list of strings]: List of tags associated to the article.
Data analysis
You can find a very quick data analysis in this notebook.
What can I do with this data?
- A multilabel classification model that assigns tags to articles.
- A seq2seq model that generates article titles.
- Text analysis.
- Finetune text generation models on the general domain of Medium, or on specific domains by filtering articles by the appropriate tags.
Collection methodology
Scraping has been done with Python and the requests library. Starting from a random article on Medium, the next articles to scrape are selected by visiting:
- The author archive pages.
- The publication archive pages (if present).
- The tags archives (if present).
The article HTML pages have been parsed with the newspaper Python library.
Published articles have been filtered for English articles only, using the Python langdetect library.
As a consequence of the collection methodology, the scraped articles are coming from a not uniform publication date distribution. This means that there are articles published in 2016 and in 2022, but the number of articles in this dataset published in 2016 is not the same as the number of articles published in 2022. In particular, there is a strong prevalence of articles published in 2020. Have a look at the accompanying notebook to see the distribution of the publication dates.
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