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How to Use Investment Property Calculator For Analyzing Real Estate Investments | How to Use Investment Property Calculator For Analyzing Real Estate Investments
Spreadsheets? Outdated! Gone are the days when investors research average costs and income, and enter their figures into tiny little cells. This tedious process becomes even more agonizing when a spreadsheet has to be created for every property looked at. With today’s technology and resources, investment property calculators are taking over and helping investors quickly analyze multiple properties at a time.
What is an investment property calculator?
An investment property calculator is a tool in which investment cost assumptions are entered to generate automatic calculations and predictive outcomes, to indicate if a property is a good investment opportunity.
Related: The Use of Predictive Analytics in Real Estate Investing
What does it calculate?
There are so many calculations or values that help an investor infer if they should invest in a specific property or not. Let’s quickly go over what Mashvisor calculates:
Cash Flow
This is probably the most important value investors inquire about because cash flow is an investor’s monthly profit. Think about it as an investor’s salary. Cash flow is equal to the monthly expenses deducted from monthly income.
Mashvisor’s interactive investment property calculator takes into account the following Recurring Monthly Costs: mortgage payment (principal and interest), property tax, HOA insurance, property management, maintenance, and utilities.
The calculator has a cell for “Other” Recurring Monthly Costs. Vacancy provision is a good “other” to consider. Enter between 4–8% of income. Cash flow should be positive.
Cash-on-Cash Return
This number gives the investor the returns on a property based on the amount of cash put in the investment. It is calculated by dividing cash flow by investment costs.
The investment property calculator takes into account the following investment or Startup Costs: down payment, furniture, appliances, and closing costs.
The calculator also has a cell for “Other” Startup Costs. Inspection and renovation (if applicable) are costs that should also be taken into account.
While cash-on-cash return can be calculated for a specific property by entering these values, it is also automatically presented when clicking any property or neighborhood on Mashvisor’s dashboard.
There are two average cash on cash return values given for a neighborhood — traditional and Airbnb. Depending on the location, some investment properties perform better with a traditional lease or by being listed on Airbnb.
Cap Rate
This calculation is also very important to investors because it is the purest form of understanding a property’s returns. Cap rate tells the returns of a property independent of its financing or the way it was paid for. Therefore, this number indicates the returns as if the property was already paid for.
Cap rate is calculated by dividing the net operating income by property price.
Cap rate is not on the investment property calculator but is automatically presented by clicking a property. When users are looking at several investment properties simultaneously on Mashvisor, they want to quickly know the cap rate without having to factor in the down payment or loan type that will be used.
Related: How To Do Investment Property Analysis
Filter calculations
When looking for properties on Mashvisor, these calculations can be filtered so that properties which meet the investor’s criteria appear. Cash on cash return, cap rate, budget, and rental income can all filtered to quickly find the investment properties that meet the set requirements.
What else does it calculate?
The interactive investment property calculator does not only give the returns based on what is entered but also provides insights by using predictive and comparative data and algorithms.
When the user is entering values in the investment property calculator, the income may be unknown. Mashvisor data is able to project a property’s expected income, both traditional and Airbnb. Therefore, a user can click a property and get a breakdown of rental income, expenses, cash flow, and cash on cash return for both traditional and Airbnb strategies without even having to enter any numbers. This can then be altered by using the mortgage calculator.
But what if an investor wants to have an understanding of an overall neighborhood? The data is able to give a neighborhood’s average median home price, traditional rental income, Airbnb rental income, Airbnb occupancy rate, and the optimal strategy (traditional or Airbnb). This means investors can search any city and quickly analyze a neighborhood, helping them to narrow down potentials areas, and bringing them closer to finding a property.
Why is it better than spreadsheets?
Investment property calculators have a couple of advantages over spreadsheets. Clearly, they save time and brainpower. Investors can spend months just analyzing different areas in order to find the best real estate markets and investment properties. Unfortunately, their research doesn’t stop there. They then have to look at comps in order to estimate costs and income to start making those spreadsheets to calculate returns. Investment property calculators do all of this work for the investor. The average values are already entered into the formulas, which means investor do not need to look at comps.
Secondly, these calculators and analyses are based on comparative and historical data, which means the assumptions are more likely to be accurate than a real estate investor’s estimates.
Finally, although this is all about numbers, there is somewhat of a human aspect to this tool. The Mashmeter gives an overall neighborhood score, grading how well the neighborhood is for real estate investing.
Investment property calculators are becoming the new go-to tool in real estate investing. They are expediting the research process and making real estate analytics easier to understand. Searching for the best investment properties can take a lot more time than one might think, start using investment property calculators to save time and motivation!
Use Mashvisor’s investment property calculator to find and analyze real estate investment properties. | https://medium.com/mashvisor/how-to-use-investment-property-calculator-for-analyzing-real-estate-investments-ee10a32771d0 | ['Peter Abualzolof'] | 2016-08-22 12:08:14.870000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Property', 'Cash Flow', 'Investing', 'Real Estate'] |
President’s Birth Certificate Fraudulent | President’s Birth Certificate Fraudulent
Newly released documents add to disastrous week
Reeling from the revelations in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, the President was sucker punched by additional disclosures from former campaign chair Steve Bannon. Bannon revealed formerly unknown documents proving the President was born to German parents in Germany during World War II.
Bannon released the documents to the press when the President continued to attack him for his comments in Wolff’s book. “I apologized, called him a great man, and he calls me ’Sloppy Steve,’” Bannon told reporters. “I’ll show him sloppy. The moron entrusted me with these documents and forgot I still had them. There will be no room for Fatty Trump when the Fourth Reich ascends, I can guarantee you.”
Bannon: I’ll show him sloppy. The moron entrusted me with these documents and forgot I still had them. There will be no room for Fatty Trump when the Fourth Reich ascends, I can guarantee you.
The Smithsonian’s restored image of the President’s real birth certificate
The documents include a birth certificate from a Dresden hospital dated 1942, four years earlier than the President’s declared birthdate. According to the certificate his father Fred was still using the original family name “Drumpf,” and his mother’s real name is Maria Anne Müller. Bannon also produced photos of the infant taken by the family that verify his German origin.
Stu D. Klossly, documents curator for the Smithsonian, verified the certificate’s authenticity. “In spite of numerous calls from the White House threatening to cut our funding if we didn’t ‘lose’ the certificate, we were able to certify it’s the real deal,” he confirmed. “Right down to the fat little footprints.”
The President napping with gifts from a loving family. (MaxPixel)
Bannon believes the Drumpf’s agreed to immigrate to America as fifth columnists when the war’s momentum shifted to the allies. “Want to know why he’s convinced every immigrant is a terrorist? Because it’s the story of his own family,” he claimed.
This isn’t the first time questions about the President’s citizenship have been raised. In 2011, during one of his first short-lived campaign, the President used third-party news organizations to release proof of his citizenship. The documents were immediately dismissed by New York State officials.
“Those documents are as fake as the fake fake news,” the President Tweeted immediately after the revelations. “I fought the Nazis in WWII. I’m the perfect, blonde Arian prototype. No one’s more American than me.”
“Those documents are as fake as the fake fake news. I fought the Nazis in WWII. I’m the perfect, blonde Arian prototype. No one’s more American than me.”
In related news, police caught three arsonists trying to break into the Smithsonian early this morning. The mean were trying to set fire to the official archives wing when apprehended. All three men were later identified as members of the White House staff. A White House press release claims, “these men were rogue actors. Roguest of the rogue. Besides, nothing of value would have been destroyed. Who cares about moldy certificates anyway?” | https://medium.com/the-haven/presidents-birth-certificate-fraudulent-15ca49bb6c38 | ['Phillip T Stephens'] | 2018-01-07 21:40:50.914000+00:00 | ['World War II', 'Donald Trump', 'Humor', 'Politics', 'Satire'] |
keys to improving your skills in tech | GO BIG AND LEARN A LOT
Okay, back to goal-setting. Before you commit yourself to an activity, whether that’s a side project, a club, or anything else, ask yourself what you want to get out of the experience. What skills do you want to learn or further develop? If you already have lots of evidence of a certain skill on your resume, will this experience demonstrate a new skill?
If you’re trying to learn a lot of different things quickly, commit yourself to the biggest thing you can for a short period of time. For example, you want to develop your leadership skills so you sign up to help organize a hackathon: throw yourself into a director role, learn as much as you can from the experience over the course of a semester, then move on to the next thing.
Aim for as senior of a role as you can, don’t worry about how much experience you already have. No one cares if you’re “just a first year” student; if you’re given the role, you deserve it.
I don’t recommend sticking around the same clubs year after year; while there is some satisfaction in climbing the ranks of a familiar organization, each year you will be working on about the same problems, and you will learn less and less each time. Do the thing for one semester, then take what you learned to a new organization, where you can take on new problems and meet new people.
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
step two: pick a thing and do it.
So on to the meat of this article. Assuming you’ve reflected on what you already know and what skills you want to develop, the following will be some ideas for what you can to further develop skills that would be valuable for a software development role.
First and foremost, prioritize opportunities that interest you. I subscribe to the belief that as long as you enjoy everything that you do, you won’t get burned out. As students, we don’t yet know what we like or what we want to do with our careers. Go after opportunities that interest you, and if you realize it wasn’t as great as you thought it would be, move on to something else. | https://medium.com/@alexaliaskovski/keys-to-improving-your-skills-in-tech-d3f95de381da | ['Alexa Liaskovski'] | 2020-12-25 00:26:22.311000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'Learning To Code', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Students'] |
Maximizing the Micro-Moment | Maximizing the Micro-Moment
Audiences consume over 12 hours of media each day — but few publishers tailor content to meet “always-on” demands
Sixty percent of people who share a post on social media do so without reading the story. Many have written off these so-called “blind sharers” as poorly engaged audiences, but these sharers aren’t unintelligent or lazy — they are a reality of audience’s busy lives, and their habits play a key role in how ideas and information spread today.
For publishers to better understand how the blind share affects distribution, they have to understand how audiences confront their daily content avalanche through what we call “micro-moments.” These are short periods throughout the day when global audiences encounter content such as:
Taken together, these “micro-moments” make up a significant percentage of audiences’ content consumption and thus a significant percentage of publishers’ daily traffic.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017 found that some of the most popular places for reading news on a smartphone were in bed, on public transport, and in the bathroom.
Maximizing the Micro-Moment
To maximize these micro-moments, publishers have to create content that is at once digestible and resonant, no matter how much time a reader can give. This means creating substantive content for all levels of engagement: the blind sharer, the busy consumer, and the long-reader.
For the blind sharer (the person with 30 seconds):
Publishers should think of this content as a social “artifact” — something that can travel across social media independent of a full article. This is content for audiences that have a mere 30 seconds to grasp its value. Social artifacts can include infographics, stats, graphs, quotes, or visuals — any content that is snackable, concrete, and memorable. Consider the following Facebook post from The Atlantic.
One minute after the stat was posted, the first commenter responded by tagging a friend. That commenter only had time to see the stat in their News Feed and tap out a quick message, but the text of the comment — “beans power ☀️” — suggests they still grasped the value of The Atlantic’s piece within those few seconds.
2. For the busy consumer (the person with 6 minutes):
Content that manages to distill the value of a full narrative in a highly compelling and visual format will draw in readers who can spend a few dedicated, but still brief minutes. The video that accompanies the social post above dives into the research featured in the full Atlantic article in a way that’s quick — about 3 minutes — and easy for audiences to synthesize while they are standing in line for their morning coffee or waiting for a friend to meet them for brunch.
Stills from “What if Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef?” a short video from The Atlantic’s series You Are Here, hosted by James Hamblin.
3. For the user who likes to unwind before bed (the person with 15 minutes or longer):
Publishers should still produce formats for audiences who want to spend time absorbing content and considering its implications.
Screenshot of the original article written by James Hamblin in August 2017
The article, “If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef” provides a complete picture of the original research on substituting beans for beef, touching on everything from a brief history of climate change legislation to the American Psychological Association’s definition of “ecoanxiety.”
Customized, Not Diminished
In each of the pieces above, The Atlantic did not oversimplify or water down its content. Nor did it think that the research behind the article was only meant to be read by academics with access to scientific journals. Instead, it created multiple entry points to expose audiences to these big ideas, eventually leading to over 380,000 interactions on social media.
The goal for any piece of content, no matter its length, is to start a larger conversation that enables an idea to travel and take hold. This happens not only when an article is first published, but when the publisher makes that content available in many forms for different moments and different types of readers. | https://medium.com/atlantic-57/maximizing-the-micro-moment-77217b63162a | ['Merrill Wasser'] | 2018-04-27 18:59:35.268000+00:00 | ['Attention', 'Audience Engagement', 'Content Strategy', 'Social Media', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
How to stake Harmony ONE | How-to Stake Harmony ONE
Learn how to gain passive income and help decentralise the Harmony network by staking your ONE in this cryptocurrency staking guide.
What is staking?
In a blockchains using a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism such as Harmony, stake is used as security towards confirming transactions. Validator nodes need a certain amount of the native cryptocurrency staked to be elected to join the consensus. A validator must put up at least 10,000 ONE as stake, and can also take stake from delegators. Delegating allows you to stake your ONE coins with a validator in return for a share of the block rewards, without having to run your own validator node.
On Harmony, staking with an elected validator can yield a 9–10% APR which is paid in ONE coins.
As a delegator the minimum stake is 100 ONE, the more you stake the greater the reward.
When staking your ONE with a validator your ONE coins still belong to you and are in your wallet, but they are locked. This means you cannot use your ONE while they are delegated but you can choose to un-delegate at any time to unlock your ONE.
There is a delay of 7 epochs between undelegating and your ONE coins being unlocked for use, but you can delegate to another validator the epoch after undelegating.
One epoch in the Harmony protocol is 32768 blocks which works out around 18 hours with a normal block time of 2 seconds. During times of increased network load this may take longer.
How do I stake ONE?
First you will need a Harmony staking compatible wallet.
How-to Stake Harmony ONE with a Google Chrome based browser
If using your Chrome based web browser to delegate your Harmony ONE coins, you have a choice of wallets:
Once your wallet is setup and loaded with ONE tokens head over to the Staking Dashboard and select a validator to delegate to.
You’ll need to sign in with your wallet before you can delegate:
You can choose more than one validator to stake with, so you can split your stake as much as you like as long as you stake the minimum 100 ONE per validator.
Note: Delegating, Undelegating and claiming rewards are all transactions on the blockchain which must be paid for with ONE coins; the transaction fee. So remember to leave some ONE in your wallet! Transaction fees are very low on Harmony. Leaving 1 ONE in your wallet will allow you to pay for thousands of transactions.
Claiming rewards
You’ll start earning rewards the epoch after you delegate. You might not see these rewards straight away as the dashboard only displays whole ONEs.
You can see a list of the validators you have staked with and your current rewards in the Portfolio section of the dashboard:
Claiming rewards is done all in one go, your rewards from all validators are put in a pot waiting for you to claim.
How often you claim is up to you, but seek tax advice in your location as in many places claiming rewards will be a taxable event.
How-to Stake Harmony ONE with a Smartphone
Currently the easiest way to stake is via the Blits wallet which is available for Android and iOS smart phones. With Blits you can buy and stake ONE directly from the wallet app:
Happy staking!
Dan | https://medium.com/@dkvalidator/how-to-stake-harmony-one-e051c73701b | ['Dk Validator'] | 2021-08-25 14:20:06.972000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Harmony One', 'Staking Guide', 'Staking', 'Passive Income'] |
Local Magazine Editor Just Extremely, Devotedly, Obsessively Involved | New York mag editor Adam Moss finally goes on the record: he is not, contrary to the last ten years of reports, a micromanager. “I totally dispute it.” God bless! | https://medium.com/the-awl/local-magazine-editor-just-extremely-devotedly-obsessively-involved-c1c4a0658cad | ['Choire Sicha'] | 2016-05-13 07:42:53.012000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Adam Moss', 'Media'] |
7 reasons why Anti-Vaxxers are wrong | Vaccinations are an important part of public health. They prevent the spread of contagious, dangerous, and deadly diseases, and save millions of lives every year.
For example, smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century, until the vaccine completely eradicated the disease from the earth. No matter how beneficial and essential vaccines are to public health, there are always going to be skeptics.
Widely known as “anti-vaxxers”, many people believe that vaccines are harmful to the human body, and especially children. However, I did not write this article just to say that. If many people believe in fake science supporting theories that vaccines are harmful, than it is up to us, the scientific community to rise up against misinformation, which is probably our most dangerous and fierce opponent we will ever have, only strengthened by fearmongering in social media, texting, and other communication platforms.
In the article, I will break down and debunk the claims made by anti-vaxxers, one by one. | https://medium.com/techtalkers/7-reasons-why-anti-vaxxers-are-wrong-d2eaad1de739 | ['Varun Cheedalla'] | 2020-08-10 19:41:03.588000+00:00 | ['Debunked', 'Vaccines', 'Anti Vaxxers', 'Virus', 'Medicine'] |
Europe Oilfield Equipment Market Worth $18.71Bn By 2022 | The European oilfield equipment market is expected to reach USD 18.71 billion by 2022, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Horizontal and directional drilling activities are expected to drive revenue growth over the forecast period. In these processes, the well is turned horizontal or to a specific target or location. These flexible drilling techniques have already emerged as a separate growth industry in North America and are now expected to gain importance in other regions including Europe.
Declining crude oil prices have been a major factor inhibiting the regional oilfield equipment market in the recent past. Stable crude oil prices in the near future is expected to help in oilfield equipment industry’s recovery
Drilling segment was the leading product segment with revenue share exceeding 65% in 2014. Key factors which are expected to drive drilling machinery segment include technological advancements in drilling techniques, increasing demand for horizontal & directional drilling and use of digital services in the sector. Drilling is also expected to witness the highest growth of 1.9% from 2015 to 2022.
To request a sample copy or view summary of this report, click the link below:
www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/europe-oilfield-equipment-market
Further key findings from the report suggest: | https://medium.com/cmfe-market-research-reports/europe-oilfield-equipment-market-worth-18-71bn-by-2022-1bfcd2686cf1 | ['Rajesh Varma'] | 2020-12-24 06:27:35.682000+00:00 | ['Europe', 'Oilfield Equipment', 'Oilfield'] |
The Disgusting Story of a President Who Secretly Purchased Enslaved Children | The Disgusting Story of a President Who Secretly Purchased Enslaved Children
James K. Polk served as the eleventh President of the United States.
President James K. Polk | Photo Credits: Mental Floss
The Slavemaster President, James K. Polk served as president of the United States (US) from 1845 to 1849. One of Polk’s astounding contributions was expanding the territories of the United States during the Mexican-American War. This is regarded as a notable achievement as the size of the country is said to have grown by more than one-third, extending the US border to the West Coast.
This expansion gave rise to country-wide discussions about whether slavery should be incorporated into the newly annexed regions. The bulk of the debate showed how white northerners were growing profoundly dissatisfied with the extension of slavery. As a consequence of this, Polk tried to conceal his own personal investment in slavery.
It is reported that during the four years Polk spent in the office, he bought 19 enslaved people, some of them which were children and some young adults. Lisa Mann, a historian at the White House Historical Association stated that of the 19 enslaved people the President purchased, 13 of them were children. Mann writes that this entire slave keeping practice was swept under the rugs by a conclusive strategy adopted by Polk. He used to instruct his confidants to buy the slaves for him and then transfer them discreetly to him.
So, the question then comes to mind, what did Polk do with these slaves? As a consequence of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, many indigenous people were removed from their native territories and Polk purchased some of these lands. Hence, the President used to send his slaves to work on the Mississippi plantation, which was part of the lands he had purchased.
Polk played the role of a ‘Benevolent’ Slaveowner in public.
It is surprising to note that despite slavery being a cruel act that many at the time had started to condemn, Polk did not consider the act as morally and ethically unjust. Hence, the clandestineness shown by Polk was not due to his embarrassment of being involved with such a barbaric act. Instead, Polk’s indulgence in slavery was a renowned fact even during his Presidential Campaign from the Democratic Party. When Polk won the elections and took charge of the office, he brought the enslaved people to the White House with him. A more astonishing fact is that Polk is one of the twelve US presidents known to have engaged in slavery.
So, what was it then that caused Polk to adopt such a secretive attitude? The explanation for this anonymity undoubtedly had to with the changing attitudes of the white northerners regarding the morality of splitting up enslaved families. Not only this, but Polk had made many arguments during his campaign, which would be undermined had his indulgence in slave practice not been so concealed. A letter written by Polk in 1846 stated that:
“It would unnecessarily subject me to assaults from the abolition newspapers if the public found out about his purchases of children and young adults.”
Furthermore, Amy S. Greenberg, who is the author of Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk, and a professor at Pennsylvania State University stated that:
“By the time you get to James K. Polk, slaveowners are saying slavery’s actually this really great system because slaveowners really care about their slaves,”
She then further adds:
“It becomes a common thing for national politicians, if they own slaves, to say, ‘Well, I own slaves, but it’s only because I inherited them’; or ‘I own slaves because they’re part of my wife’s dowry, but I’d never buy or sell slaves unless it’s what the slaves want,’”. “And when Polk runs for president, this is what his surrogates on the campaign trail all do. They say, ‘Oh, James K. Polk has never bought or sold a slave except to keep families together.’”
From these comments made by the people, it becomes quite evident how the rich used to justify slavery and portray it as a symbol of mercy rather than injustice. All of this ties in with the fact that Polk, or much of the other US presidents for that matter, were not ashamed of their indulgence in slavery due to their success at deceiving the public on the matter.
Polk desired inexpensive, productive, and young slaves.
What the people did not know, however, was that Polk was not buying slaves to keep families together, rather he was acquiring enslaved children and young adults for himself. Michael David Cohen, a research professor at American University and former editor of the James K. Polk Project at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, states that Polk, in a letter to his cousin, had defined his favorite slaves as those who were ‘young and effective’.
Cohen further stated that:
“He wanted them, younger ones, because…they’d be around for a long time so he’d get his money’s worth out of them. And also, in the case of girls, they would have a lifetime over which they could give birth to additional slaves because any child born to someone, he owned was considered his property as well.”
With all this, Cohen notes, that Polk was trying to use the Mississippi plantation and the slaves who worked on it for him as a retirement project for him and his wife, Sarah Childress Polk. This is quite baffling to see, how a US president treated children as assets that could be used to further his own financial status.
What is more astounding is that Polk purchased children rather than young adults because not only were the children relatively inexpensive to buy, but they also lasted longer; hence, Polk used this as a way of raising his revenues on the Mississippi farm he owned. Greenberg states that coupled with the violence of slavery, the prevalence of diseases such as malaria in Mississippi meant the mortality rate was very high. Around 46 percent of the enslaved children in the antebellum South died before the age of 15, and that number was at least 51 percent, probably even higher on Polk’s plantation.
Polk’s presidency ended in 1849, and he died a few months later in June 1849. His widow continued on the path of slavery established by Polk during his reign. It is interesting to note that two decades later when the Civil War began, black men from the very plantation Polk owned, escaped to join the Union Army and fight against the brutal and barbaric practices of slavery. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-disgusting-story-of-a-president-who-secretly-purchased-enslaved-children-77045470c65c | [] | 2020-12-24 13:21:39.947000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Slavery', 'Culture', 'Racism', 'History'] |
K2Crypto ahead of the New World Economy through AI tech | Foreseeing the future become available for K2Crypto ecosystem platform users with adaptive Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions.
On the backside inside our ecosystem ML is used to extract useful, actionable real-time information from often sizeable amounts of data to better inform investors of the appropriate decisions to take. As if it`s the case when making strategic decisions around the implementation of other emerging technologies, firms struggle to strike a balance between being early adopters and late adopters.
Our K2Crypto team has used AI and ML techniques in the past 9 months, and the number of respondents using linear regression in investment strategy and process outnumbers those using AI and ML techniques by almost five to one.
K2Crypto solutions provide global capabilities, supported locally to every customer by complex financing and based on individual liquidity requirements. We are connecting customers to opportunities by implementing a smart design of market analytics to explore the safest way to navigate your finance in the future. | https://medium.com/@k2crypto/k2crypto-ahead-of-the-new-world-economy-through-ai-tech-29cf91f659f0 | [] | 2020-12-23 01:43:11.666000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Ecosystem', 'Banking', 'AI', 'K2crypto'] |
5 reasons why CyberMiles (CMT) is better than Ethereum, will change e-commerce | From the folks at CryptoRecorder:
CyberMiles is a blockchain that is focused on the e-commerce market. The idea is to open up the online marketplace by allowing ordinary people to create and execute smart contracts. The question then arises, what makes it any different from Bitcoin or Ethereum? Well, CyberMiles happens to be more efficient than these two on multiple aspects. Just to give you perspective on how good CyberMiles is, here are five reasons why it dwarfs Ethereum, and has better chances of growth.
1. It is cheaper
While Ethereum can be used in e-commerce, it gets more expensive as the network grows. This makes it inconvenient for use in large-scale ecommerce applications. On this front, CyberMiles is way ahead of the curve. It is designed to keep transaction costs low irrespective of the size of the network. This is part of what will drive its adoption in the multibillion dollar e-commerce industry and push up its long-term value.
2. It supports multiple languages
For someone to develop a smart contract in Ethereum, they have to first learn solidity programming language. That’s quite limiting because it takes time to learn a new programming language and, more so, create a smart contract. Again CyberMiles dwarfs Ethereum on this front given that it allows developers to create smart contracts in multiple programming languages. For instance, a developer can create a smart contract in Java, Java Script and Python. This places CyberMiles way ahead of the curve, when it comes to adoption in the e-commerce space.
3. It has higher TPS than Ethereum
One of the most limiting aspects of Ethereum is that it is quite slow. This makes it inconvenient for launching large-scale decentralized applications, such as those created for e-commerce purposes. On this front, CyberMiles is way ahead given that it is over 100 times faster than Ethereum. This makes it the perfect blockchain for adoption in ecommerce, when compared to Ethereum. That’s a major plus to its long-term value.
4. It has a proactive anti-bug mechanism
One of the greatest issues with Ethereum is that it is prone to bugs. This has happened to the network in the past, making it quite ineffective for large-scale applications. CyberMiles solves this problem because it has an inbuilt anti-bug mechanism. In essence, any funds on the CyberMiles blockchain can never be lost. And in the case that they get lost, there is a consensus mechanism for recovering them.
5. Users can use CyberMiles to release their own tokens
One of the best things about CyberMiles is that it enables users to execute smart contracts using the CyberMiles token (CMT)…
Read more at cryptorecorder.com/2018/04/28/cybermiles-cmt-5-reasons-why-its-way-better-than-ethereum-and-will-change-e-commerce | https://medium.com/cybermiles/5-reasons-why-cybermiles-cmt-is-better-than-ethereum-will-change-e-commerce-7ddc1e306166 | ['Mark Brinkerhoff'] | 2018-04-30 15:56:12.754000+00:00 | ['Cmt', 'Ethereum', 'Ecommerce', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
Perhaps the closest relation which I can draw from the topic of capitalism is the nature of my… | Perhaps the closest relation which I can draw from the topic of capitalism is the nature of my father’s job as an auto-technician mechanic. Being a member of the working class, I grew up witnessing how his struggles and the fruition of his labor became an advantage to the car-owners, whom I preferably refer to the “economically privileged”. As my inherent social reality, I am not estranged to the basic principles and evils of the free market.
For Karl Marx, there is an immanent relation between man’s labor and human nature, that is man’s species-being — his sense to work beyond his needs which separates him from other living things. In the prevalence of the bourgeois society, however, his work simply loses its character and becomes subsistence, therefore only exemplifying the exploitations and alienation from his own labor. As presented in Ritzer and Stepnisky (2018), this alienation of the working class, is identified from either their productive activity, product, fellow workers, and human potential. To elaborate, first, man is alienated from his productive activity when he toils for the capitalist and in the end receives wage for the labor he did not decide himself. For my father whose job is basically repairing cars under the direction of a company he works for, the fulfilling end is earning money for survival not by owning his work. Second, the working class is alienated from their own creation as in the case of NutriAsia factory workers who are not only working for capitalist Joselito Campos, but are reportedly exploited (Rey & Bautista, 2018). Third, capitalism promotes isolation and interpersonal hostility with other fellow workers which is observable with call-center agents. Lastly, man is alienated from his human potential as in the case of the sales lady whose smiles and greetings are scripted in a controlled environment.
Marx presupposes capitalism as structurally unequal — the capitalist benefit more at workers disadvantage. This creates arbitrary distinctions on the part of the workers, setting them up to compete against one another (class conflict). In a capitalist society, profit generation rests on the exploitation of proletariat who inevitably will increase and be soon capable of revolution that necessitates political action, birthing a communist society. The evils of capitalism are hence, can only be resolved through social change. Participating in the free market while fighting for the rights of those victims of it, is therefore a disguised privilege.
References:
Rey, A., & Bautista, J. (2018). LOOK: Why NutriAsia workers are on strike. Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/nation/reason-nutriasia-workers-on-strike
Ritzer , G., and Stepnisky, J.,(2018) Sociological Theories. 10th Edition . Sage Publishing, 80–116. | https://medium.com/@kasosyo/perhaps-the-closest-relation-which-i-can-draw-from-the-topic-of-capitalism-is-the-nature-of-my-bff457d82135 | ['Tele Me'] | 2021-03-04 03:04:03.284000+00:00 | ['Sociology'] |
Back to the future | BEST, Board of European Students of Technology is a constantly growing non-profit and non-political organization, present in 33 European countries. | https://medium.com/@best-chisinau/back-to-the-future-a18ecf8fb0e6 | ['Best Chișinău'] | 2020-12-20 19:04:11.108000+00:00 | ['Best Chisinau', 'Teamwork', 'Volunteering'] |
My Journey To Becoming A Reiki Grandmaster Healer | My Journey To Becoming A Reiki Grandmaster Healer
And how the process healed me
Photo by Bibarys Ibatolla on Unsplash
Healing is a beautiful world that is connected to the Heart. Healing art is a gift to the healer, and a healer is a gift of existence to humans. Someone who brings the gift of empathy to this world inbuilt.
An intuitive healer can energetically connect with life and use Cosmic grace to heal a situation. ‘A situation’ can be a life form or space or time or anything that can be conceived.
This is the story of my life.
Since childhood, I used to be a sensitive person. The combination of playfulness and sensitivity made me an extroverted introvert, or in other words, an ambivert.
People loved talking to me. I liked interacting, but meaningless or fake conversations used to drain me. I hence preferred being alone in my own space. Just being and resting was always my thing.
I always had an untapped gift. I could easily detect the different vibes of people. I could feel their emotions. The news, the happenings around the world had a great impact on my emotional well being.
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash
It wasn’t something that I learned somewhere, but just an inherent quality that existed. The heart intuitively knew that people are not happy or satisfied.
I would be grateful for the small things I had and would share them with the less fortunate ones.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
I would always pray how I could contribute to bettering the lives of individuals in general. How could I help?
Hah! I never knew then, that it was going to be such an exhilarating journey in itself.
After my graduation, a troublesome period of struggle started.
I was preparing for my postgraduate entrance exams and had been diagnosed with the thyroid problem. The hormonal problem caused my body great trouble.
I suddenly started gaining weight. My eyes were weakening because of the constant pressure of studies. I had severe and persistent headaches that lasted for days.
I was constipated (a by-product of hypothyroidism), and because of this, my body developed anal fissures, and fresh bleeding happened every time during stool passage.
I was physically troubled and mentally in a log jam.
Nothing seemed to be working. I was not totally depressed or sad. But I was not in a very happy place either.
Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash
I had a keen interest in spirituality and was meditating since ten years. I found solace in reading spiritual books. They opened my mind. They touched my soul.
The year was 2012; I was looking for a solution online when I first got to know about past life regression. The website had a couple of phone numbers of past life regression therapists.
I researched a bit on this topic. I had never given serious thought to it till then. But what was the harm in doing so, I thought?
Randomly I selected a phone number of a lady. The soothing voice on the other side calmed my nerves.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash
I asked her about the regression therapy, how should I proceed. Do I actually have to meditate or something for better results? I was curious and excited to know what it really was.
She assured me in her same motherly tone and explained everything patiently. When I was convinced I asked for the address.
She explained the route to her home. The fact that I was going to a stranger’s home, that too alone did not bother me, not for once.
I reached her place and met her. I had never seen such a graceful, beautiful, and kind-hearted lady. Meeting her was a blessing in itself. She was a real-life angel.
At her place, I felt home. It was comfortable and that I felt no stress about anything. (Now, I call her ‘Maa’, it is a Hindi word for divine mother.)
Photo by British Library on Unsplash
We had some snacks and started discussing my life. Without any hesitation, I told her whatever was happening.
I realized, not only her aura was soothing but her voice was also divine. It felt like the sweetest melody of the universe coming through her throat.
She explained the method of past life regression to me and told me that she would do the healing also during this regression session. Every word coming out of her was such a grace to listen.
We proceeded further without much delay. The experience was surreal. The revelations were an eye-opener. When it ended, it felt like as if it lasted for only 20 minutes, but in reality, 3 hours had passed. It was magic.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
It felt as if time didn’t exist. It was an extremely refreshing, and wondrous experience.
She guided me on the future sightings also, as I was worried about my entrance examinations. It felt so absurd that I almost forgot about them till sightings transpired precisely the same way I saw them. They were spot on.
Photo by Anna Elfimova on Unsplash
During our conversation, I discovered that she was a Reiki master too, and had an interest in metaphysics. I was naturally drawn to Reiki and was excited about the same.
Reiki is a well known healing art. I call it an art as it is much closer to heart than mind.
In this energy healing practice, healer taps into the energy of the universe to send the healing to a specific person, place, or situation.
Photo by Dev Benjamin on Unsplash
She told me that whenever the subsequent class would happen, I would be informed. She also started my distant Reiki healing alongside.
The class was scheduled after a couple of weeks. I was initiated into Reiki.
The experience was overwhelming.
I felt extremely close to the cosmos. It felt the universe is asking me to open myself up.
Existence was pouring all its secrets inside me.
At that time, I was initiated into Level 1 and Level 2 of Reiki.
Level 1 is for self-healing and Level 2 of Reiki is for distant healing, where healing of a person, place or situation can be done who is not in close proximity.
Words are not sufficient to put down the feelings that I had during those times. It was pure joy, bliss, satisfaction, and divine love.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
During the early period of initiation, we had to do self-healing continuously for 21 days, without any break. I loved it so much that I continued this for months!
It completely transformed my life - inside out, as if the caterpillar had metamorphosed into a butterfly.
Photo by Yuichi Kageyama on Unsplash
I could feel the transformation. My body healed miraculously, the pain vanished as if it had never been there.
The fissures healed, the bleeding stopped. The severity and frequency of headaches gradually diminished to totally nil.
The body healed and became resilient. New energy flowed within.
Image by Okan Caliskan from Pixabay
My thoughts which used to weigh me down earlier were transmuted. I knew within that nothing could hold me down any longer.
The mind became a calmer place. Positivity exuded. My intuition developed further. I became more and more grateful for this beautiful body, and life.
I experienced the lightness of being. The surrender came automatically. I knew everything had been taken care of and everything was unfolding at its own pace in a very beautiful manner the way it is supposed to be.
Photo by Andrew Small on Unsplash
As for my entrance examinations, somewhere, somehow I knew I’d be within the merit list in the approaching year. I was so in sync with the universe that I knew it had to happen.
In the coming year, I secured 8th rank in AIIMS, Delhi (most prestigious college of the country), 2nd rank in my state, 160th position in All India PG entrance examination.
Photo by Doran Erickson on Unsplash
I didn’t know how it happened. I didn’t have to change my preparation style to make this happen. But somewhere inside, I knew it had to happen.
Reiki changed my perspective. It opened numerous avenues in my life, within me. It connected me to this vast universe in a very intimate way.
This opening of the portal of the universe made me more empathic and also connected to everything.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
I noticed that many people, even strangers were beginning to open up easily to me. Space automatically opens up where they would find the solace in sharing.
They discuss their problems uninhibitedly. One of my close friends used to joke about how I attracted these people who were so confused and in dark phases of life. But deep down I knew they all required healing.
Well, don’t we all need it?
A hungry person does not think of anything but the food. Similar is the case with love and healing.
Photo by William Farlow on Unsplash
Love is all around us. Healing is natural to us if we allow. Sometimes just a gentle nudge or reminder is sufficient for people to open up to their best possibilities.
Intrigued by the miraculous results, my journey continued. After practicing Reiki for 6 years, I was initiated into Reiki Master and Grandmaster Level.
I have been blessed to practice it since. I have used it in every aspect of life and it has touched many other lives too. I have witnessed its miraculous results.
Photo by Fernando Brasil on Unsplash
Sometimes, I am shocked to see the speed with which it works. After all, it is an intelligent energy and knows where it is required and accepted the most.
All I can feel is gratitude towards Existence and the gift of healing. Thank you for being a part of this life. Thank you!
Adios for now!
More stories for later.
Love and Healing to all,
Ruchi ❤ | https://medium.com/soultouch/my-journey-to-being-a-reiki-grandmaster-healer-c200a1525361 | ['Ruchi Thalwal'] | 2020-08-26 07:13:08.095000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Healing', 'Love', 'Empathy', 'Life'] |
AI Guild Podcast #5: From Biology into Data Science with Macarena Beigier-Bompadre | AI Guild Podcast #5: From Biology into Data Science with Macarena Beigier-Bompadre
Macarena Beigier-Bompadre has very deep domain expertise in Machine Learning. Her Data Science skills include Python, R, SQL, Biostatistics, Scikit-learn, Neural Networks, and Deep Learning, and data visualization tools. She co-authored 23 scientific papers.
Macarenas tips for the transition from academia into data science:
Start to learn a programming language (e.g. R) early
On-site data science courses have the advantage of getting real-time feedback on your work
“You can always go back to academia”, and data science skills will always provide a career advantage regardless of the field
About the interviewer:
Leyla Allahyarova is an IT Management Consultant at Lexta GmbH in Berlin and a co-founder of the AI Guild.
About the podcast:
AI Guild is a community of Data Scientists and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Practitioners as well as everyone who wants to strengthen the AI community in Europe and support businesses with the accelerated adoption of AI.
On the AI Guild Podcast Series, we share valuable insights from our community of Data Scientists and AI Practitioners, helping you learn more about the topics of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. It is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, and other channels. For more updates, follow our #podcast channel on Slack, and subscribe to us on your favorite podcast channel of your choice! | https://medium.com/ai-guild/ai-guild-podcast-5-from-biology-into-data-science-with-macarena-beigier-bompadre-8401ffd68a78 | ['Leyla Allahyarova'] | 2020-05-02 06:25:44.288000+00:00 | ['Ai Career', 'Biology', 'Data Science', 'Academia'] |
Mental Health Awareness | #Getting Closer to your Mega Project
I had this in my mind for quite a while and the one who is reading this blog can relate that we all at some point have been through a stage where we needed help regarding our mental health.
We approached the one’s that can help us overcome this hidden and covered pain.
Some of us might have gone to a therapist ( I went to one), Or maybe your friend and your family helped you in that stage ( Mine helped me a lot more than I can ever thank them).
I want to shift your focus to that all of those of were struggling with this particular issue must have been got aware of it that they have this problem so they went out seeking help from others.
Now if I don’t know that what will I do I ask you guys a question?
I will not know what is the core of the problem that I am having and this could wreck my life. If someone is physically fit does not mean that he is mentally fit too.
In Pakistan, if we see there isn’t much awareness talks about Mental health the goal is not to tell them that you have a problem the goal is just to let them take care of their health both mental and physical.
So my goal is to help those around us for a much better and happier life.
Thanks | https://medium.com/@aarij-aziz170/mental-health-awareness-8b57d6fe5d99 | ['Aarij Aziz'] | 2020-12-26 12:13:26.552000+00:00 | ['Amal Fellowship', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Goals', 'Mental Health', 'Amal Academy'] |
Leadership: Trust 101 | We have all heard that trust is earned. But it goes both ways: for the leader and for his or her people.
The leader must continually work just as hard at earning the trust of his or her followers as they must equally work in earning his or hers.
To be an effective leader is to be a credible ‘trustholder’, for people wholeheartedly respond to the leader’s cues and instructions to the degree that they trust, respect and admire that leader.
Before a leader can be fully trusted, there is however a questioning preface: “is this person trustworthy?”. Essentially, the people are constantly asking “can I really trust my leader?”.
This shines some light on the ambient behaviours which the leader consistently exudes: whether warm, principled, values-oriented and fair etc, or cold and detached, selfish, and arrogant etc.
A leader’s trust tank thus fills up to the degree that his or her people can perceive positive and trustworthy qualities in him or her as an individual and as a leader. Usually, people observe the person before the position that he or she occupies and disseminate commensurate measures of trust.
Being perceived as trustworthy is thus an essential brick in the basic building blocks of trust for any leader, for it strengthens the leader’s weight of influence and enhances his or her general appeal.
The ABCD Model of Trust
In Trust Works!, a book on cultivating trust, Kenneth Blanchard and two other colleagues book put forth a concept known as the ABCD model of building high trust.
“A” stands for Able/Ability.
They postulate here that one of the primary ingredients for creating improved trust is competence.
The emphasis of ability in this regard revolves around respected expertise.
“Authority flows to the one who knows” says the ancient Socrates.
Therefore, a leader may do well to have respectable levels of adeptness in the relevant technical or professional activities that concern his or her specialized field such as marketing and finance, and more importantly in the general skills of leadership such as communication, decision making and creativity etc.
Strong ability in technical and general leadership skills may also lend perceptions of legitimacy to the leader, thus boosting overall trust ratings.
“B” stands for Believable/Believability.
Trust is very synonymous with believability. If one cannot be believed, one can hardly be trusted. If I cannot believe a word you say, I will struggle greatly with the prospect of trusting you.
One way in which leaders and managers may enhance believability is to ensure that their words and actions constantly match up.
Credibility may suffer greatly when publicly espoused values, ideals and behaviours do not match with the leader’s consistent conducts, thus negatively affecting the leader’s believability.
Believability, therefore, means that a leader consistently models expected behaviours and that he or she does not stop. If he or she does, then the opposite end of the stick may quickly turn — an erosion of trust.
This shows that to be believable is to be constant — in acting in a compatible manner with proclaimed (positive) values.
“C” stands for Connected/Connectedness.
The leader has to be moderately close to his or her people in order to feel their heartbeats and to create a climate of openness.
Being connected means that the people are valued, respected and appreciated for who they are and that the leader is willing to build a sound relationship with them that echoes that belief.
Certain leaders may be sceptical about being sociable with their people because they feel that being close would dilute their leadership influence.
The assumption may be that friendship with subordinates automatically means inviting contempt towards their position as leaders. While an extremity of friendship might put respect in jeopardy, moderate affableness on the leader’s part might actually enhance involvement and productivity.
People eventually grow to resent leaders who unashamedly behave in a manner that clearly illustrates just how wide the chasm of status is between them. But they are open and ready to wholeheartedly work alongside the leader who shows interest in them and values their worth as human beings and as contributors to the organization.
It is almost certain that some subordinates will abuse the friendship of their leaders. But there’s more to be gained from the aggregate than from the minority who flout respect.
“D” stands for Dependable/Dependability.
Dependability is generated as a result of consistent behaviour in the right direction.
When people see how constantly the leader embodies and models proper values, and how committed he or she is to them and to the organization, they may be more likely to grow a new depth of respect for the leader.
This depth of respect may translate into increased dependability towards the leader. People often depend on whom they respect deeply.
We may find that we are often guided by the notion that it is the people who should be primarily concerned with being found dependable vis a vis to the leaders. Not necessarily.
Both the leader and his or her people may be better off if they exchanged mutual levels of respect, trust and dependability amongst each other. Results might be achieved quicker, the environment might be a lot more inspiring and people may enjoy higher rates of overall workplace satisfaction. | https://medium.com/@ccachukwu/leadership-trust-101-37eaf6b5016f | ['C.C Achukwu'] | 2020-12-15 14:00:28.956000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Leadership Development', 'Management', 'Management And Leadership', 'Trust'] |
インフラエンジニア日記 #55 2020 11/30 ~ 12/04 | What's new in Kubernetes 1.20? | Sysdig
Kubernetes 1.20 is about to be released, and it comes packed with novelties! Where do we begin? As we highlighted in… | https://medium.com/@shimoda_98944/%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%95%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A8%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B8%E3%83%8B%E3%82%A2%E6%97%A5%E8%A8%98-55-2020-11-30-12-04-1bc38191fca9 | ['Wataru Shimoda'] | 2020-11-30 00:00:00 | ['AWS', 'Infrastructure', 'News', 'Gcp'] |
Who Do We Say We Are | Who Do We Say We Are
By Minister Paul J. Bern
I was having a casual conversation with someone just recently on the train ride home (that’s right, I use public transit to get around since I no longer own a car), and there came a point where I was asked, “What do you do?”. I replied that I was a minister, musician and a writer, as well as a blogger and political activist. “What denomination are you from?”, the lady inquired. I explained that I was nondenominational, and that I was not aligned nor affiliated with any other churches, be they virtual churches like this website or those of the brick-and-mortar variety. I talked to her about my views regarding being set aside, or standing alone, pledging allegiance only to Jesus Christ instead of ‘Religion, Inc’. By that time, it was time for me to get off the train, and we bid each other warm goodbye’s.
But it got me to thinking: Who or what do I say that I am? What’s my sense of identity? Does that match up to what’s going on inside my head, or do I think one way and act another? These are not comfortable questions for anyone, but if we don’t inquire about this to ourselves, how do we measure our authenticity as human beings and Christ followers? And so I took an internal, in-between-the-ears inventory of myself. I came to the conclusion that, among other things, I want to be like Chris Mintz, who took multiple bullets at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College during the 2015 school shooting there, saving many more lives in the process.
I want to be a peacemaker like Mr. Mintz’s friends and family members have called him, and I too stand against indiscriminate violence wherever it may be found. “Blessed are the peacemakers”, Jesus said at the Sermon on the Mount, “for they shall be called ‘sons of the living God’” (Matthew 5: 9). So I concluded that being a peacemaker was a good starting point regarding my own self-inventory.
The apostle John wrote about this topic in his first Epistle nearly 2,000 years ago, and I quote: “If anyone says, ‘I love God’, yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1st John chapter 4, verses 20–21). People who are devoid of love can never be peacemakers because they are inherently selfish individuals. But if we are true Christians and followers of Christ, we sow seeds of peace and unconditional love wherever we go. If you want to be a man or woman of peace, the first step in learning how to do that is to worship the Prince of Peace unconditionally. Let Jesus be your example to follow, your coach and your mentor.
I am also a crusader for civil and/or human rights, and against social injustice and economic inequality. I have written and self-published 7 faith based nonfiction books on these topics and I have blogged extensively as well. I was formerly middle class before winding up on disability. I know what it’s like to lose everything and to have to start one’s life all over again from scratch. And I know what it’s like to wind up homeless. One of the most important lessons I learned from these experiences is that we live unfulfilled lives as long as we chase after money, material goods and the trappings of luxury and convenience. These are the things that simply don’t matter in the long run.
But seeing who is in need, or what contribution can be made, or what innovation can be implemented that benefits everyone equally, it is all these things that we should strive to achieve. Cooperation, then, replaces competition when it comes to the worship of the Son of God, and this bleeds over into the life of the believer like a Spiritual blood transfusion. Competition is so 19th and 20th century! Mutual cooperation for mutual benefit, like a beehive, is the wave of the future, and it resembles God’s kingdom on earth much more closely (see Revelation chapter 20, verses 4–6).
That is only part of His directions for those that followed Him concerning how they were supposed to live life in service to others. Christians call it the Sermon on the Mount, but it was lived as a lifestyle until about 300 AD by Jesus’ followers. By then some Old Testament teachings on warfare had replaced Christianity as a lifestyle and devalued it to a mere ideology. Jesus also said he came to replace the law because it had not been followed by the Jews, much to their own detriment. Just think of all the false teachers and error-laden churches that ignore these teachings. For those who do not follow His teachings I ask this: Are we all the same peoples despite color or nationality, and all the same citizens despite the unjust nature of government or of the religion we follow?
Is civilization all about wars and conflict? What about the non-warriors whose gifts to us include all the advances in farming that none should go hungry? Those who devised portable or temporary shelters so that man could venture beyond the close environs of the cave or those who devised ways to bring water to the villages that none might be thirsty or crops perish from the lack of water? Who was the hero or heroine who devised the wheel? Who among our ancestors built stationary shelters that we now call houses? Who first tamed and rode horses?
All of these people from our ancient past are true heroes, giving us lasting gifts that advanced civilization, even if the gifts were soon turned to warlike purposes. Is someone considered a danger because of their gender, sexuality, skin color, political ideology or personal attributes? Why is it that women in modern society earn an average of 25% lower pay for the same work as opposed to men? Why is a nurse less valued than a doctor? Why is a teacher less valued then a banker or a lawyer? How many can name one person who is not recognized by their own community for what they have given?
How will we be remembered by the next generation? We are all given a choice and a say in what happens tomorrow, today. A million today’s were shaped by what a million nameless, faceless someones did yesterday. Do we go along to get along or do we stand up and demand our say-so and contribution in our future? Do you wait for Jim or Sally, Joe or Jane to take the lead, or do you begin hoping that they will say or do something you can agree with? The only person responsible for your decisions and what happens tomorrow because of them, is the one looking back at you in the mirror. Shall we become part of the solution, or remain part of the problem? We can be contributing individuals to the world of tomorrow, or the zoned-out TV watchers and self-isolating video game players of today. Which do we choose?
Which brings us back to the community and the growing of support and friendship. Who are your friends? Are they just people you grew up with or work with or go to the club or church with? Are they all men or women or all the same racial background as you are? Are all of your friends the same general age or do you number the elderly and the children among your friends? In American society, friendship sometimes seems shallow, temporary and based on filling someone’s immediate needs. One different outcome and way of looking at friendship is offered in the Native American community. They look at friendship as a choice, a responsibility and that it be long lasting. Jesus said it best when he uttered these words, “Greater love has no man, than to lay down his life for his friends”.
A friend is someone you choose to give your friendship to without any qualification. It doesn’t matter what they do in life, it doesn’t matter what they may or may not have done. The friendship remains not because of who we are or what we have to offer. Friendship is a mutual choice. So, go out and make one new friend this week and go back to your current friends and say you will support them, stand by them and offer advice if they ask for it. Make sure they know that you will help them in time of trouble. When times of trouble do arrive, such as mass shootings, follow through with them. Enjoy their companionship at all times. Make it your choice, it is your life. Are you starting to see being a peacemaker as something worthwhile now? Is peacemaking something of value in your family, neighborhood, community, state or nation? Are you willing to become a peacemaker or support those who do choose to become one? Will you be a Chris Mintz, or one who will actively support such uncommon and tough-as-nails individuals? Will you be part of the solution to gun violence?
I, for one, vow to do so without hesitation, and I will go to any length to propagate peace, even if my personal safety is at risk. I will continue to insist that all life is precious, that all life is God’s handiwork, with each form of life having a singular uniqueness all its own. I will continue to advocate for the homeless because every human being on the planet has the fundamental human right to shelter. The cave men of 100,000 or 200,000 years ago had roofs over their heads, and none of them ever punched a time clock.
I will also continue to stand up against economic inequality, social and racial injustice, and waging warfare. I would endure torture, jail or death rather then compromise any of my beliefs. Perhaps the act of enduring any or all of the above will bring others to believe as I do, knowing that I write on Christ’s behalf. I will speak out against any injustice or any war, and even use my own body to shield victims of injustice, if necessary, just like that ex-soldier in Oregon did back in 2015. I am asking you to do the same, having given you all ample reason to support my stand. No more working for the wealthy to make them richer. We work for the benefit of all humankind from this day forward, not just the top 1 or 2 percent. And we will enforce peace across America, first by our relationship with Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and secondly by acquiring the means to defend ourselves whenever appropriate, so this terrible cycle of violence can be stopped for good. | https://medium.com/@greatestservant62/who-do-we-say-we-are-1be6a26df4f2 | ['Pastor Paul J Bern'] | 2020-12-27 20:22:37.001000+00:00 | ['Who Are You', 'Real Christianity', 'Truth', 'Social Gospel', 'Christian Blogs'] |
Caching in AWS | DATA ON AWS
Caching in AWS
Repeat read access patterns have mandated the implementation of a caching layer in most modern applications. These access patterns might be for different use cases, such as configuration files, images, any file on a CDN. The idea behind caching is to store some items closer to the compute layer to avoid time spent on roundtrips and bandwidth limitations, usually resulting in sub-millisecond response times for building blazing fast applications.
Scaling up an application, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’ll have to scale up all the components so that they synchronize well after the scaling up. For most businesses, it is better to use managed solutions implementing different layers of the application.
One such component is the cache. Caches are used everywhere — in your browser, in your mobile apps, when you’re streaming audio, and when you’re watching a YouTube video. It’s important to understand that what we’ll be talking about in this post is server-side caches and not client-side caches.
Caches are usually implemented using high-speed volatile devices such as RAMs. To implement a cache, you can use one of many cache algorithms or cache replacement policies. Two of the most popular OSS caching projects that allow you to do that is — Redis and Memcached. AWS’s ElastiCache supports both these projects.
A cache doesn’t necessarily have to be in-memory. You can use a fast SSD as a cache for a slow HDD with a rotating disk if you think about it. Anything with higher IO and lower latency can be used as a cache. That’s why services like DynamoDB are used as caches too. And then, there are in-memory tables in relational and non-relational databases, which use a part of the RAM to store data. We’ll talk about these different services in this post.
ElastiCache for Redis & Memcached
AWS ElastiCache is a caching service that supports both Redis and Memcached engines. Both Redis and Memcached have a baseline of standard features but provide enough unique features to have separate use cases for both. We’ll delve into the architecture and AWS-managed features for both of these caches in the upcoming posts.
Memcached is a multi-threaded, in-memory key-value store that supports caching of simple data types. Memcached is meant just for caching simple string objects up to 1 MB in size. Redis, on the other hand, is much more than a cache. Redis can store advanced data types such as hashes, lists, and sorted sets. One other significant difference between these two is that Redis supports persistence on disk, enabling you to store long-lived data or reload your cache in case of a server restart.
These caches can support many use cases, including storing and processing data from streaming platforms, leaderboards, IoT devices, etc. For example, Redis is increasingly being used for high-speed geospatial data storage and processing.
As mentioned earlier, you can use these caches to improve the response times of an application drastically. For new data, rather than going to the database first and writing it, you can write it to a cache first and serve any following read requests from the cache itself. For older data, when something is requested after a long time, you can bring it to the cache for any further requests.
DynamoDB
Caching doesn’t start and end with Redis and Memcached. DynamoDB is a multi-purpose, serverless, key-value database used both as a key-value-cum-document store and a cache. For simple applications, you can use DynamoDB to store configuration files for your application. For high volume, complex applications like gaming platforms, you can use DynamoDB to store session information, leaderboards, etc.
Although DynamoDB supports storing JSON data, don’t use it as a replacement of MongoDB on AWS. For availing all the capabilities of MongoDB on AWS, use DocumentDB.
Data engineers can use DynamoDB to store data pipeline and orchestration metadata to enable replayability. ML engineers can use DynamoDB to feed data into SageMaker for real-time predictions and analysis. With DynamoDB being a much more flexible product than an in-memory cache, many use cases have a much wider array. I wrote about my experience using DynamoDB about two years ago:
In-Memory Tables in Databases
Having used relational databases extensively, I have to mention that I haven’t seen a complex application using only a single caching solution. Databases use the same caching mechanisms in the form of buffer memory. The idea is to keep as much of the database within memory as possible. For faster reads and writes of non-critical data, say, when you’re processing data for an ETL job using pure SQL, you can use in-memory tables. Keep in mind that these tables aren’t durable. Everything in the buffer memory of a database goes away if the server is restarted. The buffer is warmed up again when you start querying the database again.
Using memory-based tables brings us back to the concept of using anything which has higher IO and lower latency than your next closest storage medium as a cache. And that’s exactly what memory tables are used for.
What’s Next?
This was the third post in a long series of posts about data-related services on AWS. Previously, I have talked about RDS in detail. The last post was about specialty (purpose-built) databases on AWS.
If you’re interested in reading more of my writings about data & infrastructure engineering, you can visit this page and subscribe! You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
More content at plainenglish.io | https://aws.plainenglish.io/caching-in-aws-f662be7582f4 | ['Kovid Rathee'] | 2021-09-05 09:04:38.564000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Programming', 'Dynamodb', 'Cloud Computing', 'Redis'] |
Raised by Ants | There was something weird with Boris and it wasn’t that he was raised by ants.
Sure, this simple fact was quite out-of-the-ordinary but this wasn’t the point.
Boris was your typical Caucasian teenage boy which meant he watched too much porn, had a second account on twitter which served him to act as a troll and a seriously fucked up love for a girl named Alice. Typical, I said.
But the dude was weird, I mean it. Like it wasn’t just that people would say to girls : Do not date this weirdo, he’d bring you to his house for his parents to eat you. Because people would do this, and it wasn’t only that he’d been raised by ants, surely there was something fucked up about him.
It’s not that I think it’s impossible to be raised by arthropods and still become a good guy. I mean, History would tell you that Boris grew up to run a grocery store and he’d raise three beautiful children and nobody ever talked about insects ever again.
But at the time it was weird. Maybe it was the era. Nobody ever saw someone raised by ants. I mean you’d have this crazy images. Friggin’ giant ants limping across dirt basement in their one story house. Who actually knew what this kind of parents would do to their kids ?
I mean, it was a first. And surely you’d have to be cautious. Those were GIANT ANTS, MAN. Not that I’d have a problem with that. I just never spoke to the kid, not that I hated his guts or anything. It was just like that. And now that I recall there wasn’t a lot of people talking to the boy.
It wasn’t about the parents, let just say the kid was weird. Like fucking silent all the time ; always hanging out with this fat goth chick. Except for this girl, I don’t think anyone ever talked to the guy. I mean, let’s be clear, it’s impossible to start a conversation with the likes of : So your parents are ants but they live in the ground and shit? That’d be messed up, anybody would tell you so.
And so it comes we never spoke to the dude. And the dude was all quiet and stuff. Like alone, like he wasn’t even bothered by his loneliness. This ain’t normal. Not that I think the dude should have suffered or something but it should have at least annoyed him, right ? Like what with being different and all and nobody ever talks to you. I was kinda popular in high school so I know it’d have bothered me.
And there he was, with his parents being ants, not being annoyed as shit nobody wanted to be near him. Just going on with the flow, contempt with himself, that’s how I took it at the time. I still think like that nowadays. Dude was fucked up. Like he didn’t need us, like he didn’t anyone’s company except for that goth chick.
Boris was fucking weird, man, and it had nothing to do with his parents being ants. | https://medium.com/@basile-lebret/raised-by-ants-9f062605b0a | ['Basile Lebret'] | 2020-11-26 23:03:18.803000+00:00 | ['Flash Fiction', 'Science Fiction', 'LGBT', 'Fiction', 'Ants'] |
The benefits of reimagining technology in the public realm | Principles of good deployment
Below is a summary of the principles, for full details including context and examples can be found here.
Principle 1: Transparency
Devices that collect data in the public realm should clearly communicate:
what data are being collected why data are being collected (the purpose) how the data are being processed who owns and controls the data what (if any) personal data are being collected, and how they are anonymised
Principle 2: Trust
Publicly collected data should be made available, where appropriate, by an independently accountable data trust. These trusts should evaluate individual requests for data, and provide justifications for when data cannot be released.
If data collected in the public realm are mostly created by citizens, they should be able to see how the collection of them can contribute to the common good, and therefore benefit society.
Where data or derived information could be used for public benefit it should be made available to the relevant authorities. In some cases, data may be made available to public authorities only: for example where privacy or safety issues make the data unsuitable to be publicly available. This assessment should be carried out by a data trust.
Explainer: What is a Data Trust?
Data trusts as defined by the Open Data Institute ‘provide independent, fiduciary stewardship of data’. They provide a legal framework allowing data to be pooled together and looked after by a third party. They provide a set of rules whereby data access can be limited to only those that also conform to rules of access and safekeeping. This gives people and organisations confidence when enabling access to data.
“Data Trusts ensure governance structures are in place and address both the terms of data sharing and the monitoring of access…by providing third-party oversight from and creating a degree of separation between developer, data collector and profiting organisation.”
In The State of City Data, we explored the role Data Trusts could have in enabling cities to encourage public confidence and consensual participation with technology in the public. Data Trusts ensure governance structures are in place and address both the terms of data sharing and the monitoring of access. This can be done in an acceptable (and ethical) manner by providing third-party oversight from and creating a degree of separation between developer, data collector and profiting organisation.
Principle 3: Public Good
Digital street furniture should only be placed in the public realm when it explicitly demonstrates public benefit.
There must be a fair value exchange between the place, its users and inhabitants and the street furniture. This can be seen either directly through services provided or indirectly through revenue share.
Principle 4: Longevity
The full life cycle of any object placed in the public realm should be considered and the objects should be subject to review or reassessment on an agreed regular basis.
Principle 5: Inclusivity
The design of street furniture should reflect the diversity of the people who use it, not excluding any groups or individuals and not imposing any barriers to its use.
There must be a fair value exchange between the place, its users and inhabitants and the street furniture.
The information around data collection that Principle 1 covers should equally be accessible to all potential users.
If Digital Street Furniture forms a part of the public streetscape, the design should be inclusive and consider the local and wider community. The design of Digital Street Furniture objects should allow everyone to access the services in a way which does not hinder some users.
Additionally, related to Principle 3, the design should not unintendedly exclude certain users from accessing its services or benefits.
Read the full set of Principles here. | https://medium.com/connectedplaces/reimagining-technology-in-the-public-realm-e2d4987d3a43 | ['Connected Places Catapult'] | 2020-08-12 14:56:34.510000+00:00 | ['Street Furniture', 'Digital Infrastructure', 'Technology', 'Data', 'Public Realm'] |
Lunch break conversation during a vaccination shift | An excerpt from small talk at work
Colleague: Are you new over here?
Me: No I’m the medical backup for the vaccinations that are taking place. I’m here to help in the case something bad happens.
Colleague: Yes, you need a doctor for that of course. I’ve applied for the Janssen vaccination but I didn’t hear anything yet from my family doctor. I’m above 60.
Me: Oh wow. That’s strange…
Colleague: Yes but a time ago I refused AstraZeneca. I don’t want that.
Me: Mhm…
Colleague: I’m seeing young people around me that get vaccinated and I’m 63 years old. I also registered at the RIVM (Dutch national health preventive medicine) for a Pfeizzer vaccine. My family doctor said that he would put me on a list. If there are enough people on the list I will get a notice.
Me: Hmm ok… There is also a website on which you can register prullenbakvaccin.nl (literally translated “garbagecanvaccine.nl”, a real website) did you know that? It collects refused vaccines. If you see on the map of the website that there is a vaccine available somewhere then you might be allowed to travel to that location and ask for a vaccine.
Colleague: Yes, but that means I will have to travel maybe to Groningen (300 km from where the conversation takes place).
Me: Yes, but you could also be lucky and see a location nearby that has something left.
Colleague: Hmm, yes we’ll see. I’m going to smoke a cigarette… | https://medium.com/@k-h-kramp/lunch-break-conversation-during-a-vaccination-day-ecbbaaa09055 | ['Kelvin Kramp'] | 2021-06-04 21:47:27.932000+00:00 | ['Vaccin', 'Covid 19', 'Conversations'] |
Maximize your crypto gains by using these Trading Strategies | Within the idap.io community, we received positive feedback on our last post, Types of orders and how to use them in crypto trading and thus we want put out more introductory articles touching upon many topics relevant to beginners in crypto trading.
In this post, we will provide a gentle foray into Trading Strategies and how newcomers can benefit from choosing the right one. Our Desktop Trading Interface has been designed to encourage and pursue a strategic style of trading, and thus we hope to inspire a new generation of retail investors who learn and trade with our platform when its comes to crypto trading.
To begin at the beginning, a trading strategy comprises objective rules set to dictate your entry into a trade and the exit from said trade. Simply put, with a trading strategy, you minimize the guesswork involved in selling and buying your coin or its derivative instrument by planning ahead and sticking to this plan. A trading strategy specifies when you enter a particular trade, what factors trigger this entry, what conditions need to occur for you to exit this trade, how funds are managed to achieve the trade, the kind of time frame you will follow, what relevant order types will be involved and so forth.
As stressed many a times, trading is an art form and like with any art form, there is a requirement for individuality; there is no one-rule-for-all type of strategy. Each new trader needs to identify what kind of trading suits them most and then develop a strategy in line with this style. To give an overview, there are several styles of traders present in the market, though it is noteworthy that this is in no way a hard and fast categorization: | https://medium.com/idap-io/maximize-your-crypto-gains-by-using-these-trading-strategies-890dc8c31826 | ['Bitfex Exchange'] | 2018-07-12 15:35:45.394000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Strategy', 'ICO', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
A 20-Year-Old GOP Strategy Drew the Road Map for Trump’s Attempted Coup | In 2000 in Florida, minority votes were systematically suppressed, in part through the use of a so-called felon list that kept tens of thousands of Black voters from casting a ballot because of past criminal convictions but also included an estimated 20,000 wrongly included names. In Florida, typically more than 85% of Black voters vote Democratic in presidential elections (it was 89% this year). More than 50% of the names on the felon list were Black.
And while this year, Republican secretaries of state are by and large standing up to Trump, even in the face of death threats, in 2000, Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, put her thumb on the scale for Bush. She and her staff attempted to short-circuit vote recounts requested by the Gore campaign in largely Democratic counties.
Republican partisans didn’t chant “Stop the Steal” that year, but they did pioneer the use of aggressive tactics to influence the election outcome after the fact. In Miami-Dade County, they staged a protest that bullied the local canvassing board into stopping a manual recount of votes in what became known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
In fact, the Bush team marshaled often contradictory arguments with the only organizing principle that it helped their candidate win — just like Trump forces have spent the past month doing, though far less effectively.
Harris, with the urging of Bush’s team, sought to dissuade local canvassing boards from doing a manual recount of votes in Democratic counties by citing a narrow interpretation of Florida’s election rules. At the same time, Bush’s legal team was fighting to ensure that overseas military ballots, which leaned Republican, were counted even if they didn’t adhere to the state’s electoral laws.
In 2020, Democrats openly fretted about the possibility that Republican state legislators in key battleground states would ignore vote tallies and award their state’s electoral votes to Trump.
In 2000, what may have stopped this from happening was not a fealty to the will of the voters but rather the fact that it wasn’t necessary. After the liberal-leaning Florida Supreme Court ordered a full recount in three Democratic-leaning counties, James Baker, the former secretary of state who spearheaded the Bush effort in Florida, publicly stated that “one should not be surprised if the Florida legislature seeks to affirm the original rules” that had given Bush his narrow vote lead. It was an open invitation to the state’s Republican-controlled House and Senate to ignore the final vote count if it favored Gore and hand the state and the presidency to Bush.
Finally, Trump’s oft-stated hope that the Supreme Court would award him the presidency did not come out of left field. It came out of Florida.
In 2000, the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court ruling that called for a broad recount of all so-called undervotes in the state — 60,000 votes that for a variety of reasons had been discarded (because it had been too difficult to interpret them or there had not been enough time to determine voter intent).
In a 5–4 vote, the Court’s conservative bloc, relying on the Constitution’s equal protection clause, used the dubious argument that since there wasn’t a uniform standard for determining voting intent when counting undervotes, it would disadvantage some voters. Never mind that each Florida county already had its own procedures and standards for counting votes or that the Court failed to identify any victims of this supposed violation, which is a crucial aspect of the legal interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Even more remarkable is that in a Supreme Court decision a week earlier, the Court had rejected an equal protection argument raised by the Bush lawyers. The conservative bloc, it seemed, had already made up their minds and was merely looking for an excuse to justify their decision.
As outrageous as the final Bush v. Gore decision was, the writing had been on the wall. Three days earlier, the Court granted the Bush campaign’s request for a stay in the voting in Florida. In case there was any question about the implicit message being sent by the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, in a brief concurring opinion, ended the mystery. He suggested that to allow the vote to go on would “threaten irreparable harm to [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election” if the recount found that Gore actually had the most votes in Florida. The implication was clear: that the conservative justices were more concerned about Bush’s “legitimacy” than the legal case they were being asked to decide.
After the Court’s stay made it was hard to imagine any scenario under which it would allow Florida to continue the count and give Gore the victory. On December 12, the decision in Bush v. Gore confirmed that assumption.
Yet, it’s what came afterward that is perhaps Bush v. Gore’s most benighted legacy.
After the divisive recount drama, many pundits assumed that Bush would strive to bridge the nation’s divide and reach across the aisle to Democrats.
Writing for the Brookings Institution, Thomas Mann said that Bush’s narrow victory, when combined with his loss of the popular vote and his reliance on the “judicial activism” of the high court, created “the most inauspicious of circumstances” for his presidency.
In the New York Times, R.W Apple, then the dean of the Washington political press corps wrote, “With Congress narrowly divided and his own mandate all but invisible, Mr. Bush will need to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation he promised during his campaign.”
Considering that in 2000, Bush had embraced the mantle of “compassionate conservatism” in direct contrast to the hard-edged conservatism of Newt Gingrich and his band of House Republicans, such a notion hardly seemed far-fetched.
But Bush governed with the same ruthless, win-at-all-costs strategy that his campaign team used during the Florida recount. Before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he rammed through a massive tax cut and pulled the United States out of international agreements supported by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
After 9/11 Bush’s efforts to unite the country were primarily focused on building support for the invasion of Iraq — and occasionally questioning the patriotism of those who opposed it. His chief aide, Karl Rove, would infamously slander Democrats by suggesting that after the 9/11 assaults, they “offer(ed) therapy and understanding for our attackers” while Republicans “prepared for war.”
In 2004, Bush would narrowly win reelection: His tainted victory four years earlier had long been forgotten by Republican voters and the media at large.
In the words of Tom Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Bush’s victory in 2000 and his first term were the “first application of Gingrich-style politics to presidential politics.” This was “streetball politics” and one Schaller says that “cared little about elite opinion.”
In the years since, the “Gingrich-style” has come to define Republican politics up and down the ticket, whether it was the impugning of John Kerry’s patriotism by Bush’s allies in 2004 and the “lock her up” chants in 2016 or the mindless obstructionism of Senate Republicans for electoral benefit during the Obama years and their norm-busting blocking of a vacant Supreme Court seat in 2016. | https://gen.medium.com/a-20-year-old-gop-strategy-drew-the-road-map-for-trumps-attempted-coup-2e38260e5ff7 | ['Michael A. Cohen'] | 2020-12-11 17:26:35.759000+00:00 | ['Voting', 'Bush V Gore', 'Election 2020', 'Trump', 'Politics'] |
Facing Destruction and Death: Lessons on how to Survive a Tsunami | To know the terror of a tsunami, listen to the stories of survivors.
They tell of the ocean “bubbling and boiling.” A giant wave “smashing homes to smithereens.” Of hearing a roar preceding the wave, “like a huge plane coming right at you.”
The earthquake and monster wave that struck Japan in 2011 claimed more than 18,000 lives. Despite significant progress in tsunami sciences, the death toll continues to be devastatingly high. It doesn’t have to be.
Haoliang Xu is the United Nations Assistant Secretary General and Director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific
While research has yet to resolve several questions, there are simple steps that can be taken to limit losses, especially the loss of life.
In the last 50 years, there have been 37 deadly tsunamis, approximately 1 every 1.5 years, most of which have been in the Asia Pacific region.
The numbers may seem deceptive compared to the frequency of other extreme climate events, but the loss of lives and economic consequences are significant. In Japan, the direct economic loss immediately following the 2011 tsunami has been estimated by the World Bank at a staggering US $235 billion, in assets destroyed. | https://medium.com/school-preparedness-for-tsunamis/facing-destruction-and-death-lessons-on-how-to-survive-a-tsunami-a74f11b3b7c4 | ['Undp Asia-Pacific Disaster Risk Reduction Team'] | 2018-07-26 03:16:41.158000+00:00 | ['Disaster Response', 'Tsunami', 'Preparedness', 'Asia Pacific'] |
Natural Impediments to Harmony in South Asia | Natural Impediments to Harmony in South Asia
8 September 2020 Manish Jung Pulami
he South Asian geography extends from the southern part of the Indian Ocean, and the main boundaries of South Asia are the Indian Ocean, the Himalayas, and Iran. The Arabian Sea borders Pakistan and India to the west, and the Bay of Bengal borders India and Bangladesh to the east, and the western boundary is the desert where Afghanistan shares a border with Iran. The countries of South Asia include Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, and Afghanistan.
Throughout history, South Asia has been characterized by violent conflicts. The peace and harmony in South Asia is the goal of the states in the region, but different impediments have been restricting South Asian harmony. One of the obstacles of the South Asian harmony has been the diverse geography within and the strategically located geographic location of themselves in the globe.
Harmony is always a function of development, but in South Asia, the underdevelopment is among the reasons for the conflict within it. There are three landlocked states in South Asia- Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan whose landlocked geography is one of the impediments for development. The trade and the other economic activities are blocked because of the landlocked nature. The geographic, economic, and social factors have contributed to the internal violence in Nepal and Afghanistan. Similarly, Sri Lanka, a large tropical island off India’s southeast coast, and the other is the Republic of Maldives, an archipelago off the southwest coast of India, are also geographically isolated states. The Maldives is most affected by climate change and the rise of the sea level (Bhatnagar & Ahmed, 2020).
One of the obstacles of the South Asian harmony has been the diverse geography within and the strategically located geographic location of themselves in the globe.
Moreover, most of the South Asian continent is made from the land in the original Indian Plate. Pressure from tectonic action against the plates causes the Himalayas to rise in elevation by as much as one to five millimeters per year. Destructive earthquakes and tremors are frequent in this seismically active realm, which has cost lives and property in the region in the past years. As a natural impediment to development, it has also affected South Asian harmony.
The major rivers of South Asia and the birthplace of the human civilizations such as the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra River, and other rivers such as the Kali, Gandaki, and Koshi gets recurrent reversal of winds called the monsoon which arrives every year, and there is heavy flooding whose effect on the infrastructure of the region is disastrous. Every year hundreds of people die in the Northern and Northeast region of India, Southern Plains of Nepal, and Bhutan. The worst-hit places are along the coast of the Bay of Bengal, such as in Bangladesh which affects Bangladesh’s economy and infrastructure (Kafle, 2017).
The extensive Thar Desert in western India and some parts of Pakistan, conversely, do not receive monsoon rains. Much of southwest Pakistan, a region named Baluchistan, is waterless, with desert conditions. This makes the conditions worst for farmers and the economy of the South Asian states.
The topography of the South Asian states has positioned them in a geostrategic location.
The mountains on the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan spread through Kashmir meet up with the high ranges of the Himalayas. The Himalayas make a natural barrier between India and China, with Nepal and Bhutan pro tem as buffer states with Tibet. Such natural barricades are the hindrances for trade among the states. Also, the topography of the South Asian states has positioned them in a geostrategic location.
Nepal, as a landlocked state, is located geo-strategically between the two Asian giants, India and China. Similarly, Afghanistan faced an upsetting destiny because of its geostrategic location connecting Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East (Bhatnagar & Ahmed, 2020). Equally, Sri Lanka as an island state enjoys the geostrategic location, owing to its deep harbors and trade-friendly location. Bangladesh is also one of the major and important states in the Bay of Bengal. As a result of these geo-strategically important locations, the states face a tremendous amount of interference and clash of interest of the major powers from all around the world (Bhatnagar & Ahmed, 2020).
The growing demand for water due to overpopulation, rapid urbanization, and scarcity of the resource has increased the intensity of the conflict.
One of the major geographical reasons for conflict in South Asia is water and its sharing. Water resources in South Asia have been straightly connected to national sovereignty and security for many reasons. The growing demand for water due to overpopulation, rapid urbanization, and scarcity of the resource has increased the intensity of the conflict. The Teesta basin which is identified for the lack of an agreement between India and Bangladesh over its waters sharing has added internal disputes and significant matters connected to the bilateral relations between the two states (Malhotra, 2010).
Similarly, another histo-geographical conflict in South Asia is the Indus river conflict between India and Pakistan. Though the water issue is regulated through the Indus Waters Treaty, it has been criticized for being outdated. Thus, this has increased the conflict between the two states ultimately affecting the whole region. Also, the Kosi Treaty and Gandak Treaty between India and Nepal for the sharing of the waters between the states have been controversial and there have been sour relations between the two friendly states (ECC Platform Library).
Thus, the geography of South Asia has highly impacted the harmony, cooperation, and comprehensiveness in the region through the conflict in the interest among the states because of the natural resources, or due to natural barriers and lack of cooperation in natural resources sharing. In conclusion, more than purely geographical or natural impediments, geography has created a diverse range of culture, history religion, and population which are also the impediments for cooperation in South Asia.
References
Bhatnagar, S., & Ahmed, Z. S. (2020). Geopolitics of landlocked states in South Asia: a comparative analysis of Afghanistan and Nepal. Australian Journal of International Affairs.
ECC Platform Library. (n.d.). Water conflict and cooperation between India and Pakistan. Retrieved from ECC Platform Library: https://library.ecc-platform.org/conflicts/water-conflict-indus-basin-between-india-and-pakistan
Kafle, S. K. (2017). Disaster Risk Management Systems in South Asia: Natural Hazards, Vulnerability, Disaster Risk and Legislative and Institutional Frameworks. Journal of Geography & Natural Disasters.
Malhotra, P. (2010). Water Issues between Nepal, India & Bangladesh. New Delhi: Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
Disclaimer: The article was originally published in The Rise. | https://medium.com/@manishjungpulami/natural-impediments-to-harmony-in-south-asia-30332e20b5ac | ['Manish Jung Pulami'] | 2021-07-06 06:58:18.813000+00:00 | ['Conflict', 'South Asia', 'Impediment'] |
Operating System and I/O | A place to find introductory Go programming language tutorials and learning resources. In this publication, we will learn Go in an incremental manner, starting from beginner lessons with mini examples to more advanced lessons.
Follow | https://medium.com/rungo/operating-system-and-i-o-a08684076adb | ['Uday Hiwarale'] | 2020-03-14 17:52:29.410000+00:00 | ['Golang', 'Golang Tutorial', 'Golang Development', 'Go', 'Programming'] |
Daniel Neiditch Hypes Sustainability from NYC Rooftops | If you want to make a statement, there are few better places to do so than from the middle of Times Square — or, in Daniel Neiditch’s case, from atop a massive building just next door. Neiditch does a lot. He’s the real estate mogul at the helm of River 2 River Realty, a firm […]
By Dave Devloper
If you want to make a statement, there are few better places to do so than from the middle of Times Square — or, in Daniel Neiditch’s case, from atop a massive building just next door.
Neiditch does a lot. He’s the real estate mogul at the helm of River 2 River Realty, a firm that has acquired over $1 billion in real estate holdings across New York state. He’s a philanthropist with a fierce passion for helping New York City’s homeless. In his free time, he serves as an on-call EMT for the city. Neiditch even threw the opening ball for a Red Sox home game in 2018.
But the cause that Daniel Neiditch is really known for, the one that quite literally sends a message from the rooftops, is sustainable energy.
In the spring of 2011, Neiditch installed the city’s highest residential solar array atop the Atelier, a 46-story luxury condo building in Manhattan. The glittering panels broadcast an eye-catching message, not in the least because of their total rejection of the environmentally-unfriendly stereotypes so often associated with luxury.
The idea of high-priced NYC real estate brings jaw-dropping excess to mind — amped-up electricity needs, sprawling square footage to heat, extravagant water needs. And, to be fair, Atelier Condos does boast an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, and luxurious penthouse with a price point of $85 million.
But, Daniel Neiditch explains, even the kind of extravagance that draws celebrity tenants and awes veteran interior design photographers doesn’t have to be wasteful.
Neiditch’s Manhattan gem offers a cohort of environmentally-friendly amenities including motion-activated hallway lights equipped with efficient fluorescent bulbs, energy-saving appliances, double-paned windows, and, of course, solar energy. Daniel Neiditch sets himself apart from his peers by making mindful consumption a guiding principle of his real estate endeavors.
The shift into green thinking hasn’t only been a win for the environment — according to Neiditch, the change has boosted his bottom line quite a bit, as well. Since 2015, the Atelier has achieved around $120,000 in savings every year and reduced energy consumption by a full 15 percent.
“It’s still mind-boggling to me that more groups haven’t done what we did at the Atelier […] This is such a no-brainer, I feel like it’s just a matter of making more people aware,” Neiditch said of the savings to the Midtown Patch. “For a relatively inexpensive choice, it’s given us so much return.”
Daniel Neiditch hopes that his sky-high solar panels will inspire others in his field to realize the benefits of environmentally-friendly construction and retrofitting.
“[The Atelier is] the highest building in NYC with solar panels, and that’s something I’m really proud of […] I just want more builders and developers, people in my position, to see what a great benefit solar power creates for their business and the city as a whole.” he says. “As a city with 8 million people, we need to do better. We consume too much energy not to.”
Daniel Neiditch’s frustration with the New York real estate sector’s lack of action has made him a self-proclaimed evangelist for green building and technology. He often writes on matters of sustainability and green building for publications such as Forbes and Entrepreneur, explaining why the green energy revolution should be seen as a driver for new and profitable change rather than a costly burden.
In one such article for Forbes, Neiditch writes: “In an industry where being environmentally conscious is becoming more important and being money conscious has always been crucial, solar power is the easiest way to generate clean energy and excitement at the same time.”
It seems unlikely that with all of this passion, Neiditch will stop at conventional solar panels. During an interview for the entrepreneur-centric platform Ideamensch, he aired a few of his still-percolating ideas.
“There’s one thing that Europe, specifically Denmark, is doing that hasn’t caught on in the United States yet, and that’s solar water pumping systems,” he shared. “Though they’re usually utilized on farms and other rural areas to water crops, they would still be a great coup for investors, especially ones in the real estate industry.”
Will Daniel Neiditch be the one to bring Danish solar energy innovations to New York’s luxury residential sector? There’s no way to be sure — but you would certainly be wrong to underestimate his drive to make New York a brighter, greener, and healthier city.
After all, it’s easy to see what comes over the horizon when you’re pioneering solar energy from high-rise rooftops.
Originally published on ThriveGlobal | https://medium.com/@danneiditch/daniel-neiditch-hypes-sustainability-from-nyc-rooftops-4966285e641 | ['Dan Neiditch'] | 2020-02-07 15:05:09.397000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'NYC', 'Daniel Neiditch', 'Dan Neiditch', 'New York City'] |
Face Mask Detection using darknet’s YOLOv3 | Face Mask Detection using darknet’s YOLOv3
COVID-19: Tutorial on how to build a face mask detector using YOLOv3. *For inference, both video streams and images can be used. Stefanos Kanellopoulos Apr 12·9 min read
This article aims to offer complete guidelines (step-by-step) for someone who wants to train an object detector from the YOLO family on custom data. Due to the pandemic, such a task seems to be quite topical.
For this tutorial, I am going to use YOLOv3, one of the most frequently used versions of the YOLO family, which comprises the state-of-the-art object detection system for the real-time scenario and it is amazingly accurate and fast. Newer versions such as YOLOv4, YOLOv5 might achieve even better results, and in my next articles, I am going to also experiment with these architectures and share my findings with you.
Supposing that you already have a grasp of object detection using deep learning techniques and specifically you know the basics about YOLO, let’s dive into our task…
Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash
You can find this project uploaded on my Github repo.
Environment 🌠
In order to implement this project, I exploited Google Colab’s resources. My first experimentations of the pre-processing steps were built on my laptop since they were not computationally expensive, but the model got trained on Colab using GPU.
On Colab via Edit->Notebook Settings someone can activate GPU, Image by author
Dataset 📚
First things first, in order to build a mask detector we need relevant data. Additionally, because of the nature of YOLO, we need annotated data with bounding boxes. One option is to build our own dataset by gathering images either from the web or by taking pictures of friends/acquaintances and annotate them by hand using specific programs such as LabelImg. However, both ideas would be exceptionally tedious and time-consuming (especially the latter). The other option, which is the most viable by far for my purpose, is to use a publically available dataset. I chose Face Mask Detection dataset from Kaggle and I downloaded it directly to my Google Drive (you can check out how to do so here). The downloaded dataset consists of two folders:
images , which comprises 853 .png files
, which comprises 853 .png files annotations, which comprises 853 corresponding .xml annotations.
After we download the dataset, we need to convert the .xml files into .txt and, more precisely, we need to create the YOLO format in order to train our model. An example is shown below:
Assume this is the annotation of an image that contains only 3 bounding boxes (this can be seen from the number of <object> … </object> spans) in .xml format.
To create a .txt file we need 5 things from each .xml file. For each <object> … </object> in an .xml file fetch the class (namely the <name>…</name> field), and the coordinates of the bounding box (namely the 4 attributes in <bndbox>…</bndbox>). The desirable format looks like this:
<class_name> <x_center> <y_center> <width> <height>
However, to achieve that I created a script that fetches the aforementioned 5 attributes for each object in each .xml file and creates the corresponding .txt files. (Note: More analytical steps about the approach of the conversion can be found in my script).
For example, an image1.jpg must have an associated image1.txt containing:
1 0.18359375 0.337431693989071 0.05859375 0.10109289617486339
0 0.4013671875 0.3333333333333333 0.080078125 0.12021857923497267
1 0.6689453125 0.3155737704918033 0.068359375 0.13934426229508196
And this is the exact conversion of the above .xml file into a .txt file. (Note: It is crucial to group into the same folder the images with their corresponding .txt annotations).
Of course, before proceeding with the training we need to be absolutely sure that the conversion was right and we are going to feed our network with valid data. To do so, I created a script that takes an image and its corresponding .txt annotation from a given folder and displays the image with the ground truth bounding boxes. For the above example the image can be shown below:
maksssksksss0.png from Kaggle's publicly available Face Mask Detection dataset
And this is when we know that we are doing well so far, but let’s go on…
Train-Test Split ❇️
In order to train our model and validate it during the training phase, we have to split our data into two sets, the training, and the validation set. The proportion was 90–10% respectively. So I created two new folders and I put 86 images with their corresponding annotations into the test_folder and the rest 767 images into the train_folder. | https://towardsdatascience.com/face-mask-detection-using-darknets-yolov3-84cde488e5a1 | ['Stefanos Kanellopoulos'] | 2021-04-12 14:21:26.349000+00:00 | ['Object Detection', 'Machine Learning', 'Computer Vision', 'Covid 19', 'Deep Learning'] |
Dockerfile: ADD vs COPY | COPY and ADD are both Dockerfile instructions that serve similar purposes. They let you copy files from a specific location into a Docker image.
COPY
The COPY instruction copies new files or directories from <src> and adds them to the filesystem of the container at the path <dest> .
COPY has two forms:
COPY [--chown=<user>:<group>] <src>... <dest>
COPY [--chown=<user>:<group>] ["<src>",... "<dest>"] (this form is required for paths containing whitespace)
ADD
ADD has two forms:
ADD [--chown=<user>:<group>] <src>... <dest>
ADD [--chown=<user>:<group>] ["<src>",... "<dest>"] (this form is required for paths containing whitespace)
Dockerfile best practice for copying from a URL
Docker suggests that it is often not efficient to copy from a URL using ADD , and it is best practice to use other strategies to include the required remote files.
COPY only supports the basic copying of local files into the container, while ADD has some features (like local-only tar extraction and remote URL support) that are not immediately obvious. Consequently, the best use for ADD is local tar file auto-extraction into the image, as in ADD rootfs.tar.xz / .
B ecause image size matters, using ADD to fetch packages from remote URLs is strongly discouraged; you should use curl or wget instead. That way you can delete the files you no longer need after they’ve been extracted and you don’t have to add another layer in your image. For example, you should avoid doing things like: — Dockerfile Best Practices
ADD http://example.com/big.tar.xz /usr/src/things/
RUN tar -xJf /usr/src/things/big.tar.xz -C /usr/src/things
RUN make -C /usr/src/things all
And instead, do something like:
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/things \
&& curl -SL http://example.com/big.tar.xz \
| tar -xJC /usr/src/things \
&& make -C /usr/src/things all
For other items (files, directories) that do not require ADD ’s tar auto-extraction capability, you should always use COPY .
Like to learn?
Follow me on twitter where I post all about the latest and greatest AI, DevOps, VR/AR, Technology, and Science! Connect with me on LinkedIn too! | https://grigorkh.medium.com/dockerfile-add-vs-copy-d120e72d09dd | ['Grigor Khachatryan'] | 2019-06-10 06:31:28.736000+00:00 | ['Docker Image', 'Docker', 'Filesystem', 'DevOps', 'Dockerfiles'] |
10 Minutes of Terror | Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
“They wanted to be confirmed in something by you. By your face, by your terror of them.” — James Baldwin
There’s a running joke between the faculty and students on my campus:
The boulevard leading to the college is a training facility for police stops.
Training for both the police officers conducting the stops and for the people of color they pull over. The rule is you drive like a turtle, your hands at ten and two o’clock, and you stay casual, whatever that means. But people of color already know this unwritten rule. I’m not saying anything new here. I’ve driven the boulevard countless times over the years as a student on my way to the college, and most recently as a faculty member on my way to work. I’ve been lucky not to be pulled over, until today.
I stopped at the intersection.
A sheriff coming from the right side of the intersecting street made a left and stared intently at me, and my car. We made eye contact, or a better way to describe it would be face-to-face contact. He was wearing pitch-black wrap-around sunglasses, and a ball cap pulled down low. After he drove past I looked in my rear and side view mirrors and watched him continue down the road. I drove on, my mind running through possible scenarios:
Will he make a U-turn and come at me full speed?
Is he calling in other cars to cut me off up ahead?
Should I speed up and put as much distance between us as possible?
I played it casual and kept driving at a slower-than-usual speed, but inevitably all those videos ran through my head. You know the ones I’m talking about.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
I fell into a daydream of myself starring in an episode of the American theater of death porn, the destruction of the black body.
Then I saw the sheriff’s jeep behind the car directly behind me. I had to focus. I went into my glove compartment and pulled out the cheap vinyl pouch with my registration and insurance card in it. I also pulled out my driver’s license and placed all of it in the visor in front of me.
The sheriff switched lanes but didn’t pass me. He stayed in my blind spot. The car behind me turned down a side street and the sheriff got behind me. At this point, I figured he was running my plates. He stayed there for a while. To be precise, he stayed there through two traffic lights two blocks apart. He switched lanes and again stayed in my blind spot. Another car got behind me and after a few minutes he cut that car off, got in close behind me, flashed his lights, and pulled me over.
“Took you long enough,” I thought.
This is how terror works.
Everyday moments become loaded with the fear of being maimed or killed, or the fear of losing a loved one. The flood of cell phone videos depicting police violence, much like the news stories of ISIS attacks in Europe and mass shootings in America, keep us in a state of fear. This fear is multiplied exponentially into something else when the state, presumably charged with our safety, does nothing. And as these events accumulate and the world’s citizens receive no justice and no resolution, we are all left adrift in terror. We begin to distrust police, politicians, and the whole system.
I think of this passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
“But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Critics of police reform, those people James Baldwin called “the vast heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority,” dismiss what I’m about to say. They can argue it all day if they want to, but the truth is that for a person of color, looking in the side view mirror as a police officer approaches their car is terror only other people of color can understand.
I watched the sheriff approach my car, his hand on his gun, and I watched him watch me watch him.
I thought about power, but mostly I was thankful my children weren’t with me.
I am convinced that the terror the state wants us to feel, that the law enforcement officers who summarily execute black people and POC in this country want us to feel, that the Klan and all of their affiliates (many of whom have infiltrated state and law enforcement agencies) want us to feel, is the same terror they harbor of us inside the nebulous psyche of whiteness.
These are the moments when Zora Neale Hurston’s words, restated in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, haunt most:
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”
I lowered my window and said nothing. I waited for the sheriff to speak. He raised his hand and pointed to my inspection sticker. “I thought your sticker was a rejection tag from inspection,” he said. “I see now it’s orange and expires in 2018. You’re ok. You can go.” And I said thank you. Never mind that my inspection sticker is yellow. He was courteous, he walked back to his jeep, and he drove off. Maybe you think this is the part where I say, “You see, not all cops are bad,” or some other comforting nonsense.
Image captured by Kwesi Abbensetts
All I kept thinking was that I sat in that car alone and nobody knew I was there. That if he shot me dead there would be no witness.
In the hands of the state, people of color are in the void. I had to place all of my trust and my very life in the hands of this armed agent of the state. Meanwhile, there is irrefutable evidence in the world proving that if he wanted to kill me, he could have, and the state would do nothing about it.
The most unforgivable aspect of police violence is the wall of silence. Think of the second officer in the dash cam video of Philando Castile’s murder. How he stood right next to Castile’s window and didn’t feel the need to pull his gun, but stood by as his partner turned belligerent and fired round after round into Castile’s car. Or the officer, who stood by and watched as his partner dragged Anthony Promvongsa from his car, punched and kneed him, threw him to the floor, and continued to pummel him.
Think about the countless videos of officers murdering, maiming, or beating POC and shouting, “Stop resisting. Stop resisting.” Notice their partners standing meekly as officers around them brutalize an unconscious black body unable to resist. Think of Dave Grossman, a police trainer who has become a kind of celebrity, who on camera “tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives,” as Radley Balko notes in his review of the documentary ‘Do Not Resist’ in The Washington Post. All of these terrifying thoughts, these facts of American life, ran through my mind during a simple traffic stop.
I could go on, but you already know. We already know. Say their names. You know them by heart the same way I do. The only conclusion a sane and logical person can come to is that the state wants us to feel this terror at all times. With each passing day, it feels like there are more people on the side of this madness than there are people who would see it end.
I got pulled over today and I didn’t die.
Allhamdulillah.
Are you one of THOSE PEOPLE? Write with us. [email protected]. | https://medium.com/thsppl/10-minutes-of-terror-a0b1bc0dfceb | ['Roberto Carlos Garcia'] | 2018-09-04 13:32:03.068000+00:00 | ['Short Stories', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Police Brutality'] |
Smoking. Does it really matter? | Why do people smoke?
Everyone around the world knows the adverse effects of smoking, then the question really is why do they smoke?
The scientific reason can be because cigarettes contain nicotine. Nicotine is as addictive as cocaine and heroin and cigarettes are available at stores, so no one’s going to question them. The more time you spend on smoking the harder it becomes to quit, the same follows for other nicotine products.
Most of the deaths are not of people who are direct-smokers, but of non-smokers, due to second-hand smoke. What I mean here by second-hand smoke is that they were exposed to the smoke of cigarettes somewhere.
Why doesn't the government ban tobacco?
The main reason why the government doesn't ban tobacco is that they generate lots of revenue for the government and ban on tobacco may have effects on the people related to tobacco cultivation or production.
On November 2, 2002, the supreme court-ordered ban on smoking cigarettes in public places, because they pose serious damage to the health of non-smokers.
From 1975, inscribing the packets with a statutory warning- ‘ cigarette smoking is injurious to health’ was made mandatory by the government.
According to WHO, If we increase 10% tax on the tobacco then there will be a 5% reduction in smoking in high-income countries and around 10% reduction in medium to low-income countries.
In conclusion, the government may not ban tobacco directly because of the effect on the life of tobacco cultivators and production workers. But they try to implement every measure possible to reduce the usage of tobacco. At last, It depends on the attitude of smokers, Even if the cigarettes were banned they will find a way or other to consume them. As a smoker, people have to think about what their life is going towards and what good does it make to their families. | https://medium.com/@mabasheer/smoking-does-it-really-matter-68cbea65cc3c | [] | 2020-12-21 04:06:23.703000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Tobacco', 'Lifestyle', 'Smoking', 'Public Health'] |
In These Trying Times, I Want To Remind All My Followers That I Have A Ridiculously Hot Body | Hey, guys! But enough about you. I hit 5 million followers yesterday. Yes! Wow. Hitting the 5 mil mark is a very humbling experience — it really reminded me how important I am. I have a voice, you know? And in these unprecedented times, I have a responsibility to speak up and use it.
So I just wanted to take this time to remind every single one of you that, no matter how many people lose their jobs or get sick in the coming months, I will always, through it all, have a perfect, beautiful goddess body.
The thing about being as hot as I am is that it’s amazing and I love it, but it’s also a lot of fun and has made me really rich. The other thing about my hotness is that it’s always extremely relevant, even, and maybe especially, now. In these ugly, uncertain times, people need something unwaveringly beautiful with which to steady themselves: me.
Here I am one year ago today, in a diamond-encrusted string bikini in Majorca. So much has changed since I took this photo, like how I can no longer fly private for a weekend getaway to Barthalona with my girls. But a lot has remained the same — as you can see here in this pic taken just yesterday on my private beach in Malibu, my skin is still luminous, my waist is still tiny, and my butt has maintained the size and shape of a gorgeous pumpkin. Let the constancy of my beauty be a comfort to you in unstable times. Look at me. Just look at me. Look at me. Look.
One thing that’s really been helping me through all of this is ignoring the news completely and thinking about how beautiful I am instead. You should try it. Free of charge, here is a photo of me in my bespoke Louis Vuitton lingerie set (for those who are curious, it’s Mulberry silk blended with 24K spun gold, and no, you can’t buy it anywhere) stretched out on a bed of cherry blossom petals that I had shipped in from Japan. I’m posting this to remind you that it doesn’t matter that you’ve lost your income and can’t feed your family: the best things in life, like the natural beauty I was born with and have never once altered with surgery or injections or FaceTune (that is all slander), are completely, 100% free.
Sure, sometimes I question myself: is posting a photo of my smoking hot bod in my new custom swimwear line (don’t forget to use my discount code QUARAN-CUTIE for 10% off!) really helping anyone? Shouldn’t I be including some photos of my face, too? And the answer to that question is always: YES, bitch. You weren’t born with (naturally) plump lips and dewy angel skin for nothing.
Throwback! Here I am in a mesh Gucci jumpsuit clawing my way through a throng of shrieking fans to get to my Range Rover. I miss regular life.
Yes — regular life. We all miss it. These are hard, uncertain times. And yet, they are not. Because here I am, still so soft and smooth, and my beauty is not at all uncertain, it is incontestable and also very wonderful. Are you looking at me? I have 5 million followers. Lots of zeros on my checks. I’m using my platform to make the world a better place. Taking off all my clothes on the internet is feminism. I am on the front lines. I am the face of Calvin Klein. I am the face of the goddess Aphrodite except better. I am influencer. I am paid sponsorship with SkinnyBitch SelfCareMoneyTea. I am all leg. I am mostly booty. I am made of sex and cash. I am me. I. Me.
Me.
Me.
Anyway, guys, that’s it from my end! Stay positive, and remember: there’s still so much beauty in the world. I’m still here, aren’t I? | https://medium.com/slackjaw/in-these-trying-times-i-want-to-remind-all-my-followers-that-i-have-a-ridiculously-hot-body-83b88036cb8a | ['Molly Henderson'] | 2020-09-17 00:31:38.071000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Beauty', 'Satire', 'Social Media', 'Instagram'] |
#getfiredthenfireup | Finally, if the vibe turns sour and the company decides to clean house, don’t sweat it. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Consider some of the most influential people in their fields — Anna Wintour (fashion), JK Rowling (literature), Sallie Krawcheck (finance) — they have all been let go and are now at the top of their game.
Anna Wintour was fired… but is now the most influential figure in fashion
It may feel like shit at the time — and it is. You feel rejected and dejected, as if no one appreciates your value or talent. It may make you question whether you have that talent at all. That slowly eats away at your confidence and begins a downwards spiral from which it can be hard to recover.
But try to get into a different headspace by focusing on the good stuff — the skills you gained, the good leaders you met, the industry rules you learned. (Plus you want to ensure the bastards don’t win.) You should leave any job with a reasonably healthy self-esteem. If your spirit has been broken, you’ve invested too much in a firm that hasn’t invested in you.
Remember that if you’ve been fired for being too avant-garde in your field, you are a pioneer. You’re ahead of your time. You think different. All geniuses are compelled to be irreverent — that’s how progress is made.
Think Anna getting booted by US Harper’s Bazaar for fashion shoots that were ‘too edgy’. As a junior fashion editor at Harper’s in the mid 1970s — her first job in New York after moving over from London — she was told she was too ‘European’ and would ‘never understand the American market’. She lasted nine months before the Editor-in-Chief cut her loose. Clearly, suffering this setback pushed her to be better, improve her game and enjoy a little humility. (We all need that, genius or not.)
Think also of Sallie getting the sack as CEO of Citigroup’s wealth management business for being ‘too honest’ in speaking up for investors getting their money back after receiving bad advice. That’s despite the character trait earning her the reputation of being ‘the last honest analyst’ on Wall Street years earlier. Ouch.
Sallie Krawcheck recast her rep after high-profile dumpings. Credit: Ellevest
Yet another firing was around the corner. Just two years later, Sallie was dumped as President of Global Wealth and Investment Management for Bank of America. Double ouch.
But the Wall Street titan-turned-entrepreneur took charge and simply recast her fine reputation in the wake of these high-profile dumpings. As Chair of Ellevate, a woman’s network, and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform she co-founded for women, Sallie has shifted her rep from ‘one of the most powerful women in finance’ to ‘one of the most powerful women in finance working for women’. Much better fit, much cooler gig.
Anna, JK and Sallie now lead their fields for a reason. Your talent belongs elsewhere. You too will find a better home for it.
Getting fired is an obvious (and painful) kick that you can’t ignore. But it tells you less about you and more about the fearful, ignorant, cowardly or backward-looking manager or organisation that you worked for. Don’t look back. You’re better off without them — your talent would not have developed while you worked there because small minds fail to see greatness or, if they do, are challenged by it and seek to get rid of it. Those managers will never become leaders and never inspire; they are destined for mediocrity. And they would have held you back. Be grateful they set you free. | https://medium.com/winningatlife/getfiredthenfireup-3a22c2f91090 | ['Arti Kumria'] | 2020-11-10 06:27:58.535000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Anna Wintour', 'Gender', 'Career Advice', 'Women In Leadership'] |
Why Are Americans So Reluctant to Wear Masks? — Jennifer Bourne | Why are the American people so reluctant to put masks on, and why are American officials so hesitant to make mask-wearing mandatory?
COVID-19 reached the United States in late January with coronavirus-related deaths being reported as early as February 6. In the weeks that followed, as the virus quickly spread, many counties and states issued “stay-at-home” orders in an attempt to mitigate community transmission. However, it was not until April 9 th, more than a month after California declared a state of emergency, that Los Angeles became one of the first cities to require its residents to wear face coverings when visiting essential businesses. In New York, the state hit hardest by the virus, it was not until April 15 ththat Governor Cuomo finally ordered all residents to wear face coverings in situations where social distancing is not possible, including on public transport, in stores, and on crowded sidewalks.
A variety of factors have contributed to this delay and reluctance.
First of all, there have been conflicting messages and regulations around the world over whether or not people should wear masks in public to slow the spread of COVID-19. On one hand, some governments have urged everyone to wear masks, which provide a barrier from respiratory droplets-the predominant way the virus spreads, in public and have made mask-wearing outside mandatory. In many parts of Asia, such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, everyone now wears a mask by default. One of my Chinese friends jokingly said: “the new social norm [in Beijing] makes me feel that going outside without wearing a mask is like running naked.”
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) insists that only two types of people should wear masks: those who are sick and symptomatic, and those who are caring for people who might be infected. The Center of Disease Control (CDC) has long advised against mask-wearing, but has revised their recommendations in early April to encourage wearing face coverings in public.
From a technical perspective, masks not worn properly can be counterproductive. Their removal requires special attention, that many people aren’t aware of, to avoid hand contamination. According to some medical experts, masks can create a false sense of security that actually leads to an increased risk of infection.
There is also strategic concern that masks should be reserved for healthcare workers due to the shortage in supplies. That is why the CDC specified that people should wear cloth face coverings, not surgical masks or N-95 masks which should be reserved for frontline workers. Similarly, when Los Angeles City issued their mask-wearing mandate, Mayor Garcetti specifically stressed that his order does not require the face coverings be medical grade.
Moreover, there are different cultural perceptions of wearing masks. In Asia, due to the convention of collective thinking, the welfare of society is prioritized over individual preference. In a pandemic, people wear masks to show their care for each other and to demonstrate solidarity. Before coronavirus mask-wearing had already become a social norm. In Asia, it is not uncommon to wear a mask for beauty concerns, like covering a pimple or hiding a red nose during allergy season. Masks are also an easy way to cope with air pollution or keep warm in the winter and can be used to combat privacy and security concerns, like being caught on surveillance cameras or harassed by strangers on public transit.
In the West, though, there is a deep cultural resistance and even stigma associated with face coverings. It suggests that one is sick or contagious and should be isolated. Wearing a mask when one is perfectly healthy is perceived as insincere and socially awkward. Socially, being able to see one’s face is important as Westerners rely on more nonverbal cues like eye contact, facial expression, and vocal sounds to judge intention and meaning in conversations. With masks on, it can be more difficult to catch those nonverbal cues.
There are also harmful stereotypes associated with face coverings. Hijabs, head coverings worn in public by some Muslim women for religious reasons, are seen by some as an oppression of religious freedom and female equality. Facial coverings have come to symbolize a rejection of progressivity whereas uncovered women are seen as in pursuit of individual liberty and modernity. In more extreme cases, religious face coverings are associated with deceptiveness, and even security threats, which has led many European countries including Germany, France, Italy, and Austria to issue various degrees of bans on Islamic veils in public places. In non-religious cases, people of color have expressed fear of wearing masks publicly because of its potential to exacerbate racial profiling and place their lives in greater danger. The image of a black male wearing a hood and a mask is often prejudicially associated with crime or violence.
Under normal circumstances, the best practice would be to always follow the preference of locals in cross-cultural settings. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When an Asian person travels to the West, he should take off face coverings when talking to his Western counterpart. When a Westerner visits Asia, he should not feel offended when his Asian interlocutor is wearing a mask.
However, we are not under normal circumstances. We are in the middle of a global pandemic and America is in an uncharted territory. A recent survey conducted by ABC News suggests that more than half of Americans are beginning to wear masks as a new coronavirus-induced normal takes hold. This survey suggests that cultural and social perceptions towards mask-wearing can change in the face of crises to form a new norm.
If that proves to be true then it follows to ask: Will this new norm hold in America? A brief review of the modern history of mask-wearing in China and Japan may shed some light.
In 1910, in order to combat the pneumonic plague in China’s Manchuria, Chinese authorities broke with their longstanding opposition to Western medicine and appointed Wu Lien-teh (also known as Wu Liande), a young and brilliant Cambridge-educated Chinese doctor, to oversee efforts to stem the outbreak. Wu went deep into the affected areas to lead prevention and control work, and soon identified that the plague spread via droplets in the air. He designed masks to protect against these droplets and ordered the infected and their immediate contacts to wear them, encouraging the general public to follow suit. Once the epidemic was over, most people took off their masks and discontinued the practice. Then in 1937, with the onset of the Sino-Japanese War, face masks became popular again to protect against chemical and biological warfare. But, after the war, Chinese people once again put away their masks. It became a pattern that when there were airborne diseases, the Chinese would put them on and when the epidemics were over, they would take the masks off. It was not until the turn of the 21 stcentury that mask-wearing became a norm in China. Mass industrialization has led to severe air pollution in China and masks became needed year around to protect from the unhealthy air quality. Then in 2003, SARS broke out and killed thousands of people in China; the memory of the suffering the outbreak caused has cemented the norm of mask-wearing in China. As a result, when COVID-19 hit, many Chinese people were already wearing masks and those who weren’t wasted no time putting them on. Many even had a few N-95 masks handy, which had been bought to protect against the smog.
In Japan, the introduction of a mask-wearing culture was also initiated by combatting a virus and can be traced back to 1918 when the Spanish flu reached Japan. Years later, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 triggered a massive inferno and the sky was filled with smoke and ash for weeks. Japanese people again donned their masks to protect their respiratory systems. In 1934, a second global flu epidemic cemented Japan’s love affair with masks and since the 1950s, Japan’s increase in industrialization has led to rampant air pollution, shifting mask-wearing from a seasonal to a year-around habit. In recent decades, masks with unique colors, shapes, and designs have become symbols of fashion to the degree that Japanese people have no problem wearing them all year around.
It follows that perhaps one reason why Americans were so slow to put on masks could be that, until COVID-19, America has not faced a situation that demands them since the 1918 flu. It escaped the 2003 SARS outbreak, got H1N1 under control quickly, and the air quality in the United States has generally been good. It is worth noting that the fact that the US does not have a mask-wearing culture does not mean that American people have never worn masks in history: during the 1918 flu pandemic, it was mandatory for the public to wear masks in some parts of America and in 2019, as wildfires raged up and down California, local residents did put on masks to avoid breathing the dangerously smoky air. These cases may simply have been too anomalous and disconnected to instill a new norm.
Another reason for the resistance to mask-wearing in our current time could be that people may not realize that wearing masks has important symbolic meanings. It is a visual reminder of the danger of the virus. It reminds us that we are not in our usual comfort zone and that we should resist touching our faces and eyes and maintain social distancing. It warns against complacency. Most importantly, it shows our commitment to protect not only ourselves but also society at large. It demonstrates that Americans are able and willing to take collective and unified actions when needed to. It symbolizes solidarity for the best interest of the nation. Given the shortage of test kits and the possible asymptomatic nature of COVID-19, there is no way to be sure if we or the people close to us are contagious. New York Governor Cuomo has recently been promoting a campaign called “Who are you wearing your mask for”? It’s a timely campaign encouraging people to not only think about themselves but the ones they love and care. More campaigns of this kind should be promoted in the US. Wearing masks is a way to demonstrate that we are one country and one people and that we are in this together.
To return to my earlier question: How long is this new norm of wearing masks going to hold in America? My answer is: as long as our fight with COVID-19 demands it, and possibly no longer. As seen from the Chinese and Japanese examples, it will take more than a single virus to make this mask-wearing phenomenon a more permanent social norm. Deeply rooted in cultural resistance and social profiling towards mask-wearing, I doubt that the Western perceptions are going to change after this pandemic. But I am certain about one thing: when the next pandemic hits, the Americans officials will take much less time to issue mask-wearing orders and the American people will need much less persuasion to put their masks on. | https://medium.com/@berggrueninstitute/why-are-americans-so-reluctant-to-wear-masks-jennifer-bourne-800dbb3d2811 | ['Berggruen Institute'] | 2020-09-25 21:48:06.471000+00:00 | ['China', 'Politics', 'Masks', 'Us China Relations', 'Culture'] |
Staying safe in defi and how to not get rekt | Staying safe in defi and how to not get rekt
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Binance Smart Chain, and crypto in general, with large projects getting rugged, exploited or accidentally losing users’ funds left, right and center, all in the middle of one of the biggest market corrections in history.
In times like these, what’s a crypto samurai to do to stay SAFU?
Here’s a bit of what I’ve learned.
HODL. Don’t trade. Don’t leverage.
Trading is the fastest way to get rekt.
I run arbitrage/market making/liquidation/etc bots, both on-chain and on CEXs. Humans have no chance against bots. They react in milliseconds. They will front-run you, sandwich-attack your transactions… even when you think you are winning, they are taking a big chunk of your profits. You just have no idea. Then the market moves and you get liquidated.
Humans also have a huge tendency to buy high and sell low. We are emotional creatures driven by fear and greed. Who wins? Bots, exchanges, brokers, banks...
If you believe in a token/project/company, just buy and HODL. Sell when you no longer believe.
Bias towards large caps and liquidity
When evaluating risk and return, I value large capitalization and liquidity across the board. The larger the capitalization and liquidity, the lesser the potential for manipulation, and the more accurate the market’s pricing will be — I can be more confident taking on positions with lower levels of research and due diligence.
Avoid low caps/exotics/derivatives. Whether tradfi or defi. Unless you really know what you’re doing and have done extreme DYOR. If you don’t know what you’re doing, improper DYOR will likely hurt more than help you.
Diversify. Manage your risk.
Asset classes
Don’t hold everything in crypto. Hold tradfi — shares, property, a bit of cash. Buy large cap growth/tech equities. Balance it with some (large cap, as always) value/income stocks. Maybe a touch of art, wine, watches, cars...
Again, avoid low caps/exotics/derivatives. Unless you are a bank/salesperson/broker, you are almost guaranteed to be on the wrong side of that trade.
Chains, projects, CEXs (centralized exchanges)
Hold the megacaps — BTC, ETH, BNB. Spread it out over multiple chains and projects. Hold less in CEXs, and spread them out if you can. Again, always favour the large caps.
Wallets, devices
Don’t hold everything in 1 wallet.
Use hardware wallets. Keep backup hardware wallets.
If possible, use devices exclusively for crypto. That is, use phones, tablets, computers that are only used for crypto and nothing else. Split wallets/keys between the devices and don’t mix/share them.
Do your own research.
But be realistic about how much you really know.
DYOR will only get you so far. Again, if you don’t know what you’re doing, this tends to hurt you more than help you. Take your time to really understand how things work. Then take a breath and DYOR some more.
“Verify, don’t trust” is kind of rubbish. I write code for a living, do I perform a comprehensive smart contract review/audit of the projects I invest in? Am I qualified to? Probably not. Some of the most well-audited projects have been exploited and hacked. These are audits done by large teams of seasoned security experts. What chance do I have of catching something they missed? What chance do you?
You need to trust the devs.
The biggest vulnerability for most projects I feel is not even in the smart contracts, but in the UI/dapps. Many projects tend to have poor opsec around their websites and UI, and there are so many attack vectors to secure. I’m surprised these have not been more widely exploited. All it takes is for an exploiter to change the approval address on the website and they can take all your tokens.
PancakeSwap and C.R.E.A.M. got their sites taken over by hackers in March. This could have been so much worse if the attackers had been more sophisticated and more subtle about the changes they made. How many users actually check and verify the address they are approving tokens to? Do this if you can, and use tools like unrekt to help. I believe there will be a wave of these type of attacks coming soon, resulting in much bigger losses to users.
Common sense
When you see 4+ digit APYs on the newest hyped projects, ask yourself — where does the yield come from? Is it sustainable? What value is being created by this project? Is there any longevity? When there is no clear answer then the project is likely a pure-farm/ponzi/degen play.
Yes, some people make money from them. But it’s a zero sum game. So unless you’re a master manipulator/pump and dumper with a strong following on Telegram and Twitter… There’s better ways to make money.
Who can you trust then?
Again, favour large capitalization and liquidity. How long have they been around? Who are they affiliated with? Have they been exploited/hacked before? Have they accidentally lost users’ funds before?
If they are owned by Binance, chances are they will be able to do things like inject 2,000 BTC and 2,000 ETH of their own funds into their protocol within an hour of an exploit happening to contain the damage, and do it again when the same thing happens a few months later.
If they are properly affiliated/listed with Binance and/or other large reputable exchanges/companies/projects this would already indicate some level of due diligence having been done.
Does not mean things can’t still go wrong though.
Flash loans, exploits, and ACryptoS
We are now being asked countless times on our Telegram: “Is ACryptoS vulnerable to flash loan attacks? With all these attacks happening, what preventative measures are you taking so you don’t get exploited?”
We haven’t done anything.
There have been so many flash loan attacks from way before BSC even existed. They all essentially use a flash loan to manipulate some sort of pricing that a protocol incorrectly uses — it could be to calculate a reward or to price a deposit/withdrawal, etc. We have always been cognizant of this and have taken special care from the start not to rely on any external pricing in our smart contracts. The only place we may possibly be exposed is when we harvest the Vaults and sell the harvested tokens — but the exposure is minimal, limited only to the amounts harvested.
Does this mean we are invulnerable to flash loan attacks? Can we guarantee we won’t get exploited? It would be foolhardy of me to say yes.
However, I can say the ACryptoS approach has always been a bit different, with a prevailing focus on safety and sustainable tokenomics. As always, DYOR and proceed with caution. | https://medium.com/acryptos/staying-safe-in-defi-and-how-to-not-get-rekt-9c3310dd4ae8 | ['X'] | 2021-05-25 12:00:58.524000+00:00 | ['Binance Smart Chain', 'Decentralized', 'Yield Farming', 'Smart Contracts', 'Defi'] |
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DOG EFFECTIVELY | From the start, Dog( Canine) Training can appear to be quite overpowering, particularly if this is your first canine. In all actuality preparing your canine is a major venture.
On the off chance that you make it stride by step, you will discover the assignment to be far less overwhelming. Here is some data to help kick you off:
Start a Canine Compliance Program: Figure out how to set a fundamental establishment before you start to prepare your canine. Train Your Canine Utilizing Games: Preparing your canine should be entertaining! Everybody knows it’s simpler to realize when you are making some acceptable memories, so take a stab at executing a few games into your canine preparing routine. A month and a half to an All-around Prepared Canine: Utilizing this timetable as a guide, you can show your canine the fundamentals in around a month and a half.
Encouraging feedback: There are various approaches to prepare a canine, however, most canine experts concur that the positive way is the best for both the canine and coach.
How to Prepare Your Canine With Encouraging feedback Need assistance with canine preparing? Consider finding support from a canine coach. Attempt bunch classes as well as private exercises, and check here for tips on reasonable canine preparation. House Preparing and Case Preparing Except if you intend to keep your canine outside — and not many of us do on the grounds that it’s not prescribed — you’ll have to show your canine where to kill. Thusly, house preparing (additionally called housebreaking or potty preparing) is one of the principal things you need to chip away at with your canine. Container preparation can be a useful piece of the preparation cycle. This incorporates house preparing just as numerous different regions of preparing:
Box Preparing Canines and Doggies: Here are the nuts and bolts of preparing your canine or pup to acknowledge and even appreciate the case. Not exclusively will it help with housebreaking, however it will likewise give your canine a position. Step by step instructions to House Train your Canine: Regardless of anything else, house preparing isn’t that confounded, yet this doesn’t mean it’s simple. Consistency and ingenuity are key during the housebreaking cycle. Compliant/Fervor Pee in Canines: If your canine is as yet having mishaps in the house, it very well might be in excess of a straightforward housebreaking issue. Your canine may pee out of fervor or to communicate compliant conduct.
Rope Preparing Canines and Pups Each canine requirements to figure out how to stroll on a rope. Other than the way that most zones have rope laws, there will be occasions when keeping your canine on a chain is for his own wellbeing. Figure out how to acquaint your canine or little dog with the chain, at that point show him how to walk appropriately on the rope, even alongside you on a bicycle. A free chain walk shows your canine not to pull or lurch when on the rope, making the experience more charming for both you and your canine. Dark lab little dog on a rope, watching his proprietor Chalabala/Twenty20 Step by step instructions to Mingle Canines and Doggies Socialization implies preparing your little dog or grown-up canine to acknowledge new individuals, creatures, and different places by presenting him to these things. Mingled canines are less inclined to create conduct issues and are by and large more invited by others. Socialization can likewise help forestall the improvement of fears and fears. Most importantly mingling your canine or doggy will make him a more joyful, all the more polite canine. Clicker Preparing for Canines Clicker preparing, a typical type of uplifting feedback, is a basic and viable canine preparing technique. In spite of the fact that it is still fine to prepare your canine without clicker preparing, numerous individuals think that it’s accommodating. With clicker preparation, you can undoubtedly and successfully show your canine a wide range of essential and progressed orders and deceives. It’s quick and simple to figure out how to clicker train your canine Fundamental Orders and Fun Stunts There are some essential canine preparing orders and canine deceives that each canine should know like come, talk, drop it, remain, back up, and so on Essential orders give your canine structure. Also, they can assist you with beating regular canine conduct issues and will help guard your canine. 3:24 The most effective method to Prepare Your Canine to Remain What’s a better time than flaunting your canine’s cool stunts?! Canine stunts are an incredible method to take
your canine preparation to the following level and give your canine some psychological incitement. Sealing Practices and Investigating Sealing is the last advance in preparing your canine to do any new conduct. Figure out how to confirm practices so your canine will be as loyal at the recreation center or a companion’s home as he is in your own front room. Keep in mind, since you have arrived at the last phases of preparing, it doesn’t imply that conduct issues won’t manifest. Find out about the most well-known canine conduct issues and how to manage them. These aides will assist you in exploring this piece of the preparation cycle: Sealing Practices: Practice practices in an assortment of circumstances with various degrees of interruption. Without sealing, your canine may act well in your lounge room, however appear to fail to remember all his preparation when he is outside the house. Train Your Canine Restraint: This strategy shows your canine that nothing in life is free, yet that he needs to procure things like food and consideration through dutifulness. Basic Canine Conduct Issues: Understanding potential conduct issues can assist you with identifying and address them before things gain out of power. Canine Conduct The executives Versus Canine Preparing: While canine conduct the board and canine preparing are two unique things, they are not totally unrelated. Conduct the executive is a significant piece of any canine preparing program. Progressed Canine Preparing When your canine has dominated all the essentials, you can think about proceeding onward to further developed stunts. These exercises will help keep your canine dynamic, fit, and intellectually animated. Also, they will help reinforce the bond you share with your canine buddy. Recollect that preparation is a progressing cycle.
You will never be totally wrapped up. It is imperative to continue dealing with submission preparing for the duration of the life of your canine. Individuals who become familiar with a language at a youthful age however quit communicating in that language may fail to remember a lot of it as they become more established. The equivalent goes for your canine: use it or lose it. Going through even the most essential deceives and orders will help them remain new in your canine’s brain. Also, it’s an incredible method to invest energy with your canine. furthermore, There are various styles of canine preparation and finding the one that turns out best for you is significant for making a canine that is a skilled, steadfast, and devoted individual from the family. All fruitful strategies for canine preparing work to strengthen the connection among canine and overseer and the establishment of any effective preparing program is getting the admiration of the canine. Luckily, canines are wired essentially to search out pioneers and to follow the heading of those pioneers.
Both chain/collar preparing and reward preparing have been around for quite a while, and they have demonstrated their adequacy after some time. The sort of preparing that works best will shift from canine to canine, and from breed to raise. Remember that each type of canine has its own remarkable characteristics, fortified by several years of specific reproducing.
The chain and preparing restraint is the most essential bit of gear utilized in preparing a canine. Utilizing the lead and preparing restraint appropriately is crucial to fruitful canine preparation. The preparation collar is intended to apply a particular measure of weight each time the chain is fixed. The measure of weight put on the rope controls the measure of weight set on the preparation choker, and the weight can be changed by how the canine reacts.
Obviously, the characters of individual canines fluctuate a considerable amount, even inside set-up varieties. You, as the proprietor of the canine, know in a way that is better than anybody which style of canine preparing will work best, so it is essential to work with the mentor you decide to accomplish your objective of a willing, faithful, and benevolent canine.
Chain and choker preparation is the most ideal approach to achieve numerous sorts of canine preparation, especially in circumstances where the canine should have a significant level of unwavering quality. For example, canines that have a significant task to take care of, for example, salvage canines, police canines, and gatekeeper canines, by and large profit by rope and choker preparing.
The initial segment of preparing with choker and rope, obviously, is to buy a quality, all-around made preparing restraint that will accommodate your canine appropriately. There are numerous kinds of preparing collars and rope available. The main thing is to pick one that is solid and all around made. The exact opposite thing you need to do is pursue your canine down after he has broken his choker.
The length of the restraint should be around two inches longer than the outline of the canine’s neck. It is critical to precisely quantify the canine’s neck utilizing an estimating tape. To get a precise estimation, you should ensure that the tape isn’t tight around the canine’s neck.
In a choker and chain based canine preparing program, first, the canine is shown specific conduct, by and large with the rope. After the canine has shown that it comprehends the order, the chain is then used to address the canine on the off chance that it resists, or when it commits an error. The rope is the principal type of controlling and speaking with the canine in chain and choker preparing.
When utilizing chain and restraint preparing, the canine should be prepared to confide in the overseer and acknowledge their bearings truly. All together for the canine to be completely prepared, the controller should exhibit the capacity to put the canine into a stance or position the individual in question would not like to take. This doesn’t mean utilizing power, yet it does, by and large, require some degree of actual control. This control is most effectively and securely done utilizing the primary apparatus of chain and collar preparing the rope.
The all around prepared canine is one who will stroll at his proprietor’s side on a free lead, neither dropping behind nor charging ahead.
The very much prepared canine will likewise change his speed to meet that of his overseer. By no means should the overseer be compelled to change their speed to coordinate that of the canine.
On the off chance that the canine starts to charge ahead, it is imperative to address the canine expeditiously by giving a speedy pull on the chain. This will give the canine a decent update that he needs to change his speed. It is imperative to rapidly soothe the weight when the canine reacts. The preparation collar is intended to mitigate pressure when the chain is slackened.
Most canines will promptly react to revisions by a decent, appropriately utilized preparing choker. In the event that the canine doesn’t react as guided, it could be important to apply more prominent weight. This can be particularly valid for enormous canines or the individuals who have previous conduct or control issues. In the event that you are as yet unfit to get a reaction from your canine, it is conceivable that you are utilizing a preparation restraint that isn’t huge enough for your canine. In the event that you figure this might be the situation, make certain to request master counsel prior to continuing. | https://medium.com/@drbrown2020/how-to-train-your-dog-effectively-ecc5354237f1 | ['Dr Brown'] | 2020-12-24 17:18:48.978000+00:00 | ['Dog Training', 'Dogs', 'Dog Behaviour Training'] |
Getting Busy in the Gig Economy: How to get More Calls on WhenHub Interface | Getting Busy in the Gig Economy: How to get More Calls on WhenHub Interface WhenHub Mar 21, 2019·7 min read
It’s the gig economy. Everyone has a side hustle. Everyone is freelancing. With the cost of living going up and the ability through technology to do more with less, people are starting to get creative. There has never been a better time to jump on and off the clock at your leisure and make work revolve around your life instead of the other way around. There are many platforms available to help you make a bit of side income, but what if you already have a career, or you don’t have the time to sit in a car all day to deliver food or people? What if you only have 15 minutes or one hour or just want to be at home? Well, that’s where WhenHub Interface comes in.
MAKING THE MOST OF THE TIME YOU HAVE
Do you have a few minutes during lunch to talk to someone about what you are best at? Do you have a bit of time while you are walking your dog to share your knowledge? WhenHub Interface allows you to maximize your time throughout the day to take calls from people who have questions about the fields you are an expert in.
Alternatively, what if you need to talk to an expert? What if you are editing a digital photo or looking at a clogged pipe in your sink. You can just contact an expert on Interface in real time and get custom answers to your questions. That sure beats going on YouTube and searching a million videos about Photoshop or clogged pipes to find the one that sort of resembles the issue you are having.
Even better, Interface even has licensed physicians practicing telemedicine. You can currently talk to a doctor in real time about anything from serious health issues like cancer to finding out if you sprained your ankle in Zumba Class. Of course, you still may have to visit a hospital at some point, but if you can save a visit or two and avoid the huge lines, well… enough said.
GETTING YOUR SIDE HUSTLE ON
When you are ready to show the world your expertise on Interface we have a few tips for you that will help you get way more gigs. Follow these steps and don’t look back, because your phone may be ringing off the hook pretty soon.
A PICTURE SAYS A THOUSAND WORDS
When you don’t have a lot of time and you are scrolling through your social media feed, what stops you and makes you click on a profile? It’s usually the image. Try having a nice clear professional looking image of yourself that relates to your area of expertise. Full body shots or images of objects are fine as well, but make sure they really relate to your expertise. Your face will be the best conveyor of trust, but if you absolutely must have an image of something else, make sure it is clear and that it really speaks to your abilities.
BUT WHAT ARE YOU REALLY GOOD AT?
Now you have a great image, but what else will make you stand out. Apart from a professional image, people are looking for clear expertise topics. Try not to be a jack of all trades and list everything you can think of. Try to list only what you truly feel you are an expert in, or at least what your top expertise is. If you have twenty different expertise topics listed, you just might give off a desperate vibe. Don’t worry, you’ll have enough room in the rest of your profile to go into more detail about the other things you are great at.
IT’S ALL IN THE NAME
WhenHub is all about connection and part of that has to do with names. Think about how you look for businesses on the internet, you probably are going to pick a business person who lists their first and last name instead of something like “Kermit the Frog”. Unless you are actually Kermit the Frog, you probably should use your real name or at least a real sounding nom de plume. Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, so if you aren’t going to use your full name, then put some thought into a name that fits with what you are an expert in.
IT’S NOT A GET RICH QUICK SCHEME
On WhenHub you get to charge what you think your services are worth, but potential clients will also get to decide, based on your profile if they want to pay your rate. Try to be realistic when deciding on your rates. You may even want to consider donating your time for free until you have enough solid ratings to merit asking for money. In the end, stay competitive and think about what others in your field of expertise are charging and why someone would pay you the same, more or less.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
Let people know you are on WhenHub. Share it on your website, blog or social media channels. We even wrote a recent blog post on how WhenHub now has a profile button available that can be placed on websites to tell everyone that you are available to share your expertise. WhenHub is also offering a Donation Button for one time and ongoing subscriptions, so your followers can support your ongoing work. Promotion is the name of the game and this can be as big or as small as you need it to be.
LET’S SCHEDULE IT
WhenHub gives you the ability to post a public schedule of your availabilities. That way, if you have an extended period of free time and you want to maximize it, post your schedule in advance. Again, share your schedule on your blog or your social media. If people see on Monday that you are available on Saturday, they can plan in advance to talk to you.
YOU MAKE THE CALL DURING THE CALL
Sure, you can share your expertise on WhenHub from anywhere. You can be having your morning coffee or out to lunch or walking your dog, but just think about how your client will perceive you during the call. Because you decide when you are available, you can dress more appropriately when you know you will be talking to clients. How does someone in your area of expertise dress? What is the appropriate setting for your expertise; an office, the woods, a laboratory? Think about that before you are ready to take calls. Walking your dog during a call might be a great idea if you run a dog walking business, but it might be a bit tacky if you are a grief counselor. Just do what is appropriate and what will keep people coming back, referring their friends and giving you high ratings.
Also, if you are using the mobile app don’t lean in too close to the camera, keep it an even distance from your face and don’t let the camera obscure parts of your face. It just looks weird. Make the person calling you feel like they have your full attention and you aren’t distracted.
INTRODUCING THE NEW FREE TOPIC OF THE DAY
In order to help you get started promoting your expertise, WhenHub Interface is starting a Free Topic of the Day Campaign. Twice a week we will feature a free expert topic, meaning that WhenHub Interface will not charge the usual 20% fee for calls that experts receive for that whole day. All experts in the topic of the day will get to keep 100% of the fees they charge. On top of that when the monetary value of your call comes out to at least $10 USD (or WHEN Token equvalent), WhenHub Interface will also give both the caller and the expert an additional 500 Free WHEN Tokens. Experts get to share their expertise and get paid for it and callers get to learn more about the topic of the day and get paid to do it.
Now that is a deal that just can’t be beat.
Our first Free Topic of the Day is Wednesday March 27, 2019 in the topics of Telemedicine and Cancer Immunotherapy. Mark your calendars!
IT’S UP TO YOU
Finally, and probably most important is have fun. It sounds cliché, but generally, if you are speaking about something you are an expert in, that will automatically create a strong engagement and you’ll exude a natural enthusiasm with your caller. This already makes your job easier. Being really into what you are talking about will make you a better expert, but make sure you also listen to your caller and answer their questions. Sure you are excited to talk, but remember that people will call you with specific questions and they may not have all day to sit and chat, especially if they are paying.
Just do the best you can and with each call you’ll get better and better. Who knows, maybe your field of expertise will be helping people become successful on WhenHub.
We look forward to having you on the platform, whether you’re an expert or just have questions for an expert. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff happening soon and we want you to be a part of it.
First Free Topic of the Day is Wednesday, March 27, 2019, for the topics of Telemedicine and Cancer Immunotherapy | https://medium.com/@whenhub/getting-busy-in-the-gig-economy-how-to-get-more-calls-on-whenhub-interface-ec5165a3ba20 | [] | 2019-03-28 19:12:21.209000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Side Hustle', 'Freelancers', 'Consulting', 'Gig Economy'] |
PUBG player Solo King reacted to PUBG banned by PTA | Scienceooze | PUBG remains temporarily prohibited in the country according to an order issued by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). the decision was made, after receiving numerous complaints about the game. Solo king well known PUBG player speaks on this decision of PTA
On 1 July, Pakistan Telecommunications Authority PTA temporarily banned the renowned foreign video game Player Unknowns’ Battlefield (PUBG) in Pakistan. The entire situation is based on the fact that suicidal cases due to PUBG have enforced the PTA to banned it. The Lahore High Court has requested to PTA to consider the issue and listen to the complainants. Many people have supported this decision while others have opposed it.
Online networking stages have been raged with individuals who grandstand their abilities in the game. Jawad Ali is one of these individuals, a well-known PUBG player Solo King, he considered this decision wrong and speaks on the game being banned in the country. He mentions that through PUBG, the people of Pakistan have made a good profit.
Player has loyal fans who can see you on all social media platforms. All videos are monetized so that the uploader can receive money from people who enjoy videos online. He says that I know such a large number of people who have taken their enthusiastic and specialized talent succeeding in playing PUBG. It warms my heart to imagine that they should taste the unforgiving real factors of life sharply
Well-known brands like Mountain Dew have also sponsored numerous Pakistani PUBG tournaments that receive huge turnouts. He says that because of its PUBG players, Pakistan has gained a highly respectable place on international platforms. Pakistan’s Team Freestyle won the International PUBG tournament and played in other well-known competitions. Solo King mentions that in this current situation people are using PUBG as an alternate way to spend their time.
Solo King while talking about suicidal cases have mentioned that their death was sad news but their parents were not taking control of their children’s mental health. There may be several other reasons for this mortality like drug-related issues. There can be no pall over the grief of these deaths, but the real reasons behind these deaths must be brought to the public.
Many grim areas should be discussed when discussing whether PUBGs should or should not be allowed in the country instead of seeing what can be collected from the surface. The destiny of Pakistan ‘s game is still in confusion whether the government decides to permanently ban the game or lift the temporary ban. | https://medium.com/@fahidsafdar/pubg-player-solo-king-reacted-to-pubg-banned-by-pta-scienceooze-a576a8612e48 | [] | 2020-07-07 08:57:23.721000+00:00 | ['Banned', 'Games', 'Hacking', 'Pakistan', 'Pubg'] |
Solving the TCP/IP connection error in a Python Flask App During Deployment | Let’s get started
Let’s begin by finding out what TCP and IP are and what they are responsible for doing in our applications before we can move forward.
TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol, while IP stands for internet protocol. For starters, TCP like any other protocol has a set of established rules, it defines how to establish and maintain a network conversation where applications can exchange data. TCP works with the Internet Protocol (IP), which defines how computers send data to each other.
This blog assumes that you have tried deploying your Flask application to Heroku and gotten to the last stage where you create a database schema on Heroku through this command heroku run python3.6 manage.py db upgrade and received the following error or something similar if not the exact error:
(psycopg2.OperationalError) could not connect t
rver: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
What this error is trying to say or at least from my experience, is that it’s trying to connect to your database but can’t. Assuming you have created a start file(start.sh) that will set up your environment variables and run the application easily for you rather than exporting them each time you have to run your application via python3.6 manage.py server. | https://medium.com/@faith.thuita/solving-the-tcp-ip-connection-error-in-a-python-flask-app-during-deployment-f25ccfd6b1d2 | ['Faith Thuita'] | 2019-09-10 05:01:01.245000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Flask', 'Heroku'] |
The Sims 4 Modern Python Modding: Project Template | This is the tutorial for the project template I made which lays out the new project groundwork for you and comes with scripting to automate much of the modding process.
I’m using Windows, but this ~ should ~ be cross-platform compatible. Please let me know if it’s not either by leaving a comment on here or by filing an issue at the issue tracker here.
Major Updates have been made since I wrote this
Since I’ve written this article, many major updates have taken place and it will be continued to be updated into the future but I felt enough updates have happened that it warranted re-writing this tutorial.
Please check back from time to time at the project link below and download the latest updates. You can always update an existing project as well.
Step 1: Download the Project Template
The project is available on Github, it gets updated from time-to-time with new capabilities and fixes and it’s open source so it’s the perfect place to have it. Anyone is welcome to contribute or file an issue and I encourage people to do both. Download it Here.
Click the green Code button and then Download ZIP button. This downloads it to your computer. Next lets extract it, I use 7-zip because its convenient and super fast but you can use whatever you want. There’s a million zip extractor programs, even Android has more than a dozen lol.
Now this is the actual project template you’ll see
But we’re not quite done yet, first, lets move it to a folder where we store all of our modding projects at. You don’t have to, but it keeps things organized and the template is designed for something like that.
Step 2: Copy it somewhere and give it a name
I personally store all of my projects in Documents\Sims 4 Projects . Lets copy it there.
Now lets rename it, this represents a single project so lets name it to the project we’re working on. I’m going to call it Hello World because to keep things super simple I’m going to copy the files we worked on in part 2 for this example.
Step 3: Rename settings.py.orig
Now lets rename settings.py.orig to settings.py . I did this because you could have several people working on this project and everyone of them will have a unique settings file so best to kept their own personal settings file out of the project and just have a generic one instead.
Step 4: Open the project
Lets open up the project, there’s a million editors out there people use and to be honest I use most of them. Atom , Notepad++ , Sublime , Visual Studio , Visual Studio Code , Notepad , etc… the list goes on. For this example though I’m going to use PyCharm but you definitely don’t have to use exactly what I’m using.
This is what it will open up to
Step 5: Set to use Python 3.7
As I stated in part 1 and part 2 of my tutorial, we need Python 3.7, no more, and no less. It has to be exactly that version and the latest 3.7 out at the time of this writing is 3.7.9 so we need to tell the editor to use that python version for this project. You have to have already downloaded and installed it and I covered that in part 1.
Open File > Settings
And change the editor to use the Python 3.7 version you downloaded in part 1.
Step 8: Tweak a few settings
The last step is to adapt the settings to fit your needs. I’m only going to go over the top-half of the settings file which is what you’ll often change, the rest of it can be changed but often won’t need to be. Lets go over this really quick.
Open settings.py
This is what you will see
The creator_name is simply the username or real name you want prefixed before your mod name.
is simply the username or real name you want prefixed before your mod name. The mods_folder is the path to your Sims 4 Mods folder. The default works fine for most Windows users. If you’re on a different platform like OSX or your Documents folder is located elsewhere on Windows you need to change this.
I’m going to go ahead and change it because my Documents folder is located on a different Hard Drive. Windows is weird, even though it’s the same Document folder you still have to change it if it’s been moved otherwise it won’t work and there won’t be any errors.
# Sims 4 mod folder location
mods_folder = "D:\\juneh\\Documents\\Electronic Arts\\The Sims 4\\Mods"
The projects_folder is where all of your Sims 4 projects are, including the Python library and Tuning files. This is how I stay organized and the downside to using templates and boilerplate projects is it’s not easy to set it up to work a different way if you don’t want that workflow and setup.
In our case it’s where we dropped our Hello World project in. I placed mine inside of Documents\Sims 4 Projects so it already matches what’s inside of the settings.py file. However, remember, my Documents folder has been moved to a different drive so I still have to update it anyways.
# Location of folder to contain your projects
projects_folder = "D:\\juneh\\Documents\\Sims 4 Projects"
game_folder refers to your Sims 4 Installation. I think most people will have it in the default path and won’t need to change this but if it is installed elsewhere you’d need to point this to your Sims 4 Game folder.
This is what I have so far, yours may be different and probably not exactly like mine.
Step 9: Decompile the python library if you haven’t already done so
Skip this step if you already have the Python files decompiled otherwise this will wipe them out and re-decompile them which isn’t bad if you don’t mind waiting 1 or more hours to re-decompile them.
If you’re using PyCharm, right-click and run decompile.py . This will begin a long process that took my machine an hour but yours may take longer or shorter.
I worked very hard to make the decompilation screen as compact, useful, and pretty as I could get it. Many files won’t decompile successfully and that’s normal which I explained in part 1.
Here we can see for base.zip 389 files decompiled successfully, 31 failed, and the process took 14 minutes. 92.62% of all 420 files decompiled correctly in base.zip . There are currently 4 modules that need decompiling. base.zip , core.zip , simulation.zip , and generated.zip . In all it will take a very long time.
Step 10: Add the decompiled files to your project
I already covered this in part 1 so I don’t want to repeat it here. After doing that you will have something that looks like this.
Step 11: Begin writing your mod scripts
You’ll find a starter file named main.py already there for you, you can change it and adjust where needed.
import sims4.commands
import services
@sims4.commands.Command('hellow', command_type=sims4.commands.CommandType.Live)
def _hellow(_connection=None):
output = sims4.commands.CheatOutput(_connection)
output('This is my first script mod')
Step 12: Enter Dev Mode
Only on Windows so far, Mac and Linux are planned in the future
Dev Mode is a special mode that allows you to connect your project files you see in the editor directly into the running game. This means as you make changes you can reload them while the game is still running from within the game.
Run devmode.py and you may be greeted by this unexpected and very confusing error message.
This is PyCharm being very annoying, it expects all the Python files across the entire project and external libraries like The Sims 4 to be completely perfect which isn’t this case so it throws a fit and displays a very vague and confusing message. More importantly none of these files have anything to do with devmode.py which is even more annoying.
Thankfully it seems PyCharm has gotten a slew of complaints about this so they’ve implemented an option to make this go away.
After you try to run the script for the first time and it displays this error message you’ll then find an option to edit the script. Click Edit .
Then uncheck Add content roots to PYTHONPATH and Add source roots to PYTHONPATH .
Click OK and now when you run devmode.py it should work now.
If you have a look inside your mods folder, something interesting has happened. You’ll find a folder with your creator name and the Mod Name
Opening it reveals this
This is called a managed folder, it’s recommended to not interact with this folder and to instead let the project template interact with it. When your in Dev Mode, Scripts is the link between the project folder and the running game. devmode-cmd.ts4script is the mod that allows you reload project files live via an in-game cheat code, devmode.reload
Step 13: Playtest it with Dev Mode
Open the game and enter hellow . You should see something like this.
Now, while the game is running, lets change it. Remove the first and replace it with second like below in main.py .
def _hellow(_connection=None):
output = sims4.commands.CheatOutput(_connection)
output("This is my second script mod")
Now re-enter the game and type in devmode.reload main . This tells the game to reload just main.py . You can just use devmode.reload if you want to reload the entire project or devmode.reload path.to.folder to reload a specific folder. It’s pretty flexible.
Now lets retry that same command
Awesome! Lets now leave Dev Mode and package up your mod. Go ahead and close the game now.
Step 14: Compile it
Run compile.py this exits Dev Mode if you’re in it and re-creates the folder to be more of a normal folder that contains a ts4script file that players would download. It also places this file in the build folder within your project.
Note that this is the first time we’re running this script as well so it’d likely result in an error so you’d have to go through the same process described above.
It pretty much describes what it did and that it exited Dev Mode. Looking inside the mods folder this is what you will see now.
Very different than before. Scripts is gone along with the Dev Mode mod. In it’s place is your newly packaged mod. You’ll also see this in your project folder under build .
Lets look inside it, I’m using 7-zip but you can use any zip extractor. Most zip extractors, though, may require you to rename it from .ts4script to .zip but thankfully 7-zip doesn’t require that.
So it appears to have just copied your src folder and compiled any Python files it found next to the source code.
This is important, the reason it does this is because when the game loads it can either compile your mod for you on start or you compile it beforehand. While the latter sounds better, the former is actually better.
If the games python version changes in the future, then your mod will survive, however if you didn’t include the source code then your mod will likely not load on a major game update like that. This keeps your mod flexible.
What about package and tuning files?
I didn’t cover package and tuning files because they’re not related to scripting however your not left in the dust. Many mods have a combination of package files, custom tuning files, and scripting.
Inside your project folder is an assets folder. This is where you place all of your package file assets and package files itself.
Once when you run devmode.py or every time you run compile.py it will sync your packages to the Mods Folder. You can manually sync anytime though by running sync_packages.py
It only searches the first-level of assets for package files, this allows you to have package files in sub-directories and they won’t be synced. So if your having an issue where no package files are being synced this would be the first thing to look for.
Often I will have temporary package files or backups or originals, etc… that’s not part of my main project so I place them in sub-folders so they aren’t synced.
Planned features in the future is to have xml tuning files to also be a part of Dev Mode.
Any help with Tuning File Names?
By default it looks for Tuning files in Sims 4 Projects\__util\Tuning but this can be adjusted in settings. If you use Sims 4 Studio and Extract Tuning Files using Sub Folders then you’ll get many folders of files that have names like this.
03B33DDF!00000000!0D94E80BE40B3604.sims.loan_tuning.Tuning.xml
what this does is change the above to
sims_loan_tuning.xml
It’s not a big thing, but it makes it prettier. I’m well aware there are other programs and tools out there that do similar things but many people use Sims 4 Studio so I just wanted an easy in-house solution to fix the naming.
Step 15: You’re done
The mod and package files will be placed in a build folder as well
Now, if you’ve been following this example you won’t have a package file there. I’m just trying to demonstrate the asset capabilities of the project template.
Step 16: Final Packaged Test
It’s advised to do a final test of the mod in packaged form just to make sure it works the way you want it to. Run compile.py and head on over to the game to test it out.
And done! It works great and you’re ready to publish the mod.
This is the end of the tutorial
I hope you enjoyed and learned from it, I had a lot of fun making this boilerplate project and spent many hours building it so enjoy!
Be sure to check out the debugging update.
I wrote a second tutorial that discusses an exciting new feature, debugging, and made an update to the boilerplate project to automate most of it. Link Here. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-sims-4-modern-python-modding-part-5-project-template-c9ffee48ab4e | ['June Hanabi'] | 2020-10-14 21:26:51.166000+00:00 | ['Sims 4', 'Python', 'Python3', 'Boilerplate', 'Modding'] |
Build a ML Web App for Stock Market Prediction From Daily News With Streamlit and Python | Build a ML Web App for Stock Market Prediction From Daily News With Streamlit and Python Gakki Cheng Follow Dec 25 · 7 min read
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
This project is originally for my Udacity Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree capstone project.
I found the dataset on Kaggle linked as:
Project Overview
I am very proud to complete this project because it challenged my skills not only in Machine Learning Engineering but also in domains such as Data Engineering and Software Engineering. I managed to learn how to use the Streamlit library in Python to build my whole ML Web app. On the web interface, you can simply start from choosing your ML model type, then adjusting hyperparameters of the model and finally selecting your evaluation metrics.
Interface of the Web App
Below as an overview:
Machine Learning Models: Random Forest Classifier (RF) & Logistic Regression Classifier (LR).
Hyperparameters: n_estimators for RF and C for LR.
Evaluation Metrics: Confusion Matrix; Classification Report; Accuracy Score.
Problem Statement
As for this post, I will try my best to guide you through my project as a very practical example of using Streamlit to build a web application.
According to the information of this dataset on Kaggle, there are some particular facts that we need to be aware of at the beginning.
First, we only need the combined dataset for our project. The publisher has kindly combined the other two datasets for us. Combined_News_DJIA.csv is the one we will be working on. ;)
is the one we will be working on. ;) Second, when we work on the train_test_split step, there is a special requirement from the publisher. I copied as below:
For task evaluation, please use data from 2008–08–08 to 2014–12–31 as Training Set, and Test Set is then the following two years data (from 2015–01–02 to 2016–07–01). This is roughly a 80%/20% split.
Data Exploration
Overview of the Dataset
The dataset contains 27 columns (25 columns are top 25 headlines crawled from Reddit World News Channel). The label column represents whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rose or stayed as the same (1) or decreased (0). Each row contains information for a specific date. In total, there are 1989 rows in this dataset.
Rose or Stayed the Same VS Decreased
Plotting out the distribution of labels, we can see the data is only slightly uneven.
Data Preprocessing
Data preprocessing steps involved:
Fill NaN values with medians.
Clean texts in each news column.
Combine news columns into one column named as ‘headlines’.
The last two steps can be achieved by writing a data preprocessing function as below:
def create_df(dataset):
dataset = dataset.drop(columns=['Date', 'Label'])
dataset.replace("[^a-zA-Z]", " ", regex=True, inplace=True)
for col in dataset.columns:
dataset[col] = dataset[col].str.lower()
headlines = []
for row in range(0, len(dataset.index)):
headlines.append(' '.join(str(x) for x in dataset.iloc[row, 0:25]))
df = pd.DataFrame(headlines, columns=['headlines']) # data is the dataset after filling NaNs defined out of the function scope
df['label'] = data.Label
df['date'] = data.Date
return df
Preprocessed Dataset Overview
Implementation
Implementation steps involved:
Tokenize the texts.
Build a Machine Learning Pipeline.
Perform train_test_split.
Fit the data pipeline.
Evaluate the Results.
To tokenize the text of headlines in first column, we need to create another function to complete this task.
def tokenize(text): text = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]','',text)
tokens = word_tokenize(text)
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer() clean_tokens = [] for token in tokens:
clean_token = lemmatizer.lemmatize(token).lower().strip()
clean_tokens.append(clean_token) return clean_tokens
This function takes a paragraph of text as input and returns a tokenized list of words as output.
Example of Tokenization
After tokenization, we can start to build our ML pipeline for this project.
For me, I started from Random Forest Classifier as a benchmark model.
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer, TfidfTransformer pipeline = Pipeline([
('vect', CountVectorizer(tokenizer=tokenize, stop_words = 'english')),
('tfidf', TfidfTransformer()),
('clf', RandomForestClassifier())
])
Since the train_test_split method is already defined by the publisher, we can simply code as below:
# seperating the data into train and test by date following the instruction by the data creator
train = df[df['date'] < '20150101']
test = df[df['date'] > '20141231'] # selecting features and targets
x_train = train.headlines
y_train = train.label
x_test = test.headlines
y_test = test.label
Fit the data pipeline and evaluate the results using the classification report.
# fit on the pipeline
pipeline.fit(x_train, y_train) # predicting the results
y_pred = pipeline.predict(x_test) print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred))
Classification Report of RF
Our benchmark ML model (RF) achieved an accuracy of 81%.
Alternatively, we can use Logistic Regression model as our benchmark.
Classification Report of LR
Logistic Regression achieved an accuracy of 82% which outperformed the Random Forest by 1%.
Refinement
To further improve our model performance, I choose GridSearch CV to loop over the parameter space and returns with the best parameters. Since the Logistic Regression somehow doesn’t perform very well after hyperparameters tuning, I will only show how to build a simple GridSearch CV for Random Forest Model.
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV
# method using GridSearchCV parameters = {
'vect__ngram_range': ((1, 1), (2, 2)),
'clf__n_estimators': [50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300]
} Grid = GridSearchCV(pipeline, param_grid=parameters, cv= 3, verbose=10) Grid.fit(x_train, y_train)
When the fitting is done, you can simply return the best parameters by one line of coding.
Grid.best_params_
After refinement, we can re-evaluate our tuned model’s performance with the classification report.
Tuned RF Model Performance
The tuned Random Forest model achieved an accuracy of 84% which has a 3% increment than the benchmark version.
As we finished the workflow in Jupyter Notebook, we are now moving to the Visual Studio to build the ML Web app with Streamlit!
Model Evaluation & Validation with Streamlit
We are going to use Streamlit library in Python to validate our ML model.
If you haven’t heard of Streamlit before, I recommend the guided project tutorial on Coursera as an introduction.
My Web app has an interface like below:
ML Web App Interface
It’s a little complicated to explain code without showing it. So I would like to summarize the coding steps as detailed as possible.
To make it more efficient, I break the steps into followings so it won’t be confusing too much. ;)
Import all Python libraries you need to complete the Web app.
Decompose your workflow into separate functions. For example, load_data() helps you load the dataset/ create_df() helps you clean and combine news columns into one headlines column/ tokenize() helps you convert text into list of words etc.
helps you load the dataset/ helps you clean and combine news columns into one headlines column/ helps you convert text into list of words etc. Build your Web App interface in Streamlit language. It sounds difficult but actually it’s extremely easy to understand!
Finally, you can actually write your code like you are in a Python environment.
Try Streamlit commands to build your interface:
st.sidebar.title(“NLP News Sentimental Analysis”) helps you create a title on sidebar.
st.subheader(‘Confusion Matrix’) display title on main page.
st.write(“Confusion Matrix “, matrix) display the confusion matrix results.
If you are interested in how I create my Web app, you are welcome to check the code logic below:
Libraries:
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer
import streamlit as st
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import warnings
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer, TfidfTransformer
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.metrics import classification_report, confusion_matrix, accuracy_score
import nltk
import re
nltk.download(['punkt', 'wordnet'])
Functions:
load_data() returns loaded dataset from your local file path.
create_df(dataset) inputs original dataset & outputs dataset of combined headlines column.
tokenize(text) inputs text & outputs list of words.
split(df) inputs dataframe & outputs x_train, x_test, y_train, y_test.
Vectorize() implemented as a pipeline of CountVectorizer and TfidfTransformer.
Other function for Web app interface:
def plot_metrics(metrics_list): if 'Confusion Matrix' in metrics_list: st.subheader('Confusion Matrix') predictions = model.predict(x_test) matrix = confusion_matrix(y_test, predictions) st.write("Confusion Matrix ", matrix) if 'Classification_Report' in metrics_list: st.subheader('Classification_Report') predictions = model.predict(x_test) report = classification_report(y_test, predictions) st.write("Classification_Report ", report) if 'Accuracy_Score' in metrics_list: st.subheader('Accuracy_Score') predictions = model.predict(x_test) score = accuracy_score(y_test, predictions) st.write("Accuracy_Score: ", score.round(2))
Justification
As for the conclusion, we started from going through the whole workflow of building a ML project in Jupyter Notebook to finally implement the model as a ML Web app by using Streamlit library.
Random Forest Model & Logistic Regression Model are tested as benchmark models first and only Random Forest Model is used for further refinement steps.
Before refinement, RF model is evaluated by the classification report method and achieves an accuracy of 81%. However, after using refinement method including GridSearch CV, the RF model successfully improves its accuracy by an increment of 3% to 84%.
Finally, as a challenge, we tried to deploy the ML model into a Web app. By using Streamlit, we only need to decompose our workflow into functions. And most of the functions can be copied from the workspace in Jupyter Notebook.
As a conclusion, I sincerely hope this article can be useful to learners in the domain of Data Science & Machine Learning.
Thank you for your time reading this article!
See you next time.
Github Link to the Project Repo:
https://github.com/TanjirouNezuko/Machine-Learning-Engineer-Nanodegree/tree/main/Capstone%20Project | https://medium.com/swlh/build-a-ml-web-app-for-stock-market-prediction-from-daily-news-with-streamlit-and-python-7c4cf918d9b4 | ['Gakki Cheng'] | 2020-12-25 22:57:39.485000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Finance', 'NLP', 'Towards Data Science', 'Startup'] |
FRENCH TECH MOSCOW — WINTER MEET UP | 22 December 2020 from 5pm to 7pm
French Tech Team is organising a business meet up! First online network event to meet the French Tech Community in Moscow. Free event and registration before Friday 18.12.
If you are a French Startup, Russian Startup, Corporate Staff in innovations, Investor, Policy maker, or Community builder and want to build up your network? Or you are simply interested in discovering Russian or French new technologies?
This event is dedicated to you to meet your peers or start new business relationships.
The objective is an effective networking event. You meet during 10 to 15 minutes sessions with the companies you decided to meet. Event lasts 2hours maximum according to your meeting schedule.
Everything will happen online in a matchmaking mode.
Follow the 3 steps to efficient meetings:
Register now before Friday 18th December. Monday 21st December, a link will be send to you in order to choose and prioritise whom you want to meet. A detailed time schedule is sent to your email.
Start your meetings on Tuesday at 5pm by clicking on your first meeting link.
Contact us for more info: [email protected] or simply register here: http://qrco.de/wintermeetup or through QRcode
If you want to follow up all French Tech Moscow news, events and activity and be informed up front please connect to our Telegram group https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAFVG5RZsn-ZYosH2AQ | https://medium.com/@frenchtechmoscow/french-tech-moscow-winter-meet-up-5a448e1b5e43 | ['French Tech Moscow'] | 2020-12-15 10:52:52.075000+00:00 | ['France', 'Russia', 'New Tech Startup', 'Meetup', 'Frenchtechmoscow'] |
Scale-up Spotlight: A conversation with Co-founder and CEO of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel | Scale-up Spotlight: A conversation with Co-founder and CEO of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel
We spoke with the CEO and Co-founder of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel, about the growth of his company and… Top Business Tech Dec 22, 2021·3 min read
We spoke with the CEO and Co-founder of Sendcloud, Rob van den Heuvel, about the growth of his company and how it has adapted to the post-Covid-19 world.
Sendcloud is an all-in-one shipping platform for e-commerce businesses that want to become international giants. Rob van den Heuvel came up with the idea for Sendcloud back in 2012 when he and his partners Bas Smeulders (Co-founder and COO) and Sabi Tolou (Co-founder and CCO) all ran an online store in phone accessories. “Things were going great, and our businesses were growing,” he explained, “but we were struggling with shipping as it was both time-consuming and expensive. After some beers, we decided to come up with a solution ourselves and asked a friend to help us build the software. Sendcloud was born, and the rest is history!”
Sendcloud started in the Netherlands but has quickly become one of the fastest growing scale-ups in Europe, with more than 23,000 customers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Austria. Its current customers range from small to enterprise-sized online retailers in industries ranging from fashion and electronics to food and drink.
Sendcloud differentiates itself in the market by being customer- and solution-centric, saying: “technology is at the heart of everything we do here”. Its end-to-end product covers the entire process, putting everything they need in one platform. In comparison, most retailers typically use three or four separate tools for shipping, labels, order picking, and returns.
Through its carrier and partner network, Sendcloud positions itself as one of the European leaders in enabling retailers to grow internationally. It’s also fully scalable, catering to businesses of all sizes, whether they ship 40 parcels a month or 400,000.
Covid-19 has massively affected businesses in the last two years, and e-commerce gained rapid momentum because of the lockdown measures as high street stores closed and people flocked to online shopping in huge numbers. When asked about Sendcloud’s last milestone as a company, van den Heuvel said: “it has to be rapidly expanding our team to keep up with this growth. We started with 140 employees in 2020 and recently reached the milestone of 300 employees” reiterating our status as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe.
Where other companies have had to slow their work down to adapt to the new changes, Sendcloud has found itself in a state of flux. This meant hiring people even faster than planned and managing all of this remotely. The biggest challenge for Sendcloud according to van der Heuvel has been scaling up the business even faster than originally expected whilst making sure new members are onboarded properly and staff remain motivated whilst working remotely.
E-commerce has grown tremendously during this past year, but now that shops have reopened and consumers have returned to the high street, this growth will naturally slow down. However, it can still be expected that many consumers will opt for online shopping in the long term. Lockdown has really caused an acceleration of an ongoing trend that ensures their safety and gives them peace of mind in a dangerous world.
Read More:
In the post-Covid world, many consumers may be craving the physical shopping experience and excitement that you simply can’t provide online. However, consumers have realized the full range of benefits of online shopping, from the peace of mind to deliveries built around their schedule, and have made it part of their routine. Covid-19 has set an irreversible trend when it comes to online shopping, and an omnichannel approach to shopping is here to stay as consumers get used to this new shopping environment.
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Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter | https://medium.com/tbtech-news/scale-up-spotlight-a-conversation-with-co-founder-and-ceo-of-sendcloud-rob-van-den-heuvel-ef41443afff3 | ['Top Business Tech'] | 2021-12-22 12:14:14.639000+00:00 | ['It', 'Cybersecurity', 'Technology', 'Business', 'Scaleup Spotlight'] |
The future of data integration | The Future of Data Integration
How cloud computing, the Python stack, data warehouses, and the growth of SaaS platforms are poised to change the face of data integration. hotglue Feb 11·5 min read
Cloud computing, big data, machine learning, data lakes, data warehouses — no doubt, if you’ve been following the tech world you’ve heard these buzz words. These trends and the resulting technologies have changed the world and are continuing to unearth new opportunities for innovation.
If you looked at the face of data integration 15 years ago when Talend, now a behemoth in the space, launched Talend Open Studio the words that came to mind were “drag and drop” interface, SQL-based, on premise, and Windows native. Since then, things have changed dramatically.
“We have observed an industry transition to cloud-based technologies and a decrease in on-premise big data application adoption … our future success depends on the growth and expansion of such market and our ability to adapt and respond effectively to [it].“ — Talend, 2020
A new era
The tools that are disrupting legacy integration solutions from the likes of Talend and Informatica are very different. For starters, they’re cloud-based rather than on-premise, web apps rather than desktop software, benefit from robust transformation tools like dbt, and leverage the capacity of data warehouses and data lakes like Snowflake to consolidate more data than ever before.
The reason these new tools are so attractive is largely due to how spread out data is becoming. New SaaS platforms to help businesses manage leads, sales, invoicing, billing, advertising, investing, user analytics, and more are growing at a rapid pace. The modern business analyst is tasked with consolidating this data efficiently and drawing useful insights that influence business decisions — and these tools deliver.
A brief overview
To give you some background, let’s discuss some of the modern players in the data integration space.
StitchData
StitchData created a platform that is focused solely on moving data from these SaaS platforms into data warehouses. The company was eventually acquired by Talend in 2018, as part of Talend’s greater efforts to penetrate the new cloud-based market.
The genius of Stitch was appealing to both analysts and developers. They started an open-source initiative called Singer which introduced a standard spec for building taps in Python (connectors to different platforms like CRMs, ERPs, and more) and targets. In recent years, the Python stack has become known for its use with machine learning and data cleansing (for instance, packages like Pandas, PySpark, Dask, and more) so it makes sense that the taps designed to obtain the data use the same stack and appeal to the same developers.
The idea was that everyone can benefit from well-maintained taps to all these platforms. After all, what single organization wants to devote the manpower to maintain hundreds of these taps as their APIs and schemas change?
For their enterprise offering, Stitch offers a nice web interface and an API that enables business analysts and developers alike to leverage these taps through Stitch’s infrastructure.
Fivetran and Xplenty
Tools like Fivetran and Xplenty take a slightly different approach, and hone in on the business analyst market. Both platforms boast hundreds of pre-built, proprietary connectors maintained by their team, a robust transformation layer, and highly scalable infrastructure to sync data from these connectors to your data warehouse.
These platforms appeal to the technical business analyst who needs to consolidate data and draw insights. Fivetran emphasizes pre-normalized data with the added benefit of in-warehouse, SQL-based transformations via dbt. While Xplenty offers a UI based transformation system reminiscent of Talend Data Studio, but with the scalability possible from cloud computing.
Meltano
Unfortunately, after Talend’s acquisition of Stitch the Singer project lost direction and many taps fell out of maintenance. Luckily, GitLab funded the Meltano open source project which aims to pick up where Singer left off. The project aims to provide analysts with the tools necessary to host, create, and run data integration pipelines on their own. They agree with Singer’s initial mission and are working on SDKs to make creating high-quality Singer taps easier.
Unlike Stitch, they want to fully realize the idea of decentralized open-source maintained taps that every organization can utilize and contribute to. They aim to find open source maintainers outside of the Meltano staff who are using their Singer taps have a motivation to keep them maintained. They already have several consultancies and developers who have stepped up to keep these taps working for the whole community.
Airbyte
Airbyte is building another fast-growing open source platform to solve the issues in data integration. Much like Meltano, their aim is to commoditize data integration and offer a self-hosted alternative to tools like Fivetran. The company is focused on expanding their open-source platform and community, and aims to become a new standard in the market.
A different perspective: what about the SaaS platforms?
Interestingly, the same problems these business analysts face while trying to consolidate their business data from all the CRMs, ERPs, and billing platforms are faced by the developers behind these SaaS platforms.
In fact, these SaaS platforms have begun to differentiate their own products from competitors by the integrations they support. For example, an accounting reporting platform that supports importing your invoices directly from Quickbooks is more likely to gain customers than one which requires manually uploading invoices as CSV files.
Hold on! We just talked about all these different tools that help analysts create pipelines for their data using all these fancy new tech trends. Can’t those help these developers too?
To an extent, yes. In fact, the APIs behind products like Stitch and Airbyte are offered as solutions to these developers. The problem is that developers often need more control over integrations than analysts do, so they often end up building and maintaining these integration pipelines themselves.
To us, that seemed like a waste of all the new infrastructure and tooling that’s already helping business analysts. Why not leverage the same software to help these developers too? That’s why we started hotglue — a lightweight tool focused on helping developers build integrations for their SaaS platforms that leverage these new trends.
Conclusion
The data integration space is massive. There are many different reasons to consolidate your business data, and still more tools to help you do it. One thing is clear though — the best tools are leveraging the latest data engineering trends and appealing to an increasingly technical audience.
It seems that the future of data integration is a market with many more niche players, and a renewed reliance on the open source community to scale with all the new SaaS platforms and use cases.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave comments or questions below. | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-future-of-data-integration-7694ebacfe92 | [] | 2021-02-15 17:39:00.793000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Data Integration', 'Data', 'B2B', 'SaaS'] |
Frostbite | Frostbite
Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash
The wind blows from the north,
You are gone the way I
Knew you would be, cold
And fleeting, the snow
Drifts along the empty street
And I wonder how you keep it up,
The ice, the frigid silence
Didn’t break for anything,
Not tears, not please,
Not desperate reasons just to
Talk, you’d go into
Another room and leave me
Freezing and alone,
You’d steal the warmth and let me
Get so frostbitten I would threaten to
Shatter, and just to test it
I would beat my head like
It hid the summer, grow
My hair out to hide the
Bruises, starve my tears
Till midnight and while you
Slept I’d let them stream
In storms,
But you preferred the frost and
I could never understand,
The blueness in my eyes must have promised
Something colder | https://medium.com/genius-in-a-bottle/frostbite-31b62b16aacd | ['Bradon Matthews'] | 2020-12-16 20:21:34.127000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Melancholy', 'Poetry', 'Free Verse', 'Poem'] |
You Can Say No to After School Activities | My husband and I have disagreed about this since before we had kids. He said he wanted his kids to play football in a league. I said if he wanted them to play football he could go in the backyard and play it with them.
We have three girls now so there hasn’t been that much football. But there also haven’t been many afterschool activities.
One reason is that I don’t want to spend all my time driving my kids around. I don’t want to play taxi service like a lot of the moms I know. It will not make me happy. In fact, I think it will make me disgruntled, like the moms I know that do it.
And yes, that’s selfish. But I am a better mom when I pay attention to what makes me happy and don’t live my life by giving everyone else priority over me.
Up until a couple years ago, we were both working full time and the kids were in full time care. We didn’t even have time for more stuff. We wanted to do stuff with them.
Also, when my kids are really interested in an activity, I am open to it. When they wanted to do ninja warrior and they were both in the same class once a week, it wasn’t a problem.
Right now they want to do a dance class and my husband said he would sign them up. I said, “You know if you sign them up for dance class that means you’re in charge of that and you’re the one bringing them, right?”
I don’t think my children are going to be professional athletes, and maybe I’ve already taken that decision away from them, but I don’t think so. My brothers were professional athletes and I have an idea of the commitment that takes. But my oldest child is only 8 years old and I don’t think we’ve taken that decision away yet.
They’re way more interested in dance and singing anyway, and they do that all the time at home. We give them plenty of space and opportunity for that, even if it hasn’t happened at a studio yet.
There are definitely times I think at least one of them might be a professional in the entertainment industry, and if so I can provide the videos of them singing/dancing at age 3.
I have friends that feel guilty about not having their kids in more activities. I can’t relate to that because I don’t feel any guilt about it. Will there be a day where one of my children laments me not introducing some activity to them earlier? Probably, but I think that’s just the way life goes. I want to provide my children with all the opportunities I can, but I also want to live my life. | https://medium.com/@rachel-bowman-jgtd/you-can-say-no-to-after-school-activities-556e3dfef73d | ['Rachel Bowman'] | 2021-09-10 14:12:28.104000+00:00 | ['Kids', 'Mom Guilt', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting', 'Moms'] |
Children of The Lost Generation. The morale you’re afraid of | “This is the morale you’re afraid of
These are the stories you’re trying to hide
Cause if truth is sour at bottom
Who’ll want to climb up that high?
You want me to tell you my story?
I’ll try, maybe you’ll understand,
So many times I wished for myself
To find a listener, and maybe I have…
They took our parents, our childhood love
From whom should I learn what to eat and what not?
How should I know where my will stands,
If my heart has been stolen by creatures from dark?
And then you tell me I’m the one at fault
The wrong one, drowning in drugs
How is it my fault that you never asked
“Where do you stand in this dark?”
If I don’t know, and my heart has been stolen,
You still have yours you’re proud of, right?
So please, take my hand and show me the way
Or is that too much for that ego you carry?”
Somebody whispered, as if even not
The sea let his wishes be carried by luck;
Not a single leaf has been struck
By the voice of the wandering young. | https://medium.com/blueinsight/children-of-the-lost-generation-poem-2d7aaa99f7da | ['Ana Mikatadze'] | 2020-08-25 12:54:43.081000+00:00 | ['Inspiring', 'Children', 'War', 'Poetry', 'Blue Insights'] |
OverClock NVIDIA VGA Card with RivaTuner | The gymers mostly use Windows XP as the Operating System platform for gaming but what if we have a lackluster VGA Card? The money is already tight to buy a new VGA card that is more powerful then what’s the solution? OverClock VGA Card!
Many gymers have difficulty getting information on how to overclock the VGA Card, calm down, the author will reveal it for you! That it’s so easy to overclock a NVIDIA VGA Card with RivaTuner and get ready to get a more stable and satisfied game even though sometimes it’s not always like that ? .
The author here will overclock the VGA Card which is quite old, namely NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 100/200 32 Mb, so it is quite old but for playing 3D games that are not too heavy like ItalianJob, WillRock and others running very smooth alias through hehe, especially after Crazy Taxi 1024x768 resolution still passing ? .
First provide 2 programs before starting, namely PC Wizard 2006 to check GPU Frequency and GPU Frequency Memory on your VGA Card. For OverClock, of course you can use RivaTuner, actually there are many tools to overclock VGA but the author chose RivaTuner because this tool has complete features.
Oh yeah, before using RivaTuner, if there is a VGA overclock tool running on the PC, first delete the other VGA Card overclock tool that you have because there can be conflicts between the tools and it’s been a natural writer so that it can finally make the NVIDIA detonator disappear, but don’t worry too much about it is precisely with the loss of the NVIDIA detonator that the CRC 2005 game can work ? .
Now consider the image below:
The GeForce2 MX 100/200 32 Mb has GPU Frequency: 175 MHz and Memory Frequency GPU: 334.09 MHz which is what we will increase later to become higher speed.
This is the appearance of the RuvaTuner program for changing the Core Clock and Memory Clock features, first check the “Enable Low-Level hardware-overclocking.”
Click Detect in the menu options and see a view like the following:
Uhui, VGA overclock is ready to do coy, we just need to pull the Core Clock and Memory Clock to the right of the blue line, after that we click the Test option.
After clicking the test there is a process and after the Test is successful then check the Apply overclocking at Windows Startup then select Apply or Ok.
Now we are back with the PC Wizard 2006 program then Wow! Currently GPU Frequency: 219.98 MHz and GPU Frequency Memory: 422.38 MHz, if you want more details in testing, you can use Bencmark in PC Wizard 2006, below the test results table.
Before being overclocked
After being overclocked
GPU Frequency : 175 MHz
GPU Frequency : 219.98 MHz
Memory Frequency GPU : 334.09 MHz
Memory Frequency GPU : 422.38 MHz
Congratulations to overclock, be careful in overclocking, all damage to the computer both software and hardware because this article is not the responsibility of the author.
Author:
^ family_code ^ / Kurniawan
Copyright / License:
All X-Code Magazine material can be downloaded, read, modified and distributed freely for non-commercial purposes, provided that it does not delete or change the author’s attributes.
Copyright in the hands of the author and X-Code Magazine by following the license GPL (General Public License).
Penulis X-Code Magazine №2 :
Capil
^ dry grass ^
roninmorgue
^family_code^
T-Koes (self-review)
Yooogy (Korido)
WoNX | https://medium.com/@bundet/overclock-nvidia-vga-card-with-rivatuner-3d3ac52e8e70 | [] | 2021-04-16 14:25:40.037000+00:00 | ['Graphics', 'Computer Vision', 'Computer Science', 'Nvidia'] |
Staying Effective At Work, When You’re In Pain | For most of us, 5 days out of 7 are spent in an office, working.
Whether or not you love your job right now, you probably still want to do well at it. Your emotions have the power to completely mess this up.
When you go through something painful or stressful, but not destructive enough to warrant compassionate leave, you have to focus every day on something you don’t care about that much. And without doubt, when stressed or upset, the things we give a f*ck about narrow right down. Say you’re going through a bad breakup, all of a sudden increasing sales efficiency seems utterly unimportant.
It is important though. Doing well at work gives you not just the technical perks, like financial rewards. It gives you a sense of purpose. A sense of achievement and power. In a time where you feel the opposite of powerful in your personal life, work can remind you, you are.
But how do you create that separation from negative emotions and maintain composure when you feel like cr*p?
The first step is being self-aware. Whilst avoidance of an issue can sometimes help you dodge it temporarily, if you’re going through something significant which will take more than a few days to pass, you can’t pretend. You need to accept you are stressed and find ways to deal with it.
There are daily things that will help. Exercise is a common strategy, and starting your day with it allows a moment in your calendar where the biggest challenge is the next rep or step. Having to focus on the physical gives your mind a rest. It’s also a very clarifying process, your perspective will change influenced by the chemical changes exercise gives you. Starting the day this way means you can go into work in that headspace, rather than an anxious one.
If exercise ain’t your thing, seeking a moment of calm before the day starts is still a good idea. Other ways to do this might be sitting and having a coffee alone, reading, trying some breath/meditation work, or listening to a podcast.
Throughout the day, the primary objective is survival. Get through it.
Workplace culture varies greatly. I’ve often worked in very creative environments and therefore have had informal relationships with colleagues. Sex, drugs and anything in between not off the table for general chit chat. The battle then, when going through something personal, is deciding how much to reveal. On the one hand, people will cut you more slack if they understand what you’re going through. On the other though, people knowing affects your ability to compartmentalise. In addition, in a bid to be supportive, you’re more likely to have people asking how you are all the time.
My suggestion: tell one person everything and tell everyone else nothing.
Your confident shouldn’t be someone you report into. They should either be a close friend at work, or possibly a mentor or career support. Many companies will have associated support networks. If you have health insurance, that firm may offer counselling support as part of the package. ‘Counselling’ may sound dramatic and unnecessary but it doesn’t need to be a big deal. Everyone needs people to talk to, to process emotions and sometimes the distance of a professional can liberate you to open up.
There’s a mental coping mechanism that isn’t spoken about often but is something I’ve personally found very useful. And that is acceptance.
Accepting that you are in pain and you will have to live through it and one day, you will be out the other side. In ‘The Fountainhead’, the novel’s heroine, Dominique Francon, chooses pain. She accepts pain in her life because to her it is more manageable than the anxiety she would have to live with by making different choices. There is courage and calm in this mindset.
Scheduling smart, is another coping strategy. When do you feel worse; morning, or afternoon? The beginning of the week or the end? Where possible, you can be savvy around planning your calendar in line with your emotional triggers. At a point when you’re likely to feel low, you may be better packing that time with meetings. Why? The distraction. Our brains aren’t conscious multi-taskers and a meeting can force you to be present in a way that independent work can’t. Alternatively, something laborious but not mentally taxing may be a good use of your time. A task which you can execute like a robot, which is how you feel sometimes when it’s all a bit rubbish.
And then there’s crying. The process of crying isn’t purely a way to express yourself; it’s actually one way to get rid of toxins. The chemical manganese is stored up by stress and released from your body through crying. It’s definitely not helpful for your mental wellbeing to be afraid of this. Afraid of showing emotions. However you don’t want to be doing it at your desk. When the pain passes, you’ll probably regret it.
Emergency walks are an option. Another one is the ‘forced cry’. ‘Huh?!’ I’m talking about a time when you’re safe and alone, focusing on crying. This will give you a release. People use this moment of forced focus in different ways, It is one coping strategy for grief, to allow a time slot everyday to think everything associated with that loss and really feel it all. Then, when the time is up, so is your dwell time on the grief, until tomorrow.
When it comes to tears, a strange thing can happen when you will them to come. Eventually, they don’t. At some point you literally have ‘no tears left to cry’ (thanks Ariana).
Hopefully, when that time comes and the riptide has ceased, your reputation at work will remain unscathed and life goes on.
Subscribe to our mailing list for more lessons like this. | https://medium.com/cleopatrasworldwide/staying-effective-at-work-when-youre-in-pain-610c69c339ff | ['Alexandra Hearth'] | 2019-04-22 08:31:49.603000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Work', 'Emotions', 'Stress', 'Anxiety'] |
Features of NFT Marketplace Like OpenSea | An NFT Marketplace is an easy-to-use platform, which is used to buy and sell assets conveniently. One such Platform is NFT Marketplace like OpenSea, its features are:
Filters: Users can apply filters in OpenSea to find a particular collectible so that it will be convenient for the users to get what they desire. The filter can be applied to things like payment method, category, or price.
Auction: Using this portal, Sellers can find the desired value for their assets, and the buyers will get the benefit of the bid as well as track the status of the bid.
Listings: In this, the owner of NFTs can list their items. The listed collectibles are managed by the platform itself.
Storefront: In the users can avail the information regarding a particular item they want.
Digital Wallet: These are integrated to ensure that the users can easily send, receive and maintain crypto coins and NFTs.
Bounty: In this, rewards can be earned. The users earn a bounty when he refers the marketplace to another listing.
If you want to develop your own NFT Marketplace Like OpenSea, You can contact Zeligz Technology Pvt Ltd. They provide updated NFT development services in the industry. They try to ensure a transparent environment and involve their clients to achieve accuracy in the work. | https://medium.com/@rurkeshcosta/features-of-nft-marketplace-like-opensea-8213859fdbf8 | ['Rurkesh Costa'] | 2021-12-31 10:57:03.785000+00:00 | ['Nft Marketplace', 'Nft Collectibles', 'Nftart', 'Nft', 'Opensea'] |
Holidays in South Africa…now with even better value for money! | By now we have all heard enough about the damage wrecked on the tourism industry and indeed the global economy by the COVID-19 pandemic.
But what if we look at this in a positive light, in terms of what it means for travel to South Africa in the future?
The Rand has weakened at a frightening rate against the US Dollar, the Euro, and the British Pound — the three currencies most of our guests pay in. This means that South Africa is just about the best value for money destination you can find if your home currency is Dollars, Euros, or Pounds.
Let’s illustrate what this means for our Group Garden Route tours.
In 2011, the price of our 6 Day Garden Route & Addo Tour was R5600. The price has increased annually between 5–10%, in line with inflation. In 2020, the same tour, with the same inclusions, costs R8600. This is an increase of R3000, or 54%, in 9 years.
HOWEVER, if you look at the tour price in other currencies, our tour is actually…. quite a bit cheaper than it was in 2011?!
* Prices based on the dorm tour rate, and the yearly exchange rate for 31 March.
The SAME Tour, SAME inclusions… 25–42% cheaper than it was NINE years ago?! South Africa hasn’t gotten any less beautiful…but our currency has gotten a lot less valuable with time. This is bad news for South Africans, but great news for people with Dollar, GBP, or Euro accounts. You are now paying $478 for a tour that includes 5 nights accommodation, most meals, approximately 2300 km of transport, 4 National Parks AND activities…you can’t even stay home for that price!
This amazing exchange rate carries on once you arrive in South Africa — accommodation, meals, world-class WINE — you will find all of these at a great quality, and an amazing price.
One small illustration, but an important one for holiday — the price of a local beer. We wrote about this in 2013, and it is more true than ever:
So, there you have it, come drink local beer in Cape Town at a fraction of the price that you would pay in your home country!
When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, we are looking forward to welcoming you to South Africa. | https://medium.com/@earthstompers/holidays-in-south-africa-now-with-even-better-value-for-money-65501eb4a0f3 | ['Earthstompers Adventures'] | 2020-04-23 14:56:40.085000+00:00 | ['Travel Post Covid', 'Multi Day Tour', 'Budget Travel', 'South Africa', 'Garden Route'] |
Social Media: A Great Way to Stay Connected and Save the Environment | Social media is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family. It also has other environmental benefits as well because it saves trees from being used for paper communications. What are your thoughts on the importance of staying connected through social media? Do you see any downsides or advantages that we didn’t mention about using this form of communication over traditional letter writing?
The average American sends and receives a total of 201 text messages per day. Multiply that number by the number of Americans, over 300 million people in 2017, and you have some serious numbers! If each person were to send just one more text message every single day it would add up to nearly 400 billion extra texts sent on an annual basis. That is over 100 billion texts sent per month! If you’re like me, or the average American, then text messages are not your only online form of communication. There are many who would argue that emailing and even blogging have just as much environmental impact if not more than sending a single message through WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
Likewise, working from a remote location such as a coworking space is just as efficient and smart. Please visit us on www.ecowrk.in to know more about our coworking locations, facilities and service plans for you to work your way to success! We are the most comfortably affordable coworking providers in India. | https://medium.com/@ecowrk/social-media-a-great-way-to-stay-connected-and-save-the-environment-7cd903f81cd7 | [] | 2021-11-30 20:01:18.901000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Coworking', 'Workplace', 'Community', 'Office Culture'] |
What is the Opposite of Stress?. Today, I am very busy. As a result, I… | Photo by Miti on Unsplash
Today, I am very busy. As a result, I am very stressed. Or so, that is the causality that is usually assigned to stress. There is too much to do, and there is too little time.
If you ask someone what the opposite of stressed is, the answers of relaxed, peaceful, calm may arise. But how many occasions arise in which any of these terms can translate into your working life, academic life, or parental life?
The answer is that there are very few stressful occasions or tasks that can be fixed by just staying calm. Instead, what you may be seeking as the opposite to stress may be something very different.
The first opposite of stressed could be confident. Does the task give you stress by simply existing? Or by challenging you in a way that you aren’t familiar with? If this is the case, instead of trying to relax, try to build your confidence. Assess your strengths and reorganize based on your skills, accomplish sub-tasks or alternative tasks to build your momentum, repeat a mantra to enforce an empowered mindset. The second opposite of stressed could be understanding. Stress often arises from trying to perform tasks that you do not understand. Rather than seeking peace, instead seek understanding. Break down the situation into its simplest parts and put your questions and conflicts on paper to confront. Once you know what you don’t know, devise a step-by-step plan that can help you to find the answers. The third opposite of stressed could be grateful. People tend to become frustrated when they are “wasting time” performing tasks that they consider to be meaningless or tedious. Perhaps you are taking for granted that you have a job, are pursuing studies that you enjoy, or have a home to take care of. My least favorite thing to do is to wash the dishes, but rather than feeling stressed at the idea of performing that task, I strive to express my sincerest gratitude to the sink for clean water, each dish for serving food that provides nourishment and delight, and the soap for washing away bacteria and making it safe to eat. The fourth opposite of stressed could be nourished. What did you eat today? How much water did you drink? How did you sleep last night? When is the last time that you stretched, exercised, or took a deep breath? If you are introverted, when was the last time you took time to yourself? If you are extroverted, when was the last time you planned some time out? Ask yourself what you need right now that you haven’t been giving yourself. These things will provide you with what you need to go about your life without stress.
The next time that a task or occasion makes you feel stressed, ask yourself the real reason in order to develop a plan to overcome it. What is the opposite of your stress? | https://medium.com/every-day-a-good-day/what-is-the-opposite-of-stress-that-you-are-looking-for-327c6cffe77c | ['Chelsea R.'] | 2020-12-14 20:28:49.293000+00:00 | ['Stress', 'Happiness', 'Life Lessons', 'Life Hacking'] |
Using Amazon EBS gp3 to Reduce your Storage Spend | Re:Invent
Today, at AWS Re:Invent, Amazon Web Services revealed that they have been working on “high performance block storage,” with more iOPS, aptly named gp3. During the keynote address, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced that AWS users would be able to “…provision Performance apart from Capacity.”
The new gp3 volumes are already available in the AWS console, and if you’re using Terraform as I am, you can easily convert your non root_block_device volumes to gp3 by adding the type variable to your code, as evidenced below.
availability_zone = module.vpc.availability_zone[0] size = “30” device_name = “xvdb” instance_id = module.aws_test_instance.id[0] type = “gp3”
Adding the “type” variable will produce the below once you run a Terraform Plan:
Pricing and iOPS
Perhaps the most impactful piece that I have not mentioned yet: the gp3 volume type offers AWS users a savings of 20% per gigabyte over the gp2 volume type, which almost makes it a no brainer to start switching your instances over to gp3.
With 3000 free iOPS, gp3 is superior to gp2 in almost every capacity, offering users a 1000x increase in base throughput capacity.
Conclusion
You can find more information on the release of gp3 in AWS’s own blog post about it today, which can be found here.
It is clear to this avid AWS consumer that AWS is determined to continue their tireless battle to claim more and more cloud market share, and I, for one, am extremely excited at all of the new offerings that AWS unveiled during AWS Re:Invent today.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please feel free to check out my other Medium articles, and to visit my LinkedIn, where I am active and always willing to chat about all things AWS.
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Follow us on Twitter 🐦 and Facebook 👥 and Instagram 📷 and join our Facebook and Linkedin Groups 💬 | https://faun.pub/using-amazon-ebs-gp3-to-reduce-your-storage-spend-2c62793f0752 | ['Thomas Gallagher'] | 2020-12-07 16:32:34.951000+00:00 | ['Ebs Volume', 'DevOps', 'AWS', 'Cloud', 'Terraform'] |
How to Train Your Artist. | Well, I don’t want to torture you here anymore, so here comes the solution:
When? The questioned painting was created 1 hour ago.
Where? Here is its whereabouts (not a museum, but a folder on my hard disk):
Who? And the Author of this painting is — I bet you know it already, as frequent reader of my blog — Deep Learned Neural Networks.
Artificial Intelligence.
Art-i-ficial for “making art”?
Well, to be honest, the whole preparation work was made by _C0D32_ over at reddit. Here is what he did: he trained the StyleGAN on around 24k images (from dataset on kaggle). And the he thankfully provided Notebook on Google Collab —to try it out.
Now it’s up to us — we can let AI generate ART.
Changing various parameters in the notebook produces very different styles, images, atmospheres.
Here, for example, we see an Impressionist landscape at spring. Trees are turning green and reflect in the calm lake. Far behind we can suspect mountain range. The style is even Pointillist, with roundish stokes, colourish points of interest.
And then… this graphic architectonic image. Is it ruins? Is it a new building aiming high? Something between Gothic arcs and modernist skyscraper — and in some way very herbal. Urban flora? Florist urbanity? But why so grey? And where all the people? Are we missing a crucial part of the story?
And here you see a depiction of an aristocrat family — in best style of a Diego Velázquez. The faces are distorted in a Francis Bacon way. In the wall opening behind the group a way is leading to the next castle.
And what about this Spanish torero, being caught short before the bull run him down. You already see the bull’s hoofs behind the gracious, dandy-alike figure of the pathetic Matador, who doesn’t know about his own fate being about to change.
OK, and now somebody Not Safe For Work may appear, so be prepared for obscenity of an abstract painting.
I don’t know, what the characters of this painting do. Probably I overinterpret it. Something between Dalí, Max Ernst, Ballmer — bodies without indications. Skins. Grins.
And here is a mysterious cabin in the woods. Something happens here. Are these people sitting out on the porch? Or rather bedclothes being ventilated outside, in fresh morning air?
As you see, a variety of styles, motifs and qualities is generated here. Learned by the Art History.
But unlike in an Art School, AI has to fend for itself. No history backgrounds. No style insights. No Academic intertextualities, no scholastic connections. AI has to fight through the vast of art by itself as a lonesome Visitor, being catapulted into the Alien World and looking for orientation.
What a great achievement! I’ll follow its way across the World Art — in our FridAIs as well (now, after two week pause).
And what’s the prize, you will ask?
Follow this link and you will be able to produce your own AI generated art! Just don’t forget to save it into your Google Drive. | https://medium.com/merzazine/how-to-train-your-artist-cb8f188787b5 | ['Vlad Alex', 'Merzmensch'] | 2019-04-11 15:05:13.992000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Art History', 'Ai And Creativity', 'Art'] |
Meross Smart WiFi Plug review: This simplistic indoor smart plug is too rough around the edges to recommend | Meross Smart WiFi Plug review: This simplistic indoor smart plug is too rough around the edges to recommend Crystal Dec 22, 2020·3 min read
In my recent review, I found Meross’ outdoor Wi-Fi smart plug to be an affordable and quite capable addition to your smart home. The indoor version of that plug, however, leaves much to be desired.
Mentioned in this article Meross Outdoor Smart Plug (model MSS620B US) See it The two devices are relatively similar in function on paper. They both support a wide range of third-party smart home hubs, including HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, SmartThings, and IFTTT. The interior model of the plug is fairly wide (4.5 inches across), but that’s out of necessity, as it offers two three-prong outlets, with a 10-amp maximum load rating per outlet. The plugs are independently operable, both via the hardware buttons situated in between the two outlets and via the app on your mobile device.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart plugs, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.iOS users who attempt to set up this Wi-Fi plug (2.4GHz only) in Meross’ mobile app are quickly diverted to the iOS Home app and HomeKit to complete the process. (A sizeable HomeKit sticker appears on the top of the plug, perhaps not the most elegant placement.) I had no trouble with setup, and after a quick minute I was able to assign the plugs to rooms, scenes, and automation schedules, and could manually turn each outlet on or off with a quick swipe.
Christopher Null / IDG The dual outlets on the Meross MSS120HK smart plug outlets appear individually within iOS Home after just a couple of minutes of setup.
If you only want to work with the plug in the iOS Home app, this might all sound fine. But if you want to use the official Meross app (which is necessary for things like firmware updates, disabling the onboard LEDs, and connecting to voice assistants), things get a bit tricky. Meross’ protocol requires you to complete setup in iOS Home, then return to the Meross app to add the device there as well. When I went back to the Meross app, the plug was nowhere to be found, and even a factory reset—followed by running through the entire setup process again—didn’t resolve the issue.
Meross sent a two-pack for this review, which sells for about $32 on Amazon; they’re also available singly for about $19 each. Since I had two, I tried the process another two times with the second plug, again with no luck getting it to show up in the Meross app (though it also worked in iOS Home).
[ Further reading: The best smart switches and dimmers ]I spoke with the company via email about the issue, and its suggestion involved a complex series of steps including rebooting everything, logging out and back in to iCloud, and trying to reduce the number of devices on the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi channel. I tried all of this, spending another couple of days working with the plug to try to get it to show up, and just as I was about to give up, suddenly the plug appeared in the Meross app as it was supposed to.
Meross If you like the Meross Smart WiFi Plug (model MSS120HK) despite its flaws—or perhaps because you’ve learned they’ve been fixed—you can buy a two-pack at a discount over a single purchase.
The final few steps of the setup process proved to be a bit buggy—involving a configuration screen that froze—but eventually everything came through and I was able to control the plug through the Meross app and connect it to Alexa. What was the fix that finally got all of these systems to start working together? I couldn’t hazard a guess.
Meross’ indoor smart plug is a bit pricier than other generic two-outlet smart plugs on the market (some of which even include energy monitoring), but it’s less expensive than many of the bigger name brands in this spice. HomeKit support is a nice addition, but the company needs to work on smoothing out its setup process if it wants to earn a broad recommendation.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@crystal20238684/meross-smart-wifi-plug-review-this-simplistic-indoor-smart-plug-is-too-rough-around-the-edges-to-9ba5efdd54ab | [] | 2020-12-22 09:08:40.413000+00:00 | ['Consumer', 'Cord', 'Surveillance'] |
Turkic Chinese soup: A barometer of anti-Chinese sentiment | By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.
A heavy soup made of pulled noodles, meat, and vegetables symbolizes Central Asia’s close cultural and/or ethnic ties with China’s repressed Turkic and Hui Muslims. It also explains growing Central Asian unease with China’s re-education campaign in its north-western province of Xinjiang and its signature infrastructure and energy driven-Belt and Road initiative.
Named Ashlan Fu and introduced to Kyrgyzstan in the late 19th century by Dungans, exiled Chinese Hui Muslims who fled over the Tien Shan Mountains after a failed rebellion in 1877, the soup has become a staple of Kyrgyz cuisine.
Made of Laghman noodles, starch preserves, onion, garlic, chilli, dark vinegar, and egg, Ashlan Fu is “the best cure for a hangover,” says Aman Janserkeev, a Kyrgyz student.
It’s also indicative of the potential fallout of China’s crackdown on Turkic and increasingly Hui Muslims that amounts to the most frontal assault on Islam in post-World War Two history and of commercial terms underlying Belt and Road-related Chinese investments in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia.
Some 150 members of Kyrgyzstan’s far right Kyrk Choro (Forty Nights) group last month protested outside the Chinese embassy in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek against the inclusion of ethnic Kyrgyz in the up to one million Muslims detained in re-education camps in Xinjiang as part of the Chinese crackdown.
In a sign of the times, Kyrk Choro, a nationalist group that has gained popularity and is believed to have the support of the Kyrgyz ministries of interior and labour, migration and youth, and the National Security Committee (GKNB), focused in its protest exclusively on ethnic Kyrgyz in Chinese detention.
Acting as vigilantes, Kyrk Choro four years ago raided clubs in Bishkek in a campaign against prostitution and accused Chinese nationals of promoting vice. In a video of an attack on a karaoke club, a Kyrk Choro leader showed a receipt that featured a girl as one of the consumed items.
Yet, while standing up for the rights of ethnic Kyrgyz and Kyrgyz nationals, Kyrk Choro has also called for Uighurs, the Turkic Muslims that populate Xinjiang, to be booted out of Bishkek’s most popular clothing bazaar and replaced by ethnic Kyrgyz.
During December’s protest, Kyrk Choro also demanded the expulsion of illegal Chinese migrants. It further insisted that the government check the documents of migrants, including those who had obtained Kyrgyz citizenship over the last decade, including 268 Chinese nationals who are in majority of Kyrgyz descent.
Kyrk Choro’s contradictory demands and claims reflect not only a global trend towards ethnic and religious nationalism with undertones of xenophobia but also concern that Belt and Road-related projects serve Chinese rather than Kyrgyz and Central Asian interests.
The Kyrgyz government recently reported that 35,215 Chinese citizens had arrived in the country in 2018, many of them as construction workers on Chinese-funded projects.
Political scientist Colleen Wood noted that social media activists were linking criticism of Chinese commercial practices with China’s crackdown in Xinjiang.
“One widely-shared image, which declares “Don’t let anyone take your land,” depicts a strong fist — adorned with a Kyrgyz flag — stopping a spindly hand — marked by a Chinese flag — from snatching factories and a field,” Ms. Wood wrote in The Diplomat.
Ms. Wood said some activists compared Chinese practice to the demarcation in 2002 of the Chinese-Kyrgyz border during which the Central Asian nation handed over 1,250 square kilometres of land to China.
Another Facebook page, Kytai baskynchylygyna karshybyz (We’re against Chinese aggression) posted articles about Chinese mining companies operating in Kyrgyzstan, a target of Kyrgyz protesters, alongside articles depicting the intrusiveness of the crackdown in Xinjiang, according to Ms. Wood.
Ashlan Fu, the popular Dungan soup, could prove to be a litmus test of the depth of mounting anti-Chinese sentiment.
An Instagram account with a Stop China feed publishes xenophobic content about Chinese culinary habits as well as regular updates on the crackdown that is expanding into the autonomous region of Ningxia Hui.
Ningxia Hui recently signed a cooperation agreement on anti-terrorism with Xinjiang in a bid to learn from the crackdown on the Turkic Muslims or in the words of the Global Times, a Communist Party organ, “to learn from Xinjiang’s experiences in promoting social stability.”
In advance of another protest at the Chinese embassy in Bishkek scheduled for January 17, Kyrgyz First Deputy Prime Minister Kubatbek Boronov called this week on the public not to believe anti-Chinese postings on social media.
In an acknowledgement of Kyrk Choro’s appeal, Mr. Boronov asserted that the group had denied participating in the December protest.
The government, much like Turkey and the vast majority of Muslim countries, has so far evaded taking China to task on its crackdown for fear of jeopardizing its relations with the People’s Republic.
Kyrgyz President Sooronbay Jeenbekov insisted last month that “the ethnic Kyrgyz of China are citizens of China, who obey the laws of their country. How can we intervene in their domestic matters? We can’t.”
If Kazakhstan where the issue of ethnic Kazakhs detained in China has flared up is anything to go by, the Kyrgyz government is walking a tightrope.
Asyla Alymkulova, a Kyrgyz national recently established the Committee to Protect the Kyrgyz People in China after her husband, Shairbek Doolotkhan, a Chinese-born Muslim, vanished in October on a business trip to Xinjiang.
Mr. Doolotkhan’s company subsequently advised Ms. Alymkulova that her husband had been “sent away to study” in a camp.
A Kyrgyz diplomat was among representatives of 12 non-Western countries whom China in the last week invited to Xinjiang to counter criticism of the crackdown and showcase economic and social progress. A group of foreign journalists was invited separately.
Short of a reunion with her husband, there is little that is likely convince Ms. Alymkulova or the relatives of thousands of other Central Asians, including at least 2,500 Kazakhs, that Chinese policy towards Muslims is benign and benefitting the community and the region’s progress.
That in turn will not make things easier for the Kyrgyz and other Muslim governments at a time that ethnic and cultural identities in a nationalistic and at times xenophobic environment are becoming prevalent. Kyrgyz attitudes towards Ashlan Fu may be the barometer.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom | https://medium.com/@mideastsoccer/turkic-chinese-soup-a-barometer-of-anti-chinese-sentiment-e73d26fc2b02 | ['James M. Dorsey'] | 2019-01-10 11:12:35.291000+00:00 | ['Asia', 'China', 'Muslim', 'Central Asia', 'Islam'] |
Why You Click More on Negatively Titled Articles | Why You Click More on Negatively Titled Articles
Negativity Bias and how it skews your attention
Image by Olya Adamovich from Pixabay
Listen to this article here.
You’re more likely to click on ‘6 Habits of Deeply Miserable People’ than you are ‘7 Habits of Incredibly Happy People’. Both titles point to the same thing but from different sides of the coin. The first, however, draws your attention more.
This is because of Negativity Bias; the natural tendency to focus more on negative things than positive.
If you receive 10 compliments in a day plus 1 insult you’re more likely to ruminate on thee insult than relish in the 10 compliments. It’s also why when we argue with our SO’s we tend focus on the negative things they’ve done rather than remember all the positives.
Psychologists Rozin and Royzman outlined the manifestation of negativity bias. Simplified, if one event is of equal positive magnitude as another is equally negative, you’re more likely to focus on the negative event (negative potency).
If both events increase in intensity at the same rate, i.e. the positive event becomes better as the negative event becomes worse, you’ll perceive the negative one to be more negative than the positive one is more positive (steeper negative gradient).
Equal strength positive and negative factors taken together tend to take a more negative outlook in the mind rather than a positive one (negativity dominance). And finally negative differentiation states the way we form negative concepts in our minds is more complex than how we form positive ones, so we have more focuson them because they take more brain power to form.
This is all very technical, so let’s run with our compliments example.
If you receive a genuine compliment and a genuine insult you’ll likely dwell on the insult than savour the compliment. If the person complimenting you does so 3 times more but the person insulting also levels 3 more digs at you, you’ll perceive the insults to be far worse than the compliments are positive. When thinking of the same number of compliments and insults, your mind will naturally lean toward seeing the overall experience as negative, even though the positive and negative factors are equal. | https://medium.com/amalgamate/why-you-click-more-on-negatively-titled-articles-than-positive-ones-51169ed6a236 | ['Rajeet Singh'] | 2020-06-29 16:07:33.509000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Self', 'Writing', 'Mindfulness'] |
SLUSH. | As, to me, it seems a bit much that, since Bush and his retarded boys club, you have taken down a generation of men — again howling seems everywhere with this many Bryn Mawr graduates in the vista all at once, like with Italians lesbians too feel the brunt of Semitic distaste at body hair, (which is strange for people who aren’t exactly Teutonic). But they think they are “in like Flynn” now that have married this many barmaids who all love Thor Movies.
And those men, an inferno full now, have been shoveled to a perpetual front, thanks to the Beehives pater and Filias, unendingly so, callusesly so. And now I am to cry and wince for lesbian bravos who dreamed of being Buddy Sorrel and instead had to be mussed up by Louis wingman, Otter himself, Colbert.
Men have been sent to a eternal gash in the earth, an never-ending fiasco. (We lost the Italian word when a “high yellow goon named Barry” showed up to make sure that any hags crying for men, caught up in the friendly confines of Bagram Air Force base, were drowned out by the perpetual clapping for the eventual voting for a black man. A man who had to have a hag on his ass all the way to flag day, a hag whose credo was never say die, when not saying instead, what time is it kids, and letting that freckled perpetual wooden boy that dances on strings next to Buffalo Bobbie steal the show.)
Or all those who went up in pyrotechnics cause they were in a cancer ward that got in the way of perfectly named Hellfire drone, despite that big blood colored crescent painted up there like Altman’s MASH (as somehow, again, we are off — if not to find the holy grail, the arc of the covenant, which the Romans did quite well and awful without single shelling of it, as they were more men than angels.)
I, Machiavellian I am, do smell a double agent. But then, like some, I’ve read more Sallust than you have.
Sadly, today I heard that Gore was right, and we are an empire now, without a even twelve year old Juvenal on the crew. We are sadly a multinational corporation that still is bitch slapped into anger when it sees their woman’s movies clunk at the Box Office. This is as Mad Magazine is to be shuttered in ways no one can do to gangster movies.
This is all unbelievably sad to me, as one would think that, with big bad Trump as the bogeyman, you’d still be suing every quiver in your bow to defeat, like Virgil’s backwardly brilliant shot and hit, Amechi scores.
But, alas, even scurrilous cartoons are used against thieves, and the very same bourgeois and the vulgar platitudes and rhymes of the street people used against Augustus would be used.
But, you seem to be closing down everything, as again, it seems I was wrong, as instead of the Oviddian line it seems every night in the Clinton marriage is indeed closing night, and closing time.
Bill perhaps knew that ridicule is the price one pays for that purple sash as opposed to the Gene Rayborns and IN-law Jewish machers of now. This is because no woman screeching about cultural appropriation notices who took over Columbo when Ben Gazerra wanted no part of it. They think the purple sash is some sort of guard against all such things, as you hob nob at funerals all by now for the same person, yourselves.
So in a week that wrote the spec script for THE GOOD WIFE, or whatever it is called now (editor’s note: The Good Fight), as I did see parts of it, and sadly can report there is no Julianna in it, but worse yet, no Goofballs from Sports Night as an everyman hero, and worse yet, no Calinda with Roman girl haughtiness that makes one watch her massive eyes and aquiline face.
So, this script, with its allusions to Paladin, are wasted here, as it seems to now be a bunch of black girls with a Polish chick as the brains of the operation, much like the democrats have been since Dukakis sadly lost.
In fact, only a Jewish girl remnant did I write some nice lines for, and some wistfulness from Christine Baransksy did I write, when she intrigued by Jesuit Virgil. She admits, when his friend in this teleplay, and fellow Georgetown alum, Wil, asked her if she thought there was still torture going on — she admitted, not only to that, but that Barry the God did use one of those stingers and daisy cutters unmentioned.
This was as the Romans, men with sharp sticks, are maligned, did blot out an American citizen, whose only crime was saying things, as an Islamic that Barry couldn’t initial, as close enough for gummit work.
So, now, (between the funerals for dying old coots showing that, in fact, Julius Caesar was again the oak he was when, called that dead and decrepit, once vaunted Roman senate was less an assembly of kings, as it once was to being a mausoleum)…so now, men now are sent to tribunals for killing an enemy you had Charlie’s War make out of whole cloth…?
Italian Jazz…Now like the cops you’ve made prance in military drag, wake me up at 9, I wanna watch SWAT, now the poor suckers who you’ve made into pawns in a perpetual war, for perpetual written off losses — lest one scared out of his mind guy blows away some Arabs — they might be placed on war crimes trials by the Gucci shoes wearing, climate controlled perpetual Nuremberg, that only a country willing to utilize a bombs can star chamber up…?
No, this is against Roman laws of romance farce, as again the shuttering of Mad Magazine shows that the satire that you censor is the satire you can’t sell any mezzanine tickets to. And sadly, and without an ear for the crowd, the circus owners think they are running a church, and the homilies are cast out in stereo, into a Tyber shore that always liked dancing girls more than the spell caster school marms ever did like.
No matter what, when the ground stopped smouldering, the Romans, beloved by me and Bill and Gore and the Jesuits and my father, and (hated so by the Jewish in-laws and Miss Grundy’s of the world who hated if not more than anything their love of life as much as their acceptance of death) every Roman sortie is, in definition, a suicide mission if need be — as Uncle Julius said — would send in Questers and arbiters, to count up every fallen man every enemy, every broken bone, broken sword or broken helmet.
AS YOUR AFTERMATH OWNS INKS OF BUSH BOYS WHO FLEW TOO CLOSE TO A SUN THEY ‘ERE NOTHING MUCH LIKE Idiots who see us all as Monicas and suckers in the North tower, and though huff and puff about Trump can’t get too uppity with their red-necks women’s and naggers as, after all, Bill Clinton built that Roman road to hell and you, without a Virgil, the name I gave my Jesuit lawyer hero, on the crew.
It’s one thing to have an aftermath, just don’t be an accountant about it.
So, I finished the play at about 67 pages, should I send it in…?
My brother tells me, don’t bother, it’s over their heads. Oh, I say, no this is good television, I think it’s still done by The English man who made Gladiator and ,..and…and…maybe he's right.
But at least I finished it, as I did a play called Pygmalia back when my father died as a nice, remember, acne amid the barbarians, to who fire is just another weapon. | https://medium.com/fat-daddys-farm/slush-b4d947828a8b | ['Turnus Jones'] | 2019-09-14 14:01:02.616000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Satire', 'Short Story', 'TV Series', 'Politics'] |
To Select a Relevant Book, I Don’t Just Need to Know About Books | The very first book I remember enjoying as a little child was “Scuffy the Tugboat.” It was a book about a toy tugboat that was built to sail in the small world of kid’s bathtubs. But Scuffy had larger ambitions. It wanted to sail in the rivers and the seas. One day Scuffy’s wishes come true when somehow the current of a small stream that kids play in takes it to larger waters. An initially excited Scuffy soon meets massive vessels that appeared magnificent, arrogant, cold, scary, and completely indifferent to its existence. Scuffy also has a few narrow escapes with the larger boats. The toy tugboat, after a scary and disillusioning experience in the sea, finally has a happy reunion with the family who loved it, cared for it, and relished watching it sail in their bathtub. As a child, I loved the book because it was a beautiful story of warmth and belonging.
Soon after Scuffy, I found Amar Chitra Katha comics and was totally hooked to them for a few years. These comics ranged from ancient Indian mythology to spirituality, to biographies of famous people, as well as recent history. I did not just read them, I devoured them. I enjoyed ancient stories far more than contemporary ones and The Mahabharata was my favorite. I lost count of how many times I read that comic. I loved the theme of honor and justice. But it wasn’t just that. I enjoyed reading about ancient times.
I never really outgrew Amar Chitra Katha. In fact, I have been thinking of purchasing the entire volume of all their publications for some time and I might get it pretty soon. But, at that time, my love for those ancient stories gave way to a set of books that were very popular with young boys at that time. My reading interests progressed from Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” to “The Hardy Boys” to “Perry Mason”. When I entered college, “Perry Mason” gave way to “Sidney Sheldon,” “Jeffrey Archer,” and “Arthur Hailey.”
I’m not particularly proud of this phase because even though these were fun books, I read them because everyone around me was reading these books. I was not making conscious choices. In retrospect, I would have preferred to read some of the classics like “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights,” “War and Peace,” and maybe even a deep dive into The Mahabharata.
Eventually, Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey gave way to self-help books of which I read a lot but I don’t think they helped me much.
It was like being in the dark ages of my literary journey and unfortunately, I stayed there for a long time.
Finally, I saw the light when I picked up “The Fountainhead” from a roadside book vendor as an impulse purchase without knowing anything about the book. Somehow, the name sounded familiar and the introduction was interesting so I bought it. It was the first book that really made me sit back and think. To this day I am very grateful for that co-incidence because I don’t know how long it would have taken me to see the light had I continued on the literary path I was on.
After reading “The Fountainhead” thrice and “Atlas Shrugged” twice, the next few years were a shallow dive into the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche. These were good books without a doubt but to be very honest they did not make a deep impact on me.
What did make a deep impact on me was a book that found its way to me, once again through a series of coincidences, when I was in bed for almost a year after grad school recovering from a severe episode of Crohn’s Disease. “The Autobiography of a Yogi” changed my life. I was mesmerized from the moment I started reading it and I remember staying up all night in my rather dilapidated health because it was impossible for me to put the book down. Just like “Fountainhead,” I read this book three times back to back. What followed were other books by Yogananda Paramhansa, Ramana Maharishi, Paul Brunton, Sri Aurobindo & The Mother, and other books about spirituality or spiritual aspirants. This time I was not on auto-pilot. I carefully selected each and every book I read. Even though I was in bed with an exhausting sickness, it was a beautiful time in my literary journey.
Crohn’s Disease eventually went into remission and I found myself in the world of software development with a master’s degree in Computer Science and a passion for programming. The next few years, with their crazy deadlines, gave me little time to read anything besides what I had to read in order to keep up with the latest and greatest in software development. Even though I say it grudgingly right now, back at that time I devoured content on software. I bear a grudge against those days because I wish I had not worked so hard and had found the time to read other things besides software after already burning the midnight oil in front of my laptop. I was once again bordering on the dark ages.
Fortunately, late working hours, constant deadlines, working on too many projects, and trying my hands at a failed startup of my own took their toll and resulted in an almost complete breakdown which reignited my spiritual thirst. I spend the next few years reading about spiritual practice. This time, I wanted to focus on ‘actual practice’ and not just the lives of seekers.
This is the time when I started serious meditation. I say serious because, how much ever I tried, I seriously failed to meditate. I tried, failed, tried, and failed again until I understood the reason. I realized that I was doing what was known as spiritual bypassing — trying to attain spiritual heights without addressing the darker human issues that lay hidden in the corners of my subconscious. There was a lot of unresolved emotional trauma that I was dealing with. I had serious self-worth issues, I realized that despite my interest in spirituality, deep down I despised myself. But I didn’t know why. I couldn’t figure out why I lacked self-worth, why I despised myself, why I was dealing with self-worth issues. I knew something was wrong but I could not figure out why and what to do about it.
Once again, I turned to books for answers. I read several books on healing, Reiki, trauma, and self-love. I was getting closer to the problem but, at the same time, I was overwhelmed. I felt like I was dealing with a mountain of problems but with just enough energy and resources to move a small stone.
They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. True, but honestly when you have to move a mountain and all you can do is move a few stones, it is very discouraging to still see the mountain standing after an exhausting day of the best work you can put in.
That was my journey till December 31, 2019. Everything changed in 2020.
The year started with a minor surgery followed by the pandemic followed by the hospitalization of someone in my family followed by a decision to leave my two-decade-long career in software development. In the midst of all this, I also decided to start reading for pleasure like I used to. Instead of plowing ahead on an unsurmountable mountain of emotional healing, I decided to just love myself, care for myself, follow my heart, and once again start reading books that gave me joy — an emotion I was desperately in need of. I revisited all the books that had given me joy right from childhood to my adult years, starting with “Scuffy the Tugboat.”
That decision, I feel, made a huge difference. When I started reading for joy, I found that a lot of my trauma was also being healed in the process. That’s when I came across the concept of bibliotherapy — which literally means healing with books. I learned more about it. Bibliotherapy made a lot of sense to me and I also understood why fiction was helping me heal my emotional trauma.
I still read books to understand how to heal unresolved trauma but I also read a lot of books that give me joy. Along with these, I also read fiction books where the protagonist struggles with issues similar to mine. I feel this combination works really well. It gives me more healing and less fatigue, not to mention reclaiming the joy of reading a good story.
I just finished reading “The Bridges of Madison County” — my first romance novel — and Anne Bogel’s wonderful book “I’d Rather Be READING”. I don’t know which book I’ll read next. I’ve got a few to select from but whatever I choose, now I know that I’ll make a conscious choice. | https://medium.com/@adaptives/to-select-a-relevant-book-i-dont-just-need-to-know-about-books-bb9659a31041 | ['Parag Shah'] | 2020-12-26 10:59:50.284000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Authenticity', 'Emotional Health', 'Joy', 'Reading'] |
Lifesaving toxicity-Queerphobic Bond | A pensive evening, some very conservative gospel music blasting on my earplugs. Am sitting at a local cafe typing away some emails with a jar of cappuccino-yeah it's one of those hippie cafes.
I do this often, not listen to music while working remotely- that’s obvious- but find myself listening to some back-in-the-day radical Christian artist singing about fire and brimstone to all queer people.
Now, at first, -when I realized my bisexuality at 19- I couldn't listen to such content, it was just too much listening to someone constantly telling me how am supposed to be burning in some pit of hell but lately, I find it oddly relaxing. Almost as if it seems to remind me of something very different from its context yet weirdly familiar.
Growing up in a very radical Christian African family - no correction -country- has its own perks, you know more like “traditions”. Like how we used to listen to continuous tapes of gospel artists together back in the day till midnight on Friday evenings and Saturday’s attend overnight fellowships. It was our family norm until I was probably 17.
At 24 now, less of any type of a Christian and far from my family. Sometimes I just want to connect with my family again, you know to feel the familiar warmth again, like my mum humming to the song with an off-tune voice, my little sister singing the wrong lyrics all the damn time and little me just laughing while I just mess it all up with some improvised drum made of cooking fat tin- yes we all used that. And guess what, that toxic track always gets me on the family warmth even if it's the most queerphobic song I have ever heard.
Now I admit to being quite a sentimental person so I feel a lot, contrary to what men are “supposed to” and while it's not something to be proud of I have found myself jamming to the lyrics of the song while thinking -damn, this woman is crazy.
But just like the love, we share when my boyfriend and I are all on the crypts hating on some celebrity we saw on tv or my family is closer together when hating on queer people. Who knew toxicity can be a lifesaver, a source of warm bonds-as long as it's not violent!
I have been using it to close the gap between me and my fam! | https://medium.com/@happyfamea/lifesaving-toxicity-queerphobic-bond-1e473b38e02d | ['Happy Fam Ea'] | 2020-12-20 08:19:24.950000+00:00 | ['East Africa', 'Lgbtq Youth', 'Queer', 'LGBTQ', 'Same Sex Marriage'] |
A SUITCASE FULL OF HOMES | PRIVILEGED, SHELTERED YET SOMEWHAT DISPLACED
Photo via Unsplash by Ray Hennessy
MUMBAI, INDIA — In elementary school a lot of us joined the choir; we were taught a lovely Samoan nursery rhyme called ‘O Le Pepe’ by Ester Temukisa and Laban-Alama. The song goes ‘Va’ai I le Pepe, Va’ai I le pepe’ inviting us to see the butterfly as it flies and flutters about (E lelelele solo, ma fa’apepepepe’). Listening to this song almost 15 years later, in a country different to the one I was born and raised in, I seemed to resonate with it more. Identifying with the butterfly, the song goes on to say ‘E pei se manulele, E pei se manulele, mania on a lanu ese ese’ which means like a bird, colourful and beautiful. I remember, singing this song at an International Day at our school, with the rest of the choir. A choir comprising of more than half of the worlds nationalities, yet all sung in harmony. I came home and would sing it much after the international day was over. I loved it even though I wasn’t quite sure of what to make of it at the time. The last part of the song, actually was my favourite ‘E lele i i , Ma lele i o, Ae leai, leai se pa’o’ which means it flies here and there but doesn’t make a sound at all. Often times, as kids surrounded by an international community, we fail to realise the sounds we make or the voices we have. As butterflies of the world, we flutter around the globe, picking up and leaving our little bread crumbs, in each and every corner.
Ever heard of the phrase “living out of a suitcase”?, well for some it’s more than just a phrase, it’s a lifestyle, and it’s one that some of us, Third Culture Kids (TCK’s), inevitably consider home.
American sociologist, David Pollock defines us TCKs as “a person who has spent a significant part of his or her development years outside the parents culture. He explains that we, “the TCK frequently build relationships to all of the cultures which may be assimilated into the TCKs life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationships, to others of similar background.”
We are also often defined as “placeless”, or to be more specific “placeless people of privilege”, which yeah, as a TCK and having a definitive social circle of TCKs, I can’t say I disagree.
Unlike most TCK’s I have had it relatively easy. I lived in one house, up until I moved away to University. Well now you must be thinking, what do you mean? How are you a TCK then? Let me explain. Definitively speaking, I was born and raised in Thailand, a country that I wasn’t ethnically from, nor were my parents — who are of Indian origins.
From an early age, I was exposed to a multitude of cultures.I was enrolled into the kindergarten near my house. It wasn’t an Indian kindergarten, nor a Thai one but rather one of Japanese-English medium (random? — I agree). My two best friends were Japanese and Korean — my favourite cuisines till today. You could also say I became multi-lingual; maybe not in the language per-say but definitely in the culture. I could tell the difference between Japanese and Korean, and I learnt how to use chopsticks before I could even use a fork and spoon.
In Thai, there is a saying ‘Nam Kuen Hai Reeb Tak’, if literally translated it means ‘as the water rises don’t hesitate to take some’. In essence, encouraging one to seize the opportunity that presents itself, before its too late. Or on a lighter note to seize the day. So I guess, with us TCKs we are quick to seize these opportunities, friendships and culture that more often than not are thrown at us.
In fact, a recent virtual conversation with a friend, who I had also grown up with, made me realise the level of diversity we were exposed to while living in Bangkok. Recognising this privilege we had of studying at an international school, meant we had the world at our feet.
Growing up, I was acquainted to (at the time) a somewhat foreign concept of “expat life”. From the moment I started elementary school, I had friends from Argentina, Germany, America, Japan and even more so, cross-cultural kids who were living the third-culture life. They came and went, and like them, I was also used to making new friends along the way.
A perk that came with my diversified portfolio of friends was the cultural richness. Whether it was my friends returning from Argentina with a big jar of Dulce De Le Che, endlessly dancing to the tune of the Ketchup Song, learning the art of Origami with my Japanese friends or the intense obsession of K-Pop songs that came about in middle school, we all shared many memories.
Come senior year, -like the butterfly in the nursery rhyme, we too had to flutter away, I quickly noticed that everyone had their mind set on a university of their choice. At age 17, as excited as I was to move away from home, I was grappling with the separation of being away from it for the first time. Moving away connected me to my roots even more so; being a part of The Thai Society, as well as eating the usual Thai meal (where although I’d get ‘americanised’ Pad Thai with Sriracha Sauce — and not Thai ground chilli vinaigrette), it still gave me the satisfaction of home.
After Scotland, it was a series of shorter moves, so I went back to Thailand for 6 months and then India for another 5 months (which mind you was the first time I ever lived in India in the 17 years — at the time — of my existence). I was culturally ‘out of sync’ by the originality and authenticity of my mono-cultured acquaintances. Still determined, I found some footing at a job, which among other things, sort of validated my place in this new environment. Still, I noticed differences. It was definitely an adjustment; the adjustment of being in a new city, one I was supposedly meant to share a strong connection with from the get-go. There was the difference of speaking in a mother tongue with a slight foreign accent. There was also that main difference of looking too foreign for locals, even though, I was/am technically Indian. While I took no offence in the mockery towards my accent (yes speaking to some uber drivers included), I was also eager to explore; I still remember the admittedly, foreign thrill and excitement of trying ‘Pani Puri’ (on the street!! with bottled water though don’t worry) or ‘Elco Dosa’ for the first time.
A commonly held perception of us,”hybrids” if you will is that we are an accumulation “both the local and the global culture” thus a ‘glocal’ culture” (Besley, 2003). It was this excitement of having street food (apparently not a very south bombay thing), that also rooted me back to Thailand, where local food was accessible yet divine — or as they say in Thailand ‘Ha Daaw’ (5 Star).
5 months had passed. Emotional messages, dinners and “I’ll see you soon’s” were in order.
The suitcases were packed, the passports were checked and the plane was boarded. It was time for Paris. With a heartfelt sense of nostalgia, of leaving this new life behind, I was surprised at the emotional connection I had built with Mumbai.
While the cultural repercussions of our many moves will continue to dawn upon the best of us, it will also continue to add flavour to our ever expanding suitcase of identities. Scholar and educator, Michel Vandenbroeck famously said “it is a personal mixture of past and future, of fact and fiction creatively rewritten into an ever-changing story.
To be continued from Paris, and who knows where next. | https://medium.com/@shannontanwani/a-suitcase-full-of-homes-c647f61cfcea | ['Shannon Tanwani'] | 2020-07-11 17:29:25.500000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Culture', 'Identity', 'Family', 'Sociology'] |
Improving your logs management solution | Introduction:
In this post we will introduce one of the most popular logs centralization solution “ELK Stack”. Then we will improve it by adding new components and new features . Finally, we will give some tips in order to efficiently deploy your logs platform.
ELK :
As its name indicates, ELK solution is the acronym for the composition of the three components Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana tools.
ELK makes it easy for users to centralize your logs data, generated in heterogeneous format and coming from different sources, in one dashboard and offering the possibility of research, analysis and visualization of real time information system logs .
Elastisearch is an open source search and analysis engine written in java,
which uses Apache Lucene for data indexing . It stores information in a document-oriented format.
Logstash is an open source Extract-Transform-Load(ETL) tool written in Java and Ruby. Used for collecting, analyzing, managing, filtering and transforming logs.
Kibana is a data visualization tool , written in javascript. Used to visualize elasticsearch data.
It offers many features :
- Users can visualize the indexed data from elasticsearch in real time thanks to its powerful log exploration interface.
- Users can create bar charts, custom dashboards, etc …
- Users can create and apply filters on the data.
Why this solution is quite limited?
However, the ELK stack lacks some features and presents some drawbacks.
The most popular inconvenient of ELK is the huge memory consumption that logstash uses, users are always lead to set up logstash on each server that generates log files which causes a huge loss of resources for companies and may affect their applications.
In addition to that, this solution does not provide an identity and access management system in order to control users access to the company’s data.
Furthermore, this platform lacks from confidential data protection, it does not present an anonymization feature to hide clients sensitive information.
Finally, ELK does not provide an alerting real time system to detect and notify users in case of failures ,problems or weird spikes that could happen in production.
How to improve ELK?
Since this solution is not perfect, we focused on its limits and fixed them by building a new formula based on the ELK solution.
I want first to present the new Logs management architecture in the figure below: | https://medium.com/@ghaith-jemai/improving-your-logs-management-solution-75a98e0cf252 | ['Ghaith Jemai'] | 2020-12-12 10:31:04.049000+00:00 | ['Beats', 'Kafka', 'Logstash', 'Elk', 'Kibana'] |
Learning How to Say No | Saying this two letter word is more powerful than we realize
Photo cred: Life Hack
This lesson of saying no is something a grand majority of us can relate on. There are many people out there who think thoroughly before making a decision, stand strong in those decisions, and move forward swimmingly. There are people out there who say no to favors and desires from others, simply because they do not want to or don’t feel like it. To those people I’ve mentioned — I’m envious of you. Teach me thy ways, oh Master.
Many people have these issues unless you’re Shonda Rhimes or Tina Fey, both of whom have taught that saying yes more times, leads to greater opportunities, experiences of abundance and career exploration. However, if you’re similar to me, saying yes too often leads to burnout. And in my case, even health complications. Overextending your boundaries and energy leads to discomfort and most times the sufferer is no one but yourself.
In learning more about my own boundaries recently, and the need to strengthen them, I’ve come to look around and takes pages off of the books of friends. The best friend who has consistently mentioned she doesn’t like texting — Boundary. The coworker who would tell stories of her saying no to having drinks with friends after work because she was tired or just didn’t feel like it. Or the times she would entertain company, she had a time limit. Boundaries people, boundaries.
Having limits on your time with others or saying no to invitations, I have found, doesn’t mean you’re not a good friend. It actually shows, to me at least, that you have a great deal of respect and awareness for your time and energy. We all have different capacities in a myriad of ways. If we are aware of which subjects we simply don’t have much capacity for mentally, emotionally, or physically, it will be a sign for us to say no or put a limit on the time we do share with people.
There’s this lovely guilt residue after saying no ; but chances are, our perception of how people will digest our no, is often wrong. People won’t actually care as much as we think they will. The human mind has these annoying habits which tell us things will make us happy or fulfilled when they actually won’t. Chances are, the things we are constantly saying yes to, might provide some thrill or fulfillment in the short term but in the long term, we still walk away feeling a bit awry.
In trying to correct this feature within my personality and strengthen my boundaries, I fall back a lot. Old habits die hard, the saying goes, and I’ve found that to be true when you’re so used to saying yes that afterwards you realize you don’t feel comfortable or don’t have the capacity. This leads to changing your mind a lot, and although it can translate as being unreliable or flakey the fact of the matter is I’m learning. It’s okay to change your mind, it’s okay to say no.
We live in a yes culture and taught that by saying yes, you’re allowing the art of life experience and connection. I’ve noticed, however, the cultural conversation has shifted from one of saying yes to people, places, and things to rather saying no and having boundaries. It seems we have noticed, as a society, that we have some boundary issues. This is where the beauty of self awareness and individual capacity comes in and can teach us the art of saying no.
Saying yes to that awesome vacation with people you love in Greece at the end of the year? Amazing. Constantly saying yes to coworkers, friends, and family who soak up so much of your time and energy that you don’t have much left over for your mental health? Hell no.
There’s a learning curve to easing your way out of the people pleasing circus but with gentleness and patience, one can get there. It’s worth it. | https://medium.com/curious/learning-how-to-say-no-eb04a78a15d4 | ['Jessica Delugo'] | 2020-08-18 17:31:05.695000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Boundaries', 'Psychology', 'Saying No', 'Self Improvement'] |
A Small Story About A Short Supreme Court Decision With Big Implications | This is the order in its entirety. That’s it.
A Small Story About A Short Supreme Court Decision With Big Implications
Chief Justice John Roberts is the deciding vote in upholding leeway for counting votes amid pandemic in Pennsylvania
If this election is close, Pennsylvania is extremely likely to play a key role. With a high percentage chance it could even be the deciding state this time around.
That’s why this particular Supreme Court ruling is potentially so critical. With only 8 Justices, following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett not yet through the Senate, the decision was split evenly 4–4, which means it stands; the attempt to overturn it being denied.
In short: Pennsylvania absentee ballots received up to 3 days after Election Day will still be counted, even if they are not clearly postmarked, unless there’s clear proof the vote was actually cast after Election Day.
More specifically that means, according to the now- upheld decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (p. 37):
“[A] three-day extension of the absentee and mail-in ballot received-by deadline to allow for the tabulation of ballots mailed by voters via the USPS and postmarked by 8:00 p.m. on Election Day to reduce voter disenfranchisement resulting from the conflict between the Election Code and the current USPS delivery standards, given the expected number of Pennsylvanians opting to use mail-in ballots during the pandemic.”
And the Pennsylvania High Court adds a footnote regarding ballots that arrive without a postmark or with an illegible postmark, which is also part of what was challenged:
“In such cases, we conclude that a ballot received on or before 5:00 p.m. on November 6, 2020, will be presumed to have been mailed by Election Day unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day.”
And of course, it should be of benefit to all voters, because it increases the chances every vote legitimately cast will be counted. So why would Republicans not want all absentee ballots to be counted?
It’s certainly not because Pennsylvania is sending out mail-in ballots to all its registered voters like some other states are doing. Because it’s not. In Pennsylvania, while anyone who wants can get a mail in ballot, you still have to go through the process of requesting one in order to get one.
Could it have something to do with the fact that Democratic voters in the states so far have put in for close to 3X more absentee ballots than Republicans? Around 1,800,000 to 700,000. With close to a million of those already returned. Slightly more than 6,000,000 people cast votes in Pennsylvania in the last Presidential election, with Donald Trump winning by 44,000 votes.
It’s probably also worth keeping in mind that when George W. Bush prevailed over Al Gore in 2000, with the Supreme Court’s intervention, the official margin in the state that decided it that year: Florida, was just 537 votes out of a similar total of around 6,000,000.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling is one of those where the Justices don’t have to write opinions, and don’t even have to say which way they voted, just the ultimate outcome. Unless they want to.
And while no Justice attached an optional opinion, those who would’ve granted the Republicans’ application to block the Pennsylvania Supreme Court-approved measures did make themselves known. And no surprise to learn they are Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.
Meaning, as the Economist’s Steven Mazie points out:
“The 4 dissenters (who must be fighting mad but held their tongue on why) would have told a state court that its interpretation of its state constitution was illegitimate. That is profound judicial activism & bears no resemblance to the “federalism” conservatives espouse.”
Speaking of federalism, one of the core arguments made by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General for keeping the decision in place is that states deciding how to administer their election process is a key aspect of federalism.
Which is interesting, because the Justices who rejected that are the same ones who claim federalism is what they’re all about. In fact, they are all members of the Federalist Society. As is Chief Justice John Roberts.
Also, while the Constitution says Representation can be withheld from states that withhold from their citizens the right to vote, it says nothing about the federal government restricting how individual states choose to administer elections.
Of course, Republican meddling in Pennsylvania is probably far from over, especially if the vote is close and votes are still being counted past Election Day. And by then Judge Barrett might very well be on the Court.
Could Republicans even re-up the case they just lost as soon as Judge Barrett is seated, which could very likely be before Election Day? Sure they could. But would they want to risk appearing so nakedly partisan, cynical and corrupt?
Just in case, if you’re in Pennsylvania, this probably isn’t time to breathe a sigh of relief. Get those absentee ballots in soon anyway, or vote in person anyway… | https://ericjscholl.medium.com/a-small-story-about-a-short-supreme-court-decision-with-big-implications-78b130e471de | ['Eric J Scholl'] | 2020-10-20 16:39:35.530000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Supreme Court', 'Voting', 'Law', 'Election 2020'] |
Even The Universe Agrees With Copiosis | Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Thomas Townsend, a passionate Copiosis supporter and contributor.
By Thomas Townsend
In a few hours Jupiter will conjunct Saturn at 0:29 degrees of Aquarius. Many of us have been singing this song and keeping the faith that this time would come. This happening on the solstice in this time of deep transformation is clearly a turning point. The transition continues, the ripping and tearing of the old paradigm from those attached to it will continue.
But for those who are ready, this is the new beginning. The Cosmic Mother is pregnant with innovation, new ways of relating to each other and new ways of relating to the earth.
The pain and challenge remain; however, the pain of the dying past is now the birthing pain of the world we have long envisioned. Peace, Love, and Understanding will replace the hatred and fear still present in those who resist this awakening. Let them go the way of all things out lived, while we embrace the shadow of our past and own how it controls the system that enriches a few, while the many languish in poverty, injustice, and abuse.
Birthing the new reality
I welcome a new system that honors work and rewards the betterment of people and planet. Gone will be money and debt. Government becomes individual responsibility based on community values. All basic needs are met at no cost to the consumer, by socially rewarding the producers. True freedom prevails and we are free to live lives of passion, purpose, and fulfilment.
This is not a Utopia, so it doesn’t automatically change people. What it does is make options available that weren’t before, options which can change people over time. I am being transformed, and like me, it is for those who get this possibility to live full speed, driven by a passion, a knowing, that all people would know this bliss.
It is the time for all those who would embrace this new Paradigm of shared abundance to live in their heart space and be prepared for the fun of birthing this new reality.
I feel blessed to have lived to see this day. And to having been introduced to a vision fulfilling this ideal, and the people working to make this vision real . “I hope someday you will join us, and the world will be as ONE.” | https://medium.com/copiosis/even-the-universe-agrees-with-copiosis-74473fcfafb9 | ['Perry Gruber'] | 2020-12-21 17:24:56.120000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Income Inequality', 'Economics', 'Astrology', 'Copiosis'] |
Sunrises = New beginnings…❤. Turning 24 years old in 17 days and it… | Turning 24 years old in 17 days and it made me think back on what I’ve learned, every situation I overcame, beautiful memories and not so beautiful ones, everything that has made me who I am today and everything that has made me want to change and become a better woman, human being, soul everyday that i know i am capable of evolving into.
This thought on this post is my reminder and yours that you are capable, resilient, and worthy each morning of creating the life you desire and of loving yourself, talking to yourself with love regardless of hardships or changes in life. It’s so easy to give up and believe the bs your subconscious thoughts wants you to believe. All that is doing is blocking your light. Your ability to move forward, to have confidence in everything you do, and most importantly, your ability to truly love your inner self.
This journey is not easy, but even better. Challenges are what keeps me going. Because it’s a constant reminder that I CAN do it. I CAN if i believe i can. So, I know it will be constant work but if i worked for others throughout my life, why not work on what’s most important to me: myself? Although it doesn’t pay me in cash, it does pay me in quality of life & of mind. Now is my time to continue to work on myself and for myself.
Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash
Reminder: Be patient with yourself through this beautiful evolving journey.
Wish everyone a loving Sunday and remember, even if you’re super close on giving up, remember your motivations in life, and remember why you made it this far. We are all warriors.
Being grateful is essential to this part of the journey.
Grateful for my struggles and my successes.
They taught me to keep moving forward no matter what.
Feeding my mind love because i choose to.
What’s stopping you from feeding yours with ❤ ? | https://medium.com/@lovejulissa/transformative-realizations-6c7dcf6d3e0d | ['Julissa Jimenez'] | 2019-08-11 14:55:51.435000+00:00 | ['Love Yourself', 'Transformation', 'Self Love'] |
Cryptocurrency Consultant: Gridcoin | Many people have heard of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in recent news. Whether it be about Bitcoin passing $1100 USD recently, skeptics questioning the ‘bubble’ forming around Bitcoin, or why Bitcoin is a good investment. However, many consumers do not realize there are various other crypto-currencies in circulation. I’ll be analyzing ‘Gridcoin’, one form of cryptocurrency, based on three categories:
History: When the cryptocurrency was founded and any major events.
Price: How stable the cryptocurrency is and the value of one coin.
Usage: To what extent is it used at the moment of writing.
Rating: Rating out of 10 and whether its a good investment or not.
The first currency I will be analyzing is Gridcoin.
Gridcoin, an open source cryptocurrency based on the BOINC platform
History:
Gridcoin officially launched on October 16, 2013 by its pseudonym developer Rob Halförd, making it younger than the giant known as Bitcoin (2009). Like almost all of the cryptocurrencies in circulation, Gridcoin works without the intervention of a third party organization. Other than that, not a lot of important events have happened. It’s a lesser known cryptocurrency and isn’t really in major news.
Price:
WorldCoinIndex Price Chart for Gridcoin compared to US Dollars
Since the founding of Gridcoin, it has never passed $0.08 USD. Relatively, the price fluctuates very often. However, it is clearly on a more-or-less upward gain. Gridcoin passed $0.06 earlier this week as well.
Usage:
Gridcoin is a lesser known cryptocurrency. On the Gridcoin website, only 3 services are advertised currently accept Gridcoins: CoinPayments, Crypto-Games, and Cointopay Marketplace.
Rating: 5/10
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that is increasing in value overall. However, without a serge of popularity, as seen in other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, it will never be on the same level of usage. Even if the price of Gridcoin increases, having no place to use said coin completely ruins the value. | https://medium.com/theglobalvoice/cryptocurrency-consultant-gridcoin-f6801981e49a | ['Alejandro Ignacio Morles'] | 2017-12-05 21:33:50.119000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Economics', 'Gridcoin'] |
Get your game up with JavaScript: Understanding Variables | So, before we start here is a brief introduction about me. I am Vishwajeet Raj, MERN Stack Web Developer. Passionate about bringing minimalistic Designs to Life. I started as a Designer for DSC NSEC and GDG Kolkata. Currently, I am a Freelance Web Developer.
So, why do we need variables?
Think about it, would programming make any sense if there were no variables. There would be no container to receive data from an API, contain calculated data, no data structures, etc.
Variables play a pivotal part in programming.
They are containers that store data.
Coming to JavaScript Variables.
There are 3 keywords that are used to declare variables in JavaScript which you need to keep in mind.
var let const
Understanding Variables declared with the var keyword:
Scope: Function Scoped
Now, what do I mean by function scoped?
What do I even mean by scope?
Scope in programming means the accessibility of the variable within a block of code (The code wrapped inside curly brackets {} ).
By function scoped I mean the variable is not accessible outside the function.
If a variable is created inside a function and you try to log in outside the function it won’t work.
You get a Reference Error: (variable name) is not defined.
Variables declared with var keyword are function scoped.
2. Can be updated and redeclared.
You can update these variables with new values.
You can actually redeclare these variables, yes you heard it right.
Variable declared with var can be redeclared and reassigned.
3. Hoisting
These variables are hoisted to the top of their scope and are initialized with undefined.
Hoisting is a really big topic on its own. I am not exploring it deeply here.
Hoisting means all the variables and the function declarations are moved to the top of their scope. However, there is no actual movement of code.
If the variable is accessed before the declaration, it evaluates to undefined. Suppose x is accessed before declaration with var.
Hoisting explained for variables declared with var keyword.
Understanding Variables declared with the let keyword:
Scope: Block Scoped
Variables declared with let keyword are block-scoped ( code inside curly brackets {} ) and not accessible outside that block of code.
Variables declared with let keyword are block-scoped
2. Can be updated but not redeclared within its scope.
You can update these variables with new values.
You cannot redeclare these variables, within the same scope.
You try to redeclare, you get an error.
Variables declared with let cannot be redeclared within the same scope.
3. Hoisted to the top of their scope but are not initialized.
These variables are hoisted but not initialized not even with undefined.
Variables declared with let are hoisted to the top of their scope but are not initialized
Here is proof that JavaScript actually hoists the let variables. In the below code snippet, you can see that the ReferenceError doesn’t say cannot access ‘variable name’ before initialization because it hasn’t been declared. If it's declared as the above code snippet. You get the detailed error message “Cannot access ‘variable name’ before initialization”.
Accessing variables without declaring them.
Understanding Variables declared with the const keyword.
Scope: Block Scoped
I think I’ve already written about blocked scoped the same applies here. It can’t be accessed outside of the scope it's declared within.
Example of const variables being blocked scope.
Cannot be updated or redeclared within its scope.
The variables declared with const keyword cannot be updated or redeclared because const declaration creates a read-only reference to a value.
Redeclaring variables declared with const keywords.
Updating variables declared with const keyword.
In case where the content is an object or array, this means the object’s contents (e.g., its properties) can be changed or the array’s elements can be changed.
Here is an example with an array.
Array declared with const keyword.
Hoisted to the top of their scope but are not initialized.
These variables are hoisted but not initialized that’s why javaScript is able to detect that the variable is actually defined but it’s being referenced before the initialization.
Hoisting with const variables.
Quick Recap :
Variables are containers that store data.
Before ES6, we had var x = 10;
After ES6, we have let x; const x = 10;
Variables declared with var keyword:
Scope : Function Scoped
Can be reassigned
Can be updated and re-declared within its scope .
. Hoisted to the top of their scope and are initialized with undefined.
Variables declared with let keyword:
Scope: Block Scoped
Can be reassigned
Can be updated but not re-declared within its scope .
. Hoisted to the top of their scope but are not initialized.
Variables declared with const keyword:
Scope: Block Scoped
Cannot be reassigned
be Can neither be updated nor re-declared within its scope.
Hoisted to the top of their scope but are not initialized.
At last, Thank you for reading. | https://medium.com/@vishwajeetraj11/get-your-game-up-with-javascript-understanding-variables-7ce232071eb8 | ['Vishwajeet Raj'] | 2020-11-18 14:38:38.738000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Web Dev Resources', 'Javascript Development', 'Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript'] |
Valuable Lessons I’ve Learned Working from Home | During these times we find a huge amount of people starting to work from home. Despite the fact that software development is more adapted to this change than most other careers, it’s still a huge change for individuals who used to work from the office. As one of the many office workers, I was also impacted by this shift and I would like to share my experience.
Communication with colleagues
Software development in itself usually requires minimal social interaction in comparison with other careers. Even if you are in the office you find yourself working on your own ticket most of the time. But when you are working from home it becomes even more lonely. There is no occasional conversation with colleagues or some discussion during lunch. Most of the workday socializing is limited to daily scrum.
Additionally, if you have some issues you want to discuss or need advice for resolving some bug, it seems much easier to come up to a colleague at the office rather than pester them on Slack. However, after several times you’re getting used to sharing screen via Google Meet or Slack, it doesn’t differ too much from regular communication.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Time spent getting to work
On average Canadians spend around 25 minutes commuting to work. I was on the longer side of this scale with 45 minutes for commute, which sums up to 7.5 hours a week. Some of that time can be spent productively (reading articles, listening to audiobooks, etc.). However, when I started to work from home in the end I found a substantial amount of additional time each week which can be spent on other activities.
Physical activity
Time spent working from home emphasized to me how much software development is a physically inactive job. When I went to the office I still had to spend some time outside catching a bus. But now, when I am working from home and especially with pandemic outside I found myself leaving home only once a week to stock up on groceries. And after several weeks I found myself craving this bit of physical activity I had before. In the end, I found a substitute in the form of playing table tennis several times a week.
Photo by Hector Falcon on Unsplash
Time management
When you are working from home, you seem to have a more flexible schedule. You can start working later than you usually do or take longer lunch breaks. At first glance, it definitely seems like a big advantage, however after a week of taking longer lunch breaks it seemed to me that I was spending more time working, although, in summary, I was working the same hours as I was in the office. This part more than any other depends on your preferences, but for myself I found that it’s better to start with sticking with a schedule you built up at the office, making changes only if necessary. This allows for a much smoother transition to working from home.
Work/Personal life separation
Work is an essential part of our day to day life, but it’s also important to find some separation between it and other activities. At first, I found it a bit daunting working in the same room where I spend most of my free time. It just seemed that line between work and leisure time getting blurred out. However, in some time this feeling disappeared on its own. Although I can imagine some physical separation could help as well, for example, if there is a possibility to arrange an equivalent of ‘home office’ and only use it for work that could help with the transition.
Photo by Allie on Unsplash
In conclusion, shifting to work from home presents several challenges, such as finding your balance and finding what works specifically for you. However, it also presents many benefits and possibilities to learn something new, in the end becoming more efficient and flexible at what you do. | https://medium.com/weavik/what-did-work-from-home-teach-you-18265046ef55 | ['Hennadii Husiev'] | 2020-07-09 19:47:20.702000+00:00 | ['Freelance Work', 'Quarantine', 'Software Development', 'Work From Home', 'Covid 19'] |
On K | Photo by Clarisse Meyer on Unsplash
She kneels over me,
And carefully pushes my hair out of my face- the strands I’ve purposely placed to hide my tears.
“You’re okay,” she says.
You’re okay, my brain echoes, and it sounds far away.
But at this moment, I can almost believe I will be okay.
Because she is strong and brave and beautiful and most of the time,
I feel I am none of these.
So, I lean into her and I marvel that such a human can exist. | https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/on-k-52ef65367b0b | ['Elyse Wright'] | 2020-12-17 09:23:47.693000+00:00 | ['Writer', 'Poetry', 'Poet', 'Poem', 'Friendship'] |
XSPA Stock: XpresSpa Climbs On United Airlines Partnership | XpresSpa Group Inc (NASDAQ: XSPA) is screaming for the top in the market this morning, and for good reason. The company announced that it has entered into a partnership with United Airlines that has the potential to generate significant revenue.
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XpresSpa Group Announces Agreement With United Airlines
Management Commentary
This Agreement Could Result in Significant Revenue
Risks to Consider Before Buying XSPA Stock
Final Thoughts
XpresSpa Group Announces Agreement With United Airlines
In the press release, XpresSpa said that its subsidiary, XpresCheck, entered into a national agreement with United Airlines. The agreement surrounds the provision of COVID-19 testing services with Newark LIberty International Airport and Denver International Airport.
XSPA went on to explain that starting on December 21, XpresCheck will support direct flights to Hawaii, giving vacation travelers the peace of mind in feeling safe while vacationing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the agreement, XpresCheck will provide pre-travel testing with rapid molecular testing services. Passengers who test positive are informed that they will need to leave the airport and self-isolate as per CDC guidelines, along with anybody the passenger is traveling with.
Management Commentary
In a statement, Doug Satzman, CEO at XSPA, had the following to offer:
We are very pleased to support United’s efforts to provide their customers with more testing options to meet their destination entry requirements with our easy rapid molecular testing protocol and convenient on-site testing facilities. Our partnership with United Airlines will start with select flights to Hawaii in two major hub airports and expand to additional cities as our plans continue to develop.
The above statement was followed up by Toby Enqvist, Chief Customer Officer at United. Here’s what he had to say:
United was the first to offer a customer COVID-19 testing program… | https://medium.com/@dubai122/xspa-stock-xpresspa-climbs-on-united-airlines-partnership-c175af0c205e | [] | 2020-12-17 20:57:50.027000+00:00 | ['Vaccines', 'Partnerships', 'Actors', 'Covid 19', 'Makeup'] |
Ruby to Elixir - A Paradigm shift !! | Pune Elixir Meetup — May 2019
Wanna know my experience of getting introduced to elixir after working with Ruby and Rails for more than 2.5 years?
Why in the first place?
Why did I think of learning elixir?
I had been working on a project since 2016 and had a seamless backend application running on Rails. I was happy with the system’s performance until 2018 when the application really started to scale. The increasing Sidekiq jobs, cron jobs running over each other started choking up the whole system. There was a real need to run the jobs parallelly and without using up most of the system resources.
It’s a bad feeling when your production application chokes.
Apart from scaling the Infrastructure, there was a need to perform some very high optimizations at the application level. To make code and query optimizations and to make the application really perform the processing of jobs in parallel. Therefore, I started searching for alternatives to integrate into the system to increase its efficiency.
It’s then I came across Elixir which has already created a lot of buzz in the Ruby community due to its performance and fault tolerance.
The first thing that anybody learns about a language for the first time is its syntax. I was still thinking in Ruby when I started learning elixir’s syntax. Being from the Ruby background It was a mike drop moment as my confidence swayed up to very high levels after learning the basic syntax of elixir and seeing the similarities between the two.
The reason was, Elixir’s Syntax is so similar to Ruby.
The method definition (Ruby vs Elixir)
Method Definition in Ruby vs Elixir
Variable Assignment (Ruby vs Elixir)
Variable Assignment in Ruby vs Elixir
Hash vs Map (Ruby vs Elixir)
Hash in Ruby vs Maps in Elixir
Array vs List (Ruby vs Elixir)
Array in Ruby vs List in Elixir
String Interpolation (Ruby vs Elixir)
String Interpolation in Ruby vs Elixir
These were some of the similarities that made elixir very similar to Ruby.
But soon after digging a bit, I was struck with the realization of how little I know about Elixir and the architecture it is based upon.
The Paradigm Shift !!
The Realization
The similarities between Ruby and Elixir remained at the syntax level only. These two languages are different from each other in many ways starting from the architecture level.
For example:
The difference in Looping (Ruby vs Elixir)
Notice, how in this example we are calling each method ON an Array Object in Ruby. Whereas, we are Passing an array in each function of a module in Elixir.
The difference in function calling (Ruby vs Elixir)
Similarly, we are calling reverse method ON a string object in Ruby. Whereas, we are passing "hello" (a string) in the reverse function of a module in Elixir.
The differences that were immediately noticeable were:
No Classes No Objects Modules being used in the current file are explicitly included. State/Data Structure is passed into functions as arguments. Immutability
The Two Paradigms
I realized that one of the major differences between the two languages is the programming paradigms that these languages work on. And that is the reason for the above-mentioned differences between the two languages.
Ruby works on Object Oriented Programming ( OOP ) Paradigm whereas Elixir works on Functional Programming ( FP ) Paradigm.
Go ahead and read the definitions on Wikipedia for these two paradigms. Those definitions are understandable if you know the two paradigms but may not give a clear understanding if you do not know these concepts already.
Let me explain them in my own words. Essentially, OOP and FP both paradigms have the same goal of creating programs but their way of achieving their goal is different. They say that a program consists of two important components:
Data (which is handled by data structures in our programs) Behaviour (which we normally write in methods/functions)
OOP works on the concept of bringing the Data and Behaviour at the same place. This place in OOP is called an Object.
FP says that the data and the behavior of a program are different and should be kept separately. This makes it completely different from OOP.
Since we cannot keep the data and the behavior in FP at a single location, we cannot create objects and hence no classes in FP. Rather, FP works on a different pipeline like model where you have a pipeline of functions where you provide a data structure as an input and get a modified data structure as the output.
Functional Programming in Elixir
In contrast to Ruby where OOP is followed by creating Classes and instantiating them by creating their Objects and calling methods on those objects to change their data.
Elixir follows the functional programming paradigm by creating:
Modules Functions (Pure functions ideally)
Let’s take an example to understand this. Suppose you have a bicycle shop. You want to drop down the rates of those bicycles by $100 whose manufactury date is more than 6 months old.
Let’s see how this can be done in ruby.
Ruby Code
To do this in Ruby, you would have to keep cycle_id , cost and manufacture_date (Data) and their methods reduce_cost and old_bycicles (Behaviour) in a class called Behaviour . This class tells us how bicycles (Objects) will be created and how their data will be stored.
Ruby Code
To reduce the cost of an array of bicycles you will call .each method ON an Array Object of bicycle objects and eventually call reduce_cost method ON each bicycle object.
To do the same thing in Elixir.
Elixir Code
Here, instead of creating a class or objects, we are using a module Bicycle in elixir to enclose a set of function(s) bicycles_with_reduced_cost .
We are passing an array of old_bicycles and passing it to bicycles_with_reduced_cost function which is processing it and returning a NEW array of bicycles in new_bicycles . The new_bicycles will be a different array from the old_bicycles .
Immutability in Elixir
You will be able to compare it with them old_bicycles and see the differences. This is because of immutability in Elixir. This way of checking the differences and seeing if a certain method was called is not possible in Ruby natively because the objects in Ruby are mutable and can change themselves. Therefore, the only way to check if a method was called in Ruby is to check the flow of the code whereas you could easily compare the data structure before and after calling a function in Elixir to verify the same.
There are a lot of other interesting features in Elixir that I found will be really helpful for Ruby developers.
Pipe Operator Pattern Matching Scaling through processes OTP (Open Telecom Platform)
But let’s keep the discussion on these for some other time. :)
What is the final Outcome?
Should we say goodbye to Ruby (Or OOP) and adopt Elixir (Or FP) for the future?
Well, the answer to this question is that it depends on the kind of application you are building. I saw a wonderful line in this blog and Quoting because it deserves to be mentioned. ;)
Michael Fogus, author of “Functional JavaScript”, suggests in his blog post “FP vs OO, from the trenches”. That when he deals with data about people, FP works well, but when he tries to simulate people, OOP works well.
❤️ Like, Share or Leave A Comment!
If you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to give it a 👏🏼, share it with a friend you think might benefit from it and leave a comment! Stay tuned for more exciting blogs on Flutter, Elixir, React, Angular, Ruby, etc.
Thanks !! | https://medium.com/stackavenue/ruby-to-elixir-a-paradigm-shift-ebc410c1a066 | ['Vikram Singh Jadon'] | 2019-06-17 11:34:02.365000+00:00 | ['Elixir', 'Functional Programming', 'Ruby'] |
From Linear Regression to Ridge Regression, the Lasso, and the Elastic Net | Figure 1: An image visualising how ordinary regression compares to the Lasso, the Ridge and the Elastic Net Regressors. Image Citation: Zou, H., & Hastie, T. (2005). Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net.
From Linear Regression to Ridge Regression, the Lasso, and the Elastic Net
Introduction:
Ordinary Least Squares (‘OLS’) is one of the oldest and most simple algorithms used for regression. However, there are now several variants that were invented to address some of the weakness encountered when using regular least squares regression.
Despite being one of the oldest algorithms, linear models are still very useful. In fact they often can outperform fancy and sophisticated models. They are particularly useful when there is not a huge amount of observations, or when the inputs reliably predict the response (low signal to noise ratio).
In this article, we will first review the basic formulation of regression using linear regression, discuss how we solve for the parameters (weights) using gradient descent, and then introduce Ridge Regression. We will then discuss the Lasso, and finally the Elastic Net. This article also will belong to my series on building Machine Learning algorithms from Scratch (mostly). So far, I have discussed Logistic regression from scratch, deriving principal components from the singular value decomposition and genetic algorithms.
We will use a real world Cancer dataset from a 1989 study to learn about other types of regression, shrinkage, and why sometimes linear regression is not sufficient.
Cancer Data:
This dataset consists of 97 observations from a real scientific study done in 1989. The data includes 8 predictors and the outcome of interest is lpsa (log prostate specific antigen).
This dataset is discussed in somewhat detail in The Elements of Statistical Learning.
First, we load the libraries we will use and then read in the dataset.
Here is what the first few observations look like:
Figure 2: The first few observations of the prostate cancer dataset. The predictors include log cavol, log weight, age, lbph, sci , lcp , gleason, pgg45. We also have an indicator telling us if the observation belongs to the training or test set. Image from Author.
Of the 97 observations, 67 are indicated to belong to the training, while the remaining 30 are saved for testing at the end of training the algorithms. Notice, we won’t need the ‘Id’ column or the ‘train’ column, so we remove them. We also scale and centre our columns as is often recommended before regression.
We first split the 97 observations into an initial training set and testing set. The size of the initial training set was 67, with the remaining 30 observations in the test set. (x_train,y_train) and (x_test,y_test). We will further decompose our training set into a train/validation set later in the article. Note that our models will be evaluated on the test data, so we don’t use the test data anywhere in fitting our models.
Regression Setup:
First, consider a simple regression problem with N observations (rows) and p predictors (columns) that consists of:
N x 1 vector of outcomes, Y.
Figure 3: Our vector of outcomes for each of our N observations. Figure from Author.
N x (p+1) matrix of observations , X
Figure 4: Each of the N observations is represented in a row. We also add in an additional 1 to each observation to account for the intercept or ‘bias’ term. Figure from Author.
(p+1) x 1 vector of Weights, W.
Figure 5: Our vector of Weights, W. Figure from Author.
To obtain our predictions, we multiply our weights, W, by our observations, X. Hence, the residuals, or the difference between the true outcome and our prediction can be represented in a N x 1 matrix:
Figure 6: Our Prediction minus our estimate. Note that the estimate is obtained my multiplying the weights by our observations. The closer our prediction is to the true value, the closer to zero the row will be. Figure from Author.
The ‘perfect’ case would be that the matrix in Figure 6 was full of zeros, as this would represent a perfect fit on the training data. But that is almost never the case, and this would also likely represent a case of ‘overfitting’ the model.
Cost Functions:
In order to determine how good a model is, we need some definition of ‘goodness’. In linear regression, this is almost always the mean square error (MSE). This is simply the sum of square errors between our estimate and the true observation.
Figure 7: The red dots represent the actual observations, and the surface represents our prediction at any point (X1,X2). The lines indicate the distance from our prediction to the actual observed data. The sum of the squares of these distances defines our cost in least squares. Image Citation: This image is used with permission and appears as Figure 3.1 in Elements of Statistical Learning, II edition.
Typically, this is defined over an example as the loss function. For the whole training data, we work with the cost function, which is the average of losses over each training example.
To find the minimum of the cost surface, we use gradient descent , which involves taking the derivative with respect to each parameter.
When there are only two parameters, the cost surface can actually be visualized as a contour plot. In higher dimensions, we cant directly visualize the surface, but the process remains the same for finding the minimum. Gradient descent relies on the learning rate alpha, which controls the step size we take.
Figure 8: Gradient descent is the process of taking steps to find the minimum of the loss surface. Image Citation: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Non-convex-optimization-We-utilize-stochastic-gradient-descent-to-find-a-local-optimum_fig1_325142728
For each epoch or iteration, we calculate the derivative of each parameter with respect to the cost function, and take a step in the direction (the steepest) direction. This ensures we reach a minima (eventually). In reality, it is not so simple, as the learning rate can be too large, or too small leading to becoming trapped in local optima.
Figure 9: Gradient Descent. The steps for training our weights (parameters). This involves updating each weight by subtracting the derivative of the cost function with respect to the weight, multiplied by alpha ( the learning rate). Figure from Author.
Now is a good time to define some helper functions that we will use later on:
Linear Regression:
Linear Regression is the most simple regression algorithm and was first described in 1875. The name ‘regression’ derives from the phenomena Francis Galton noticed of regression towards the mean. This referred to the fact that while children of very tall parents or very short parents were usually still taller or shorter , they tended to be closer to the mean height. This was termed “regression towards the mean”.
Figure 10: Galton’s Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature. Image Citation: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00509.x
Least Squares Regression works by simply fitting a line (or a hypersurface in more than 2 dimensions) and computing the distance from the estimate to the actual observed points. The Least Squares model is the model that minimizes the squared distance between the model and the observed data.
Figure 11: Cost Function for linear regression. The cost is the normalised sum of the individual loss functions. This is the same as the Mean Square Error multiplied by a scalar ( the result in the end is equivalent). Figure from Author.
Figure 12: Derivative of the cost function for linear regression. Figure from Author.
You may notice that this could make our algorithm susceptible to outliers, where a single outlying observation could greatly impact our estimate. That is true. In other words, linear regression is not robust to outliers.
Another issue is that we may fit the line to the training data too well. Suppose we have a lot of training data, and many predictors, some with colinearlity. It is possible we will obtain a line that fits the training data extremely well, but it may not perform as well on test data. This is where the alternate linear regression methods can excel. Because we consider all the predictors in least squares, this makes it susceptible to overfitting, as there is no penalty for adding extra predictors.
Because Linear Regression doesn’t require that we tune any hyperparameters, we can fit our model using the training dataset. We then evaluate the linear model on the test data set, and obtain our Mean Square Error.
Gradient Descent from Scratch:
The following code implements gradient descent from scratch, and we provide the option of adding in a regularization parameter. By default, ‘reg’ is set to zero, so this will be equivalent to gradient descent on the cost function associated with simple least squares. When reg is larger than zero, the algorithm will produce results for ridge regression.
Since we are now using a custom function, we need to add a column of ones to our matrix x_train_scaled, these will account for the intercept term (the terms that will multiply by the weight W0). We also turn our objects into numpy arrays to allow for easier matrix calculations.
Let us check out how the gradient descent went:
Figure 14: The cost decreases quite quickly as we continue to form better and better weights. Figure from Author. Figure from Author.
Now let use use the weights we obtained using gradient descent to form a prediction on our test data. Our builtin MSE function will use Wlinear to calculate the predictions, and will return the test MSE.
Using gradient descent to obtain our weights, we obtain an MSE of 0.547 on our test data.
Ridge Regression:
Ridge regression works with an enhanced cost function when compared to the least squares cost function. Instead of the simple sum of squares, Ridge regression introduces an additional ‘regularization’ parameter that penalizes the size of the weights.
Figure 15: Cost Function for Ridge regression. The cost is the normalized sum of the individual loss functions. This cost function penalizes the weights by a positive parameter lambda. Figure from Author.
Fortunately, the derivative of this cost function is still easy to compute and hence we can still use gradient descent.
Figure 16: The derivative of the cost function for ridge regression. Figure from Author.
Quick Facts:
Ridge regression is a special case of Tikhonov regularization
Closed form solution exists, as the addition of diagonal elements on the matrix ensures it is invertible.
Allows for a tolerable amount of additional bias in return for a large increase in efficiency.
Used in Neural Networks, where it is referred to as Weight Decay.
Use when you have too many predictors, or predictors have a high degree of Multicollinearity between each other.
Equivalent to Ordinary Least Squares when lambda is 0.
Also known L2 Regularization.
Regularization. You must scale your predictors before applying Ridge.
Figure 17: Comparison of the OLS estimates and Ridge Regression estimates in the two dimensional case. Notice the ridge estimates are bounded in a circle at the origin from the regularization term in the cost function. The Ridge estimates can be viewed as the point where the linear regression coefficient contours intersect the circle defined by B1²+B2²≤lambda. Image Citation: Elements of Statistical Learning , 2nd Edition.
Because we have a hyperparameter, lambda, in Ridge regression we form an additional holdout set called the validation set. This is separate from the test set and allows us to tune the ideal hyperparameter.
Choosing Lambda:
To find the ideal lambda, we calculate the MSE on the validation set using a sequence of possible lambda values. The function getRidgeLambda tries a sequence of lambda values on the holdout training set, and checks the MSE on the validation set. It returns the ideal parameter lambda, which we will then use to fit our whole training data with.
The ideal lambda is 8.8 as it results in the lowest MSE on the validation data.
Using Cross Validation, we obtain an ideal ‘reg’ parameter of lambda=8.8, so we use this to obtain our ridge estimates using gradient descent.
Using Ridge Regression, we get an even better MSE on the test data of 0.511. Notice our coefficients have been ‘shrunk’ when compared to the coefficients estimated in least squares.
Lasso Regression:
Lasso Regression or (‘Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator’) also works with an alternate cost function;
Figure 18: The Cost function for the Lasso Regression. We still regularize, but using L1 regularization instead of L2 as in ridge. This derivative of this cost function has no closed form. Figure from Author.
However, the derivative of the cost function has no closed form (due to the L1 loss on the weights) which means we can’t simply apply gradient descent. Lasso allows for the possibility that a coefficient can actually be forced to zero (see Figure 19), essentially making Lasso a method of model selection as well as a regression technique.
Quick Facts:
Known as a method that ‘induces sparsity’.
Sometimes referred to as Basis Pursuit.
Figure 19: Comparison of the OLS estimates and the Lasso Regression estimates. Notice the Lasso estimates are bounded in a box at the origin from the regularization term in the cost function. The point where the ellipses intersect the bounding box give us the lasso estimates. Notice in the above, we intersect at a corner, this results in that coefficient (B1) in the above case being set to zero. Image Citation: Elements of Statistical Learning, II edition.
Since we can’t apply gradient descent, we use scikit-learn’s built in function for calculating the ideal weights. However, this still requires we pick the ideal shrinkage parameter (as we did for ridge). We take the same approach that we took in ridge regression to search for the ideal regularization parameter on the validation data.
Lasso provides an MSE of 0.482 on the test data , which is even less than ridge and linear regression! Moreover, Lasso also sets some coefficients to zero, eliminating them completely from consideration.
The Elastic Net:
Finally, we come to the Elastic Net.
Figure 20: The cost function for the Elastic Net. It contains L1 and L2 loss. Figure from Author.
The elastic net has TWO parameters, thus, instead of searching for a single ideal parameter, we will need to search a grid of combinations. Hence training might be a bit slow. Instead of search for lambda1 and lambda2 directly, it often is best to instead search for an ideal ratio between the two parameters, and an alpha parameter that is the sum of lambda1 and lambda2.
Quick Facts:
Linear, Ridge and the Lasso can all be seen as special cases of the Elastic net.
In 2014, it was proven that the Elastic Net can be reduced to a linear support vector machine.
The loss function is strongly convex, and hence a unique minimum exists.
The Elastic Net is an extension of the Lasso, it combines both L1 and L2 regularization. So we need a lambda1 for the L1 and a lambda2 for the L2. Similarly to the Lasso, the derivative has no closed form, so we need to use python’s built in functionality. We also need to find the ideal ratio between our two parameters, and the additional alpha parameter that is the sum of lambda1 and lambda2.
Figure 21: The Elastic Net (red) is a combination of ridge regression (green) and the lasso (blue). Image Citation: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Visualization-of-the-elastic-net-regularization-red-combining-the-L2-norm-green-of_fig6_330380054
We don’t code the Elastic Net from scratch, scikit-learn provides it.
We do however perform cross validation to choose the two parameters, alpha and l1_ratio. Once we have the ideal parameters, we train our algorithm on the full training using the chosen parameters.
Wow! Elastic Net provides an even smaller MSE (0.450) than all the other models.
Putting it together:
Finally, we have calculated the results for Least Squares, Ridge, Lasso and the Elastic Net. We have obtained weights for each of these methods, and also obtained the MSE on the original test dataset. We can summarize how these methods performed in a table.
Figure 22: The final comparison of each of our models. This table summarizes the final estimated coefficients, and the mean square error on the test set. Figure from Author.
Simple least squares performed the worst on our test data compared to all other models. Ridge regression provided similar results to least squares, but it did better on the test data and shrunk most of the parameters. Elastic Net ended up providing the best MSE on the test dataset by quite a wide margin. Elastic Net removed lcp, gleason and age and shrunk other parameters. Lasso also removed the consideration of age, lcp and gleason but performed slightly worse than Elastic Net.
Summary:
Understanding basic least squares regression is still extremely useful, but there are other improved methods that should also be considered. One issue with regular least squares is that it doesn’t account for the possibility of overfitting. Ridge regression takes care of this by shrinking certain parameters. Lasso takes this a step even further by allowing certain coefficients to be outright forced to zero, eliminating them from the model. Finally, Elastic Net combines the benefits of both lasso and ridge.
In certain cases, we can derive exact solutions for least squares, and we can always derive solutions for ridge provided lambda is >0 . Choosing lambda is the hard part (you should use cross validation on the training dataset to choose the ideal lambda). We didn’t show the closed form solutions in this guide, because it is better to learn how the solutions can be solved from scratch, and because the closed form solutions don’t usually exist in high dimensions.
Thank you for reading, and please send me any questions or comments!
Want to learn more?
If you liked these topics and want to learn more advanced regression techniques, check out the following topics:
Sources:
Images from Elements of Statistical Learning are used with permission. “The authors (Hastie) retain the copyright for all these figures. They can be used in academic presentations.”
Code on GitHub:
[1] Zou, H., & Hastie, T. (2005). Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net. Journal of the royal statistical society: series B (statistical methodology).
[2] Amini, Alexander & Soleimany, Ava & Karaman, Sertac & Rus, Daniela. (2018). Spatial Uncertainty Sampling for End-to-End Control. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
[3] Stamey, T. A., Kabalin, J. N., McNeal, J. E., Johnstone, I. M., Freiha, F., Redwine, E. A., & Yang, N. (1989). Prostate specific antigen in the diagnosis and treatment of adenocarcinoma of the prostate. II. Radical prostatectomy treated patients. The Journal of urology, 141(5), 1076–1083. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-5347(17)41175-x
[4] Hastie, T., Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., & Friedman, J. H. (2001). The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction. New York: Springer.
[5] Hoerl, A. E., & Kennard, R. W. (1970). Ridge regression: Biased estimation for nonorthogonal problems. Technometrics.
[6] Tibshirani, R. (1996). Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological), 58(1), 267–288. | https://towardsdatascience.com/from-linear-regression-to-ridge-regression-the-lasso-and-the-elastic-net-4eaecaf5f7e6 | [] | 2020-11-06 19:49:35.401000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Linear Regression', 'Machine Learning', 'Statistics'] |
I Am Not Your Sweetie | “I am not your sweetie or your cutie.”
The response came cold, swift, and fierce.
A man I had never met rejected my affections outright. He resented them.
Still, I persisted. Some days, social media is worth nothing more than a release of aggression, not unlike boxing gyms or the self-contained parlors specifically reserved for smashing dishes.
He was a Trump apologist, spewing all the usual filth about Biden’s canoodling with the Chinese, the specter of socialist horror, and the threats of $6 gas and the destruction of retirement funds.
Usually, I don’t bite on such unsatisfying morsels. As with stress eating, feeding myself on the fried rancid nuggets of untruth and disinformation on social media only leaves me feeling sick and full, never nourished nor sated. I ate this invitation like a double chocolate Milano. One more couldn’t hurt, even if it wouldn’t help.
“I voted for Biden. Say goodbye to racism, destruction of institutions, embarrassment among the international community, and the pimping out of the White House for narcissistic gain. Go, Biden/Harris!”
Within seconds, he answered.
“That’s a stupid response!”
With a textual wink and leer, I continued with the overture, not intending to lure him in as a sexual object, but to set him back on his heels.
“That’s all you got?? Hahahahaha! Okay. Lovin’ you, darlin’. Keep it up.”
Darlin’.
It was by design. One mustachioed and bearded man calling another long-haired and mustachioed man “darlin’.”
I imagine most straight men don’t like to be called “darlin’” by other men. “Darlin’” is the exclusive domain of sassy waitresses in diners where flirtation is part of the service, and tips are awarded by how well one plays the role.
I am not looking for tips. I aim to make a point.
When engaged in word-to-word combat on social media, which admittedly is a most useless endeavor, I find it hard to resist showering my opponent with terms of endearment, not epithets. While sparring with today’s foe, I made sure to punctuate each of my arguments with “sweetie” or “cutie” or another sugar-coated barb, still working assiduously to convey my message with some degree of seriousness.
Darlin’. Cutie. Sweetie. Honey. Baby. Buttercup. Snowflake.
First, they are caught off guard. Men don’t usually talk to each other that way, unless it’s at the corner of 18th and Castro. Keeping one’s opponents unsteady and on the defensive is one of the first tenets of warfare. I don’t know if pleasantries and innuendo were part of Sun Tzu’s strategic ploys, but I’ll generously offer up my playbook if it would be helpful to future generals and commanders.
Second, I’d like to reclaim terms of endearment and flip hypocorisms for all of us. Why should scruffy men, redolent of cigarettes, petrol, and sweat, at the Waffle House have all the love? Why shouldn’t straight white Republican men have some of my affection, even if saucily delivered? We are a divided country. I would like to issue my dissent and protest with a pet name or two…if only to accentuate the sweetness of my voice.
Ultimately, when I use “darlin’”, “sweetie”, “cutie”, or “honey” in a politically-charged conversation with other men, it is a dare. I want them to rail against the insincerity and condescension. I would like them to know what it feels to be patted on the head while being shoved down with both hands. Let us remember moments when many of us — usually our sisters, mothers, aunts, friends, and lovers — were dismissed and ridiculed for speaking up and yelling at the top of our lungs, as if we were just restive and rambunctious children.
I dare you to call me a “faggot.” We both know that I’ve survived worse — and you would look like a coward.
58% of American white men voted for Trump. I presume many of them are straight. For the gay white men who voted for Trump, I would only say, “You are not darling, sweet, or cute. I am ashamed for you.”
For the other American white men who voted for Trump and continue to be the water-carriers for his racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, climate crisis denial, and vengeance against immigrants and refugees, I will call you “darlin’” and “sweetie” as a diversion from my baser impulses. You are more than just an idiot. Coarse name-calling is cheap. When I call you “sweetie” or “cutie” — with all of the insincerity and derision that those words hold — you might understand what it means to be treated as if you didn’t really matter.
Or, you might find that I’m actually capable of kindness.
After some back and forth, my adversary offered that I live under Biden’s rules and he would live under Trump’s rules, and we would see who prospered.
“That’s all well and good with me, sweetie,” I wrote. “The problem is that we live in the same country for now. I lived in the US with Trump in the White House for four years. I didn’t like it. I voted for someone else. What was that line in 2016: “Suck it up, buttercup”? As long as we are Americans, which we are the last time I checked, we are in this together. Okay, cutie?”
“I am not your sweetie or your cutie,” he responded tersely.
Lovin’ you, darlin’. This is where we are. | https://medium.com/@anthonyweeks/i-am-not-your-sweetie-4520ef0c2ac5 | ['Anthony Weeks'] | 2020-11-07 16:56:59.888000+00:00 | ['Terms Of Endearment', 'Sexism', 'Politics', 'Homophobia', 'Warfare'] |
Don’t Just Do the Right Thing, Act Beautifully | Morality is universal, or isn’t it?
In the current political scenario, it feels that the line between right and wrong can be twisted. The same act is interpreted as both right or wrong depending on who is providing judgment. The notion of morality is being challenged as never before.
The lenses we apply distort how we judge events and other people.
When a society is having a moral standard clash, it’s time to ask ourselves: what factors do we pay attention to when making a moral judgment?
This post is an invitation to reflect on how you approach morality, not to tell you what’s right or wrong. The perfection of our soul requires acting wisely, not just doing the right thing.
Moral lenses distort our judgment
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”― Aristotle
We all experience the same reality, yet it seems that everyone is watching a different movie. That’s the problem with moral lenses — they can distort our judgment.
Do your intentions define your personal morality? Or do your actions?
Your answer to this simple, yet fundamental question, defines the kind of ‘ethical lens’ you tend to use.
For strict utilitarians, the outcome is all that matters — intentions, not so much. The problem is when people do what’s considered right, but are not internally convinced. That happens when our actions are driven by hypocrisy or political correctness rather than by our internal morality — it’s like donating money to a cause because it looks good, not because we care about it.
For deontologists, the action is all that matters — the intention or outcome are not as important as what you do. The act itself defines if you are behaving morally or not.
For virtue ethicists, we should care about one’s internal relation to the act— who you are in doing something, is more important than what you do. This approach is based on the notion that, a wise person, would know what to do — you have a natural tendency to do the right thing.
Action, intention, and outcome are interconnected. Sometimes, it can play against us. For example, if your intentions and actions are good but, the outcome is not, people will judge your actions as negative even though you were trying to do good.
The lenses you use don’t just determine your moral actions; they influence how you evaluate or judge others too.
Why we love to blame and punish
Our instincts play a significant role in our behaviors. We have an impulse to react to sad or adverse events — the mind wants to have ‘cognitive closure.’ We prefer having an answer as quickly as possible than to discover the truth.
We quickly rush into moral judgment— when an incident creates fear and anxiety, we want to find someone to blame and punish.
Research suggests we have two cognitive processes to make moral verdicts: one for outcome and another for intent. Usually, these two collide.
People believe that punishment should be based on outcomes, not intentions.
Intentions motivate blame: Did they mean to do it? Or was it an accident? And punishment is defined by outcomes: What actually happened? Who caused it to happen?
This Psychology Today piece presents an interesting challenge, who’s worst? A driver that misses a red light by accident and kills someone? Or a driver that wants to kills someone on purpose but misses?
We would undergo a conflict between accounting for the first driver’s intent and the outcome of the driver’s action. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but people would still want to punish him. However, people would be less willing to punish the second driver because she caused no harm — they will assign more blame though.
Social values influence our moral judgments too. What most people do is what’s the right thing to do.
Many Americans responded to last year’s Charlottesville violent incident with disbelieving horror: “This is not who we are.” However, as this Washington Post piece explains: “It is who we are.” People learn from their culture and society — if kids are raised around people who sanction racism, they will take it as socially accepted.
Which takes to the origin of violence. Is it driven by evil hearts? Or is it conditioned by our moral values and judgment?
Lessons from our violent-self
Why do people lose control and become violent?
That’s the premise of this insightful AON piece “How could they?”
Contrary to popular belief, very few of violent crimes are committed by ‘crazy people.’
According to a large-scale study of criminal offenders, around 10 percent were committed by those who score above the cut-off for psychopathy. Most of us would never think of committing any of the atrocities that we see on the news. However, what is even more troubling is to accept that someone ‘normal,’ like us, can turn into a perpetrator.
So, what causes ‘normal’ people to commit violent acts?
The Disinhibition theory explains that even ordinary people have violent impulses — they are under control until a particular stimulus triggers violence. Typically, it’s caused by someone who mistreats them. Imagine a man that has a rough day at work and then, suddenly, beats his wife because his boss treated him disrespectfully.
The Rational approach establishes that violence is a means to an end: a way to achieve instrumental goals. Take the example of a country invading other — regardless of the collateral damage — just to take over its natural resources.
Tage Rai concluded that both theories felt short. The author of the above-mentioned article, decided to address the root cause of violence: “Why do people disagree?”
After years of research, professor Rai determined that “violence is a way to regulate social relationships.”
Moral is in the eye of the beholder — the aggressor decides to eliminate those who are behaving immorally according to his/her standards. Throughout history, we’ve experienced many ‘Moral Cleansing’ episodes that — though initially ignited by a psychopath — were implemented and carried out by a large group of people who were previously considered ‘normal.’
The Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan Genocide are some of the many sad examples of this justification of violence based on someone’s superior moral values.
Perpetrators use violence to create, repair, sustain or change valued relationships. The purpose of violence is to maintain one’s moral order.
As Tage Rai wraps us his explanation: “if genuine moral beliefs can motivate dangerous people, we have an issue.”
Moral absolutism is relative
“Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton
Absolutism motivates Moral cleansing — perpetrators believe morality is absolute: they know what it is, but the rest doesn’t.
McCarthyism is a classical example. Senator Joseph McCarthy said: “I decide who’s a communist and if you doubt my decisions, you’re a communist too.” The Catholic Church used a similar approach in many occasions: “In the name of Holiness, we decide.”
Some moral absolutes are clear — we all know it’s wrong to kill someone.
However, absolutists use morality as self-serving — to manage their reputation. They don’t apply moral lenses consistently and universally. Sociological studies have shown that, when exposed to violent acts, people are more accepting if those happened a long time ago or in a country or culture far away from theirs.
It’s easier to accept and assign lower moral standards to others.
Pope Benedict XVI said: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
This view creates a worrying tension: either you follow the absolute moral (from the absolutist in charge), or you are simply embracing a bad behavior. They believed, because people are flawed human beings, that we cannot make moral decisions on our own.
Absolutism determines that external moral rules —established by Government, Religion, or a corporation — must always be obeyed without any questioning.
Barbara O’Brien says it better on this Thought Co piece: “The notion that there are only two approaches to morality — you either follow the rules or you are a hedonist with no moral compass — is a false one. There are many approaches to morality, and these approaches should be judged by their fruits — whether their overall effect is beneficial or harmful.”
The author explains Buddhist ethical decision-making. There are no moral absolutes — our choices involve a complex nexus of causes and conditions.
Clearly, our natural morality is, by design, limited — rather than being fixed it’s something that we need to train.
Forget moral, act beautifully instead
“Hatreds never cease by hatred in this world; through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law.”— Buddha
Buddhist psychology believes that we are all born sane. That makes a lot of sense if we get back to the fact that psychopaths commit only 10 percent of crimes. Anyone can make a wrong turn.
I’m not justifying violent acts by any means.
However, the pressure to conform to social norms sometimes backfire. Many people were absolutely normal and perfect (to the eyes of others) and, all of a sudden they snap. So, what happened?
Repressing one’s negative side can be damaging — being a hypocrite to please others, doesn’t make you a better person. You deny a part of you. At some point, that pressure will have to be released — that’s why some people become violent all of a sudden.
The pressure to be perceived as a moral person is hard — many people will do whatever it takes to earn those bragging rights.
What if we embrace good and evil as the two sides of the same coin? Understanding that this duality lives within everyone can remove the tension that, ultimately, causes more harm.
Acknowledging the good-evil duality is not just being kind to yourself — it will help you manage internal pressure. If we deny our evil side, it’s easier for us to explode and lose control. Accepting the wild wolves that live within us, is the first step towards taming them, as I explained here.
As Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Right and wrong are neither moral judgments nor arbitrary standards from outside. Through our own awareness, we discover what is beneficial (“right”) and what is unbeneficial (“wrong”).”
Rather than pushing people to do something because it’s right, our society must help them become wiser. Detractors might think that this will only drive chaos. To clarify, I’m not about removing the laws, but to acknowledge that, laws by themselves won’t make people behave better.
Take the change that’s happening in the workplace as an example.
Many companies are letting go of regulations and rules. They are providing their employees with more freedom to choose — treating them as grown-ups, not children. The results are very positive: people are becoming more accountable and engaged. We must learn to trust people’s wisdom.
Aristotle associated the rightness of an act with its beauty. A virtuous act is the right thing to do, primarily because it harmonizes with the concrete elements of a situation. It drives fulfillment.
The Greek philosopher stated a clear formula. The doer of the moral deed must have a certain ‘state of mind’ in doing it. First, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose it, and choose it for itself, and thirdly, the act must be the expression of a formed and stable character.”
Immanuel Kant said: “So act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your person in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as means.”
Buddhism talks about wisdom, rather than justice. It upholds the ideal of not doing to others what you would not want them to do to you. It encourages us to embrace ‘wise view,’ ‘wise speech,’ and ‘wise action.’
Kant talked about beautiful acts when it feels natural to do something — you have the inclination to act beautifully.
Beautiful action is about paying attention to the world. As a doer, you don’t feel divided — what you do is aligned with your own values, not just with external laws. | https://medium.com/liberationist-thoughts/the-perfection-of-the-soul-dont-just-do-the-right-thing-5db2890e6ece | ['Gustavo Razzetti'] | 2019-08-08 22:30:35.315000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement', 'Leadership'] |
A Negroni in Lisbon | “You see that bridge? What does it look like to you?”
“Um — the Golden Gate bridge?”
“Yes! San Francisco! Same architect, did you know that? But ours is bigger. Wait, maybe smaller.”
It’s the third time that day the striking red bridge over the Tagus river is pointed out to me, and the third time the narrator debated how Lisbon’s bridge measured up to its famous American counterpart. But I play along. If a fib allows someone’s happiness to bubble up to the surface for a few seconds, how can it be wrong?
I sprawl on the sailboat, the dictionary-definition of languid, looking at the bridge and the towering Jesus with the receptive hands that I’ve also been told by multiple people (and also fibbed about not knowing) was inspired by the iconic Rio de Janeiro version.
“It was to honor us for remaining neutral during World War II,” the boat’s skipper says proudly. I think of Memorial Day being celebrated back home in the US at that moment, of my grandfather who laid in soiled sheets in a dark submarine for hours to avoid detection by the Nazis, of my great-uncle whose plane was shot out of an Italian sky before he could legally drink — and choose silence.
The waves lap gently at the side of the small sailboat and the hot air toasts my sunscreen-lathered skin. I close my eyes and sink into my body.
I read an article a few months back about how when we travel, we focus on all the ways we can change the external factors — what we see, eat, and do each day — but forget that we’ve also brought along our minds, with their thought patterns and anxieties and all the other quirks we’d rather have left at home. Travel isn’t a cure. “We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones,” it said.
In the end, it’s all about gratitude. Wherever you go, you have to be able to find pleasure in the banal and joy in the routine.
That’s what this trip will be for me, I decide. A practice in gratitude. I’m tagging with my husband, who is attending a conference here in Lisbon. Unlike most other trips we’d taken, there are no expectations tied to this one. Paris had been Romance. Rome had been History. Peru had been Machu Picchu. Bali had been Healing. But Lisbon — well, Lisbon doesn’t have anything it has to live up to. Gratitude seems like a good assignment as any.
Gratitude begins with awareness — you notice, you appreciate. I start this practice as soon as we check into our Airbnb in Barrio Alto, a neighborhood we’ve been warned will be noisy at night. The notion of lively bars and top-notch restaurants and singing in the streets below our bedroom window sounds pretty dreamy to us — almost as dreamy as the AirBnb’s super low price tag.
The stairs are narrow enough that I can’t carry my teal suitcase by my side; I have to hold it in front of me like a fat awkward child as I navigate the slippery wooden steps, each one a slightly different size than the previous. A man comes down from a floor above as we ascend, carrying a cardboard box filled with wine bottles. Seeing us come up (though hearing must have been his first sense activated due to our bags banging the walls), he retreats all the way back where he started from, the only way to allow us enough room to pass.
The mini-mountain climb is worth it. As we spin up and around the fifth and final flight of stairs, the skinny dank darkness transforms into a breezy space with skylights and hanging plants. An open doorway leads to a balcony overlooking the city, where a mountain range of red-tiled roofs guides our gaze to the grand Tagus River, and just passed it, hazy green hills.
“I’m actually from France,” says our host after handing us the keys and showing us how the hot water heater works. “I came to Lisbon for a work trip twenty years ago and forgot to leave.”
After filling us with tips and advice until our eyes start to glaze, he departs and the loft above the rooftops is ours. The swing hanging from a wooden ceiling beam, the squat white stove, the windows with the heavy shutters that flap open in the breeze, the mannequin in the corner wearing lacy red underwear, the oil painting of a man’s nude back — all ours. I walk around the small space slowly, letting my eyes rest on each item, contemplating the story behind it. Practicing awareness. Out on the balcony, I take a deep breath of air. Thank you, I think, Thank you for bringing me here. I’m not sure who I’m thanking — God, the universe, my husband, the airplane — but it doesn’t really matter.
I have a mind that tells stories, dissects memories, and creates scenes. It hops from past to future, future to past, like a time traveler who has lost control. This makes being in the moment, thus being aware, thus practicing gratitude, difficult.
But there are aspects of a summer vacation in Lisbon that help. We drink thick coffee in tiny cups and sink our teeth into warm, custard-filled pastries. We walk for miles on slippery tiled streets, up and down the city’s seven hills until our legs scream. We pop into dusty old churches and art galleries. We sit at a table under a tree dripping with oranges and sip cool Vinho Verde that manages to be juicy yet dry, completely satiating while leaving you wanting more. We wait until we are truly hungry then eat dinner at a tiny restaurant brimming with candles and loud voices. In front of us appear platters of black pork, cuttlefish in their own ink, clams in brothy rice, bowls of olives, crisp oven potatoes, beef tartare cradling a raw egg, and thick buttery mushrooms. We let the day carry us and make it a point to notice and to savor.
We don’t stress about work or make lists. For the first time in probably a month, I eat lunch away from a screen, the usual knot absent from my belly. I promise myself, as I always do on vacation, that this mindfulness, this joie de vivre, will be my only souvenir.
(Though I’ll end up coming home with two art prints, a box of chocolates, and a badly bruised finger from a surfing accident).
At what will turn out to be our favorite restaurant, we’re guided to the bar while we wait for our table to be ready. “I can make any cocktail,” says the bartender when we ask for a drink menu.
“An Old Fashioned?”
“Hmm, not that.”
“A Manhattan?”
“What’s in that one?”
“Okay, what cocktail do you like to make?”
His eyes light up. “A Negroni! I make the best.” Brow furrowing in concentration, he pulls out bottles, glasses, an orange, a knife. The restaurant is filled to the brim but the other servers pause their food runs and gather around the bar, watching the tall, bearded man behind it mix liquors with the intensity of a chemist.
And it is — the best.
A few days later, I’m belly-down on a surfboard, parallel to the miles of sandy, sparsely populated beach thirty minutes outside of Lisbon. My instructor floats next to me, a safari hat covering his bald head, his nose white with zinc. As I go over in my head for the hundredth the one-two-three-four steps to catch a wave while also trying not to get smacked in the face by the smaller waves passing under my board, he speaks low, steady words.
“Who controls your legs? Do your legs control your legs? No, it’s your mind. Everything is your mind.
“Be with yourself. It’s you and the sea, nothing else. Don’t worry — just be.
“Why are you thinking so much? You are so tense. You have too high expectations for yourself. Trust your body more — it knows what to do better than you do.
“Money, you can always earn more later. Time, you cannot. It’s gone forever. Don’t waste time for money.
“Once you leave the sea, move slowly. Stay in harmony with the ocean. If we move to fast, rush to the next thing, the peace we have gained leaves us. Slow down and let the peace of the ocean stay with you.”
For less than half of what I pay my therapist for a single session-I’m getting four hours of soul work plus surfing lessons.
Later that day, I take a nap and wake up feeling calm and connected to myself. While my husband works, I walk to a nearby park with my journal and a bottle of Vinho Verde. I don’t drink it though — instead, I watch a young couple roll in the grass in each other’s arms, a tightrope walker balance between two trees, and a man in a cross-legged meditation pose, gazing at the cloudless sky.
I doodle in my journal about the purple flowers and noble trees, but it’s the kissing and balancing and meditating that make me feel that everything in our world will ultimately be okay.
On our last morning in Lisbon, we wake up to phone notifications of a delayed flight. My husband goes out to get us coffee and pastries since we aren’t yet back in the US where sugar becomes evil. I pull up the covers and let my body rest. We have a few more hours. I don’t think about the clock ticketing down, only about how nice the sheets feel against my skin. | https://medium.com/@maryconroyalmada/a-negroni-in-lisbon-5a4ebb42864a | ['Mary Conroy Almada'] | 2021-01-15 12:18:30.686000+00:00 | ['Personal Essay', 'Memoir', 'Short Story', 'Portugal', 'Travel Blog'] |
How Sometimes Fallouts Hurt More Than Anything. | Fallout hurts as bad as breakup(yes)
I always had a hard time letting go off people who were close to me ,be it family,friends or anyone I’m close to for that matter. But specially in case of friends, it has never been my cup of tea.
I never had someone to call my best friend for more than a couple of months or sometimes a year when I’m lucky, since i was a child. So on the basis of too much of experience in this area, I can say ‘those who say fallouts doesn’t hurt as bad as breakups do are big fat liars' .
Why? You’ll only know and understand it totally once you’ll experience it. Specially when a person leaves you with no closure,these different scenarios you are making up in your head about ,where did you went wrong?
This question haunts you for so long and the desperation for closure you carry in your eyes is real. Those arguments you are having with that person in your head and in worst cases having dreams about them,where you both have patch up again.
To be very honest ,I have been through every phase I have discussed above, but the one that kills you slowly from inside and makes you hollow is the one where you see your bond fading , you witness it over the phone screen from all your chats and that pain in your heart ,when you know no matter how hard I try, nothing is gonna be same again.
It kills you inside, It eats you up. Doesn’t that sound like a freakin' real breakup. I go through severe anxiety when I doubt about my appearance , behaviour and my ability to be a friend, A good friend,I mean how bad I must be that no friend lasts more than a while.
But at the end only one thing helps;
“People may come for a reason,but in life,
Everything happens for a reason”
So you should never stop believing in this beautiful bond even it fails you million times,its worth it and it exits. | https://medium.com/@neeruyadav153099/i-always-had-a-hard-time-letting-go-off-people-who-were-close-to-me-be-it-family-friends-or-anyone-a55a50779078 | [] | 2020-12-22 20:27:03.988000+00:00 | ['Friendship', 'Loss', 'Fallout', 'Healing', 'Friends'] |
Coin Market Cap — Ripple (XRP) Price & Analysis, June 17, 2021 [CoinMarketCap] | XRP price continues to drop and is down 5.2% on the week.
It has been an amazing year for the digital property XRP, which showed fantastic development in the last number of months. Announcing in December 2020 that the SEC would take legal action against Ripple for performing an unregistered securities offering had a substantial influence on the value of XRP going into the brand-new year.
XRP has actually continued to post three-year highs since then, and reached $1.9669 in mid-April, despite the SEC news. Unfavorable news struck the crypto-verse again in the last couple of days of May, causing Bitcoin and XRP dropping to a low of $30k and $0.65, respectively.
Crypterium research study analysts anticipate that if the $0.80 support is not preserved, XRP might retest $0.65. XRP is presently trading at $0.8464. This is what they stated:
“XRP price continues to drop and is down 5.2% on the week. A coming down triangle pattern shows up on the chart. Purchasers provide strong support around the $0.80 mark.
The coin has actually not yet revealed any signs of growth after the current decreases. As a result, we prepare for a decrease to $0.65, with a possible breakdown above that level.
The 200-day moving average is presently the last line of defense of XRP from a bear market, as is true with most digital assets in the crypto market at the moment.
XRP/USDT chart shows that the important moving average is providing support at $0.72.
A weakened structure by XRP is visible from XRP’s everyday MACD, MFI, and RSI indicators, all of which indicate a retest of the 200-day moving average.
Simply put, if bulls fail to safeguard XRP at the 200-day moving average, the remittance coin will probably go on to retest its previous low of $0.65. | https://medium.com/@coinmarketcapitalization/coin-market-cap-ripple-xrp-price-analysis-june-17-2021-coinmarketcap-f0f5a97bb634 | ['Coin Market Cap'] | 2021-06-17 14:23:28.908000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency Market Cap', 'Ripple', 'Coinmarketcap', 'Crypto Market Cap', 'Xrp'] |
[READ]-Contra el cáncer / Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy (Spani… | [READ]-Contra el cáncer / Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy (Spani… Lisagriffith Dec 13, 2021·5 min read
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Contra el cáncer / Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy (Spani…
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For over a century, we’ve accepted the scientific consensus that cancer results from genetic disease due to chromosomal damage in cell nuclei. But what if cancer isn’t a genetic disease after all? What if scientists are chasing a flawed paradigm, and cancer isn’t a disease of damaged DNA but rather of defective metabolism as a result of mitochondrial dysfunction? What if that startling truth could revolutionize our understanding of other diseases as well — and show us a radical new path to optimal health?In this groundbreaking guide, the first of its kind, New York Times best-selling author and leading natural-health practitioner Joseph Mercola explains how nearly all disease is caused by defective metabolic processes. Then he reveals what’s really causing your metabolism to go haywire: damage and dysfunction in the mitochondria, thousands of which are at work in nearly every cell in your body, generating 90 percent of the energy you need to stay alive and well. When mitochondria become damaged in large numbers, it is impossible to stay healthy.Dr. Mercola shows you that you can to take control of your health simply by giving your body the proper fuel — and it’s not what you’ve likely been led to believe. A ketogenic diet, very low in carbohydrates and high in healthy fats, is the way to optimize the biochemical pathways that suppress disease and support healing. And the benefits can be astonishing — not only in treating or preventing serious illness, but in boosting your brainpower, increasing your energy, helping you lose weight and keep it off, and much more.As you read this book, you’ll learn in clear, rational terms how your body works at a molecular level. You’ll finally understand the type of fuel it’s designed to burn in the most efficient way possible. You’ll find detailed guidelines for starting and sticking with a ketogenic eating plan. And you won’t have to wait a decade or two for metabolic mitochondrial therapy to make its way into the mainstream. You can build a healthier body and brain at the cutting edge of this exciting new discipline, starting right now.
Books are a valuable source of knowledge that affects society in different ways. Whether you are reading a masterpiece by an award-winning author or narrating a bedtime story to children, the significance of books cannot be overemphasized.
Human beings need to learn and stay informed, which are crucial needs that books can fulfill. They are also essential for entertainment and enable individuals to develop wholesome mindsets throughout their lives.
“Millions of books have been published over the years and they continue to be an integral aspect of people’s lives around the globe.
From making it easier to understand different aspects of life to serve as worthwhile companions that take you through challenging times, books have proven to be precious commodities.
Books are essential in a variety of ways that go beyond enriching your mind or entertaining you. They have stood the test of time as reliable references for centuries. They stimulate your senses and promote good mental health. Other benefits include enhancing your vocabulary, allowing you to travel through words, and inspiring positivity through motivational literature.
While the internet and television are useful in their own ways, nothing can compare to a great book. Books ignite your imagination, give you new ideas, challenge your perspectives, provide solutions, and share wisdom. At every stage of your existence, you can find a relevant book that will add value to your personal and professional life.
Books are filled with knowledge and they teach you valuable lessons about life. They give you insight into how to navigate aspects of fear, love, challenges, and virtually every part of life. Books have been in existence since time immemorial and they hold secrets of the past while providing a glimpse of the cultures of previous civilizations.
A book has the power to change or reinforce how you feel about your surroundings. It is a therapeutic resource that can equip you with the tools you need to stay on track and maintain a good attitude. Whether you want to learn a new language or delve into the intrigues of nature, there is a book for every situation.
There are numerous reasons why books are important. Reading books is a popular hobby as people around the world rely on them for relief and entertainment. Books contain records of history and are used to spread vital information. Reading books helps to improve your communication skills and learn new things. It can be useful for easing anxiety among students and professionals.
Other reasons that highlight how important books are in their positive impact on intelligence, writing abilities, and analytical skills. Books give people a great way to escape into another dimension. They are packed with endless possibilities for adventure and experiences that would be difficult to access in reality.
It is essential for people to strive to include books in their daily lives aside from using them for academic or professional purposes. They aid emotional and mental growth, boost confidence, and sharpen your memory. It is natural for people to be curious and want to learn more, which is why books are still significant today.
Books are a valuable source of knowledge that affects society in different ways. Whether you are reading a masterpiece by an award-winning author or narrating a bedtime story to children, the significance of books cannot be overemphasized.
Human beings need to learn and stay informed, which are crucial needs that books can fulfill. They are also essential for entertainment and enable individuals to develop wholesome mindsets throughout their lives.
“ | https://medium.com/@lisagriffith_83872/download-http-co-readingbooks-host-book-6073161964-e6ebaac9c67b | [] | 2021-12-13 00:39:43.936000+00:00 | ['Download', 'Reading', 'Book', 'Read', 'eBook'] |
Autistic, Not an Idiot: The Evolution of the Autism Diagnosis | Autistic people did not just appear overnight. We did not call them Autistics. Instead, we used other names like odd or unusual. So, when and where did the label of Autism come from? I was curious and started digging. Here is what I learned.
Image of one person swimming against the current while all other people in the image are swimming in the same direction as the current. Image by Prawny from Pixabay
Not an “idiot.”
Was Leonardo da Vinci Autistic? What about Albert Einstein? Looking back at their traits and behaviors, we might now think that they might have been. I have read countless examples of historical figures showing autistic characteristics. The earliest example I read about was from 1799³. It was about a French boy named Victor, who liked to walk around naked in the forest³. At the time, he might have been called many things but not autistic³.
According to this Smithsonian Magazine article³, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe from Boston documented autistic traits as early as 1846. Dr. Howe was years ahead of his time and an early proponent of the rights for the disabled³. He is known for opening the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1832³.
In 1846, Howe implemented a mental health survey documenting hundreds of individuals exhibiting autistic traits³. One of his subjects was a man named Billy, who was 59 when Howe assessed him³. Howe described Billy as someone with severe “limitations in spoken language” but “superior cognition” in musical ability³. Billy was known for his “perfect musical pitch and knew more than 200 tunes”³.
Before Howe completed the health survey, the individuals such as Billy were called “idiots”³. It is hard to believe, but the word “idiot” in those days was not used in the way we used it today. Back then, “idiot” was used for someone with “deliberate sensitivity” and “intellectual disability”³.
Howe, along with his colleague, Dr. Samuel Woodward, differentiated autistic traits from “idiots” at the time. Dr. Woodward was the head of the Worcester Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts³. During the same timeframe, Dr. Woodward identified a group of children in his hospital that would not fit the definition of “idiots”³. Instead, he described them in the following manner³:
“Little patients with intelligent faces, well-formed bodies, good development of the head and active minds. Their movements are free, easy, and graceful. Many of them are sprightly, even handsome. They are generally restless, irritable, and extremely mischievous. They rarely are able to speak. No person familiar with these cases would be likely to mistake them for idiots” (Donvan & Zucker, 2016).
Although Howe and Woodward could not identify the root causes, they managed to identify common traits and behaviors that could help differentiate autistics from those who suffered from other disabilities³.
From Autoerotism to Autism
Autism entered the picture when Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Eugen Bleuler introduced it in 1911⁴. Bleuler derived Autism from the word “Autoerotism,”⁴ which was first introduced by an English physician Havelock Ellis⁸, and later adopted by Sigmund Freud in 1905⁴. Freud described “Autoerotism” as “hallucinatory thinking in conjunction with self-soothing in a stage of thinking which preceded the infant’s engagement with external reality”⁴.
Bleuler adopted the word “Autism” to describe the worst cases of schizophrenia⁴. Bleuler thought of Autism as “infantile wishes to avoid unsatisfying realities and replace them with fantasies and hallucinations”⁴. In the UK, Autism was deemed hallucinatory up until the 1950s⁴. Other researchers challenged this hallucinatory assumption of Bleuler, which resulted in a complete change of the description and meaning of Autism by the 1970s⁴.
Infantile Autism as Childhood Schizophrenia
Meanwhile, in the US, Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, gave a first formal diagnosis of Autism to a patient named Donald Gray Triplett of Forest, Mississippi⁶. In the 1940s, Kanner thought of Autism as “disturbances of affective contact,” but by 1956, he switched to the term “infantile autism”⁷. Like Bleuler⁴, Kanner also thought that “infantile Autism” should be categorized under childhood schizophrenia⁷.
Authors John Donvan and Caren Zucker have published Triplett’s story in a book titled “In a Different Key.” Donvan and Zucker also wrote the Smithsonian Magazine article mentioned earlier³.
Since his work was published worldwide, Kanner is generally given credit for discovering Autism³. However, Kanner believed that Autism had most likely existed before the recognition he brought to the condition³.
Asperger’s Syndrome
Kanner continued his work under the label of “infantile autism” in the US. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a Viennese psychiatrist, Hans Asperger, made his own discovery. In 1944, Asperger published a study describing the behaviors and abilities of four boys he observed⁷. A first, he called the condition “autistic personality disorders in childhood” and later called it “ autistic psychopathy”⁷.
Kanner and Asperger did not realize that they were working on the same condition⁷. Kanner’s patients had more severe symptoms, lower IQ and nonverbal; while, Asperger’s subjects had average or higher IQ⁷. Asperger described his patients as “little professors” and highlighted their abilities and strengths⁷.
Unfortunately, Asperger’s work was not widely published. It did not gain recognition on the international level until the British researcher Lorna Wing introduced it in 1981 in her publication titled “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account”⁷. Wing proposed discontinuing the use of the term “autistic psychopathy” and renamed it “Asperger’s Syndrome” because Wing suspected that Hans Asperger himself was also an autistic⁷.
Lorna Wing continued to bring awareness to Asperger’s work. Meanwhile, countries worldwide started to adopt the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. This manual is titled Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The second edition of the DSM (DSM-II) classified “infantile Autism” under childhood schizophrenia⁴.
Pervasive Developmental Disorders
When the third edition of the DSM (DSM-III) was published in 1980, the childhood schizophrenia category was removed from the manual⁴. Autism was categorized under a new class called the “Pervasive Developmental Disorders,” which was further divided into four subcategories: Infantile Autism, Childhood-onset Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Residual Autism, and an Atypical Form⁴.
Autism, Asperger’s, and PDD-NOS
By the early 1990s, Lorna Wing’s publications about Asperger’s Syndrome gained attention⁷. With this recognition and additional research, the DSM-IV, published in 1994, brought more changes to the Autism diagnosis. Autism was still categorized under “Pervasive Developmental Disorders”; however, there now were three subcategories: Autistic Disorder, Asperger’s Disorder, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS)⁵.
Kanner and Asperger thought that their patients did not share a common condition⁷. It was Wing’s work that provided enough evidence to show the overlap while also highlighting the differences between Infantile Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome⁷.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
The changes to the Autism diagnosis criteria did not stop with DSM-IV. The most current, 5th, edition of the DSM has dropped the subcategories and grouped all three forms under Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). According to the DSM-5, three deficits in social communication and interaction plus two types of restricted, repetitive behaviors must be present to diagnose ASD².
The reason for grouping the three forms under one spectrum disorder was to eliminate the clinician’s difficulties in assigning the appropriate subcategories⁷. Instead, the clinicians now specify the severity of the Autism for each criterion¹. The severity is designated as Level 1, 2, or 3. Patients on the lower levels require less support, and higher levels need substantial help¹. For more information, see the guidelines published by Dr. Laura Carpenter from the Medical University of South Carolina¹. The document describes the social communication, restricted interest, and repetitive behaviors associated with each severity level¹.
What is in the name?
There is no doubt that the label for Autism and its meaning has evolved over the years. The name itself is not essential but having a consensus on diagnostic criteria is critical. No matter what we call the condition, it does not change the difficulties faced throughout life by those on the spectrum. Most in the community would agree not to get stuck on the label and instead focus on the individuals' strengths. At the same time, a name is needed for a variety of reasons. A clearly defined name for the condition along with diagnostic tools helps with early detection and interventions. Some use the label to understand themselves better. While others use it to connect with their tribe. It does not matter what we call Autism; at the end of the day, we should use the name to improve the lives of those on the spectrum. We should all help them reach their full potential, no matter how different they may be. | https://medium.com/@mybackyardlab/autistic-not-an-idiot-the-evolution-of-the-autism-diagnosis-8d5a78c24d8a | [] | 2020-12-14 18:35:49.092000+00:00 | ['Diagnosis', 'Autism', 'Autism Spectrum Disorder', 'Autistic'] |
If you are in their city, you need to check out these Amazing DJs! | You are getting Hitched! It’s time for some dhol-baja! But you want your party DJ style. Its time for everyone to have a memorable time at your wedding functions. What are you waiting for? Having the DJ who understands the vibe of your wedding party has to have been playing on your playlist and playlists that bring everyone grooving to the dance floor. Say No More! I have got for you some of the amazing wedding DJs that are going to rock your functions like never before. Check out these DJs who are known in the circuit to perform in Weddings all around the country.
DJ Rackish: DJ Rackish is a DJ in Pune. He is known to play in multiple bars and lounges playing for more than 16 years of experience. He is always updated on the latest trends and the latest music With his catchy mixes, this Pune DJ can bring you to the dance floor even if you are not willing to dance. He is famous in a lot of popular clubs of Pune and brings his own equipment to other events like wedding functions, birthday parties. He usually makes his mixes in music genres like commercial, Punjabi, Hip-Hop, Bollywood, English Retro, and 80s-90s Rock ’n’ Roll.
DJ Lalit: DJ LALIT has been DJing in Pune since the last decade. He is a DJ and a Producer and also very well-known for his remixes. He is popular for his performances in clubs, lounges, and corporate/private events in Pune.
DJ Sukhi: DJ Sukhi is a known DJ in Pune. He brings his own light and swanky creations to various events that give a unique vibe in the event he performs in. Based out of Pune, he has made a lot of people groove on the beats of his music and have a great time. He brings just the right mixes to the events and gives you the right feels for the event. He is very famous for his performances in many clubs and he himself is known to dance with his audience raising the bar of his music 10 times higher. The various genres he dwells in our commercial, Punjabi, Hip-Hop, EDM, House, Bollywood.
DJ Baba: DJ Baba is a well-known DJ in Ludhiana. He is famous for getting the people on the Dance floor while cheering him on to his music. He knows how to make every event in Ludhiana a party mood. This DJ in Ludhiana has been rocking the music world since 2014. This DJ in Ludhiana knows how to promise that his guests have a great time. The music genres he excels in are commercial, Hip-Hop, EDM, House, Bollywood, Bhangra, and Retro.
DJ Ginni: DJ Ginni is the DJ you have to look out for in Ludhiana.10 years in the industry, but he still remains Unique in the circuit of DJs. He has got his new style in remixing Bollywood songs. DJ Ginni makes his mixes in music genres like Commercial, Hip-Hop, EDM, House, Bollywood, Tech House, Bhangra and Retro.
DJ Sheggy: DJ Sheggy is a DJ in Indore who gives you the best of music on wedding functions. He senses the vibe of the function or an event and has some great party numbers in the event he is performing. His collection includes some of the best numbers and is top in the charts. This DJ in Indore someone you should not miss out for his peppy numbers and his compilation includes Commercial, Punjabi, Hip-Hop, EDM, House, and Bollywood. It’s just been 3 years to the DJ arriving in the DJ industry but is gaining fans from all over Indore.
DJ Sourabh: DJ Sourabh based out of the city of Indore is a DJ in Indore who has the crowd go wild on their music. Apart from performing in clubs, they also perform in wedding functions and other parties. Whenever his mixes are played everyone turns to the dance floor in the city of Indore. He has been DJing for the last 5 years. Always updated with his music, you wouldn’t want to miss his performances in Indore. His musical genres include Commercial, Punjabi, Hip-Hop, and Bollywood.
Look for their gigs next when you are in their city. You will have a gala time!
Now you can book these DJs through StarClinch. | https://medium.com/@rastogishivam0803/if-you-are-in-their-city-you-need-to-check-out-these-amazing-djs-e84a9c8286f3 | ['Shivam Rastogi'] | 2020-03-11 07:01:46.346000+00:00 | ['Weddings', 'Dj', 'Entertainment', 'India', 'Music'] |
How to Amplify Your Content with Social Media Ads | Let’s start with the bad news first. It’s tougher than ever to get your content noticed.
Changes to Google’s search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile, paid search CPCs are at all-time highs in established markets.
Organic reach in social media? It’s pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1 percent will be shared more than 1,000 times. And Facebook just announced that you’re even less likely to get your content in front of people who aren’t related to you. (Sorry.)
Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than 1 percent.
How Content Marketing Doesn’t (Usually) Work
How does content marketing actually work? Many people believe content marketing is basically a three-step process:
Create new content. Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). People buy your stuff.
Nope. This almost never happens.
Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn’t a straight line — and it takes time.
So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?
Social Media Ads To The Rescue!
Now it’s time for the good news, guys! Social media ads provide the most scalable content promotion and are proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.
And the best part? You don’t need a huge ad budget.
A better, more realistic process for content marketing would look like this:
Create: Produce content and share it on social media. Amplify: Selectively promote your top content on social media. Tag: Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie. Filter: Apply behavioral and demographic filters on your audience. Remarket: Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers. Convert: Capture qualified leads or sale. Repeat.
You can use the following 10 Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a catalyst to get more eyeballs on your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.
1. Improve Your Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads — and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score”:
While Twitter calls theirs a “Quality Adjusted Bid”:
Whatever you call it, Quality Score is a crucial metric. You can increase your quality score for Twitter and Facebook by increasing your post engagement rates.
A high quality score is great because you’ll get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score is terrible because you’ll have a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.
How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content — your unicorns (the top 1–3 percent that performs better than all your other content) vs. your donkeys (your bottom 97 percent).
To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, you’ll have to test it out.
Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
Pay to promote the unicorns on Facebook and Twitter.
The key to paid social media ads is to be picky. Cast a narrow net and maximize those engagement rates.
2. Increase Engagement With Audience Targeting
Targeting all of your fans isn’t precise. It’s lazy and you’ll waste a lot of money.
Your fans aren’t a homogenous blob. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.
For example, by targeting fans of Donald Trump, people with social media marketing job titles, NRA members, and the hashtag #NeverHillary (and excluding Democrats, fans of Hillary Clinton, and the hashtag #neverTrump), this tweet for an Inc. article I wrote got 10x higher engagement:
Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods help turn average ads into unicorns.
3. Generate Free Clicks From Paid Ads
On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).
If you’re doing this, you need to stop. Now. It’s a giant waste of money and offers the worst ROI.
Instead, you should only pay for the thing that matters most to your business, whether that’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.
For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign you only pay when someone follows you. But your tweet that’s promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of $0.
4. Promote Unicorn Video Ads!
Would you believe you can get thousands of video views at a cost of just $0.02 per view?
Shoppers who view videos are more likely to remember you, and buy from you. A couple quick tips for success:
Promote videos that have performed the best (i.e., driven the most engagement) on your website, YouTube, or elsewhere.
Make sure people can understand your video without hearing it — an amazing 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, according to Digiday.
Make it memorable, try to keep it short, and target the right audience.
Bonus: video ad campaigns increase relevancy score by 2 points!
5. Score Huge Wins With Custom Audiences
True story: A while back I wrote an article that asked: do Twitter Ads work? To promote the article on Twitter, I used their tailored audiences feature to target key influencers.
The very same day, Business Insider asked for permission to publish the story. So I promoted that version of the article to influencers using tailored audiences.
An hour later, a Fox News producer emailed me. Look where I found myself:
The awesome power of custom audiences resulted in additional live interviews with major news outlets including the BBC, 250 high-value press pickups and links, massive brand exposure, 100,000 visits to the WordStream site, and a new business relationship with Facebook.
This is just one example of identity-based marketing using social media ads. Whether it’s Twitter’s tailored audiences or Facebook’s custom audiences, this opens a ton of new and exciting advertising use cases!
6. Promote Your Content On More Social Platforms
Medium, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, and LinkedIn Pulse call all send you massive amounts of traffic. It’s important to post content here that is appropriate to the audience.
Post content on Medium or LinkedIn. New content is fine, but repurposing your content is a better strategy. This will give a whole new audience a chance to discover and consume your existing content.
Again, you can use social media ads as a catalyst or accelerant and get hundreds, thousands, or even millions of views you otherwise wouldn’t have. It might even open you up to syndication opportunities (I’ve had posts syndicated to New York Observer and Time Magazine).
You can also promote your existing content on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, or Digg. Getting upvotes can create valuable exposure that will send tons of traffic to your existing content.
For a minimal investment, you can get some serious exposure and traffic!
7. Optimize for Engagement for Insanely Awesome SEO
RankBrain is an AI machine learning system, which Google is now using to better understand search queries, especially queries Google has never seen before (an estimated 15 percent of all queries).
I believe Google is looking at user engagement metrics (such as organic click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) as a way, in part, to rank pages that have earned very few or no links and provide better answers to users’ questions.
Even if user engagement metrics aren’t part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates will have its own great rewards:
More clicks and conversions.
Better organic search rankings.
Even more clicks and conversions.
Use social media ads to build brand recognition and double your organic search click-through and conversion rates!
8. Social Media Remarketing
Social media remarketing, on average, will boost engagement by 3x and increase conversion rates by 2x, all while cutting your costs by a third. So make the most of it!
Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.
9. Combine Everything With Super Remarketing
Super remarketing is the awesome combination of remarketing, demographics, behaviors, and high engagement content. Here’s how and why it works.
Behavior and interest targeting: These are the people interested in your stuff.
These are the people interested in your stuff. Remarketing: These are the people who have recently checked our your stuff.
These are the people who have recently checked our your stuff. Demographic targeting: These are the people who can afford to buy your stuff.
Now you need to target your paid social ads to a narrow audience that meets all three criteria using your high engagement unicorns.
The result?
10. Combine Paid Search & Social Ads
For our final, and most advanced tip of them all, you’re going to combine social ads with PPC search ads on Google using RLSA.
RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customized search ads only to people who have recently visited your site when they search on Google. It increases click-through and conversion rates by 3x and also reduces cost-per-click by a third.
But there’s one problem. By definition, RLSA doesn’t target people who are unfamiliar with your brand.
This is where social ads come in. Social ads will help more people become familiar with your brand.
Social ads are cheap way to start the process of biasing people towards you. Although they may not need what you sell now, later when the need arises, people will either do a branded search for your stuff, or do an unbranded search but click on you because they remember your memorable or inspirational content.
If your content marketing efforts are struggling, then these ridiculously powerful Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks will turn your content donkeys into unicorns!
Originally published on The Wordstream Blog.
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About The Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. | https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/how-to-amplify-your-content-with-social-media-ads-219f4c31b305 | ['Larry Kim'] | 2020-11-10 04:04:46.967000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Facebook', 'Advertising', 'Tech'] |
What Does China’s Drive to Self-Sufficiency Mean for Global Inflation? | One of the things that we’ve learned from globalization is that everything is connected. Even if our focus is on trading one particular asset, it can still be pushed around by external factors that don’t immediately appear to relate to the instrument. This is why it’s important to always be on the lookout for news that might have an unpredictable impact on your trading.
For example, if you are trading stock in McDonald’s, it might not be immediately obvious how China’s drive to reduce carbon emissions could impact the stock. McDonald’s doesn’t even own restaurants in China — they are all franchised. But there is a complicated supply chain that can affect McDonald’s earnings.
So how else is China’s drive to self-sufficiency affecting the global economy?
The world’s second-largest economy is important
Of course, most traders are aware of China’s impact on markets in general. China is the largest consumer of commodities in the world and can make policy decisions that impact global markets.
And while we know that, China’s national economic plans can have broader, unique global impacts, that aren’t accounted for in traditional market analysis.
China has the world’s largest herd of hogs. Yes, there is a market for trading pork meat, but relatively few people participate in it. But. that’s a bit beside the point. China is the largest consumer of pork meat. Therefore, the Chinese government has a strong push to become self-sufficient in meat production, due to strategic reasons.
Find the source
Pigs consume a lot of food to produce pork, which means that China is not only buying a lot of soy, wheat, and rice, but stocking up on it too. China’s grain stocks are at a record high, as the consumption of grain to feed a growing hog herd could put a strain on resources.
So, even as the cost of grain increases, China is still buying more to meet internal demand.
Meanwhile, China is trying to reduce its carbon emissions by phasing out coal. The increased cost of electricity has led to plants that produce fertilizer to shut down. China produces over 90% of commercial fertilizer.
Right now is when farm suppliers stock up on supplies for the harvest next year. And there are also forward contract negotiations for next year’s harvest. The two-sided pinch on farmers is pushing up the price of grains, well above record levels.
Everyone is affected
Soybeans are not just used for feed. In fact, the price rise in one grain spills over into its substitutes. Soy oil is used to make a diversity of things, like car seats. Corn is used to produce not just cooking oil, but ethanol for cars. And it’s also a key component of manufacturing plywood. Plywood is an essential element for building houses and has a record cost increase.
Of course, many measures of inflation try to ignore “volatile” elements like food costs. But that doesn’t help someone holding McDonald’s stock. Specifically, they will see an increase in the price of beef, because China is buying up food stocks normally used to feed cows.
Eventually, those higher costs for food will trickle into the broader economy, and potentially impact CPI around the world. So, even if you aren’t trading those specific commodities, they can still impact your trading. | https://medium.com/@orbexmarketing/what-does-chinas-drive-to-self-sufficiency-mean-for-global-inflation-9691a2285cf0 | [] | 2021-12-30 10:38:10.697000+00:00 | ['China', 'Inflation', 'Forex', 'McDonalds', 'Forex Trading'] |
2019 Black Friday + Cyber Monday Deals for Designers | Australia Red Cross Disaster Relief & Recovery Fund Raiser
Want to join me in making a difference?
Over this Black Friday period, I’m raising money to benefit Australia Red Cross: Disaster Relief & Recovery for those affected by bushfires in Australia.
Any donation will help make an impact. Thanks in advance for your contribution to this cause that means so much to me!
Please donate what ever is in your heart.
It’s for a great cause!
Available until Dec 2.
Amazon have an awesome Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals week page that lists everything from electronics, toys, kitchen tools, pet supplies, and more.
There are also sales on thousands of items so browse through our top gear articles below to get inspiration:
Top Gear for Designers:
Top Laptops
Top Gear for Video Editing
Master a new skill with an online course from Udemy for just $10 which gives you up to 90% off any particular course!
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The Futur will be dropping course sales on these dates with limited quantities, for only 24 hours each deal.
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> Click here to get $15 off your next Booking
The $15 will be refunded to you after checking out of your hotel. Booking.com will send an email with the refund. You must have a Booking.com account to get refunded. Have any questions? See their FAQ.
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The Ultimate Logo Design eBook by Kyle Courtright is the “definitive guide to logo design”. This eBook would go for $29 however you can get $10 (35% off) the book, making it just $19. This is your chance to up your logo & branding game — there really is no other resource like this. Use coupon code ‘JUST10OFF’ at checkout.
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I will update the deals below as they come in. If you have your own, please contact me.
Courses
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Submit your own sale and I’ll add it above.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Retail Links
The big boys will have some great deals too, see their quick links below.
More Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deal Compilations
Best Black Friday Deals 2019 on CreativeBloq
Coming Soon
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Copy and paste the below to share:
2019 Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals for designers & web professionals! https://wp.me/pao2ax-dI5 #BlackFriday #CyberMonday via @justcreative
Click here to tweet.
Thanks! | https://medium.com/just-creative/2019-black-friday-cyber-monday-deals-for-designers-957178780993 | ['Jacob Cass'] | 2019-11-16 20:06:28.396000+00:00 | ['Black Friday', 'Cyber Monday', 'Deals'] |
How To Deal with Loneliness in Festivals & Explore its Beauty? | How To Deal with Loneliness in Festivals & Explore its Beauty?
So many arrangements of celebration, but still something is missing. Amid so many people and joyful events, are you finding yourself alone? Let’s explore the beauty of loneliness. Umme Salma Follow Nov 28, 2021 · 4 min read
Image from pixabay.com
Yes, it happened to me years before. I was going through a phase when I was afraid of festivals as that cruelly mirrored me with the ghost of loneliness.
My whole family was going through a tough time, but it deepened when the festive season brought its gift of an extra dose of sadness for us wrapped with glittered packaging of celebration.
After my dad’s demise, we could not celebrate the festive seasons in a true sense for a couple of years. After losing the love of life, the festival becomes a kind of punishment for my mother. Imagine, with the heavy heart of losing the love of her life, she made all the yummy dishes and put a smile on her face to make us happy. But, I could not see the spark in her eyes.
Things got worse when I had my breakup with my boyfriend; my dream of a prince charming coming into my life and rescuing us from the cruel world of loneliness got shattered. It affected my mother’s health badly as she was trying to find happiness in weaving the dream of her daughters’ new life. My father’s death, my mother’s deteriorated health, and the sudden breakup broke me down into little -pieces.
I used to find solace in my work and was so busy and occupied with work that I had no time to feel sad. I intentionally did not allow my sorrows to control me. But at the festive time, I got the luxury to feel sad and alone. During long vacations of the festival, the loneliness got the opportunity to squeeze me every ounce and took the remaining spirit of life.
Long story short, by the grace of the Almighty, now we (me and my family) embrace and celebrate festive wholeheartedly, our souls dance with the rhythm blending in the festive eve, and it brings color into our lives.
But, that chapter of my life teaches me to see the beauty in loneness more deeply and profoundly. That life-changing lesson helped me to learn to accept life as it is and celebrate life fully.
This story is dedicated to those beautiful lonely souls who are still unaware of the hidden treasure in the cave of loneliness.
Tears, let it flow for some time.
I always prefer to see my glass is half full rather than empty. So mostly, even at my difficult time, I remain calm and composed.
However, when I was going through seasonal festive sadness fever, I realized sometimes, crying releases our deposited pain. I believe through praying, in front of Almighty, we should surrender completely, and seek forgiveness to Him and release our pain in the form of tears. It’s the time to connect with our higher self; it’s the time to connect with our creator.
Come on, write it down.
At every festival, I wrote an exclusive journal to pour my heart unknowingly its healing power and medical recommendations. I did it as it gave me a friendly shoulder. Moreover, I used to write my plan for a sunny bright future; it was like writing my destiny, although I believe in pre-destiny.
Write down everything you are feeling. Who knows, that may become your masterpiece one day!
Create and Spread Happiness
I have a keen interest in food photography, and I used to watch Andrew’s food photography in the festive then clicked beautiful pictures of delicious food items made by my mom. It’s not only helped the hunger of my creativity but also, my mom feels appreciated. Her face lit up seeing the beautiful pictures of her hand-made food.
Yes, you can create happiness or create a doomed atmosphere to indulge. I am sure you are smart enough to choose to create happiness and spread it among your loved ones, or family, or stranger, or even to your pet.
Why are you not pamper yourself?
I am obsessed with utilizing time, and sometimes I make wrong steps out of that obsession. For example, I remember I used my entire holiday doing digital marketing courses. Later, I realized it was not a good strategy as it exhausted me eventually. The festive was approaching to end, and so my energy level was.
I did not allow myself some time to rest and do some self-care things in festive to recharge me.
Self-care is one of the meaningful activities that we can do during our vacations. Who does not want to look beautiful, feel beautiful?
Celebrate the season with a whole heart. You are not alone, and even if you think you are alone, that is not miserable. Trust me; explore the beauty of loneliness gracefully and enjoy every bit of this.
Enjoy the festive season and read good articles that can feed your thoughts, bring peace to your soul. Recently, I read a beautiful article on writing by Radhika Iyer. I am sure you are going to love this :)
Thanks for being with me. | https://medium.com/coffee-times/how-to-deal-with-loneliness-in-festivals-explore-its-beauty-4878672ff20c | ['Umme Salma'] | 2021-11-28 18:37:42.258000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Festivals', 'Loneliness', 'Coffee Times Movement'] |
How To Find The Most Valuable Instagram Niches | Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Regardless of how much you know about Instagram growth tactics, the likelihood of growing and monetizing your account sustainably and for a long period of time mostly depends on the level of saturation of your Instagram niche.
It’s a hard pill to swallow for most aspiring Instagram entrepreneurs, but accepting that reality and taking the necessary steps to pivot into a niche in which you have a higher likelihood of success is the difference between being endlessly frustrated by your lack of growth (check out my article about Is Instagram dying? to learn more about that) and finally feeling like Instagram success is achievable.
What are the most valuable Instagram niches?
How “valuable” a niche is depends on how much audience growth and monetization someone is likely to achieve within that niche. You can check out my Instagram Small Business Class if you want to learn more about the details of how to monetize.
Generally speaking, accounts that start in niches which are in Introductory or Growth Phases (you can read all about the phases in my article about Instagram niches) have the highest likelihood of long-term audience growth and monetization, when compared to accounts that start in niches that are in Mature or Declining Phases. Why? Niches in Introductory and Growth Phases are not as saturated as Mature or Decline niches, and therefore, accounts starting in them have a much higher likelihood of being able to create content that’s differentiated enough (the key to growth), allowing them to grow an audience that can be sustainably monetized over a long period of time.
This means that, unlike what some Instagram experts would lead you to believe, there is no one set of “most valuable niches” for everyone on Instagram; what is most valuable for each person will likely be different, depending on your unique set of skills and interests. The most valuable niches on Instagram are the ones that are in Introductory and Growth Phases, but more importantly, the Introductory and Growth Phase niches of topics YOU are sincerely interested in.
Finding a valuable niche is worth nothing unless you are interested enough in the topic that you’ll be able to create differentiated and high quality content about it, for a long period of time. In the highly-competitive Instagram ecosystem we live in, it’s the only way to grow.
If you’d prefer to receive this information in video format, check out the one I included in my YouTube channel
How to find a valuable Instagram niche.
So knowing now that the most valuable niches on Instagram are Introductory or Growth Phase niches about topics you are sincerely interested in, the next question is: how do you find them?
The key is identifying relatively new niches that relate to your particular set of interests and skills. Even slightly tweaking the focus of your content to incorporate a new topic you’re interested in alongside the content you’re already creating might be enough to move you to a niche that isn’t saturated.
An effective way to do this is by using digital post it notes to brainstorm a list of new potential niches that interest you, then measure their size to identify if they are in Introductory or Growth Phases, and finally pivot to the one that you consider offers the most potential value.
Make a list of new niches that interest you.
Here’s a step by step explanation of the process:
First, write down all of the Instagram niches you know that you would potentially be interested in creating content about:
Second, write down your interests/hobbies/passions in life, as well as a location you can focus on that would effectively differentiate your business:
Third, mix and match them and make a list of the topics that emerge when your niches and interests intersect:
Finally, write down a list of all the topics that came up and select the ones you are most interested in creating content about.
For example, using the above example of niches I’m aware of and topics I’m interested in, I came up with the following list of interesting topics that might be Introductory or Growth Phase niches:
Meditation-related ceramics, Buddhism-related ceramics, macrame-related ceramics, Dodgers-related ceramics, ceremonial cacao meditations, the most differentiated cacao ceremonies in Perth, Australia, giving Instagram advice around plant-based food or macrame, cryptocurrency-related enamel pins, Dodgers-related enamel pins, the Great British Bake Off-related enamel pins.
Out of those topics, the ones I’m the most interested in creating content about are:
Buddhism-related ceramics, Dodgers-related ceramics and The Great British Bakeoff-related enamel pins.
Please note, these can also be called “sub-niches” since they are generally much smaller than larger niches on Instagram, but for the purpose of this article, I’ll refer to them as niches in general.
Measure the size of the most interesting niches to identify what phase they are in.
Now that you have a list of topics you’re potentially interested in creating content about, the next step is to measure the niches of those topics to identify what phase they are in.
How to measure a niche: The size and phase of a niche is measured first by measuring the number of posts within the largest hashtag of that niche, and then by measuring the number of followers of the most popular account of that niche.
The sizes of Introductory & Growth Phase niches: On average, the largest and most popular accounts within Introductory Phase niches will have between 1,000–50,000 followers and the main hashtag will have between 1,000–300,000 posts. The largest and most popular accounts within Growth Phase niches will have between 50,000–500,000 followers and the main hashtag will have between 300,000 and 1 million posts in it. Please note that these are general estimations and not all Introductory and Growth niches will fit into these ranges. The most accurate way to measure the stage of a niche is to identify their characteristics, but for practical purposes, using these measurements is a good first step for most people.
You can learn about all of the characteristics of Instagram niche phases here.
Here’s a simple step by step process of how I measure niches.
Find the main hashtag of each niche and measure how many posts it has: Go to the hashtag search bar and search for hashtags that you consider people who would be interested in the topic would search for. Scan the top posts of each hashtag you searched for, look at which hashtags those posts use, and identify the ones that seem most likely to be related to your topic. Of all of the hashtags you find, the one which has the largest number of posts is likely to be the main hashtag of that niche (see image below for reference). Keep in mind that the less you know about this niche on Instagram, the less likely you are to find the main hashtag of the niche, so try to do thorough research.
Here, the topic I was trying to measure was “handmade art dolls” and by going through the hashtag search process I identified #artdoll as the main hashtag, counting 1.2 million posts in it.
Find the most popular account of each niche and measure how many posts it has: In the main hashtag you already identified, scan the top posts for the accounts that appear to be creating the content most closely related to the topic. Search through the “Suggested for you” section in those accounts and identify more accounts that create content closely related to the topic. Of all of the accounts you find, the one which has the most followers is likely to be the main account of that niche (see image below for reference). Measure the number of followers it has and again, keep in mind that the less you know about this niche on Instagram, the less likely you are to find the most popular account of the niche, so try to do thorough research.
By going through the account search process I identified @gakman.e as one of the most popular account and it has 148k followers.
Identify what type of niche phase those measurements indicate to: Once you have the number of posts of the main hashtag and the number of followers of the most popular account, you can measure what phase that niche is likely to be in. In the example above, the topic I was trying to measure was “handmade art dolls”. The main hashtag was #artdoll, it has 1.2 million posts in it and one of the most popular accounts in it, @gakman.e, has 148k followers. Given these measurements, this niche is towards the end of a Growth Phase, nearing its Maturity Phase.
Using the topics I’m most interested in from my post-it note brainstorm, these are the results:
Buddhism-related ceramics: The main hashtag is #zenceramics with 2k posts and the most popular account is @zen.ceramics with 3,600 followers which indicate that it’s most likely in an Introductory Phase.
Dodgers-related pins: The main hashtag is #dodgerspin with 1k posts and the most popular account is @sm.pin.shoppe with 3,500 followers which indicate that it’s most likely in an Introductory Phase.
The Great British Bake Off-related enamel pins: The main hashtag is #GBBOinspired with 2k posts and the most popular account is @secreteaterfood with 3,400 followers which indicate that it’s most likely in an Introductory Phase.
Pivot to the new niche you feel passionate about and has the highest potential of growth.
The key to growth in Introductory niches is just being in one that has a high likelihood of becoming popular (which are often hard to find).
In Growth niches, it’s being able to create the highest quality content in comparison to other accounts within the niche, because that will differentiate you and therefore, make you the most likely to be followed over those to other accounts offering similar content.
Knowing this, once you’ve identified which phase your potential new niches are in, select the one that you feel most passionate about, which you also consider has the highest chance of growth long term. By selecting the niche you consider most likely to grow, you’ll have a higher likelihood of being in an Introductory niche that will transition into a Growth niche. By selecting one that you also feel passionate about, you’ll give yourself a higher likelihood of being able to create high quality content (since you enjoy the topic) and therefore, have a higher likelihood of becoming one of the most popular accounts in a Growth Phase niche.
Also keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be a BIG pivot into a completely new niche. Something as simple as organically including a new type of topic or interest into the content you already create might be enough. For example, in my account @potteryforall, I began creating content that helps small business owners grow their accounts on Instagram, in addition to the traditional ceramic-related content I had previously been creating. This has been enough to differentiate my account from all of the other ceramic curation accounts on Instagram, thus far.
From the niches I brainstormed and measured were in an Introduction Phase, the one I would pick would be “The Great British Bake Off-related enamel pins”. Why, you may ask? I love GBBO and I love making enamel pins so I wouldn’t get tired of it, but equally as important is the fact that there is no other account on Instagram focused on creating GBBO enamel pins, which would make me the most popular account within the niche. Taking into account that the show still hasn’t reached “mass” popularity in the USA and in my opinion it’s likely it will in time (given the continued prominence Netflix has bestows upon it) means that it has the potential to still grow substantially.
If you fail, try again.
If you go through this same process and don’t come across any niches that you’re passionate about and are in Introductory or Growth Phases, as well as being likely to grow — don’t worry, it’s normal. Finding valuable niches is hard. Keep your mind open, start the brainstorming process again with new interest, and see where it leads you. There is no hard science to this, try to see it as an exploration of new possibilities and have fun! If your account is already in a Mature or Declining niche, don’t fear pivoting — you aren’t likely to see any positive changes until you do.
And that’s it, pals! That’s how you find the most valuable niche for you. Use digital post it notes to brainstorm a list of new potential niches that interest you, then measure their size to identify if they are in Introductory or Growth Phases, and finally pivot to the one that you consider offers the most potential value.
Hope you find it helpful, and remember, growing on Instagram isn’t about being “cool” or “social”, it’s about understanding how the platform works and learning to execute the activities that lead to growth at a high level!
Thanks so much for taking the time to read my article! If you enjoyed it, you can support me by signing up to my Instagram Small Business class, sharing this article and giving it a bunch of claps. You can also follow me on Instagram to get updates whenever I publish a new piece ❤
If you have some ideas about what you’d like me to write about next, let me know!
If you want to read more about how to grow a small business on Instagram, check out my articles about what Instagram really is and how works, how the Instagram algorithm works, why you’re losing Instagram followers, Instagram hashtags, how to increase your Instagram engagement, how to pick the right Instagram username, how to write an Instagram bio, the best Instagram content schedulers and automators, Instagram bots, Instagram bots 2021, the best Instagram bots, how to create an Instagram visual grid, how to create an Instagram repost account that makes money, how to check if you’re shadowbanned on Instagram, and why your Instagram account isn’t growing. | https://medium.com/@theeduardomorales/how-to-find-the-most-valuable-instagram-niches-75070f15bce6 | ['Eduardo Morales'] | 2021-08-12 15:54:06.743000+00:00 | ['Social Media Marketing', 'Instagram Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Instagram', 'Small Business Marketing'] |
Consensus and Proof of Stake in the Celo protocol | Consensus and Proof of Stake in the Celo protocol
How Celo has reimagined Ethereum with Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Proof of Stake and incentives to serve mobile devices Tim Moreton Follow Nov 8, 2019 · 8 min read
Celo’s aim is to empower anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world to have access to financial services, send money to phone numbers, and pay merchants — all on a decentralized platform that is developed and operated by the community. The surface area of the project is vast and to deliver better products sooner we chose to build on some of the crypto community’s best work.
Celo’s blockchain reference implementation is based on go-ethereum, the Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol. We’re indebted to the Geth community for providing these shoulders to stand on and, while recognizing that Ethereum is an independent project with its own trajectory, we hope to contribute back where we can.
The Celo protocol incorporates a number of substantial changes in service of its end users. In this post, we focus on the consensus protocol, the core mechanism that applies new transactions and advances the agreed state of the network, and on Celo’s implementation of Proof of Stake — how it determines which nodes get to participate in consensus.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Like a number of recent crypto projects, Celo is adopting a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm. A well-defined set of validator nodes broadcast signed messages between themselves in a sequence of steps to reach agreement even when up to a third of the total nodes are offline, faulty or malicious. When a quorum of validators have reached agreement, that decision is final.
Most BFT implementations are based on Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov’s work on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Understanding and implementing consensus algorithms is notoriously tough: this is a good explainer on PBFT. Celo’s is based on an implementation called Istanbul, or IBFT. This is not to be confused with the upcoming Ethereum hard fork also codenamed Istanbul. IBFT was developed by AMIS and proposed as an extension to Geth but never merged. Variants of IBFT exist in both the Quorum and Pantheon clients. We’ve been modifying Istanbul to bring it up to date with the latest Geth releases, fix correctness and liveness issues, and improve its scalability and security. We’ll dive into the details in a subsequent post.
Moving beyond Proof of Work
Since the Celo protocol is leveraging Ethereum as the basis for its blockchain, it’s worth explaining why we took the time to move away from the Proof of Work scheme already deployed with Ethereum. (It’s also worth noting that Ethereum 2.0 will eventually make a similar move!)
In a Proof of Work scheme, nodes compete to solve a computational puzzle that consumes the vast majority of those nodes’ compute power — and entails high electricity usage, too. The chain of blocks accepted as the current state of the network is (more or less) the one that is longest and would cost the most energy to rewrite.
Here, safety comes in numbers. Network security relies on no one organization acquiring a majority of the total “hashing power” and so being able to conduct a 51% attack. This means that users of a Proof of Work network are in effect paying for miners whose presence rarely results in transactions being processed but instead prevents the takeover of the network. The higher the security, the higher the cost and environmental impact.
In BFT consensus, validators only do the useful work of building blocks by running transactions and verifying the blocks proposed by each other. This allows the network to deliver higher transaction throughput. The network is secured by having two-thirds of the validators faithfully execute the BFT algorithm: when a quorum is achieved, that block is final.
The greater capacity of Proof of Stake networks and the need to fund a far smaller pool of hardware means that its operating cost, overall and on a per-transaction basis, is far lower. Importantly, the network can use a fraction of the energy of Proof of Work.
Another benefit for new networks is being more secure, sooner. Attackers can and do rent compute resources to target Proof of Work networks and so only those networks that are most established can effectively resist 51% attacks. It is a difficult and lengthy process for a new network to get to that point.
Proof of Stake also offers immediate finality: almost all transactions complete and are irreversible within seconds, giving a better user experience. Proof of Work schemes have probabilistic finality: since many nodes are competing to mine blocks at the same time, a transaction can be reverted if the block in which it is included then does not end up as part of the longest chain and a conflicting transaction is applied instead: the chance this happens decays with time.
Proof of Stake: picking the validators
While the benefits of adopting BFT consensus seem extremely compelling, on its own it does not replace a Proof of Work scheme. BFT protocols rely on an external mechanism to determine the validators that participate in agreement. The algorithms also cannot scale beyond the order of hundreds of validators, and can resist malicious or faulty behavior by at most one third of validators. For these reasons, in an open system where there are many more participants than possible validators, some policy choice must be made to determine how to allocate these privileged roles. Further, admitting each validator has an associated risk: each new validator must be subject to a combination of strong economic incentives and/or trust to ensure the security of the network.
‘Proof of Stake’ schemes are an attempt to align the incentives of validators with those of the network. They overlay consensus algorithms (usually BFT) with mechanisms to hold potential validators’ funds in escrow as a ‘stake’, accept some of those as validators and reward them, while also incentivizing other nodes to detect and prove misbehavior, for which validators will be ‘slashed’ portions of those stakes. Balancing these aspects is challenging to do. Cosmos and Tezos are examples of successful public networks using Proof of Stake.
This contrasts with the ‘permissionless’ nature of Proof of Work schemes which permit any node to attempt to mine a block without any coordination, and rewards them for successfully doing so. Such schemes require a miner to incur an energy cost up-front, meaning that at the point of mining a block, they have a strong incentive to correctly submit the block to the network. Furthermore the number of miners can change over time and has little impact on the protocol. The underlying currency is redistributed to new miners through block rewards as they participate.
This leads to the primary criticism of Proof of Stake schemes: that stakes present a barrier to entry to most participants, and this means that they concentrate power and rewards into too few hands, and that they lack a ‘permissionless on-ramp’ in the protocol, depriving new participants of an opportunity to earn currency and get to the point where they could participate as a validator.
Webinar recording, which deep dives into the design of Celo’s Proof of Stake mechanism — how the protocol determines which nodes become validators and how incentives are arranged to secure the network.
Celo’s permissionless on-ramp: serving end users
Of course, applying transactions and validating state updates are only a small part of what a digital payments platform must do. Celo’s focus on providing the best user experience for mobile payments means that the Celo design assumptions differ from other networks, sometimes significantly.
We anticipate the majority of Celo’s end users will manage their accounts and send payments using a Wallet app on their cell phone. The open source Celo app embeds a “light client” that connects to the network and is optimized for low-power devices and low-bandwidth connections. These light clients need nodes that will answer their requests for account and transaction data and forward new transactions on their behalf. It’s likely that the vast majority of machines in the Celo network will need to fulfil this role.
In Ethereum right now, there are few incentives to run a full node that is not mining. Few nodes serve light clients, and this results in a poor experience for mobile wallets.
So Celo designed a protocol to incentivize users to operate regular nodes. With Celo, light clients pay a per-transaction fee to full nodes. Clients include in every transaction the address of a node which, when the transaction is processed, receives this fee. Full nodes advertise a minimum fee, and may choose to refuse to process transactions for which it will not receive the fee or it deems the fee insufficient.
While a full node provides other services for which they receive no specific fee, we expect that failing to service these requests will cause clients to seek other full nodes that do, who will then receive fees when they next make a transaction. The model is analogous to a cafe: while you may freeload on their rent, heat, wifi, etc, you’ll likely be required to buy a coffee periodically. Refuse and you might not be so welcome next time.
We anticipate a market emerging where light clients will (automatically in most cases) choose full node peers based on cost, latency, reliability and other factors. An abundance of full nodes geolocated close to their communities will improve app performance and reliability. Since light clients need not trust full nodes, as they can verify their work, it also provides the ‘permissionless on-ramp’ lacking in other Proof of Stake networks.
As an aside, it also turns out that using BFT consensus allows Celo clients to synchronize dramatically faster than Ethereum, which is very important for devices on poor connections. You can read more about Celo’s ultralight sync mode here, and we’ll dig in to this in a future post.
Conclusion
Celo builds on the Ethereum protocol with the aim of creating a platform that empowers anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world to have access to financial services. It replaces Ethereum’s use of Proof of Work for securely adding transactions to the ledger with a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm. And it creates a new permissionless on-ramp by creating incentives for full nodes to serve mobile devices.
In my next post, we dive into the details of Celo’s Proof of Stake design.
Get involved!
If you’re interested in finding out more about operating a node on the Celo network, either a validator or full node, or can see yourself running a validator group, you should absolutely join The Great Celo Stake Off.
We’d also love to hear your thoughts on what we’re building. The design space around mechanisms for validator incentives has many complicated trade-offs and we look forward to working with the community to iterate on this.
You can read more about the Celo Protocol in the Celo Developer Documentation, and try out Celo on the Alfajores Testnet. You can ask questions and find answers on the Celo Forum, or chat with Celo developers on Discord. | https://medium.com/celoorg/consensus-and-proof-of-stake-in-the-celo-protocol-3ff8eee331f6 | ['Tim Moreton'] | 2019-12-04 18:20:35.536000+00:00 | ['Byzantine Fault Tolerance', 'Consensus', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Blockchain', 'Technical'] |
Why more than 10,000 wait weeks to take a shortcut | Mastering a foreign language, as it turns out, takes between six and eight years. That’s six to eight years for expats or international students who get exposed to their target language every single day. And therefore much more for the occasional learner.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the brainy engineers of Silicon Valley put their heads down to find a shortcut to fluency. They came up with… an artificial intelligence?
A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Thinkin. It’s an invitation-only platform that costs €50 a month and promises the most powerful language learning routine ever made. The app is rumored to have a waiting list of more than 10,000 people.
“We have the metropolitan techies in Europe at this point,” Thinkin told me in an interview. The waiting list is actually 12,000 people long and growing rapidly, they said.
“Thinkin is the future of language learning,” mentioned Sergej Popow, one of the firm’s first customers. “ Once I started using Thinkin, I couldn’t imagine learning Spanish any other way.”
When I first heard about Thinkin, I was very skeptical. Isn’t the vast content on the internet already enough for learning languages? How could any start-up get away with charging a premium for something that was already available free? I suspected that it might be one of those expensive products that primarily function as a status symbol. But I was curious, so I spent several weeks testing it out. And it turns out that the hype is completely justified, at least if you’re the kind of person who is serious about making true progress in a foreign language.
Signing up for Thinkin isn’t easy. First, you fill out a questionnaire about your language level and motivation to become fluent to join the sign-up queue. Then, when you’re picked from the queue, there’s a mandatory onboarding session in which a language-specific expert gives you a live tutorial over video. Thinkin’s top languages are Spanish and German. It also supports French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and English, and is working on adding Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, and Russian.
Thinkin is aimed at people who have spent a lot of time and resources learning a foreign language but have hit a plateau in their learning.
Some of the app’s promises sound too good to believe — such as making users think in the foreign language simply by asking them to make sentences on their own from the ground up or enabling language learners to impress even native speakers by suggesting the most impactful way of expressing any specific idea in the foreign language. But the kind progress measurements Thinkin does, I haven’t seen before. Like keeping track of how my sentences have improved compared to the day or the week before. Or telling me that with my vocabulary, I just did the equivalent of a 20 minutes conversation in German.
These features will appeal most to power users who need to learn a foreign language for their professional career or who settled abroad. Thinkin said that the app is targeted at people with at least A2 level of language proficiency and who have spent a lot of time and resources learning a foreign language but have hit a plateau in their learning. So they are not getting better at the language and are lacking the experience to speak the language independently.
Thinkin promises to help those at an intermediate-to-advanced level reach fluency in the shortest time of three months. Partly, that’s because Thinkin is based on the science of discovery learning, which means that from day one you start to develop the intuition for the language — the same power as you have in your native tongue.
I am notoriously bad at languages. But with Thinkin, I was surprised that although my vocabulary was limited, I could easily have a 15-minute conversation with my German colleagues which I couldn’t have done earlier. It made the usually tough task of speaking German feel less like a test and more like a playground which was only about having fun and learning from mistakes (everything except a test).
It’s strange, on one level, to think about learning a language in a classroom. Always it felt like the more theory I consume the faster I will have all the tools I need to speak the language. For the most time, app developers claimed gamification was the best that could amplify language learning. Yet learners aren’t becoming fluent. In fact, 90% of language learners never reach fluency. As per research, despite all the resources available, each year learning a language is getting harder than before. The inefficiencies in language learning are huge. Thinkin says removing these inefficiencies is their driving force. | https://medium.com/@GonzalezMaria/would-you-pay-50-a-month-to-talk-to-a-chatbot-1f8c7d400486 | ['Maria Teresa Gonzalez'] | 2021-09-06 01:08:48.837000+00:00 | ['Technical Analysis', 'Language', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Chatbots', 'Language Learning'] |
The Acceleration of Slowing Down | I want to focus on only one thought in this post stemming from this quote from Lao Tzu. “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
One of the most difficult things to do in our current world is to slow down. Everything around us is made to seem urgent, that is the way our society has trended for generations now and it seems to be reaching a peak for many people. Whether you are inundated with arbitrary deadlines at work, under constant barrage from social media notifications, distraught from the onslaught of negativity in all forms of media, or just feel a sense of the world coming apart at the seams do not worry, there is a solution, although difficult to achieve. I want to break down the solution in two parts, physical and mental, and provide some things you can start working on today to reduce the flurry in your life on the physical side, as I believe the mental side is best left to the meditation and philosophy parts of this site.
The way I will be using physical in this post is not necessarily something that will require physical exertion. For instance, if your work is all computer based, as mine is, that will fall under this physical part just as much as exercise will. But let’s start with exercise and how the simplest of tasks can really help slow down and regain control of your hectic life. I am referring to walking. It was Nietzsche that said “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” and making a habit of walking outdoors for just a few minutes as many times a week as possible, will do a wonderful job of breaking the hectic cycle of life. My walks usually last for 20–30 minutes, about four times per week, where my wife, dog, son, and I all go for walk around the neighborhood. Since my son is two, he has an important role of slowing down the pace of the walk and allows me to enjoy the experience more as a relaxing activity, not an exercising one. If you do not have someone in your life to slow you down, make that a focus until you develop the habit of walking slowly. This walk is for your mind just as much as your body, so don’t lose one to help the other.
On a more work focused notes, you need to do away with a lot of modern-day mantras. Let me be clear and single out my objections to a few. I will break them into their own sections:
First, I want to tackle multitasking and how it is a lie and will cost your much more time instead of saving time. Lots of times I see people trying to multitask when they have multiple deadlines approaching and they don’t want to fall behind on any one thing, so they slowly push forward on everything at once. This is a terrible solution as it slows down multiple projects for the illusion of greater progress. It also degrades the work product by not devoting to it all your attention. Instead, I recommend trying the following: laying out what you need to accomplish in a project and then break it down into steps. Make the steps small but not too small that is becomes more cumbersome to track them than to do them. A good benchmark would be to aim for each step to take about one hour. Sometimes it will be more or less and it will be unavoidable and that is fine because you will know this before you start working. Then take each step as its own task and push it to completion and take a brief moment to reflect on the achievement before moving on to the next step. Repeat this process until the project is complete then submit it or file it away for later and you are done with that project completely. This format will allow you to feel achievement the entire way through the process and produce a quality, completed work product.
Second, if you are pursuing advancement in your career goals solely or chiefly for the additional money you will make you should rethink your objectives in life. Chasing money will drain your soul until the day your soul dies, which will be much sooner than when your body dies, and you will be nothing, but a shell of a person left without happiness or fulfillment. Research has shown self-reported happiness does not increase as wealth increases after a certain point, which is around where you can easily meet all your needs and pay all your bills. Chasing dreams of luxury cars, huge houses, expensive clothing and jewelry, and elaborate vacations are not dreams you have created for yourself. These dreams have been created for you by the people who wish to sell you something and enrich themselves. If you find yourself chasing money, try creating your own dreams for your life such as doing what you love and what you are good at for a career so every day is fulfilling regardless of money. Or you can even create altruistic dreams such as being an amazing spouse and parent for your family or volunteering your time to help those less fortunate. These types of goals, that you develop yourself, is what your soul is craving and what will leave you truly happy and fulfilled while leaving the feeling of hurriedness behind.
Finally, think for yourself and don’t put too much weight in expert opinions. This is like my point on creating your own dreams but with a bit of a twist for the environment we all live in today. We have all seen experts give a piece of advice, and then another group of experts will contradict this, only to have the experts switch sides one week later. The only thing that remained consistent is that these experts showed us their true colors and they have their own agendas to follow and they may not line up with yours. So, I ask you, who is the expert on your life (hint: IT’S YOU!).The logic no longer follows that you would make life decisions for yourself based on the opinion of people who are only looking out for themselves. I also want to be clear, it doesn’t matter which side of any argument you believe is right or wrong, what matters is the people making the arguments have largely shown to be corruptible and will say or do the thing that keeps them in a place of authority with those whom they are indebted. Others that are closer to these professions have recently opined on how many professions we thought were noble are instead, held hostage by those who fund them or provide them grant money and that has betrayed us in a difficult time. So this segment comes with a direct call to action: READ, learn for yourself, explore new ideas, keep expanding your mind, and don’t let yourself be corrupted by the news or information that is most convenient to access or listen to because it challenges nothing that you currently believe. To tie it back to the quote that started us off, hurrying how you are informed and learn out of comfort is the worst form of hurrying and it will affect every other aspect of your life.
Thank you for reading and I look forward to seeing you back here soon.
Please visit and share sovereignpsyche.com for more! | https://medium.com/@thesovereignpsyche/the-acceleration-of-slowing-down-b1e33a64fdeb | [] | 2020-07-01 03:25:48.911000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Philosophy', 'Multitasking', 'Efficiency', 'Self Improvement'] |
Would anyone be interested in me posting about my boyfriend and my relationship. | Would anyone be interested in me posting about my boyfriend and my relationship. I need advice and opinions on weather or not I should break up with him. | https://medium.com/@justycelapo/would-anyone-be-interested-in-me-posting-about-my-boyfriend-and-my-relationship-50333029b59f | ['Justyce Lapotko'] | 2020-12-18 16:45:39.817000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Boyfriend', 'Advice', 'Drama', 'Self'] |
JS Templating: Transitioning from swig to nunjucks | In JavaScript land the pace of development moves very fast and there are literally hundreds of competing libraries to accomplish almost anything you can imagine. JavaScript templating can be tricky because there are so many different options it’s difficult to know which one to choose. While building out developers.optimizely.com I chose to use swig because we had used it in a few other projects already and it seemed to have a good community built up around it. However, swig is no longer going to be maintained by its creator (although now it looks like members of the community are stepping up to try and maintain it). This was enough of an impetus to get me looking around at alternative templating solutions.
One of the alternative JavaScript templating solutions that really stood out to me is called “nunjucks”. Nunjucks is maintained by Mozilla and used in their products so it is likely to stay maintained for the foreseeable future. Additionally, swig and nunjucks both function very similarly and both are derived from jinja2 templating syntax. In this article I’m going to be highlighting some of the key differences that I’ve noticed while making the switch and provide tips for anyone looking to make a similar transition.
1. Python Style Logical Operators and Comparison Operators
In the example below, notice the use of the literal word `or` instead of `||` which JS uses to signify or. Additionally, the ‘triple equals’ strict comparison operators aren’t needed either., so `===` becomes `==` and `!==` becomes `!=`.
<!-- swig -->
{% if path === 'index' || path === 'home' %}
…
{% endif %} <!-- nunjucks -->
{% if path == 'index' or path == 'home' %}
…
{% endif %}
Changes:
Change `||` to `or`
Change `&&` to `and`
Change `===` to `==`
Change `!==` to `!=`
2. The include tag in nunjucks doesn’t accept a context object
In swig you can pass a context object in as a part of the include tag, however in nunjucks the included template simply inherits the context of the template that contains the include tag.
{% set data = {
foo: {
title: "First"
},
bar: {
title: "Second"
},
baz: {
title: "Third"
}
} %} <!-- swig -->
{% for key, object in data | sort %}
{% include 'partials/_item.html' object %}
{% endfor %}
<!-- In the _item.html file you can access the `title` property directly --> <!-- nunjucks -->
{% for key, object in data | dictsort %}
{% include 'partials/_item.html' %}
{% endfor %}
<!-- In the _item.html file you would access the `title` property with `object.title` -->
Changes:
Refactor `include` tags to not pass a context object
3. For loops in nunjucks only accept one parameter when looping over arrays
In swig when iterating over an array with a `for` tag, you are able to pass two parameters in. The first parameter will be the index of the array, and the second parameter will be the value of that item in the array. However, in nunjucks looping over an array only accepts one parameter and the second one is ignored. The best way to address this is to switch to using `loop.index0` (that’s `index` with a zero on the end) which returns “the current iteration of the loop (0 indexed)” and works the same in both swig and nunjucks.
<!-- swig -->
{% for index, item in ['a', 'b', 'c'] %}
[ {{ index }} - {{ item }} - {{ loop.index0 }} ]
{% endfor %}
<!-- result: [ 0 - a - 0 ] [ 1 - b - 1 ] [ 2 - c - 2 ] --> <!-- nunjucks -->
{% for index, item in ['a', 'b', 'c'] %}
[ {{ index }} - {{ item }} - {{ loop.index0 }} ]
{% endfor %}
<!-- result: [ a - - 0 ] [ b - - 1 ] [ c - - 2 ] -->
Changes:
Refactor `for` tags that iterate over arrays to only pass one parameter in
4. Switch to using the `dictsort` filter to make for loops in nunjucks iterate over object keys in alphabetical order
In swig, using the `sort` filter would work with both arrays as well as object keys, but in nunjucks the `sort` filter is still used for arrays, but `dictsort` needs to be used when iterating over object keys in order.
<!-- swig -->
{% for key, object in data | sort %}
{{ key }} - {{ object.title }}
{% endfor %} <!-- nunjucks -->
{% for key, object in data | dictsort %}
{{ key }} - {{ object.title }}
{% endfor %}
Changes:
When iterating over objects switch to using the `dictsort` filter to iterate over object keys in alphabetical order.
5. Markdown tag name is different
This would probably only apply to people who are currently using swig-marked to provide markdown support in their swig templates, but it’s worthwhile to note. There is a similar package for nunjucks, called nunjucks-markdown. However, the main difference between the two seems to be that nunjucks-markdown adds a `markdown` tag instead of the tag being called `marked`.
One other change I made was to switch to using markdown for highlighted code samples as well, instead of using swig-highlight.
Changes:
Switch to using nunjucks-markdown
Replace `{% marked %}` and `{% endmarked %}` with `{% markdown %}` and `{% endmarkdown %}` respectively
Conclusion
Although it’s unfortunate that swig is no longer going to be maintained by its creator, it’s very fortunate that the open source community seems to be taking ownership of swig to help keep it maintained. Additionally, it’s great that there are many other awesome alternatives such as nunjucks. If you haven’t heard of nunjucks I highly recommend you go and check it out. Hopefully you found this article useful if you are considering making a similar change. | https://medium.com/engineers-optimizely/js-templating-transitioning-from-swig-to-nunjucks-ac0e94d1794b | ['Tim Scanlin'] | 2016-04-05 22:46:06.226000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript'] |
Decentralised Exchanges: What’s the point? | Decentralised Exchanges: What’s the point?
Part Two: Making the most of collaboration in an open-source environment
Filling in the gaps
To create a stronger bridge between the token economy, and the rest of the global economy, it will be important that the frictions listed in part one of this series are addressed. This might be done through the introduction of new infrastructure, better targeting of resources, or even through a hybridisation of centralised and decentralised innovations. Let’s discuss these solutions below…
Solution 1(a): Bridging decentralised security to centralised liquidity
One idea gaining traction is to combine the best of decentralised security benefits, and centralised liquidity benefits. Decentralised exchanges store funds across many smart contracts which keeps those funds safe. Those smart contracts only come on-chain to process an order, lowering the opportunity window for theft. These decentralised exchanges match buyers and sellers on the internal network, but when an order cannot be internally filled, the order is re-routed and filled on an external exchange offering the lowest fee. This brings centralised liquidity pools into the loop, which decentralised exchanges can leverage until they accrue enough of a user-base to provide liquidity independently. What’s better is that this mechanism would only out-date once centralised exchanges have insufficient liquidity (i.e. all of the money is now on decentralised exchanges). The ‘hybrid exchange’ concept is now being tested out. The creators of Bitfinex, for example, recently launched Ethfinex. Ethfinex allow users to store funds on smart contracts, which can be liquidised on the centralised Bitfinex exchange. Ethfinex currently handle a 24h trading volume of $11 million and have just posted on their first successful month of trading. It is important for us to note however, that liquidity in this model is restricted to what is available from Bitfinex, who are having a notably difficult time meeting demand for liquidity. Out of 2.6EUR billion, 2.5EUR billion are deployed, the list goes on (see table below). By opening an oracle on the exchange to all available exchanges, a decentralised exchange will have more access to liquidity. Similarly, Omega One are playing with the concept, but have yet to enter the market.
Table.1. Shows that most active margin funding on the Bitfinex platform is already being leveraged
Solution 1(b): DLT-based transfers systems
So far, there have been two initiatives within the token economy which seek to address this problem, and could be applied to decentralised exchanges. The first is to have fiat liquidity channels on your exchange. Kraken has used SWIFT to offer this service on their exchange, opening JPY, EUR, USD, GBP and CAD liquidity. StellarTerm are a decentralised exchange which utilise this service to enable EUR and USD transactions of XMR-related purchases. The issue here however, is that users of this service must still deal with expensive exchange rates. The second solution is to integrate distributed-ledger technology into international transfer systems. This would enable same-day fiat transfers, which would be important when dealing with crypto (which is international by nature). The alternative is the week-long SWIFT transfers which require you to wait longer, and pay heavy exchange fees. This mechanism is still being researched, but we have already seen companies like Ripple (xCurrent & xRapid) and Santander (Santander One Pay FX) testing the concept. Santander can already process same-day international transfers using the technology. The incorporation of this service into liquidity channels such as those offered by StellarTerm would massively reduce fees and increase reliability.
Solution 1(c): Reducing Slippage through the introduction of crypto dark pools
Structural barriers for institutional investors are not new, so there have long been ways to deal with them. One way has been through the use of dark pools. Dark pools allow whales to trade huge sums without stating their identity or intention, effectively hiding the order book. Already being tested in the markets since the 1980s, dark pools have resulted in significant reductions in (price) slippage. This feature has existed for a few years on token exchanges like Kraken, but alone has not been sufficient for large investors. This could be due to previously lacking regulation, and poor security in the token economy. Both of those things are quickly changing. Republic Protocol is currently testing out the idea of decentralised dark pools in crypto.
Solution 2: ‘Anonymous’ custodianship
What about accountability? Aren’t innovations like decentralised exchanges and dark pools fundamentally in violation of the AML/KYC laws which are being stamped across the token economy by regulators worldwide? When investing large sums of other people’s money, how can institutional investors remain insured from scams and theft? Don’t both of these insurances run contradictory to the concept of being anonymous? Innovators focused on digital identity are quickly formulating solutions which could address this issue. Namely, the use of DLT-based zero-proof identification. Decentralised identity protocols like Sovrin, Self-Key, and Civic allow users to prove their credibility without giving away any personal information. Initially, this concept may not bode well with your senses, but Sovrin’s whitepaper summary of ‘minimal disclosure’ puts this into context:
“Suppose you had a digital copy of your driver’s license in the form of a verifiable claim. You could then use a mobile app to present a zero-knowledge proof that you are old enough to drink. The bartender could verify the proof using the public key of the issuer (similar to verifying a digital signature). But the bartender never learns (i.e., has “zero knowledge of”) your actual birth date.”
In doing this, users are able to prove key features about their credibility (such as credit rating, citizenship, etc) needed for regulatory and insurance-based procedures. They can do this without violating key principles of decentralisation or anonymity.
Solution 3: Bringing UX to the forefront of discussion
For UI/UX, the solution is straight-forward. Dedicate more time and resources! The focus should be on making the process as simple to use as For many teams outside of the token space, there are entire teams focused on user-experience. David Atchley does a great job putting the importance of UI/UX into perspective:
“Designers are playing an important part in how blockchain technology wins or loses in that future. Designing for any product should focus on the user and their goals. Never the underlying technology. Designing for any technology will always pull the focus for designers towards the pernicious and sub-optimal parts of that technology in order build great experiences on top of them. Don’t lose focus of how your product is making your user successful. And don’t let the technology become the ends, rather than the means.”
Conclusion
By simply considering what competitors are offering, what users want, and leveraging open-source infrastructure to incorporate these features into a single body, they suddenly become a lot more appealing. This is the power of interoperability. Decentralised exchanges were a fun way to test this out, and were appropriate given their foundations on principles such as decentralisation and being open-source. In doing so, we were able to outline some of the key pain points preventing greater adoption. Namely, we found that a lack of development in infrastructure, UX/UI, and a lack of custodianship made decentralised exchanges less credible. We also found ways these problems might be addressed. Namely, we found ways to bridge crypto liquidity pools between centralised and decentralised exchanges, and fiat liquidity through payment channels like SWIFT, or even better, DLT-based channels which speed up the process. We also outlined ways in which custodianship issues could be addressed, and laid out some principles for UX/UI development. Although we focused on decentralised exchanges, this concept can and should really be applied to any industry. The Convergence Ecosystem sees interoperability protocols and decentralised marketplaces as core data infrastructure required for seamless, automated data and value exchange. But in the meantime we have to deal with the world as it is; the winners will find ways to build the bridge from the old world to the new. We want to partner with teams doing just that.
Special Thanks
I would like to give special thanks to Lawrence Lundy-Bryan and Jamie Burke for advice on this piece. For any dying questions, get at me in the comments section.
Disclaimer: This does not constitute investment advice. Crypto-currencies can be extremely volatile and subject to rapid fluctuations in price, positively or negatively. The content provided in this article is provided for information purposes only. | https://medium.com/outlier-ventures-io/decentralised-exchanges-whats-the-point-6980c6b4b62f | ['Shaquile Noor'] | 2018-04-26 13:34:25.843000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Decentralized Exchange'] |
Why You Should Laugh to Learn More | Why You Should Laugh to Learn More
Photo by Leon on Unsplash
Humor and laughter have a plethora of psychological, physiological, and social benefits ranging from reducing stress, improving trust and engagement, and even enhancing learning and memory. In fact, much of these benefits can be attributed to one happy hormone named “Dopamine”.
Dopamine is a well-known neurotransmitter that is released whenever we smile or laugh. Whether it’s because of a hilariously bad joke or a 2020 meme, the release of dopamine is associated with the feel-good sensation we feel afterward. As it turns out, this neurotransmitter plays an integral role in a number of pathways in our body. Not only does dopamine help relieve stress as a coregulator in our stress response pathway, but it also plays an active role in keeping us motivated by means of positive reinforcement.
The Dopamine Reward System
Dopamine, and the feel-good sensation associated with it, is quite addicting– literally. Because of our instinct to do things that will bring us pleasure, we are drawn to things we associate with the feel-good sensation that accompanies dopamine release. For instance, if we know we enjoy ice cream, we are likely to come back for more because of the satisfaction we know it gives us.
Even outside the realm of food, the idea of positive reinforcement is a matter of finding ways to draw our attention and link the things we enjoy with secondary behaviors. Through this means, improved learning and retention can be achieved through positive reinforcement- if we associate the process of learning with something we enjoy, we’re more likely to maintain a positive relationship with it.
The Correlation Between Humor and Learning Isn’t a Joke!
While learning may not be everyone’s favorite pastime, we can use this relationship between dopamine and positive reinforcement to train our brains to learn better with a little help from humor.
The satisfaction of getting a good chuckle can become associated with learning if the two are regularly presented with one another. In other words, if we can make learning enjoyable enough, through means of humor as our “reward,” we can train our brains to look forward to learning.
Moreover, it’s true that we tend to have an easier time remembering things we find funny. In fact, this trend is called the “Humor Effect” and it’s believed to work on the basis that humor is known to be associated with increased attention and rehearsal (recall that earlier bit about dopamine?). This idea has been explored in several studies within the university setting that have shown that students tend to learn better when content-related humor is incorporated into the lesson. Thus, as people that inherently find pleasure in humor, this bias allows us to easily recall things that are associated with it.
What Does This Mean for The Workplace?
Making space for humor in your team training and meeting sessions will help boost productivity by enhancing learning and retention. In addition to these cognitive hacks of humor, there are a multitude of associated social benefits that can also be achieved. Taking steps toward an open and welcoming team will be met with the rewards of dopamine, so don’t worry! Cultivating a culture of smiles and laughter will certainly pay off. | https://medium.com/joincurio/why-you-should-laugh-to-learn-more-c7aa7b868705 | ['Madison Estrella'] | 2021-04-27 21:49:21.946000+00:00 | ['Workplace Humor', 'Workplace Culture', 'Humor', 'Psychology', 'Learning'] |
Implementation of Optimal Mean-Reversion Pairs Trading | Algo Trading
Implementation of Optimal Mean-Reversion Pairs Trading
Photo by Jake Buonemani on Unsplash
Introduction
Mean-reversion pairs trading is popular in the financial industry due to its potential long-term stability and mathematical rigor. However, one drawback of mean-reversion pairs trading is that you never tell when the relation of a pair is going to end in advance.
In this article, I want to show the implementation of optimal mean-reversion pairs trading based on our CFRM program director, Prof. Tim Leung’s paper and book. Luckily, there is an existing Python package developed by Hudson & Thames to realize Prof. Leung‘s mathematical algorithm.
Note: This project is only for academic purposes. Please consult with professionals like me before put it into live trading.
The notion of this project is simply pairing up two equities with high correlation in the same industry. One can enter correlation criteria in the code to filter out fewer pairs(like 0.8, 0.85, 0.9, 0.95). Even with a 0.95 correlation, you can still find failed cases during the OU training or backtesting phase. During the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck(OU) model training process, the failed cases happened when the signs of f(a) and f(b) were the same. They were supposed to have opposite signs.
The value of beta generated by Python package developed by Hudson & Thames was actually the amount of money spent purchasing asset B. To get the true beta, you need to divide it by the price of asset B at time 0 so that you can compute Xt, the portfolio value.
I added an additional one entry signal and one exit signal to the backtesting system, both of which were trend-following(moving average). To be honest, I didn’t put much effort into designing the entry signals and exit signals for this project because there are so many pairs generated from the data. If we actually want to trade these pairs in live trading, we need more sophisticated signals. I didn’t try out and design additional sophisticated entry signals as well as exit signals, which means further improvement is possible.
Lastly, due to my computer’s limited computing power, I could not run each and every 1074 pairs( Yes, you still have 1074 pairs after setting correlation criteria to be 0.95). My computer only ran 71 pairs in 5 days. Eventually, 28 pairs made it to the last round.
Consequently, I only post the 28 successful backtesting results. | https://medium.com/quantitative-investing/optimal-mean-reversion-pair-trading-8ce290dd22c2 | ['Jamie Keng'] | 2021-01-25 23:19:21.501000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Pair Trading', 'Mean Reversion', 'Algorithmic Trading', 'Optimization'] |
Multilingual Management with Watson Assistant | It is very common to implement a conversational assistant in multiple languages. Let’s say you have built a customer service assistant. One of the requirements may be to support additional languages, such as Arabic and Spanish, to accommodate your customer base. Often, I am asked how best to manage multiple skills, formerly called workspaces, in IBM Watson Assistant to achieve this goal. Though complete automation is a non-trivial task, there are ways this can be managed with some automation. Below are some suggestions to get you on your path.
Let’s assume you have built your Watson Assistant in the English language. Now you need to build the Arabic version of the assistant. The first thing you should do is review the list of supported languages and features for your languages of interest. Each language does not support all features. For example, contextual entities are supported in English but not in Arabic. So just be mindful of those feature differences and account for them accordingly.
Next, you need to export your English skill from Watson Assistant. Before you do that, you want to make sure that the “Irrelevance detection” option is set to “Keep existing”. There is an enhanced capability to detect irrelevant topics, however as of this post, it is only available in English. If this is not set properly, the import of your skill will throw an error later.
Irrelevance detection option
Now you are ready to export your English skill. Go to your “Skills” section in Watson Assistant, click on the ellipsis and then select “Export”. This will export your skill to a json file.
Export your dialog skill
Open that json file in your text editor of choice and look for the language parameter. Change the ‘en’ to the target language of your choice. In this case, ‘ar’ for the Arabic language. You can find the appropriate value for your language here.
Once you have made the change, save the json file. Go back to Watson Assistant, create a new dialog skill and select the “Import skill” option. Then point to your newly modified json file, which contains the Arabic language value. Watson Assistant will build your new skill with the core language set to Arabic.
To be clear, what you now have, is a copy of your English skill. It has all the dialog, intents, etc, still in the English language. But it is inside the context of an Arabic skill according to Watson Assistant. Note that there are additional bidirectional language preferences that you can optionally configure in an Arabic skill.
Translate Content
The next step is to translate all your textual content from English to Arabic. There are two major steps in this process. The first step is getting the content translated. The second step is updating the skill with the translated content. There are several ways you can go about doing this.
One automation option is to use IBM Watson Language Translator to translate all your text from English to Arabic. You would need to write a script to extract the relevant text from your English skill’s json file to process those through the Watson Language Translator service. Those results need to be stored somewhere such as a data store or a temporary location — I’ll discuss this in the next section. Remember, this is a conversational use case. English and Arabic are wildly different languages in their form and origin (I speak Arabic, so I know firsthand :) . I would highly suggest having a native Arabic resource (who also speaks, reads and writes English fluently) review all the translations to ensure that the context is optimal for conversation.
Another option would be to have a native Arabic resource manually translate the content. You would need to create a data store, such as a spreadsheet, that contains all your dialog structure, intents, etc. The resource can use this to review the content and add their translations. Using an external data store will make it much easier to manage your skills for purposes like this.
Updating Content
Now that you have the content translated, the ideal scenario would be to trigger a process to have all the content automatically updated in your skill, in Watson Assistant. This is certainly achievable but requires some work to create a program that will take the new Arabic translations from your data store or temporary storage and update the English equivalents. You can programmatically apply the updates to your skill json file. You need to have an organized and detailed data store that contains a key reference (eg dialog node ID) to ensure this is done smoothly.
Another option is to do this manually in Watson Assistant. It would not be the most exciting task, yet it will get the job done. The resource who updates the content in Watson Assistant will still require the data store reference to know how to appropriately update the content.
The option that you decide on will depend on several factors such as your sizing of effort, resources available, etc.
Managing Content Going Forward
Once you define your process to translate your skills, you can use that approach to manage any updates going forward. There are other possible options out there to accomplish these tasks but these tips will help get you started on your path. | https://medium.com/ibm-data-ai/how-to-manage-multiple-languages-with-watson-assistant-a8eb0436d348 | ['Marc Nehme'] | 2020-08-03 13:47:49.269000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Tutorials', 'Multilingual Chat', 'Ibm Watson Ai', 'Conversational UI'] |
Pandemic-Induced Decision-Making Fatigue is Robbing Us of Life’s Simple Joys. | Pandemic-Induced Decision-Making Fatigue is Robbing Us of Life’s Simple Joys.
Do you feel like you can’t make even the simplest of decisions these days? Are you feeling exhausted and overwhelmed when facing what used to feel like routine and benign choices? Is that good feeling that used to come from making certain decisions now seemingly elusive?
For the past 18 months, we have been collectively living through a pandemic, where everyday decisions that used to be simple have become potentially life-or-death for ourselves and our loved ones. There are not only too many decisions to make and options to choose from, there are increasingly fewer guidelines on what the right decision actually is.
The larger problem with decision-making becoming so difficult and potentially dangerous is that it robs us of the joy we regularly experience when we are afforded the luxury of making low cost, high reward decisions. I define these kinds of decisions as spontaneous, slightly exciting because they invite some aspect of the unknown into our lives, and are paid out in time vs. currency. Many of these types of decisions were literally made impossible due to the pandemic and various restrictions.
The remaining gulf has also put a hyper-lens of focus on the entire practice of decision making, from our leaders, to our neighbors, to scientific organizations and entire countries. We literally advertise some of our most impactful decisions by whether we wear a mask when we are around other people, and we pass fierce judgement on others’ decisions on an hourly or daily basis. Overall, decision making has become an exhausting and stressful process, so how do we start to dig out of this predicament?
Limiting our systems and choices
This topic of pandemic-induced decision paralysis was recently discussed by CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta where he stated,
“There’s a lesson in here I think for everybody. If you find yourself paralyzed by a small decision, it may help to try to restrict your options by focusing on fewer factors.”
I agree with Dr. Gupta, but how do we create these systems, in our lives and at work, and what factors do we focus on? If we look deeper into the benefits of changing and limiting our systems and our choices, it can offer more than simply making decisions easier. In business (and life), it can actually lead us to accomplish great things, if only we refocus our attention on the relevant opportunities and key outcomes that we really need in order to have successful forward momentum.
I often refer to Rembrandt, arguably one of the greatest painters of all time. He worked with a very limited color palette, yet within those restrictions he created groundbreaking masterpieces. Would he have created better paintings if he had every color under the sun to consider using when he painted? Or would he have been overwhelmed by options, and inevitably doomed to create something that had little harmony, with all the colors competing for attention?
In today’s world we need to focus on the things that will determine success or failure in a different way, in order to alleviate the stress of decision making, and ensure we can light our path and see around the next bend before we get there. We need to safely navigate to a place where we can make those higher-impact decisions that bring us joy, by reframing the way we get there.
The systems we create for ourselves provide the boundaries within which we operate, and oftentimes the clearer the boundaries and more limited the choices are, the more opportunity we create for ourselves to grow, gain confidence and even create unexpectedly amazing outcomes. Innovation often occurs when small adjustments are made within a very controlled environment, where the slightest variation can be evaluated and acted upon.
“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Goals, success metrics, whatever you call them — need to be scrutinized and perhaps completely reset. Most importantly they need to have shorter and smaller well-defined boundaries and goals, with only a few options from which to choose from to achieve the goal. Setting micro-systems clearly and in a way that can be tracked and evaluated at the beginning of any kind of effort could unlock untapped potential, and result in even better outcomes than what we could have imagined.
This means we have to get better about asking the question, “Is this working?” Not, “Did it work?”
I would suggest we look to our systems and processes to begin evaluating our answers. No longer should we ask ourselves “was I successful?”, but “am I succeeding?” and then to divide those questions up into systems that can clearly provide a yes or no answer.
Instead of existing in a world where your default process used to be, “I feel really great when I go out to dinner with my friends so I plan for a group outing at least once a week,” you are now possibility living within this process — “I feel horrible because I don’t even know if it’s safe to go out to dinner, and if we did I wouldn’t know where to go, and which place would meet everyone’s comfort levels, etc. so I just don’t go out to dinner anymore.” What if you shifted your thinking to focus on what steps or habits are required to eventually end up at dinner with your friends? What boxes need to be checked, what are the parameters or limitations, and what obstacles have to be cleared to get where you want to go?
It is also important to consider the amount of choices you are giving yourself. Humans, presented with too many options to choose from, generally default to making no decision at all, or are left feeling unsatisfied with their choice. We live in a world of immense choice in many scenarios, just consider this statistic:
In 1998, as the internet started to mature, there were 340 different types of breakfast cereals in the U.S. (which seems like a lot). By 2012 with the internet and advances in supply chain technology, there were roughly 4,945 different types.
Even with all of this choice the average grocery store limits its cereal aisle to 250 types. Why? Because people can barely handle that amount of choice, much less 20X that number.
In his well-known work, psychologist Barry Schwartz, calls this “choice paralysis.” In life and in business, more choices make us less likely to take action, and to be less satisfied with our eventual decision. With so many options at our fingertips, we blame ourselves if we’re not meeting our own standards, and we engage in frequent regret about the roads not taken. So we stop taking new roads because it’s so disappointing.
Micro-systems get you moving past each potential friction point by developing a process to support that effort. They will let you move through the process with less anxiety, help keep you making forward progress, and give yourself little wins along the way to achieving the larger goal.
We need to know we are moving things incrementally in the right direction, and what is working, as well as not working. As Barry Schwartz says in his TED Talk, “Everybody needs a fishbowl.” And that the absence of such a fishbowl (limited choice) is a recipe for misery.
If you can better understand your fishbowl, you can determine what a micro-win looks like when you’re only executing one small play out of many that are needed for a macro-win. These little things matter, particularly so when the larger objectives are much more overwhelming. We need to know what small victories look like, how to achieve them, and how to reinforce that activity or process. | https://medium.com/@TraceyHalvorsen/pandemic-induced-decision-making-fatigue-is-robbing-us-of-lifes-simple-joys-f031b346eaf5 | ['Tracey Halvorsen'] | 2021-09-15 15:52:25.691000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Lifehacks'] |
Who will make their Sandwich ? | There, I said it. Now it’s out in the open and can’t be taken back. For years, I followed Desperate Housewives like my life depended on it. One might judge me on the taste for the scandalous but my focus was always on the glamour of it all. The American Dream seems to be pretty to the eyes — So, a housewife cooking lemon meringue pie in a spotlessly clean kitchen created waves of appreciation in me and a size zero housewife decking up to visit a party evoked feelings of glitz in my so called quiet life.
What we watch and feel is what we become. I started washing dishes with a scrubber and cleaning washrooms with gloves; started connecting with my old girlfriends and basically gave my life a makeover. (This all was done consciously and in good taste). The self love amongst the characters and power of their friendship rubbed itself on me. The calm voice of the narrator soothed my generally -frayed nerves and when the so- called unconnected pieces of the episode got tied up neatly into a thought provoking theme, I was all cheers for the director.
And then , one day this make believe play that I was so tuned to watching turned itself on me. On this day, this show stopped being a respite and became a power house of energy.
Let me back up a little.
My first introduction with specially abled children was way back in school when we got the opportunity to visit Cheshire School. Too young to understand and process the significance of the trip, we made a picnic out of it. (Though my school must have done something right if I still carry snippets of that day with me till now!)
A trip to the Blind school happened a few months later. I sincerely think we drove that batch of the visually impaired crazy with our noise and our demands for song requests. Yet, they entertained us with love and true happiness. Gratitude.
So that was the sum total of my experience with specially abled kids. 6 months into a reputed Teaching course, I understood that
1) the word handicap is a big no-no.
And 2) that compassion is the way to go.
And during the last leg of my Teacher’s Training Course, my internship landed me in a prestigious all-inclusive school. Day after day, I sat in a class of young children being managed by a class teacher and couldn’t help but be constantly disturbed by the parallel teaching by the special educator.
My concentration went back and forth and finally settled on the special educator who had eyes on the back of her head when it came to her student. I saw her pester him, bully him, coax him and coach him very single minute of his time in the day. It was as if nobody else existed for them. The circus went on, minute after minute, leaving me dumbfounded and in awe at the level of commitment needed to handle a 6 year old who had no clue as to the world around him. Respect.
I generally advocate J Krishnamurthy’s teachings of creating a nurturing environment of fearlessness around a child but what I saw in that single month taught me that “Often the hardest lessons are the scariest for the child to learn”- mainly because the student is just not in a mood to jump out of their comfort zone.
Back to the video which encapsulates a trial which every parent goes through in one way or another.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJis5bRAWAk)
The son demands a sandwich and all the mother asks for is time to make one. At first, humor is her go-to weapon. Upon seeing the child’s scorn evident in his face, she decides to get assertive and asks him to make one for himself. In the eye of all his excuses, she encourages him to try .The parents of special children don’t have it easy and when Lynette, our character feels under appreciated, she has the guts to ask for an acknowledgment.
“ONE DAY I won’t be here and…” sentence has reverberated in my eyes for as long as I can remember.
The mother finally brings out the big guns as she ultimately refuses to make him a sandwich. The anger, the frustration, the madness, the tears and the horrible feeling of having lost it all completely submerges me as I looked for the real meaning of this clip.
And I concluded- Special child or not, there are some really tough lessons we will have to teach our children and sometimes, you literally burn along with your kid to drive home the crucial lessons.
And if the law of karma is anything to go by, it will be the lessons we would have to go through again- only this time to teach rather than to learn. And this is where true learning happens, right?
“ONE DAY I won’t be here and…who will make their sandwich then? | https://medium.com/@shivangimaniar/who-will-make-their-sandwich-b3dd80070a02 | ['Shivangi Maniar'] | 2021-08-25 04:29:29.026000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Children', 'Parenting Advice', 'Parenting'] |