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DIMCOIN: The Journey Continues | As we witnessed last year the crypto market, of over 1000 cryptocurrencies reached an awe-inspiring total market capitalization of $60 billion as of September 2017. It then reached 10 times that, in just two months, to $600 billion! This motivates us all to keep moving forward and working to make the DIM Ecosytem a reality.
On that note, there are a few updates:
Hybrid Stock Exchange (HYBSE) progress is going according to plan. We estimate it is 40% completed and are satisfied with the development so far. All of the software developers through-out the world are having a general meeting this month for the first time. A selected group of developers are currently going for further blockchain development training.
The journey for exchanges is still ongoing with a lot of effort put into getting DIMCOIN listed. With our recent GitHub update and the explorer almost finished, it will greatly benefit us with implementing DIMCOIN on the exchanges that we have previously talked to. Our past experience has shown us that we need to crawl before we walk. We have recently listed on Iquant as well.
DIM Ambassadors have been narrowed down to 32 applicants and the due diligence selection process is underway. This can take a while because we need to be sure with whom we are entrusting with our Brand. DIM Ambassadors will be the voice of DIMCOIN in their respective countries, promoting its vision and securing companies interested in being listed.
DIM Promoters have been chosen and have begun their work with more to follow as we finalize our approach.
DIMCOIN participants are encouraged to join the Telegram group of their language if they need specific assistance. Kindly let us know if you would like a new language to be added to the list.
Wise Consulting had a productive meeting in Dubai regarding their SRO license last week in Switzerland.
We have begun the process of selecting a DIMCOIN presenter that will be giving updates via vlogs and Youtube.
As we get closer to the completion of HYBSE, we will be looking to garner interest from more and more companies to participate. There is a listing incentive if anyone can secure a company being listed — and DIMCOIN will be offering 0.1% of the company’s listing market value as this incentive.
Monday’s AMAs will no longer be taking place, there will be a new weekly update to keep the community informed.
In conclusion, we would like to thank the DIM Community for their patience. 2018 will be the year that many will remember as the rise of DIMCOIN. | https://medium.com/welcome-to-dimcoin/dimcoin-the-journey-continues-c786f5c514a | [] | 2018-02-14 16:02:56.932000+00:00 | ['Dim Ecosystem', 'Dimcoin', 'Nem', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
DEVELOPING PROFITABILITY LAYER IN SALES | DEVELOPING PROFITABILITY LAYER IN SALES
Every business usually seeks sales. There is no other business that is strategized without Sales. As sales is the sole consideration of income sources, business owners and managers consistently plan out multiple ways to generate leads and convert it into sales. The major part of every business that needs to recognize is the audience. The targeted audience can be a good indicator to recognize the leads Sales leads are prospective buyers. The transformation of a lead into a prospect, and eventually a buyer, is denoted using the sales funnel. In order to keep filling your sales funnel with leads, here are five things you need to do:
1. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is one of the most efficient ways to generate leads. SEO-friendly content on websites, blogs, social media, and other forums helps drive leads to the website. The important aspect of inbound marketing is the quality of content that you post. Apart from writing content for business purposes, adding educational content for the casual reader is also highly recommended.
2. Partnerships
In the partnership option, two businesses complement each other by leveraging the other party’s solution or product. This means you have a qualified channel through which your leads move into the funnel. Partnering with multiple companies can help bring leads from different segments. It’s a win-win situation for both the companies involved. If you’re tying up with a partner, it should be put up on the homepage for leads to find you easily.
3. Affiliates
The affiliate model allows other companies or individuals to sell your product or solution on your behalf. Although it has a cost overhead, it helps reach out to specific regions or countries where you want to promote your product or service. Affiliates know the market better and have control over the local language, traditions, etc. If you’re a B2B company with a globally relevant solution, affiliates are a huge help in driving leads to your website.
4. Offering New Products
Use this option only if you have the time, people, and resources to build something off the shelf and promote it efficiently. It is used to enhance the value perception of your company, and to let prospects get a taste of your future offerings. This option works very slowly, but steadily in the long run.
5. Promotions
Promoting your marketing content is a vital part of lead generation. Promoting it in the channel where most of your prospects are found will ensure you get the much-needed visibility for your product or solution. Content such as infographics, case studies, or e-books should be promoted and shared on social media to reach the target audience. Discussion boards and network forums are other popular places to connect with your follower base.
While the above points are for generating new leads, it’s also best to leverage an existing database of leads that you connected with in the past. A follow-up email to those who never responded can be sent, in case they have any requirement for your new product or service.
Filling up the sales funnel should be done based on both the short-term and long-term marketing and sales goals of your company. Use a strategy or a combination that provides a steady flow of leads into the funnel. When you have a wide range of products to cater to, or if your internal teams are overburdened with prospecting activities, an external partner can help fill the gap.
Coleda B2B is a leading sales and marketing company catering to clients across the globe. Our lead generation services help you seize opportunities at the right moment, skyrocket your sales, and accelerate your revenue generation cycle. We work as an extended arm to your sales and marketing team. If you want to explore working with us, let’s connect here. | https://medium.com/@coledabb/developing-profitability-layer-in-sales-4af87e0fd81a | [] | 2020-12-21 15:18:46.408000+00:00 | ['Sales Funnel Strategies', 'Affiliate Marketing', 'Sales', 'Inbound Marketing', 'B2b Marketing'] |
Online Competition: Trial of Champions! | Play Horse Saga. Get a Legendary Steed. Win 500 MAN tokens!
Following a fierce community vote, five of Horse Saga’s Legendary Steeds pulled away from the pack and proved more popular than the rest. They are:
Angel Horse
2. Gumiho Horse
3. Samurai Horse
4. Ninja Horse
5. Gentry Horse
Voting, however, is often just a popularity contest. More challenging contests of will are often more rewarding — both figuratively and literally.
As such, we are issuing a Trial of Champions! The first person who successfully gets their hands on one of five Legendary Steeds listed above will win 500 MAN tokens!
The rules a simple:
1. Play the Matrix AI Network version of Horse Saga
2. Train and breed your horses until you get one of the 5 Legendary Steeds listed above
3. Tweet out a picture of your Legendary Steed to @HorseSagaGame. Include your Horse Saga Username and public MAN token wallet address
That’s it! The first person to get each Legendary Steed and tweet out a picture will win 500 MAN tokens. Five prizes are up for grabs — one per Legendary Steed.
The Trial of Champions runs until June 21st 2019 at 11:59pm (Beijing Time). | https://medium.com/@HorseSagaGame/online-competition-trial-of-champions-6c32fa6596fb | [] | 2019-06-14 07:47:53.291000+00:00 | ['Dapps', 'Blockchain Application', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
Improving Client Communication by Improving our Design Process | We love it when a client is enthusiastic about being an active part of their website project. Client participation is critical for every website we create.
Infantree’s most successful web projects rely on frequent communication and collaboration with the client as it’s important for both parties to have a shared understanding of goals, responsibilities, and outcomes throughout the project.
Since sharing design deliverables is a frequent and critical part of how we communicate with clients, we’ve spent time improving the design tools we incorporate into our process.
We’ve used a few different tools to create and present website designs. Here’s a summary of how each work and how they fit into our current design process.
The Website Mockup
A mockup, or comp, is probably the most straightforward way to design a website. It’s been used since web design came into existence and is what most clients expect to receive.
Mockups are documents showing a fully-designed page of a website, often using images and content that are close to final. They are created using design software such as PhotoShop, Sketch, Figma, or any of the growing number of interface design programs.
Using a mockup to present a design quickly gives the client a thorough, complete idea of what their new site will look like. It might not be interactive, but it sure looks like it could be. The design can be displayed inside a computer, tablet, or mobile device to show how the site will look when viewed on a few different devices.
The complete nature of a mockup is also one of its biggest downfalls. Mockups are rarely able to accurately represent what the site will look like when it is complete.
@StephenHay captures the feeling well:
Photoshop is the most effective way to show your clients what their website will never look like.
Clients expect their websites to look exactly like the mockups-and why wouldn’t they? It’s what we showed them, so it should look that way on the web.
The reality is there are too many variables at play to confidently promise what a website will look like, and mockups can set the wrong expectations. Due to the nature of responsive design, browser compatibility, and many other factors, it’s impossible for someone to develop a “ pixel-perfect” match of a mockup on every screen. It can be a disservice to show mockups even if they client will respond positively.
Maybe your mockups aren’t the same size as the client’s devices, and the sizing or spacing of items look different.
Or, the client opened a PDF of the mockup, approved it without realizing the zoom level was set at 75%, and when the website was complete, demanded it be reduced to the smaller size they saw and approved. (This happened!)
Long story short, clients will take mockups literally- very literally -and that can cause big problems for an agency.
Our take on mockups
We found that many benefits of mockups were often out weighed by how time consuming it is to create them and by the amount of misunderstandings and confusion they can cause. We prefer not to use mockups as the primary method for creating and presenting website designs.
Introducing the Element Collage
Our experience using mockups left us curious about approaches other designers were using to design websites. We came across new techniques that felt like a long-awaited rebuttal to the rigidity of mockups.
Dan Mall shared a new piece of his process-inspired by Samantha Warren’s Style Tiles-he uses to capture bursts of design ideas. It allowed him to “present clients with interface choices without making the investment in multiple Photoshop mockups.” Dan calls it an element collage.
A full comp often requires ideas to be fully realized. An element collage allows me to document a thought at any state of realization and move on to the next. - Dan Mall
In web development, a small piece of content that is used to build a page is referred to as an element. A design document that shows what several pieces of content could look like is an element collage. This is similar to how pieces of code are built, making for an easier transition into development.
The process for creating an element collage might start with designing only a few pieces of the site. This is usually enough to share with a client, have a conversation, and get feedback. Next, revisions are made and additional pieces are added to the element collage. This continues for a few rounds until there is a solid direction for the site’s design and the client feels comfortable moving to the next step: development.
The biggest change we noticed when we started using element collages was that we spent our time differently. Less time was spent designing and more time was spent discussing. Element collages aren’t intended to cover the design of every page and all pieces of content. They cover just enough to have a discussion about how design affects the entire site.
There was a lot of feedback and several rounds of revisions, but we spent less time in design software before nailing down the design direction. And less time spent designing means moving to development faster.
Developing a site from an element collage presents its own challenges. Translating the element collage to a developed website means designing parts of the site in the browser. Element collages are not all-encompassing design documents, so it is critical that the designer and developer frequently communicate.
The element collage is successful because it’s focused more on the feel of the site design and less on specific headlines or photographs. They also look less like a complete website than a mockup does. This keeps expectations in check. Presenting a mockup is kind of like asking, “Do you approve this?” while presenting an element collage asks, “Does this feel right? Can we keep going?”
We recognize that the shift to an element collage can make it harder for the client to understand what they’re looking at. Most clients haven’t seen an element collage before, but after guiding them through how we work they are more prepared to give good feedback that keeps the project moving.
Our take on element collages
We found them to be very helpful in establishing a solid foundation for a site’s design, but when we took sites into development the element collage often didn’t cover enough ground. Parts of the site that weren’t included in the element collage followed the general feel, but sometimes didn’t get that extra level of detail that could have made the page or section stand out.
Best of both worlds
Mockups and element collages are vastly different ways to design a website-each with their own ups and downs. Our web team uses a workflow that is beneficial to ourselves and our clients.
There is no one right way to design a site, but there are a few guidelines that consistently work well for Infantree’s web team.
Design starts with conversations
We often start with an exercise that allows them to share how they want their brand to look and feel. We use snapshots of existing designs to ask questions about what they like, what they dislike, and why. This helps set some boundaries for the web team to work within.
When we share site designs it is always paired with an in-person meeting or a phone call with screen-sharing. It seems to be the best way for us to communicate our reasons for the designs, listen to the client’s feedback, and discuss next steps.
Sharing a design in a way that cuts out a conversation leaves room for confusion.
Use development to uncover design challenges
We try to start development after design direction is established but well before all design is complete. This helps identify gaps the element collage didn’t cover.
We can use wireframes and an element collage to develop a good portion of a site’s pages without the need for additional mockups, but we often run into pages, sections, or other pieces of a site that need more layout and design exploration.
In this process, design doesn’t end when development starts. They overlap quite a bit and help each other progress.
Use the best tool for the task at hand
There are a variety of design tools we can use to help us figure out what something will look like, and the tool we use depends on the task at hand.
While mockups or element collages alone would not be our choice, each now play an important role in our workflow.
Element collages are great for figuring out design direction, exploring variations of an idea, and designing smaller parts of a site design.
Mockups are useful for thinking about how the design of an entire page will fit together. We often use them to design a few critical pages or templates to make sure the design direction works at a larger scale. They are also useful for designing unique and one-off pages that break from the rest of the site.
For times when interaction or animation is a key part of the problem, we make live code examples. In general, we will make what needs to be made in order to get the client on board with the design.
See the Pen Fun Button by Eric Clark (@eclarrrk) on CodePen.
Sharing this button prototype with a client was enough to convey the feeling we wanted certain interactions to have. Hover or tap to see the animation.
Why this is good for us (and our clients)
A rigid design process has never worked well for our team, our clients, or the outcome of a project.
Every project is different-with its own set of stakeholders, goals, challenges, priorities, and customers. Having a flexible path towards a well-designed site allows our web team to choose the tool that is best for the situation at hand.
Clients benefit from this approach because they become involved in a process they haven’t been part of before, gain a better understanding of what it takes to design and build a website, and become invested in the outcome of their site.
Our best website designs aren’t the result of flexing design skills in the hopes of impressing a client. They come from asking questions, having conversations, and solving design challenges together. | https://medium.com/@support_40297/improving-client-communication-by-improving-our-design-process-ac0ba7a0465f | [] | 2021-07-30 19:14:57.515000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Design', 'Website Design', 'Brand Strategy', 'Web Design'] |
The All-Nighter (fiction) | I once considered making art from printer jams. I liked the scrunchy concertina folds; crashing lines of text, garbled like an alien transmission; the way the ink could smear right down the paper as you hauled it out, some hapless word stretched into a long, long scream.
But that was back when I was doing my thing, living in the moment, before I started at Bill’s copy shop. Nowadays, I just hate jams, like I hate the printer-copier, and the people who come to print and copy, and Bill, and working nights when I ought to be making art.
One day I’ll be out of this and on to good things. Until then, tonight is going to be a bad one. It’s only early evening, but already I can hear the gaps between the seconds ticking, and in those gaps I feel the seconds of my life dripping away onto the floor of Bill’s back room, by the printer-copier.
They’d be tiny things, my seconds, specks among the wisps and shreds of paper torn from the damn jams: tiny, but they’d add up.
I knew it would be a worse night than usual when the printer stuck on Mr. VeggieTable. Even at the best of times I loathed Mr. VeggieTable — that badly-drawn homunculus, carrots for legs, red pepper chest and a head of broccoli — and knew I would detest his legumes if I could afford them.
Still, I had to clear the jam. The printer’s housing clicked as I opened it. More seconds fell to the floor. I pulled on the stuck paper, and it seemed to shift.
I pulled, and pulled more. The clock ticked. Apart from that the night was silent, and the yellow lights were strong, and it was just me and the printer.
Usually, you reach a moment when the paper gives up fighting, when you know you’ve won. But tonight it was stubborn. I pulled, and felt a quarter-inch move, and then another, but I must have been optimistic, because when I looked closer the strip of white paper was only just visible this side of the plastic maw.
I strained at it, wiggled the paper and strained, and again I thought I felt it give, but nothing had emerged. I cursed the printer, and Mr. VeggieTable, and Bill; it felt like I had been pulling for hours as the lights blazed and the clock ticked.
The door to the main shop edged open. It was another regular customer, the lady from Bar Barbara Ann. (These stupid business names only made me hate our clients even more; why should I have to work for them when I could be pursuing art?)
Still, I went to the counter.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
I took them, glanced at the heading on the paper — Rockin’ and a-Rollin’ Night — and was about to call up her account on my screen when she spoke again.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
I took it, glanced at the heading and was about to call up her account when she spoke again.
“I need two thousand copies,” she said, passing over a red USB stick and an A4 proof.
The clock ticked and the shop was bright.
“I need two thou…” — and I was thinking I should call up her account on the system, feeling my fingers on the keyboard, where they had always been and never been, and the shop was hazy, and the clock seemed very loud –
– and I wrenched myself out of the moment.
“Stop it!” I shouted, and I dropped the USB stick and the proof, and made for the back room, though each step seemed leaden; and when I got there I cowered on the floor by the printer-copier, and didn’t move until I heard the door sigh.
I hoped she had left. I had to pull myself together. The clock ticked. Milliseconds of me trickled to the floor. I tried to focus on something physical, something real. I tried to concentrate on pulling out the paper.
This time when I tugged I could feel that it came and came and came, feet and feet of it, and I should have been wreathed in spoiled printouts; yet when I looked, no more had been freed than before.
Focus wasn’t working. I needed to get out, away from the light and the ticking, but it was a while before I dared to look through to the store. Barbara Ann, if that was her name, had gone. There was a red USB stick and a white sheet of A4 on the floor.
Beyond the window, on the dark street, I could see rain falling, different drops striking the glass each instant, people walking, bags, cars, children, a dog, a bus, propelling themselves through the world, scurrying through the hours.
I wanted to go to that door, join that crowd moving through normal seconds. I wanted to be with them now, more than I wanted my life to be different; it was a sweeter goal than any prize.
I gazed at the window, and tried to stand. It seemed that I rose on my legs for a very long time, but afterwards I was crouching all the same, and here I am still.
Under the lights so bright that night might as well be day, I pull on the stuck paper, and time passes listlessly, perhaps. Outside, change swims by.
There’s a voice: “I need two thousand copies.” I pull on the stuck paper, and wait for the clock to tick.
I can’t hear it, but I wonder if you could hear one long tick if it never ceased, and I picture myself as a tiny figure, a Mr. VeggieTable entombed in a tick of the clock that falls forever and forever toward Bill’s floor.
“I need two thousand copies,” a lady says.
The paper budges from its jam, but doesn’t.
It’s going to be a long night. | https://medium.com/thenewnorth/the-all-nighter-fiction-ab3c024b73f5 | [] | 2019-11-22 23:22:12.801000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Psychological Horror', 'Horror Fiction'] |
From Idea to Reality | Why We Need an Open Data Policy Lab
The belief that we are living in a data age — one characterized by unprecedented amounts of data, with unprecedented potential — has become mainstream. We regularly read phrases such as “data is the most valuable commodity in the global economy” or that data provides decision-makers with an “ever-swelling flood of information.”
Without a doubt, there is truth in such statements. But they also leave out a major shortcoming — the fact that much of the most useful data continue to remain inaccessible, hidden in silos, behind digital walls, and in untapped “treasuries.”
For close to a decade, the technology and public interest community have pushed the idea of open data. At its core, open data represents a new paradigm of data availability and access. The movement borrows from the language of open source and is rooted in notions of a “knowledge commons”, a concept developed, among others, by scholars like Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom.
Milestones and Limitations in Open Data
Significant milestones have been achieved in the short history of the open data movement. Around the world, an ever-increasing number of governments at the local, state and national levels now release large datasets for the public’s benefit. For example, New York City requires that all public data be published on a single web portal. The current portal site contains thousands of datasets that fuel projects on topics as diverse as school bullying, sanitation, and police conduct. In California, the Forest Practice Watershed Mapper allows users to track the impact of timber harvesting on aquatic life through the use of the state’s open data. Similarly, Denmark’s Building and Dwelling Register releases address data to the public free of charge, improving transparent property assessment for all interested parties.
A growing number of private companies have also initiated or engaged in “Data Collaborative” projects to leverage their private data toward the public interest. For example, Valassis, a direct-mail marketing company, shared its massive address database with community groups in New Orleans to visualize and track block-by-block repopulation rates after Hurricane Katrina. A wide number of data collaboratives are also currently being launched to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through its COVID-19 Data Collaborative Program, the location-intelligence company Cuebiq is providing researchers access to the company’s data to study, for instance, the impacts of social distancing policies in Italy and New York City. The health technology company Kinsa Health’s US Health Weather initiative is likewise visualizing the rate of fever across the United States using data from its network of Smart Thermometers, thereby providing early indications regarding the location of likely COVID-19 outbreaks.
Yet despite such initiatives, many open data projects (and data collaboratives) remain fledgling — especially those at the state and local level.
Among other issues, the field has trouble scaling projects beyond initial pilots, and many potential stakeholders — private sector and government “owners” of data, as well as public beneficiaries — remain skeptical of open data’s value. In addition, terabytes of potentially transformative data remain inaccessible for re-use. It is absolutely imperative that we continue to make the case to all stakeholders regarding the importance of open data, and of moving it from an interesting idea to an impactful reality. In order to do this, we need a new resource — one that can inform the public and data owners, and that would guide decision-makers on how to achieve open data in a responsible manner, without undermining privacy and other rights.
Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash
Purpose of the Open Data Policy Lab
Today, with support from Microsoft and under the counsel of a global advisory board of open data leaders, The GovLab is launching an initiative designed precisely to build such a resource.
Our Open Data Policy Lab will draw on lessons and experiences from around the world to conduct analysis, provide guidance, build community, and take action to accelerate the responsible re-use and opening of data for the benefit of society and the equitable spread of economic opportunity.
Toward that end we will identify and disseminate best practices; develop and curate guidelines, toolkits, and frameworks to support more effective data provision and use; and implement proof-of-concept initiatives to improve our understanding of how to harness the power of open data to solve key societal challenges.
In addition, the Open Data Policy Lab will foster a community of data stewards, chief data officers, and other decision-makers within the public and private sectors to share knowledge, undertake collaborative work, and spur responsible data sharing.
In launching this Lab, our goal is to disseminate information, and more generally to work toward making manifest the many potential benefits of open data. By providing a community and a set of demand-driven initiatives, we hope to bring about genuine social, economic, and political transformation.
We’d love to have you join us on this journey. If you are interested, there are three ways to engage:
If you create policy, manage or otherwise control data at an institution, join us as a data steward partner and connect with responsible data leaders seeking ways to create public value through data re-use and collaboration.
and connect with responsible data leaders seeking ways to create public value through data re-use and collaboration. If you are studying open data or data re-use, join us as a research partner and help us build and act upon the Open Data Policy Lab research and policy agenda.
and help us build and act upon the Open Data Policy Lab research and policy agenda. If you are part of an institution seeking to advance the field of open data, support the Open Data Policy Lab by becoming a funding partner.
Over the next few months, we will release our first resources, followed by regular updates and targeted interventions based upon feedback from users and policymakers. Sign up here to receive updates and early releases from the Open Data Policy Lab, or get in touch with us at opendatapolicylab [at] the govlab.org. | https://medium.com/open-data-policy-lab/open-data-policy-lab-announcement-fe50c01e09ab | ['Stefaan G. Verhulst'] | 2020-04-21 14:40:40.634000+00:00 | ['Policy', 'Data Collaboratives', 'Research', 'Open Data', 'Data'] |
Sun Editorial: What will be the big issues of 2019? | Sun Editorial: What will be the big issues of 2019?
Local governments and schools are making their lists of priorities. Call attention to issues you think are most important. Anthony Mazziotti Follow Jan 3, 2019 · 2 min read
By Alan Bauer
The start of a new year offers an opportunity to look ahead, plan a course of action and resolve lingering issues. In some instances, new municipal and school board members will begin their terms. They will bring fresh ideas and approaches to local government. For other towns and school districts, staying the course will be the plan for 2019.
Chances are your local governments will be tackling a combination of old issues and new challenges. Some matters simply reappear every year — roadwork, for example. Others, like a construction bond, for example, show up periodically, but can have a huge impact on a community.
As 2019 kicks off, we invite you to share your thoughts about issues — old or new — you think your local governments should address this year. It might be something that, seemingly, never goes away, or an idea that is new to the arena of public debate.
Everybody wants super low taxes and super great public services. The challenge is striking a balance between the two.
We think that, ultimately, taxpayers are most satisfied when they believe they are getting the “most bang for the buck.” They want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent wisely. They want to see tangible results — good schools, responsive emergency services, smooth roads, etc. — in return for their tax payments.
Many towns and school districts will begin their budgeting processes in the near future. That’s when leaders pick and choose where your tax dollars are spent.
And that means now is a great time to let those leaders know what you want to see. Are you willing to give up a service in return for lower taxes? Would you pay more taxes if a program is started? Let your voice be heard by sending a letter to the editor to the email address at the right.
Local governments are making their lists of priorities. Here is your chance to call attention to issues you think are most important in your community. | https://medium.com/the-williamstown-sun/sun-editorial-what-will-be-the-big-issues-of-2019-dd01ec097f49 | ['Anthony Mazziotti'] | 2019-01-03 20:09:05.220000+00:00 | ['New Jersey', 'Government', 'Schools', 'Politics'] |
NLCS Game 1: Braves 5, Dodgers 1 — Robbery | Photo: @MLB On Twitter
Before the NLCS started, I had an idea in my mind of how it would look if the Braves managed to pull off this upset. Sort of a road map to the pennant, if you will. It obviously wasn’t set in stone or the only way to get it done, but it looked something like this:
Two wins with the bats. Just games where the two best offenses in baseball both live up to their regular season numbers, and the final score is something in the range of 7–6 or 10–8. In my mind these came in the middle games of the series, because both teams will be in the back of their rotations and the Braves will have the benefit of batting last in games 3–5.
One win with the bullpen. A game where the starting pitcher only gets through three or four innings and a parade of relievers comes in to just shut the Dodgers down. Again I had an idea of where this might fall, and I was thinking in one of Anderson or Wright’s starts.
One win that fills in the “other” box. Just something else outside of that. Maybe it’s a game where the Dodgers beat themselves with a couple errors or bad managerial moves, maybe it’s a fortuitous bounce of the ball or a lucky umpiring decision. Just something outside the obvious realm of how the Braves might pull this off; sort of stealing a win in an unconventional way if you will.
There’s your stolen win.
I guess you could make an argument that the 5–1 win in game one more fits the bill of the bullpen win considering Atlanta’s bullpen was lights out, and there is a case to be made that this was one of the “shootout wins” because the Braves picked up four runs in the ninth.
Or you could argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, there is no exact blueprint to winning a series, and every win counts the same no matter what the score is or how it happens. I can’t argue it.
But as far as I’m concerned, that’s a game the Braves stole. So much went wrong, and there were so many moments where it looked like the Jenga tower was about to collapse. Moments where the Jenga tower probably would’ve collapsed with most other Braves teams.
Adam Duvall picked up an oblique injury while fouling a ball off. The Braves had to turn to a 21-year-old with four career plate appearances to take over in the middle of an NLCS game. That alone was an early kick in the teeth that depleted the bench and made things a lot tougher in crunch time.
Speaking of tougher in crunch time, Pablo Sandoval played. In a postseason game. In the year 2020. The man who played in one regular season game all season was called on to pinch hit in a tie game and play defense from there. Charlie Culberson — who has pitched more recently (Sep. 4) than he has hit (Aug. 21) — was brought on to take an at-bat with the bases loaded in a tie game. The Braves had to dip into their entire bench outside of backup catcher Tyler Flowers, and had three players play in this game with a combined 15 plate appearances all season.
That was almost like a little league game where the league rules mandate that the manager lets every player get in the game for at least an inning, and somehow the Braves found a way anyway.
And how many moments tonight were you bracing for the worst? Max Fried walked the №9 hitter to put two on base for Mookie Betts in the second inning. It feels like forever ago because of everything that happened later, but that could’ve been a kill shot right there. The Braves went 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position in this game. They left 10 on base; just doing everything possible to make it tougher and tougher to pull out a win.
There were points in the game where they were practically begging the Dodgers to grab a stranglehold on it. The blown opportunities in the sixth and eighth immediately come to mind as points where it looked like the game was going to fall apart. The most important half inning of the entire night was Max Fried’s 1–2–3 effort in the bottom of the sixth; it bridged the game to the bullpen and swung some momentum back into the Atlanta dugout after a brutal missed scoring opportunity. Austin Riley had an error (somehow, it was scored a hit), and that opened the door for a potential Dodger rally.
That wasn’t just stepping into a cage to fight a lion. That was stepping in to fight the lion, locking all the doors, throwing the keys away, telling everyone else at the zoo to go home so you can’t ask for help and finally covering yourself in steak juice right before the lion showed up.
I don’t know if the Braves will play better baseball for the rest of the series, but I know they are capable of playing a lot better baseball than tonight. Of course, so are the Dodgers. That lion is still there trying to rip your heads off, and it’s going to be a pretty angry one tomorrow.
The angry lion starting off tomorrow’s battle will be Clayton Kershaw.
Kershaw has a 0.43 postseason ERA against the Braves… and a 4.75 postseason ERA against everyone else in baseball.
He has pitched against 11 different teams in the postseason, and the Braves are the only one he has never surrendered a home run to. Heck, forget home runs. In 21 innings against Kershaw in October, the Braves only have one extra base hit of any kind.
It is beyond time for the Braves to do what everyone else has done at least once against Kershaw in the playoffs, or, you know, at least do something resembling hitting.
But it was also beyond time to win a playoff series, and it was beyond time to advance to the NLCS.
Better late than never. | https://medium.com/@alancoleatl/nlcs-game-1-braves-5-dodgers-1-robbery-7e4b17fadab3 | ['Alan Cole'] | 2020-10-13 06:11:53.416000+00:00 | ['MLB', 'Baseball', 'Sports', 'Atlanta Braves', 'Los Angeles Dodgers'] |
An Introduction to Streaming ETL on Azure Databricks using Structured Streaming & Databricks Delta — Part I | Introduction
In my previous role I developed and managed a large near real-time data warehouse using proprietary technologies for CDC (change data capture), data replication, ETL (extract-transform-load) and the RDBMS (relational database management software) components. To be precise, our process was E-L-T which meant that for a real-time data warehouse, the database was continuously running hybrid workloads which competed fiercely for system resources, just to keep the dimensional models up to date. At times frustrated by sub-optimal performance, challenges of latency and vendor lock-in, I had often considered migrating to an ETL process built using open source / big data technologies (known as ETL-offloading) and whether this would provide the promise of true horizontal scalability. Naturally I was wary of the fundamental differences between the technologies, learning curve involved and the development time required.
Recently however, I was fortunate enough to work on a POC which required a streaming ETL pipeline using Azure Databricks, so I had a rare glimpse into what this migration challenge might have been like, the major differences and whether there would be any significant trade-offs.
In this blog I want to share my experiences by building a more “traditional” yet real-time ETL pipeline using the latest and greatest from Azure Databricks. I say “traditional” because the result should represent a star schema in a data warehouse, specifically Azure SQL Data warehouse, although in streaming mode for low latency between source and target. I also wanted to consider incorporating the popular concept of a data lake which is a cost-effective scalable storage option. Fortunately Azure Data Lake Storage gen 2 went GA at the beginning of the month and the connector for Databricks is fully supported.
The first part of this blog will cover the main concepts and components, as well as the overall architecture used for the demonstration. Part II goes through the complete setup in Azure, and Part III walks through the ETL pipeline developed in a series of Databricks notebooks. However if you’re eager to dive right into the detail, you will be able to run the pipeline with minimal setup in Azure.
But if you feel like a light-hearted diversion before we begin, here’s a semi-fictional journey through time from an ETL developer’s perspective…
Azure Databricks
Databricks was founded by the creators of Apache Spark and offers a unified platform designed to improve productivity for data engineers, data scientists and business analysts. The Databricks platform provides an interactive and collaborative notebook experience out-of-the-box, and due to it’s optimised Spark runtime, frequently outperforms other Big Data SQL Platforms in the cloud.
Azure Databricks, is a fully managed service which provides powerful ETL, analytics, and machine learning capabilities. Unlike other vendors, it is a first party service on Azure which integrates seamlessly with other Azure services such as event hubs and Cosmos DB.
As you would expect with such a service, it’s quick and simple to spin up clusters which can auto-scale, and auto-terminate — so your cluster will shutdown after a specified amount of time, once your jobs have completed. These two features make the service cost-effective, as you’re only billed while your cluster is running based on the number and size of the nodes (VMs) in your cluster. More information on billing can be found in part II. If you want to run the demonstration with the notebooks provided in part III, you can provision a 14 day free trial and you will only pay for the underlying Azure VMs. Once the resource is created in Azure, a Databricks workspace will be provisioned for you, which essentially stores all your Databricks assets, such as notebooks and libraries. Even without any running clusters you can still access the workspace, view notebooks, schedule jobs etc. and you won’t be charged until you spin up a cluster. It’s worthwhile noting that in a streaming scenario or one which requires a dedicated analytics cluster for a BI tool, you would need a dedicated cluster, although it could be set to auto-scale depending on the workload.
Structured Streaming & Databricks Delta Lake
Together with Azure Databricks, the two key components that in my opinion really unlock a true ETL / data warehousing use-case, are Spark Structured Streaming and Databricks Delta (now known as Delta Lake). With these improvements, mere mortals can now attempt to develop (both batch and streaming) ETL and analytics pipelines in Spark. Why so? Before structured streaming, there was Spark Streaming which used RDDs & DStreams (based on relatively low-level operations on Java/Python) and before Databricks Delta, concurrent reads/writes, DML operations and performance optimisations were limited and complex.
Structured streaming on Azure Databricks provides a reliable, exactly-once, fault-tolerant streaming platform, using a simple set of high-level APIs. You can treat an incoming stream as an unbounded table and it allows you to handle late or out-of-order data. More importantly through a feature called watermarking, you can join streaming data (with static or other streaming data) and instruct the engine how long to “wait” for records to join. This is a significant departure from how our RDBMS based ELT process ran whereby it would run a number of mappings but only on one change set (CDC table) at a time. It was done so because you could not rely on the master-detail events being recorded in the same (micro-batch) time window.
One may ask why couldn’t the Spark engine simply wait indefinitely for these late arriving records to appear. Well, it could but, but to do so requires keeping unbounded state, in other words, storing the keys in memory without any threshold at which they can be purged, which will ultimately exhaust all available memory and lead to out of memory (OOM) failures.
So whilst the ability to handle late arriving data may be very useful in a near real-time ETL scenario, it is not without it’s limits and consequence, so carefully evaluated watermarking thresholds will need to be defined to limit state. Crucially, data arriving beyond this threshold would then need to be handled in a batch process.
On a more positive note, the code changes between batch and streaming using Spark’s structured APIs are minimal, so once you had developed your ETL pipelines in streaming mode, the syntax for running in batch would require minimal re-coding. (An example of this is provided in the final notebook.)
Turning our attention now to Databricks Delta, there are certain “exclusive” features which simplify and optimise streaming (and batch) ETL scenarios. Essentially it’s an optimized Spark table with a number of SQL-like features:
ACID transactions — Multiple writers can simultaneously modify a data set and see consistent views. Writers do not affect readers.
— Multiple writers can simultaneously modify a data set and see consistent views. Writers do not affect readers. DELETES/UPDATES/UPSERTS — Writers can modify a data set without interfering with jobs reading the data set. Merge operations are well supported too.
— Writers can modify a data set without interfering with jobs reading the data set. Merge operations are well supported too. Statistics, data skipping and ZORDER clustering — Reads are 10–100x faster when statistics are tracked about the data in each file, allowing Delta to avoid reading irrelevant information.
With Delta you can write batch and streaming data into the same table, and other notebooks and clusters can read from the same table and get a consistent up-to-date view. Additionally, Delta can improve data access speeds by organizing data into large files that can be read efficiently. This is done by coalescing small files into larger ones.
So essentially it’s a transactional storage layer designed specifically to harness the power of Apache Spark and the Databricks filesystem (DBFS). The underlying data is stored as Parquet files in DBFS but Delta maintains a transaction log that efficiently tracks changes to the table.You can read and write data stored in Databricks Delta using the same familiar Apache Spark SQL batch and streaming (structured) APIs.
So is Databricks Delta the perfect solution to all ETL challenges perhaps?
Whilst the gap between the two technologies does seem to be closing, one still needs to be aware of the fundamental differences between Delta and a RDBMS. It’s files as opposed to records, it’s a columnar vs row based storage format and hence certain point operations like merges or updates (although possible) are unlikely to run as fast, mainly due the lack of real indexes. Even more so in streaming scenarios, so this is where you may need to consider alternatives, like Cosmos DB, if you have workloads which depend on running these kinds of operations in a time sensitive manner. Hopefully by running the demonstration in Part III yourself, you can evaluate these considerations.
Dataframes, Datasets, transformations & lazy evaluation
If you are new to Spark and coming from a SQL background, I’d recommend we cover a few “foreign” concepts which you’ll need to get your head around: dataframes, transformations, actions and lazy evaluation. I’ll not go in to any great detail so if you fancy some good bed-time reading, I recommend “Spark: The Definitive Guide: Big Data Processing Made Simple” written by Matei Zaharia, who started Spark in 2009 and co-founded Databricks, and Bill Chambers, who is a PM at Databricks.
Sequence of dataframes and transformations
Dataframes and Datasets are both distributed, immutable table-like data structures which can span thousands of computers. Because they’re immutable we need to perform transformations on them but store the result in another dataframe. A transformation can be anything from casting a column to a different type, applying a built- or custom function (UDF) to joining dataframes. So it’s common to “chain” multiple dataframes each with their own transformations before achieving the output you require. Spark will form an optimal execution plan, but only execute them when you specify an “action” — such as displaying the count in the notebook, or writing to an output sink. Hence the notion of lazy evaluation.
You can express business logic (in R, Python, Scala, or Java) as a set of logical transformations in SQL, DataFrames or Datasets, and Spark will transparently compile that logic down to RDDs and generate an underlying execution plan.
To begin with, you’re likely to only use Dataframes rather than Datasets, but if you’re wondering about the difference between the two, it’s that Datasets are strongly typed whereas Dataframe types are only evaluated at runtime.
Lastly Spark supports a subset of the ANSI SQL 2003 standard, so you can develop many parts of your pipeline in SQL-like notation and you can even interoperate between dataframes and SQL as you need.
Demo scenario
Whilst the following demo is loosely based on the POC I mentioned earlier, it has, for the purposes of confidentiality been altered and changed, particularly the data set. The scenario I’ve decided to use is based on the frequently cited Ad Tech use-case, although for simplicity I’ve ignored certain metrics like clicks and conversions which are fairly well covered already.
Assume the business is in the advertising sector and monitors the volume of adverts displayed (impressions) on certain websites. They are only interested in adverts displaying particular brands. The business is not interested in the usual clicks and conversions. In this scenario, adverts and impressions arrive as a continuous stream / feed of json messages (could be files) from a 3rd party. Adverts contain metadata such as when it was created, a unique identifier, name and which brand it pertains to. Impressions are, when, and on which site, an advert was displayed, including the session and user information. Fortunately we have an advert ID in both to link these however we don’t have any sort of unique key for each impression.
There are some static operational/reference sources which contain slowly changing data:
a SQL DB which contains a list of brands being monitoring a web application which the operational team uses to maintain a list of domains that are being monitored.
For convenience, assume that both of these data sets are already pre-filtered by a 3rd party based on these specific brands and domains. Adverts are an important source of reference data and individual adverts need to be easily accessible by the operational application.
The set of source tables and the target star schema we need to generate is as follows:
From source to star schema
Note, I’ve excluded the crucial time dimension for brevity, and you’ll also notice I’ve included a batch ETL scenario to showcase how we could implement a Type II slowly changing dimension requirement.
Architecture
Given the scenario we’ll implement the following architecture:
The streaming source section might seem overly complicated so this deserves a little explanation. To generate a streams of data we will use a utility to generate json data for both adverts and impressions. The utility supports defining a schema of your choice but unfortunately only supports sending data to IoT Hub. We’ll need to use stream analytics to consume the stream and route it based on the contents of the file either to Event hub or Cosmos DB.
Looking at the store section now, you may wonder why or how we can send a stream to Cosmos DB. In the scenario description above, it was mentioned that adverts need to be accessible by an operational application, from which individual adverts need to be quickly accessed. This is a good fit for Cosmos DB which provides scalability and single-digit-millisecond latency. Stream analytics can easily send a stream to Cosmos DB and we can read it back again as a stream using the superb change feed feature. Stream analytics will route Impressions to event hubs and Databricks will read both of these streams, run the ETL pipeline and stream the results to Azure SQL Data warehouse. There will also be various pipelines run in batch to provide a more comprehensive set of scenarios.
For a more realistic demonstration, I wanted to showcase how we take two streams, join them, as well as join with other slowly changing reference data. In fact, one of the advantages of Databricks, (more specifically Spark), is that you can read from many different data sources and data formats with relative ease, perform joins and transformations, and then write the output to a multitude of targets. This is why it has become a popular choice for data lake analytics.
Next, in the 2nd part of this blog, we’ll build out the above architecture but if you’re eager just to run the pipeline there will be an option described in part III to achieve this with minimal setup required. | https://medium.com/microsoftazure/an-introduction-to-streaming-etl-on-azure-databricks-using-structured-streaming-databricks-16b369d77e34 | ['Nicholas Hurt'] | 2019-07-06 13:45:16.805000+00:00 | ['Spark', 'Etl', 'Structured Streaming', 'Azure Databricks', 'Big Data'] |
The Best Banned Books | In honor of Banned Books Week, a collection of ten personal favorites with highlighted quotes from each.
Congerdesign / Pixabay
As the proverbial saying goes, people always want what they cannot have. Just as it applies to an illicit lover or the latest cost-prohibitive shiny thing, it also applies to what people desire to read.
Forbidden fruit is truly sweeter. Consequently, whenever a small-minded group bans a book from a certain demographic, it instantly becomes more seductive and fascinating, resulting ultimately in a larger readership. One simply must appreciate the irony.
It is shocking to see some of the epic, beloved works that have been restricted over the years. Let that be a reminder to us all when future works are pushed to be restricted as well.
I have not yet read everything on the banned list, nor have I loved all the ones that I have read. In honor of Banned Books Week, below are the ten best ones I have read thus far, listed in order of publication.
Fellow reading rebels, comment below and let me know what your favorite banned books are. | https://cynicalxennial.medium.com/the-best-banned-books-8d4add42b1e7 | ['Cynical Xennial'] | 2019-09-23 11:01:01.350000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Advice', 'Fiction', 'Books', 'Reading'] |
Top Freelancing Books To Read | Freelancing can be a tough job. You are your own boss, which is great, but at the same time, you have to deal with all aspects of running a business. In this article, we’ll share a list of recommendations to the best freelancing books to read and learn techniques to grow your career.
No matter what type of freelancer you are, you need to market your work, keep clients happy, network, do your administration, do your taxes and keep up with all the latest developments in your branch, and just is just a small selection of all the skills you need as a freelancer. But bottom line you just need to run a business, your own business, and that can be a hard job.
Freelancing Books To Read Recommendations
Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
Listed 3 out 17 times and this book is as a result of two-decade research on the philosophy of personal achievement. It is motivational literature in all areas of life including financial success.
The 4-Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss
Listed 10 out of 17 times. The book illustrates the benefits of working online and the advantages of outsourcing tasks at a little cost. The author explains how one can create a 4hour workweek to generate five-figure earnings through online jobs. This book also appears on many other favorites lists, like Best Business Books of All Times.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie’s classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is a timeless, cornerstone volume on how to be likable, attract people to your point of view, and change others while avoiding resentment. It’s critical to build a network in order to maintain a successful, long-term freelance career. Carnegie’s book will help you get the work you want, improve the work you have, and make any situation you face work in your favor. Finally, the price is $12.99 (Kindle)
Creative, Inc. by Joy Deangdeelert Cho and Meg Mateo Ilasco — Freelancing Books To Read
Creative, Inc. is a concise resource for freelancers who are just getting started. If you’re ready to build a thriving freelance business doing work you love, Meg Mateo Ilasco and Joy Deangdeelert Cho provide the tools you need. This book will help you learn to build a portfolio that gets clients’ attention, navigate the legal steps to business-building, and launch a successful business. Price: $1.99 (Kindle)
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie’s classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is a timeless, cornerstone volume on how to be likable, attract people to your point of view, and change others while avoiding resentment. It’s critical to build a network in order to maintain a successful, long-term freelance career. Carnegie’s book will help you get the work you want, improve the work you have, and make any situation you face work in your favor. Finally, the price is $12.99 (Kindle)
Stop Thinking Like a Freelancer: The Evolution of a $1M Web Designer by Liam Veitch
In Stop Thinking Like a Freelancer, million-dollar freelance web designer Liam Veitch illustrates important strategies for creating a more stable freelance career. Veitch teaches you how to grow your online presence, change your mindset, and repel toxic clients as you stabilize and scale your business. Freelance professionals who want to grow beyond here-and-now thinking will benefit from this book. Finally, the price is $8.99 (Kindle)
The Freelancer’s Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Have the Career of Your Dreams. On Your Terms by Sara Horowitz
Written by the founder of the Freelancers Union, The Freelancer’s Bible is a comprehensive roadmap to starting. Running a freelance business. In this book, In addition, Sara Horowitz teaches new freelancers the ropes, including how to choose health insurance, decide on office space, get and keep clients, let clients go, set rates, draw up contracts, negotiate effectively, and more. Finally, the price is $10.66 (Paperback)
Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-Connected World by J. Kelly Hoey
For Solopreneurs, successful networking is paramount to a thriving freelance career. In Build Your Dream Network, J. Kelly Hoey shares a fresh perspective on establishing and growing connections. With a focus on long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. Moreover, Hoey takes a deep dive into how to build and leverage your network to help you achieve your goals. Price: $12.99 (Kindle)
Final Words About Freelancing Books To Read
Moreover, to those listed here, there’s a rich world of books on freelancing available for professionals at all levels. Whether you’re just starting your freelance journey or are ready to level up, there’s something out there for you. Finally, what’s your favorite book on freelancing? Share it with us in the comments! | https://medium.com/@visualmodo/top-freelancing-books-to-read-54f29a85e6eb | [] | 2020-03-03 21:55:12.197000+00:00 | ['Books Recommendation', 'Freelancer', 'Book Review', 'Learning', 'Reading Books'] |
The Field | Photo by Derek Mack on Unsplash
This would be my gift to you:
fresh-mown grass to lie on
beneath windless trees
and enough sky to treat your eyes
to every shade of blue.
I would give you the sound of thunder
and the forecast of a rainy
afternoon. There — now time slows
and seems to drift
sleepy as a sated bee.
Soon we will fall asleep
but not yet. There are books to be read
and shoes to be kicked off
and sleepy conversations to hold
on the shapes of clouds: this one
is a bird, or a dog standing on its head
and that one a ship
which will carry us, when we are ready
to the dreams of our choosing.
Then, when the dark closes in
let someone come walking
unhurried across the sweet field
just before the rain
and cover us where we sleep.
Thank you for reading! You can find this and other poems in my book, Migrations: A Map of the Human Spirit. | https://kbimle.medium.com/the-field-10e8260d2886 | ['Kara B. Imle'] | 2019-06-14 17:26:21.199000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poems On Medium', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Love'] |
How I Got a Developer Job After My First Year in College | Any aspiring developer dreams about the day when s/he will get hired at a company as a programmer. For most if not all industries, there is a problem that any junior/entry-level worker will inevitably face — how do you get a job without experience, and how do you get experience without a job?
The job opening posts can be quite daunting to someone who lacks experience. They require you to have worked several years with several different technologies. In fact, those requirements have become something that developers joke about since they are sometimes surreal and written by people who don’t have any technical competency. Developers tend to joke about job posts that require five years of experience in a technology that has only existed for four years.
As an aspiring worker, you might think of these obstacles and create some type of mental block in your head that you are not job-ready, when in fact you might just be ready as anyone else.
In this article, I will try to break down four key things that I kept in mind and did which led to me getting employed after my first year in college while still pursuing my Computer Engineering degree.
1. Expanding my programming skills
If you want to break into any knowledge-based industry, you need to broaden your knowledge and apply it enough times that you become proficient with it. I realized that I wasn’t gaining very much from college, so I studied a lot outside of school. Even before I started college, I focused heavily on studying programming daily. I was so committed to it that I could grind on coding platforms for many hours a day.
Of course, that is not possible for many people, especially if you have other duties and responsibilities to take care of in life. In my case, I was more or less free, and I took advantage of that freedom to expand my knowledge in programming. But I think that anyone can find some spare time to invest in growing — it’s just a matter of priorities in life.
2. Showcasing my skills publicly
Even if you’re the best programmer out there, no one will know if you don’t showcase your skills in some fashion. Future employers will also like to see concrete work that proves your competency.
One great thing to do is to build projects. By that I mean, going through the phases of developing a system from the planning phase to deployment. It will act as proof that you are acquainted with the entire software development process.
When I watched a tutorial, I would pause it after a couple of sections and try to implement things on my own. I repeatedly pushed myself to build things independently and forcing myself into hard situations that require deep thinking and researching.
You might ask “well, what should I build?” If you don’t have any ideas, then one suggestion would be to look at popular applications that exist and try to clone them or create a minified version of them. Another suggestion is to google for “project ideas" and you will find a bunch of lists which can inspire you.
Another thing that you would probably want to do is to build an online portfolio of some sort. Ideally, at this point, you already have some built projects that you can showcase. Remember to not only link to your deployed applications but also share the source code by linking to your GitHub repositories.
I built a fairly simple online portfolio site which is not fancy in any sense but is useful since it is public and I can point to that site whenever asked.
While you’re in the process of building software, you will bump into issues that force you to search for solutions. Most likely you will find yourself on Stack Overflow a lot. This is not only a good place to get help, but helping others too. It can also benefit you in the long run when people see that you are active in the programming community and contribute to it.
I was (and still am) particularly active in the YouTube community and writing comments on programming-related videos. It’s actually a pretty good place to share thoughts with other developers and ask questions.
3. Breaking that mental block about not being job-ready
I remember myself repeatedly asking the question “when am I job-ready". I consider myself mostly being self-taught even though I have a college degree, and self-taught developers who try to get into the industry always have this question in mind.
There was a range of technologies that people kept talking about, and I convinced myself that I had to master each one of them before I could get a job. I eventually came to the realization that my definition of being job-ready was wrong. It takes years for someone to truly master a technology. Developers who already work professionally are learning new things about their technology stacks every day. Being job-ready is about knowing enough about the particular technologies that you can start producing valuable software.
For example, my current job required knowledge about C# and ASP.NET, and when I got the assignment to work in a .NET project, I hadn’t even written one line of C# code since my proficiency was in JavaScript and some PHP. But I quickly learned the concepts of C# and could start writing C# code in a matter of weeks. In a sense, both my work and school complemented each other, since I was learning technologies at work which I later had courses in at college, and vice versa — I could apply knowledge from school at my workplace. I got good grades in my C# course in college where some of my classmates barely passed it, and that had a lot to do with the fact that I was already working with C#.
I asked a programmer on YouTube the question “how to know when one is job-ready" and he simply responded by saying that once you’re somewhat comfortable with building things with your technology of choice, you are probably ready. He also said that the sooner I get employed and start working professionally, the sooner I will grow my knowledge base and experience in software development. The things you learn at a workplace aren’t close to what you learn in school for example. The day-to-day challenges at work make you mature and grow a lot quicker than someone who just does the school assignments.
4. Sending out job applications and preparing for interviews
Once I realized that the only way to grow professionally is to actually get a job, I started preparing my resume. Even though I didn’t have any work experience to add to the resume, I could still show what technologies I know and my education for example. I focused on emphasizing my deep passion for software development and programming. I also went on FreeCodeCamp.org and solved some algorithmic challenges with JavaScript.
I sent out my resume to a bunch of companies. As you would expect, not many would even reply. But I had to accept the fact that it’s just a part of the process. Here is also what can set you apart from other juniors who might give up when they see a lack of response. I firmly believed in my value as a programmer and that sooner or later someone will eventually recognize that value.
I did get some phone calls from recruiters, but they were usually reluctant considering my lack of experience and didn’t follow up.
I resisted the thoughts about me being too inexperienced and instead kept grinding and sending out job applications regularly while consistently improving my programming skills.
Then, during one week I was suddenly invited to two interviews at two different companies. I cleared the entire interview process with both companies and got two job offers. I declined one of them because the company wasn’t that “techy", and I preferred an environment with skilled developers around me to learn from. So I finally signed up for the company that I currently work at.
The number of insights and benefits I’ve had during my time as a professional developer cannot be compared with anything that I have learned in school. I’m thankful that I stepped out of my comfort zone at an early stage and took steps in my career which helped me gain valuable experience. By doing so, I was way ahead of other peers who were still trying to get a job after college.
So, if you’re a new programmer who is eagerly wanting to know when you are job-ready, chances are that you might already be at this point right now. Don’t hesitate to apply for jobs — the worst scenario is that people will reject you and let you know what areas you might be lacking in, and that will be a huge experience in itself. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-i-got-a-developer-job-after-my-first-year-in-college-b92de41d19cd | ['Yamo Gebrewold'] | 2020-12-08 18:43:32.131000+00:00 | ['Studying', 'Job Hunting', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
Why is it important to increase workplace productivity? | The notion of workplace productivity is increasingly being talked about in the business world. But what is workplace productivity? While ‘a productive workplace’ would be its simplest definition, the truth is a little more than that.
Generally, workplace productivity is related to the efficiency with which goals and tasks are carried out by individuals or teams. By fostering a productive workplace, benefits like increasing employee morale and profitability are far more possible.
However, many companies struggle with the idea of a productive workforce — it is one of the most important aspects of the business world.
What do you get by increasing workplace productivity?
Higher Profits
The most convincing and important benefit to increasing efficiency and productivity is profit. When work is completed faster as required, then this positively impacts the ‘bottom-line’.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Besides this, a company will probably see that the customers are happier with the overall efficiency and turnaround times. While, customers might not be aware of the product/service development activities, they may experience that the process of acquiring the requested product/service took less time than expected. This leads to a higher customer satisfaction level, which is more likely to bring in additional business from the customer.
Improved Brand Image
Productivity also makes an impact on the brand image of a company. From shareholders to employees and customers, high productivity projects the perception of a successful organization.
Improved Employee Morale
The employee morale is higher when productivity is high. This high morale indicates that employees are satisfied with their work environment and it’s less likely they will transition to another employer.
Thus, with better turnaround and work completion times, employees create profits and value allowing the organization to improve staff benefits and provide salary increases. Overall, this positively maps into every aspect of the business, as employees are at the center of it.
Improving workplace productivity is an imperative for organizations. OpusView workplace social software is a solution designed to increase team productivity and drive more successful project delivery. | https://medium.com/opusview/why-is-it-important-to-increase-workplace-productivity-a1a819251d1 | ['Victoria Olive'] | 2020-03-19 07:30:03.118000+00:00 | ['Work Management', 'Business Goals', 'Team Collaboration', 'Workplace Productivity', 'Collaboration'] |
How to write a blog | Blogging is all about writing, If you like to write something so, It will increase the writing skills you and it is beneficial for you. In the World, We have Amazing Bloggers which is a good thing for us because we learn from them and get inspired by them. Some People are really Interested to write a blog which is a great thing for them, so First You have to choose Your Blogging Niche which is really important for your blogging carrier. Niche is all about your Talent and skills what have you know about something or other. Look You know better about Technology so, You should make Blog about Technology. Now You can choose your niche by your Mindset and Write Good Blog. If you want to be a successful Blogger so you need to be consistent with your skills and blogging content.
First You Should Understand your Audience It is the first step of your Blogging Part. If you will understand your audience so it is the golden chance to get amazing Traffic which is a good thing for your Blog or Website. Second thing is that Set an attractive Theme that looks eye-catching for your viewers. Make your Blog Understable consequently, write some startling Language which attracts peoples more on your blog post.
Make your Blog S.E.O Friendly which is one of the most important things in your article. Make your article clean and Keep more effort into Readability. Readability is one of the most important parts of your blog.
Connect with me on Instagram | https://medium.com/@vlog2crash/how-to-write-a-blog-47c76463b61d | [] | 2020-12-27 15:27:40.975000+00:00 | ['How To Write A Blog', 'Blog', 'Blogging', 'How To Start A Blog', 'How To Start Blogging'] |
A Little Bird with Polka-Dot Wings | I took some time off from writing to rest over the Thanksgiving break. My wife and I prepared the feast for the first time in our lives and we done did good. Grilled turkey, dressing, collard greens made in an Instapot, seven cheese Mac and cheese…we have finally ascended to the highest level of cooking, the part of your life where the family trusts you with the holiday meals.
My son, during the flurry of activity, has a Fisher-Price playmat that sings songs when he kicks at it. A total earworm of a tune has lodged itself within my head — Purple Monkey in a Bubblegum Tree.
The former humanities teacher in me is obsessed with the way the song uses the word “could.” The second verse of the song makes me the most emotional:
Maybe you, could be/
A little bird with polka-dot wings, and/
You could fly, to the sea/
Then you could fly back to me/
The realities of being a Black father and a parent during a pandemic always makes the “could” stick out to me. It’s a conditional statement. There is the choice for the little bird to just fly and never come back, and leave me wondering why or where he is. It’s also hope, that the beloved with always return home.
Surprising depth from a children’s song, y’all.
What I’m Writing
Van Jones and Dave Chappelle Show the Limits Black People Face in Getting Out Our Stories. I compare both men as they choose their responses to the 2020 Election.
Our modes of storytelling all have a relationship with complicity. How do we get more white people to honestly negotiate with our anger on 400 years of enslavement, segregation, and mass incarceration?
What I’m Reading
“The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart” by Alicia Garza. I finished the book and it is both a favorite and a necessary companion piece to the other book that deeply influenced my thinking this year — Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism.
I find myself emulating Garza in my professional and personal lives. I work for an organization dedicated to educational equity and racial justice. I get my coins guiding programming that has school leaders leading their staffs to be less anti-racist. Like Garza, I focus on multi-racial coalitions that are deliberately intersectional.
But I cannot let go of the grip Afropessimism has in my heart. I am the foil of humanity. I am who humanity looks toward when it is unsure of itself.
400 years of social death and othering has furnished a sublime resignation in my bones that Afropessimism voices. It is always gonna be hard. It is always gonna be this way.
Till next time. | https://medium.com/established-in-1865/a-little-bird-with-polka-dot-wings-e5c1bcc6364d | ['Hal H. Harris'] | 2020-12-06 16:50:13.568000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Politics', 'Race', 'BlackLivesMatter'] |
Building Beginners: Ship Build Episode 5; Plank until you Float. | “A sailing vessel is alive in a way that no ship with mechanical power ever [will] be.” -Aubrey de Selincourt
Bust out your tools and prepare for another round of building!
In the last episode, we made preparations and carved out the rabbet line, and attached the garboard planks. In this episode, we’ll do the tedious, monotonous, and mind-numbing task of planking.
Won’t that be fun! Did I mention that it would be painstaking?
What I knew ahead of time was that every plank would need to be customized. What I didn’t realize was how hard it was going to be to get my planks around each unique curve.
I settled on two different techniques to bend each piece to fit and sometimes combined both for a difficult piece. One way was to boil water and let the end of the shaped plank soak for a few minutes. Another way was to press an indention into the side of the wood I was bending. The bend follows the angle of each indention.
Planking with a view of the mainmast.
Starboard side planking.
Aligning planks.
About this point, I took a break from building.
A long break.
How long? Well, let's just say I was freshly shaven when I packed it away and looked a little like this when I started up again.
Photo by Keren Fedida on Unsplash
What? Don’t bust my chops…it was only about 2 years.
When I started again I pushed hard to get the planking level up to the waterline. Based on my measurements I believed it would be at about the 2.5" mark.
Waterline measurements.
So I kept planking.
Aft planking.
And planking…
Port clamped planking.
And…*sigh*, fixing my planking…
Sawdust/woodglue repair putty.
Once I planked above the waterline I glued the interior to help seal the ship. By now the ship was eager to get into the water and sail. After all, that’s what ships are built for.
For the test, I used a level to see if the ship would list so I could add ballast if necessary. I used thick layers of wood glue as ballast along the inside and hoped for the best.
Waiting in drydock for the first float test.
The anticipation pulled at me as I kept my fingers crossed.
And the verdict?
First float test.
And she floats! Well, with a few minor leaks. Not only did she float, but the ship sat about 1/2" higher in the water than expected. Which I should have expected since there was a lot more wood still to add to weigh the ship down.
One thing I did in anticipation of this was put several more boards and precut mast pieces on top of the ship while floating to get an idea of where it would sit in the water. There was hardly any dent made, which allowed me to add more ballast to the bottom of the ship. My favorite ballast was to glue pennies along the keel on the inside.
Ponder Point:
Have you ever taken a break from your project? I mean an unexpectedly long break?
Whether planned or not, it’s no shame to take breaks. Life happens and as responsible adults, we have to deal with it.
But if you find yourself on “break” from a project and wish to start again then why not start now? No time like the present. A few minutes of being constructive in a hobby might be just the thing you need to refresh your creative spirit.
So grab that file, holster that hammer, and bring out the glue! Whatever your hobby, craft, or project is get yourself prepared!
For we are about to set sail!
Be purposeful. Be intentional. Be a beginner.
Next Episode: Planking finished and decking begins! | https://medium.com/building-beginners/building-beginners-ship-build-episode-5-plank-until-you-float-daf91ccee360 | ['M.P. Erickson'] | 2020-12-25 07:32:41.619000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Woodworking', 'Beginning', 'Projects', 'Hobby'] |
Mangools SiteProfiler Complete Review in 2021 | Mangools SiteProfiler Complete Review in 2021
SiteProfiler is a website analysis tool that offers valuable information about a website’s traffic, its inbound links or backlinks, its competitors, and much more important insights in any organic SEO strategy.
This tool is part of the SEO Mangools suite of tools, a platform designed in 2014 to be a powerful, simple and inexpensive alternative to the rest of the SEO suite on the market.
Mangools SiteProfiler Complete Review in 2021
What to Expect After Buying SiteProfile?
SiteProfiler has a good range of functionalities, although we will highlight some of its key features below.
First, the tool allows you to check the SEO strength, popularity and authority of any website and compare it with the competition. Also, the tool can estimate website traffic and the sources it comes from.
Another interesting feature of SiteProfiler is that it makes it easier to identify content that generates traffic, as well as to verify the profile of inbound links.
You can check if a website is healthy or likely to be considered spam. Lastly, just like other popular platforms like SimilarWeb, SiteProfiler allows you to find competitors or similar websites, to perform a complete analysis and benchmarking.
If you want to know more about the functionalities of SiteProfiler, keep reading to know everything about this tool and what has made more than 25,000 users trust Mangools to improve the positioning and visibility of their websites on the internet.
Can I just subscribe to SiteProfiler?
No, it is not possible. SiteProfiler is part of the SEO Mangools suite of tools, so it is not possible to subscribe to it separately. All the tools in this powerful SEO suite are included in all subscription plans. The tools work with each other and are interconnected. That is how you can get the most out of it.
Is there a demo or trial version of SiteProfiler?
Of course. Mangools offers a trial to test their entire SEO suite, which includes the SiteProfiler tool.
Just by registering on the platform and without adding your debit or credit card, you will have access to a free 10-day trial of Mangools, and all its tools included: SitePRofiler, SERPWatcher, KWFinder, SERPChecker and LinkMiner.
Does SiteProfiler offer a money-back policy?
Yeah sure! SiteProfiler, like all tools in the Mangools suite, offers a 48-hour money back policy. If for whatever reason, you subscribe to the platform and it does not meet your expectations, you will be entitled to a refund of the money within the first 48 hours.
To receive it, it is as simple as contacting the support at [email protected] or in their live chat.
Final Thoughts on SiteProfiler
SiteProfiler is an SEO analysis tool, which offers all the different metrics grouped on the same site so that you can take a quick look at them.
It allows you to analyze the level of authority and trust of any website (it can be yours or your competition’s), thanks to SEO metrics from Moz, Majestic, Alexa Rank and the number of times it has been shared on Facebook.
Another function of SiteProfiler is to analyze the link profile of a website. That is, it is capable of detecting if the backlinks of a website are malicious, and can harm your positioning so that you take the appropriate actions.
Besides offering you the possibility of finding new competitors similar to those on your website, it also allows you to detect which content from those competitors attracts the most traffic to their websites. So you can get ideas for your project. | https://medium.com/@pchojecki/mangools-siteprofiler-complete-review-in-2021-83cb2aa5f814 | ['Przemek Chojecki'] | 2020-12-21 10:42:37.604000+00:00 | ['Website', 'Technology', 'Marketing', 'SEO', 'Mangools'] |
Berlin Tech Salaries in 2019 | Published: 01. March 2019
Author: CaissaTeam
Let’s talk about kale
As tech recruiters, we at Caissa talk a lot to technology people who are thinking to relocate to Berlin. One of the first questions they ask us is,
“What will I be paid here?”
Our last year’s survey shows that Berlin-based developers and engineers are also concerned with their potential income in a new position. When accepting a job offer, 73.2% of candidates would base their decision on the salary offered.
Now, let’s try to answer the following two questions:
Why is the salary so important?
What are the salaries in Berlin?
Berlin was dubbed “poor but sexy” in 2003. With an image like this, the city’s former mayor Klaus Wowereit wanted to attract investors, tourists, and young professionals. And it worked.
What’s funny, the slogan has been associated with the city ever since, even though the “poor” part of it is not really true anymore.
Berlin is, indeed, cheaper than most of the major European locations, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Stockholm, Milan, Zurich, and even big German cities like Munich, Stuttgart or Frankfurt. However, it’s getting more expensive to live here. Mainly, due to increasing rent prices (by 34% only between 2015 and 2018!).
With Berlin becoming a major EU tech hub, there is a strong need for tech professionals. And it’s natural that those who move here would want their salary to ensure a comfortable life at a new place.
But not all employers are willing to pay more.
Based on a number of sources (Glassdoor, Stepstone, one independent survey, and our internal data), we’ve made a graph of salary ranges. This data is based on what Berlin’s engineers, developers, and tech managers earned or were offered in 2018.
This is how much people in tech earned in Berlin in 2018 (annually, in EUR).
As you can see, the difference between the minimum and maximum amounts is really big.
First of all, we didn’t distinguish between experience levels.
Secondly, one’s salary after 8 years with the same company in Berlin will normally differ from the salary of someone who changed jobs within the last year.
To make sense of our graph, we’ve looked at the most prevalent salary offers in 2018 across different specialisations (Backend, Frontend, DevOps, and Management) and seniority levels (Middle and Senior, in case of engineers).
We’ve managed to map out the mode salary ranges for the following roles:
Mode salary spans of Backend Engineers/Developers: Mid-level and Senior
Mode salary spans of Frontend Engineers/Developers: Mid-level and Senior
Mode salary spans of DevOps Engineers: Mid-level and Senior
Mode salary spans of Tech Managers: Team Lead, DoE, CTO
As you are reading this, the market demand is growing, as do salaries that candidates ask for. By the start of this year, the modes have already shifted towards the upper end of our spans.
Based on our observations and market research, the mode salaries are likely to get higher by 10–15% as we advance into 2019. | https://medium.com/caissa-global/berlin-tech-salaries-in-2019-b6ea7248e9c6 | ['Wilbur Von Biscuit'] | 2019-06-12 15:35:37.524000+00:00 | ['Job Market', 'Berlin', 'Berlin Tech', 'Developer Salaries', 'Startup'] |
The Keystone Cops | The Keystone Cops
Pexels — pixabay
Many years ago, I was visiting a casita at the junction of Roosevelt and Greenpoint Avenues in Q ueens, NY on a mission to take pictures and sell them an ad or two. After shooting an analog roll, I exited to a one-hour photo joint (this was many years ago, obviously) to have the images developed. And when I returned to pick up the photos, a scuffle between two store security guards and a shoplifter broke out in front of the store.
Because the Caribbean store employees wore no uniforms…and the thief was Hispanic, the two cops in the cruiser which pulled up during the altercation were somehow not aware enough to understand the nature of the conflict even though it was clear to me that the two black guys were trying to recover a Duane Reade bag from the Hispanic man.
So how’d the cops handle it? Both drew their pistols and pointed them at the three guys…while one yelled at the top of his lungs “eat the pavement or I’ll kill all you mother fuckers.”
I could barely believe my eyes. I wanted to jump in and yell back at the cops “don’t you see what’s happening here? What’s with the fucking guns?” Instead, I backed off and simply watched figuring I just might catch a bullet for my effort if I didn’t.
And here’s another related story: About three months ago, a phone girl I know was sitting at her new job…just minding her own business…when suddenly the screen monitor for the camera downstairs went red. Through the translucent color, she could barely make out a guy doing something with the lens.
She thought nothing of it at first (though it did seem sort of odd) and went about her business until a minute later, there was a huge crash at the door. Her heart jumped. She thought it was robbers!
“Police! Open up!” screamed a man obviously doing the bashing. “Ok! Ok! Don’t knock the door down,” she yelled back. Yumi (fake name) has been a phone girl for a while and knows how it goes when NYPD busts a joint. But she didn’t know what was about to happen next. When Yumi opened the door, an agent stuck a pistol to her head and told her not to move.
According to their press release, Homeland Security and the Southern District claimed to have been researching this and several other operations for four years…all of which leads me to believe they must have known that these girls weren’t a physical threat to anybody. What? Are they gonna put an agent’s eye out with the snap of a g-string?
In the words of MC Lyte, who once graced the back seat of my taxi…”so whatcha got a gun for?”
Next came an interrogation during which Yumi asked why it was necessary for the agent to stick a gun to her head. He responded that it was for his protection.
All of which made me wonder what the agent would have used if he were busting into a drug operation manned by actual dangerous criminals. A fucking Howitzer? Or maybe an atomic bomb? Would either of those be enough if a pistol to the head of a 4' 10" 90 pound phone girl was appropriate?
The truth is…the likelihood that this house or anybody in it posed any kind of threat to this agent was far less significant than the likelihood that his pistol might misfire and kill the woman he was terrorizing. Yet, I assume that his actions were by the book.
By me, there’s something very wrong here. Since when is it ok to stick a gun to the head of a totally non-threatening woman in a completely non-threatening situation? Because she answers a phone and puts two consenting adults together in an almost antiseptic environment?
I know the police don’t want to die on the job just because they erred on the side of consideration. But when people die because they were holding a cell phone (as happened just a few days ago)? There’s something very wrong with the system. | https://medium.com/illumination/the-keystone-cops-8aae51e10818 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-12-25 14:42:12.643000+00:00 | ['Law Enforcement', 'Culture', 'Police', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Sex Workers'] |
Between Muslimat | Ooooh, I like those polka-dots.
As a convert to Islam, I often have experiences that directly defy expectations or assumptions I had about Muslims prior to, well, really knowing any. When this happens, I find myself wishing that non-Muslims could be privy to these little snippets.
Like, just the other day. I was commiserating with a friend about how we might sometimes, just a little bit, hide our outfits from our husbands. Not because we’re dressing scandalously and will elicit some kind of possessive man-rage, but we are dressing so modestly that they will think we look like big weirdos.
Which, by the way, they hate because everyone blames it on them when we dress that way.
All I can say from this side is: give our poor Muslim guys a break, huh? It’s not their fault. | https://medium.com/say-alhamdulillah/between-muslimat-4aeacdba7fdf | [] | 2016-12-20 17:59:41.825000+00:00 | ['Islam', 'Muslim Women', 'Hijab', 'Islamophobia', 'Women'] |
New Nightingale Editorial Standards | We feel that moving to a standards-based approach will help us all to lift our voices and continue our high-energy discourse. We are thrilled to help our community share its ideas and passions. Please let us know what you think about our new process!
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Nouvelles Normes Editoriales de Nightingale (French)
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Our content varies in length as you can see from our top five articles of 2020 (scroll to the bottom of this post to link through to each of these):
I Learned Dataviz in a Year, and You Can, Too (seven-minute read)
The Great Emoji Challenge (two-minute read)
Ten Considerations Before You Create Another Chart About COVID-19 (nine-minute read)
How to Create Brand Colors for Data Visualization Style Guidelines (six-minute read)
Constructing a Career in Data Visualization: The How (14-minute read)
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Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
As Nightingale is a professional journal, we adhere to the CMOS, with some exceptions. Please familiarize yourself with this style before submitting. Note that our editorial staff will make minor CMOS-type edits directly to your article without explicitly flagging it for you.
Titles/headlines and subtitles
Headlines play an important role in getting people to read an article. All articles should have a main headline and then a subtitle that works in tandem to (a) show what the article is about and (b) attract readers.
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Eight principles for a great headline (from Medium):
Be direct Use conversational language Focus on what is most interesting Be bold in your assertions Check your bias Communicate urgency Show what someone will learn Deliver on your promises
Other tips:
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Particularly relevant for us, try to avoid dataviz jargon that the average reader might not understand.
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Again, first please follow CMOS. Next, review these quick tips.
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Spell out one through nine: The Yankees finished second. He had nine months to go.
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These tags are used for two purposes: organizing articles on Nightingale (“TopicsinDV” for example) and increasing discoverability across Medium. The five tags should have a balance between breadth, specificity, and should try to capture what an article is about as best as possible. In most cases, one of the tags should be “Data Visualization.” This article on “W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations” might be tagged with Data Visualization, DVhistory, Design, Data Science, and African American History.
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TopicsinDV — for articles as part of #dvs-topics-in-data-visualization
DVhistory — data visualization and information design crafted before 1990
Interviews — conversations with members of the community
How To — resources, guides, and step-by-step walk-throughs
Career Advice — articles about building a career in dataviz
Data Humanism
SportsViz
COVID-19
Translation
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Other tags: These are for distribution across Medium and discoverability rather than organization within Nightingale. They should correspond to what the article is about.
Some common examples include data science, artificial intelligence, programming, design, visual design, career change, education, UX, data, data ethics, charts, mapping, business analytics, Javascript, Tableau, books, art, illustration, science.
Wow, you made it all the way down here? You are dedicated and deserve to treat yourself! Go have some fun before you submit your article. Haha. | https://medium.com/nightingale/new-nightingale-editorial-standards-6cada1125d7d | ['Jason Forrest'] | 2021-05-05 13:50:48.633000+00:00 | ['How To', 'Data Visualization', 'Dataviz', 'Information Design', 'Editorial Guidelines'] |
From The Junction: Paying it Forward | Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash
Hello friends and fellow readers,
It’s been a while. I’m not a weekly (or monthly, for that matter) newsletter kind of guy, preferring to save these missives for big news and special occasions.
I think we’re all burned out on big news at the moment.
But, there are few things that are a greater cause for celebration than the publication of a new book. Whether it be a poetry chapbook or a novel, the third in a series, or an authorial debut. For every writer, it’s a BIG DEAL. The untold hours spent crafting every line and word, trying to make it absolutely perfect. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the trash can filled with crumpled pages.
Some are talented and lucky (or well-connected) enough to score an agent, to have their manuscript honed and sculpted by brilliant editors, released by a pre-eminent publishing house, and given a sizable marketing budget to climb to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.
If only we all could be so fortunate.
The path of an indie writer puts the emphasis on “independent”. The work doesn’t stop with the writing. There’s still the editing to do, the cover design, the formatting, and the most dreaded of actions: self-promotion.
And when all that is done, and your book appears available for purchase, there’s the hope that your friends and family at the very least will support you and buy it, of course; but the deeper, more secret wish is for an absolute stranger to stumble upon your words, read them, and make a connection.
I’ve been privileged to encounter some wonderful writers in my time here on Medium, and to publish them here at The Junction. And wouldn’t you believe that several of them have published books you can buy now!
I want to use this platform to pay it forward and help give these indie writers a nudge of marketing.
After all, we’re all in this together. | https://medium.com/the-junction/from-the-junction-paying-it-forward-6542b887a85e | ['Stephen M. Tomic'] | 2020-06-25 09:30:51.172000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Poetry', 'Fiction', 'Novel', 'Publishing'] |
Vaccine mandates won’t fly: Air travel disruptions and the outlook for airlines | This past weekend an in-law of mine flew down for the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party-the Georgia vs. Florida college football game in Jacksonville, Florida. I had heard his connecting flight out of Charlotte, North Carolina was canceled. No reason was given by American Airlines.
Throughout Saturday, Twitter was abuzz with the news of American Airlines’ widespread cancelations. The current flight count as I write is over 1,000, blaming weather and staffing shortages. A fellow peer in Southwest Airlines also experienced a cluster of flight cancelations topping 1,800 just a few weeks ago for the very same reasons.
Flight cancelations are nothing new nor unusual. What is unique this time are the circumstances. Many airlines in compliance with the COVID vaccine edict on federal contractors are instituting such mandates. The deadline for American Airlines employees to submit exemptions or acquire vaccination is November 24th. 1 The mandate on federal employees is November 22 and for contractors, December 8th, 2021. 2
Informal protests have sprouted up at both Southwest and American. Engaging in a formal union strike carries certain procedural actions by union leadership, and so currently union members are not technically able to organize such a move on their own. Rumors swirling are upticks in employee sick time usage driving these abrupt bursts in flight cancelations for both airlines. This makes sense as rebalancing personnel routes and planning would have averted such rampant disruptions if these were foreseeable staffing issues. They were not.
Blaming the weather seems to always be paired with the staffing excuse, but it doesn’t add up. The Doppler radar for the US was relatively benign over the weekend with rainstorms concentrated in the northeast. NOAA weather warnings were exclusively in Alaska or Canada with not a mention of the continental United States. Weather? Really?
Image: NOAA Doppler Radar 10–30–2021 Public Domain
Another theory pitched by the media was the airlines laid off thousands during the pandemic. If that’s the case, what’s the deal with the slew of abrupt flight cancelations? Employees laid off in 2020 are just now impacting thousands of flights over one random weekend a year later? It doesn’t fly. Routes were trimmed accordingly and that was done over a year ago. These trips voided over the weekend were planned well after the layoffs and reductions in staffing.
That leaves some form of mandate protests the culprit. Now, we don’t know the extent of the impact yet as the mandate deadlines are still weeks away. As we approach those dates, thousands of exemption requests will likely be granted. A smaller minority of workers will quit in protest. That’s the best case scenario. Things may develop differently.
Wildcards are in play. A number of airlines are instituting the same policies around the same timeframe. This raises the likelihood of an unexpected outcome to arise. One of those could be a labor strike, or a general refusal to the mandates. If that’s the case, obviously sustained disruptions will be a chronic problem going forward.
Where we get from here is how the quality of air travel will deteriorate. When COVID hit, planes were empty. Tickets could be had going cross country for $4 without any clever effort. As a result, routes were slashed to reduce capacity. The consequence of that is buoying flight prices as supply decreases while demand bounces back. With these mandates impacting a slice of the airlines’ workforces, that puts further pressure on reduction in services. Supply continues to shrink, prices continue to rise, and consumers have fewer options to travel.
What happens when these workers are granted exemptions, but must submit to routine weekly testing? Although the mandate does not provide for weekly testing for federal contractors (unlike the looming OSHA mandate), regular testing will likely be the reasonable accommodation when exemptions are approved. How long will workers put up with weekly testing? And what happens when the requirement shifts to testing anytime you enter the job site? Obviously it’s an untenable policy. Oddly, this also applies to remote workers. A negative test anytime you login from your house?
The fallout of this will be evidenced in workplace protests. This is all occurring right before the holiday travel season. While Thanksgiving may squeak by, Christmas and New Years’ look to be nightmares of cancelations due to staffing shortages and, of course, “weather,” whether it is or not. By then, exempted pilots and crew will have undergone a month’s worth of regular testing. It’s unsustainable to expect workers to comply indefinitely with that. Morale will decline and workers will have had enough of it.
Travelers may need to weigh other options. My in-law ended up renting a car with his friends and drove the 5 ½ hour trek to Jacksonville. They made it to the game luckily given the relative proximity of their layover to final destination. Upcoming holiday venturers may not be so lucky. They will absolutely run into unprecedented disruptions due exclusively to staffing shortages and amplified by the mandates. That’s one headache I plan to avoid this season. | https://medium.com/@powerandmarkets/vaccine-mandates-wont-fly-air-travel-disruptions-and-the-outlook-for-airlines-dcb229e435c6 | ['Power'] | 2021-10-31 15:48:04.395000+00:00 | ['Mandates', 'Airlines', 'Flight', 'Economy', 'Vaccine Mandate'] |
How To Make a Vision of a Country that Works For All of Us | How To Make a Vision of a Country that Works For All of Us Susan Corso Jan 21·7 min read
“One year ago today, health officials told Americans about a traveler who had just come home from Wuhan, China, sought treatment at an urgent-care clinic north of Seattle after falling ill — and set off alarm bells. The man had the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States.”
Enter our constant, mutating companion of the past year, the coronavirus — something we had definitely not envisioned.
“[The] inaugural committee contacted [poet] Amanda Gorman late last month. … Jill Biden had seen a reading she gave at the Library of Congress and suggested Gorman read something at the inauguration. She wasn’t given any explicit guidelines about what to write, she said.
“Gorman began the process, as she always does, with research. She took inspiration from the speeches of American leaders who tried to bring citizens together during times of intense division, including Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She also spoke to two of the previous inauguration poets.
“When she asked Elizabeth Alexander for advice, ‘she just basically told me, “The poem is already written, it’s already done. Now, it’s just up to you to bring it to life as best as you can,” Gorman said.”
This, Beloved, as we well know, is how all manifesting works. As Steven Covey advised, Start with the end in mind. Business guru Simon Sinek admonishes, Start with why. It’s called having a vision.
Both are correct. Why you want what you want the end to look like. And when manifestation is between just you, and say, a new car, the Cadillac has no preference, so it’s easy. You want a new car. You go see the Potemkins. You pays yer money. You drive off the lot in new wheels. Done and done.
But what about when the vision is a shared one? Maybe better said, what about when the vision has to be a shared one? Well, that’s quite a different story. Contemplate these recent visions that have been offered up for our consideration.
The Quotation of the Day in The New York Times is from President Biden’s inaugural remarks, “We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.” That’s one vision. How about this from an essay by Roger Cohen? “As Simon Schama, the British historian, has observed, ‘When truth perishes so does freedom.’” Ouch. Here’s another:
“If the pomp and circumstance were constrained by the challenges of the day, Mr. Biden’s determination to get off to a fast start unraveling the Trump presidency was not. In the Oval Office, where he had Mr. Trump’s portrait of Andrew Jackson taken down and one of Franklin D. Roosevelt put up, Mr. Biden signed 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations aimed at reversing major elements of the last administration, a significant repudiation of his predecessor and a more expansive set of Inauguration Day actions than any in modern history.
“‘Here we stand, where 108 years ago, at another inaugural, thousands of protesters tried to block brave women marching for the right to vote,’ Mr. Biden said. ‘And today we marked the swearing-in of the first woman in American history elected to national office: Vice President Kamala Harris. Don’t tell me things can’t change.’”
Okay, I like that one. How about you? Here’s one from the always-insightful Charles M. Blow.
“Donald Trump is a racist and a white supremacist. And yet, millions of Americans — again, mostly white — either agreed with his views or were willing to abide them. I know that there will be those who warn that I should just let this go, that holding on to it is ‘divisive.’
“To them I say, ‘Hell no.’ You can’t have a feeling of unity after there was enforcement of a practice of cruelty. There must be acknowledgment and accountability. There must be contrition and repentance.
“It is not enough to simply let the co-conspirators and abettors of a white supremacist president quiet down and cool off, biding their time, waiting for the next opportunity for their riotousness and wrath to be unfurled and unleashed.
“How is it that people of good conscience and good faith are supposed to make common cause, to find healing and unity, with people who have demonstrated their contempt for the equal humanity of others? Where is the center point between my determination to be free and your determination to contain or constrict that freedom?”
He asks good questions, Beloved. Ones we ought to be asking ourselves as we build our vision.
Bradley Onishi is a religion professor. His article, “Trump’s New Civil Religion: The storming of the Capitol is a creation myth for a political movement” gave me shivers. He lays out another vision entirely.
“Since the presidential election was called for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, President Trump has cultivated the myth that the election was stolen.” … “But myths are often invulnerable to reality.” … “The myth became the basis for contesting the facts.” … “A myth becomes reality through ritual, when its story is dramatized and its adherents brought to collective participation in it.”
Sound familiar? Spookily so, to me. How about this one?
It is a great irony that the one thing former President Trump values above all else is loyalty. Uh, that would be loyalty to himself. The Proud Boys and their compatriots are already defecting.
“But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. ‘Trump will go down as a total failure,’ the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.
“As Trump distanced himself from the Capitol violence, ‘The disappointment was immediately palpable.’ One Proud Boys Telegram channel posted: ‘It really is important for us all to see how much Trump betrayed his supporters this week. We are nationalists 1st and always. Trump was just a man and as it turns out an extraordinarily weak one at the end.’”
So much for loyalty. Another vision, this from the Letters to the Editor today. “Donald Trump never drained the swamp. He pardoned it.” Tom Goodman writes from Philadelphia. What’s a person to do in order to create a collective vision, one that works for everyone?
Professor Onishi clarifies and offers a clue, “If we are going to reckon with the import and legacy of Jan. 6, we must look inward.”
Ohhh, I see. That’s where why is to be found. Within. And if we’re honest, not serving some ideological demi-god, so is genuine vision. It’s an inside-out job, Beloved.
Chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman also points out a clue. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Make Meaning the Hottest Inaugural Fashion Trend,” she leads. “But most striking of all was the ubiquity of purple, which turned out to be practically the signature color of the inauguration.
“Perhaps because it combines the red and blue of recent political schism into a unified whole (the theme of inauguration was, after all, ‘America United’). Perhaps because, along with white, it was one of the colors of the suffragists, and to wear it was to acknowledge the fulfillment of their dream embodied by Ms. Harris. Or perhaps because, as the National Woman’s Party (the original suffragist organization) wrote in a 1913 newsletter, ‘Purple is the color of loyalty, constancy to purpose, unswerving steadfastness to a cause.’”
There’s been an awful lot of swerving in the past four+ years, hasn’t there? I wrote of whiplash earlier this week by no mistake.
Amanda Gorman, 22, is the youngest ever inaugural poet. “But none of her predecessors faced the challenge that Gorman did. She set out to write a poem that would inspire hope and foster a sense of collective purpose, at a moment when Americans are reeling from a deadly pandemic, political violence and partisan division.”
See that word, Beloved? di-vision. Traditional etymology would tell us that this meant two visions — usually contrasting, divergent ones. But what if we muse instead on my brand of folk etymology? Di- is also a prefix meaning of God. What if, instead of division, we were to choose God’s vision for these, please God, Soon-to-be-United-again States?
“On Wednesday, as [the stunning young poet] recited ‘The Hill We Climb,’ in front of the Capitol in the bright sunlight, her voice animated and full of emotion, Gorman described her background as a ‘skinny Black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother,’ who can dream of being president one day, ‘only to find herself reciting for one.’”
If you didn’t see her live, you may do so below. A more exquisite poem I may never know.
There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it
There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to be it
There is always light, Beloved, and I’m with Ms. Gorman, sometimes it takes real bravery to see it. When we willingly turn inward to see that light, that’s when, at long last, we finally learn the truth that makes us free. We are the light we’ve been waiting for.
See it. Be it. Now.
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection between spirituality and culture. Find out more at www.susancorso.com | https://medium.com/@susan-15721/how-to-make-a-vision-of-a-country-that-works-for-all-of-us-ccba689fee02 | ['Susan Corso'] | 2021-01-21 16:17:21.293000+00:00 | ['Amanda Gorman', 'Vision', 'Suffragists', 'Kamala Harris', 'Joe Biden'] |
20 sites para Baixar Ilustrações Gratuitas | Graphics | Delesign
You've reached the end. We'll be adding more soon, and would love to hear your suggestions on what to design next. Need… | https://medium.com/@biajardim/20-sites-para-baixar-ilustra%C3%A7%C3%B5es-gratuitas-db14b560b4e4 | ['Beatriz Jardim'] | 2020-12-20 02:05:06.534000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UI Design', 'Flats', 'Ilustration', 'UI'] |
A Uniquely Canadian Struggle for a National Identity sans-America | A Uniquely Canadian Struggle for a National Identity sans-America
How does one characterise a country if defined by another?
Recall the infamous debate of 25 October, 1988. On the right, incumbent Prime Minister Martin Brian Mulroney. On the left, the Liberal: former Prime Minister John Napier Wyndham Turner.
The NDP has made a surprising resurgence at once performing better than the Liberals. The Progressive Conservatives, while stable at first, was rocked by scandal and shame. And the decision to keep Turner was questioned from the start. All in the weeks leading up to, as the Globe & Mail would retroactively describe it as, “The great free-trade election of 1988.”
Note the language in the debate when discussing the election’s near-sole issue: Mulroney’s proposed Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement.
Mulroney: You do not have a monopoly on patriotism. And I resent the fact that — that your implication that only you are a Canadian! I want to tell you, where I come from a Canadian family — and I love Canada! […] And I today, sir, as a Canadian, believe genuinely in what I am doing. I believe it is right for Canada, I believe that in my own modest way I am nation-building because I believe this benefits Canada and I love Canada. […] Turner: We’re just as Canadian as you are, Mister Mulroney, but I’ll tell you this. You mentioned 120 years of history: we built a country east, and west, and north, we built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the influence of the United States, and will reduce us — will reduce us I am sure to a colony of the United States because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow.
Such are the thoughts of doubt and insecurity which plague the nation of Canada, and indeed to be well-informed on the United States but insistent on its inferiority has always been a tongue-in-cheek sign of a Canadian: from a nauseating praise for the War of 1812 to a 2019 survey finding universal healthcare more popular than the flag, anthem, and military, or even a recently-unveiled Explore Canada video featuring what else but Nanaimo bars and butter tarts.
Indeed, one can trace back almost all decisions of consequence made by the government of Canada to one of fear, perhaps justified, often not. My favourite country was unfortunately also one to argue against Patriation, free trade (the future debates regarding which essentially led to the resignation of Mulroney and his party’s disintegration), as well as against increased competition, immigration, and all the rest for reasons almost entirely dominated by anxiety over the structural integrity of the nation.
This kind of imbalance has kept many significant issues almost unchallenged in Ottawa. Taking telecommunications as an example: while Huawei hasn’t exactly been welcomed with open arms in the United States, its neighbour to the north gets saddled with the highest cell phone bills on the planet whether Telus, Bell, or Rogers. Should a situation be addressed when a “German can pick up a bare-bones mobile plan for as little as $17 a month.” But the “lowest a Canadian could pay […] was $41.08”?
And why do cell phone companies keep hiking their prices, and their supposed competitors obediently follow suit? Because Canadian law forbids foreign ownership of a major telecom company, and throws against any domestic competitor prohibitively expensive costs and regulation.
And if Big Telecom’s only defence to this blatant price-gouging is shallow appeals to patriotism, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature and a reasonable explanation for 50% higher prices. See also dairy, the Internet, and an unrelenting brain drain to the United States.
Yet scathing criticism means nothing if not backed up with a reasonable solution; and while there has certainly been enough of the former from both sides of the aisle, the latter seems to have considerably less in terms of both quantity and, unfortunately, quality.
Take the increasingly-popular but still-ridiculous theory of “CANZUK”, that is the idea the nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK could somehow come together post-Brexit to form an “imperial federation”, because, according to the official website, we all speak English and our economies aren’t Venezuela, therefore Québec should unite with Queensland.
Or the idea Canada can somehow embrace its Arctic roots, purchase Greenland, seize the Northwest Passage, and evade the obviously impending threat of “vassalization”, an idea which is not wholly preposterous but still relies on the nation both cooperating with rapidly-intensified development of its least habitable regions with minimal short-term benefit and the other nations with a vested interest in the area: Russia, the United States, China just letting a nation of 37 million claim an increasingly-valuable trade route.
But even these “solutions” do not answer the questions which have led the Canadian to resignedly seek mere difference from America as a suitable national identity. As a passage from The Unfinished Canadian by Andrew Cohen reads, “Pondering ourselves is the occupational hazard of being Canadian.”
Canada resists easy definition. […] Some of our characteristics as a people are clear. Some are contradictory. As much as this is a self-portrait, it is painted with broad brush rather than short strokes. […] If we can find it, a little irreverence, unencumbered by our proverbial politeness and suffocating political correctness, would be refreshing.
For in the end, this is what we have sought after for so, so many years: a unique and truly special way to characterise the people of Canada — for the world over from Kiel to Kansas to instantly associate Canada with…Canada! For indeed, we are more than London’s lackey and D.C.’s doormat, we are Canada, damn it, Canada!
We are the great nation of unity, to have French, English, and indigenous alike map the north of a continent, and to settle it with people of all ethnicity, faith, and creed as Canadians!
We are the great nation of strength, to break through at Vimy Ridge and land so painstakingly on Juno Beach, to prove the world the resourcefulness, innovation, cunning, and national achievement we have as Canadians!
We are the great nation of progress, to have Bell’s telephone and Bombardier’s planes linking the world in ways unimagined, and have yet insulin, the pacemaker, pablum and the wheelchair to make the world alive to see it — and on, and on!
To have a national identity sans America, we needn’t look at our odd peculiarities for brief moments of recognition, but realise our own potential withstanding already. To improve all that needs improving and do, not say. To rectify our blunders and make up for them once, twice, thrice more over.
And to make the world think more than “that’s not America”, but, resoundingly and in awe: “that’s Canada”. | https://medium.com/discourse/a-uniquely-canadian-struggle-for-a-national-identity-sans-america-808fcdeaf2c6 | ['J.J. Liu'] | 2020-12-23 05:04:18.280000+00:00 | ['World', 'Canada', 'Nationalism', 'United States', 'Politics'] |
How to Prevent and Safely Put Out a Grease Fire in Your Kitchen | Statistics reveal that nearly 5,000,000 cooking fires occur annually in the home. Of these fires, grease fires are the most dangerous and are responsible for 1 in every 5 home fire deaths. Learning how to prevent and put out grease fires could save your or a loved one’s life. If you are a landlord, property manager or Airbnb host, make sure to share this information with your renters and guests to help keep them and your property safe.
When deep frying, be especially cautious to not leave the stove unattended. All it takes is a few minutes for the grease to overheat and ignite if left unattended.
How to Prevent Grease Fires
Never leave your pot or pan unattended. This is the leading cause of kitchen fires. It takes less than 30 seconds for smoke to turn into fire, so just leaving the room for a moment could be dangerous. Pay attention around fire. Don’t cook when intoxicated or tired. Remove as much moisture as possible from food before cooking. Never put frozen food into hot grease. Keep grease at the recommended temperature. Use a thermometer to monitor. Heat oil slowly. Add food slowly and gently to hot oil to avoid splatter. Keep baking soda or salt nearby, in case you need to smother flame. Cookie sheets should be stored near the stove but not underneath. They won’t be of any help if that area is inaccessible. Always keep a metal pot lid on the counter in case of a pot fire. Store a Class K fire extinguisher nearby, ideally between the kitchen and nearest exit. Keep anything flammable (oven mitts, wooden utensils, etc.) away from the stovetop.
What Not to Do
Never douse the flame with any liquid, because it’ll vaporize and cause steam explosions in every direction. Never carry the burning pot/pan outside. Hands tend to shake when nervous, which means you’re likely to spill the grease and spread the fire. Do not use anything glass or plastic. Glass will heat up and shatter and plastic will melt. Never use baking powder or flour as substitutes for salt or baking soda. They have a lighter weight and are combustible.
How to Put Out a Grease Fire
***If the fire has spread beyond the cooktop, do not attempt to get near the stove. Leave and call 911. It’ll take less than 5 minutes for the room to be engulfed in flames.***
Turn off the burner, but do not move the pan. Moving it can cause the fire to grow faster and stronger. Don’t use any liquid to attempt to stop the fire. Remove the oxygen one of three ways:
a) Cover the pot/pan with a metal lid or baking sheet. This will cause the fire to consume the remaining oxygen and dwindle. This works best for stovetop fires.
b) This method is best for the oven; smother the fire with a lot of salt or baking soda. Make sure to hit the fire directly on top, as throwing the salt or baking soda from the side could cause the flames to jump out and further the damage. Don’t use baking powder or flour, they’re combustible!
c) Use a Class K fire extinguisher. This is a wet chemical extinguisher that lowers the fire temperature and creates a non-combustible barrier between the oil and fire. If none of the above steps work, call 911 and get everyone out of the house. Close the door behind you to contain the flames.
Keep a list of these steps somewhere you can easily access them if the time comes. Make sure to share this information with your loved ones, renters and Airbnb guests so they know what to do in case of emergency.
— — — — —
Victor Jablokov is the CEO of Wallflower Labs, a technology company based in Boston, MA that is developing products to reduce home fires caused by cooking. Learn more at wallflower.com. | https://medium.com/wallflowerlabs/how-to-prevent-and-safely-put-out-a-grease-fire-in-your-kitchen-1d6cbfdc354b | ['Victor Jablokov'] | 2017-08-15 18:28:31.596000+00:00 | ['Airbnb', 'Smart Home', 'Cooking', 'Property Management', 'Fire Safety'] |
ลุ้นราคาหุ้นไทยใน SET100 สอยกำไรใน 7 วัน | Keras documentation: About Keras
Keras is a deep learning API written in Python, running on top of the machine learning platform TensorFlow. It was… | https://medium.com/botnoi-classroom/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B8%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%B8%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%99%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%97%E0%B8%A2%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%99-set100-%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%A2%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%B3%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A3%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%99-7-%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%99-17bed1907931 | ['Pop Phaetthayanan'] | 2020-09-16 06:28:12.267000+00:00 | ['Botnoi Classroom', 'TensorFlow', 'Stock Market', 'Colab', 'Machine Learning'] |
How to Get Started as a Fiction Writer on Medium | A couple months ago I published a post on Medium called “Why Fiction Writers Should Find a Home on Medium.” It was, admittedly, an attempt to see how many fiction writers other than myself were on Medium and to see if Medium actually could be a viable place to post fiction. Though the platform predominantly features non-fiction writers and posts, I did discover that there are a number of fiction writers on here. And I do believe Medium is a viable place for fiction writers. My own story Extraction, a thriller story released in episodes has been doing fairly well (though I’d like it to reach even more people).
My first post addressed the why, and this is my attempt to address the how. Below I’m going to outline some of the things I’ve done or that I’ve seen others do to get their stories noticed.
1. Write a Great Story
That’s a given, right? But seriously, though, if you want people to read your story, you have to give it all you’ve got. If you have a great story, there are people who want to read it; you and those people just haven’t connected yet. Writing a great story is the first step in making that connection.
2. Don’t Just Write Fiction
This one might seem difficult if all you want to do is write fiction, but if you want to find readers on Medium, you often have to get noticed as a non-fiction writer first. I often write about writing since I’m a high school English teacher, and this is how many readers first encounter my work.
I try to write interesting stories and include a mention that I also write fiction and a link to one of my stories. It also helps if you include in your bio a link to your best fiction piece.
Sometimes you have to earn people’s respect in the sphere of thought leaders, whether that’s in creativity, productivity, entrepreneurship, or whatever, before you can get the interest of people for your fiction.
3. Join a Publication
Whether you’re a fiction or non-fiction writer on Medium, one of the biggest keys to getting noticed is getting your work picked up by a publication on Medium. That way you get your work in front of the readers that already follow that publication. If you’re writing non-fiction alongside your fiction, getting your non-fiction posts into a publication is just as important as your fiction.
One of my favorite fiction writers on Medium is N. Mozart Diaz, and I love reading the stories that are a part of a publication he’s an editor for, Two Thousand Words. The Coffeelicious is also a solid publication you might want to try. Some others I’ve contributed to are Curiosity Never Killed the Writer, The Unlisted, and Writer, Reader, and Lover of Words. There are a host of others on Medium to check out. You can also create your own publication. That’s what I did with my story Extraction.
4. Market Your Stories
Being a fiction writer who gets noticed requires a certain level of marketing ability. Don’t just write a new story. Write a separate non-fiction post that talks about your story and gives people a reason to read it. Include a link at the end to the story. (Notice how many times I’ve included a link to my story Extraction so far?)
The key to good marketing is creating a headline that makes people want to read. Of course, don’t just create click bait. Nobody will want to read your work then.
5. Promote Your Stories on Social Media
Don’t just post to Medium and hope people will click on your story. Posts have a way of disappearing quickly on Medium, so going outside of Medium is important. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, promote your stories and try to get people interested in reading. If you have people that you think would enjoy your work, ask them to read it and share if they enjoy it.
6. Network with Other Fiction Writers
Medium may seem like a predominantly non-fiction medium, but there a lot of fiction writers on here as well. I read a lot of their work and recommend it when I enjoy it. Respond to people’s work on Medium. Leave notes. Ask other people to read your stuff. They may not, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Fiction writers have found a way to find each other on here, so if you’re a fiction writer, make yourself known as well.
7. Tag Your Work as Fiction
Medium lets you add tags to your posts. If someone’s following a certain tag, then your post should ideally show up in their feed if your post has that tag. Fiction seems like the clearest tag to use as a fiction writer, so it seems like a good idea to use it.
Share Your Tips for Getting Noticed
Are you a fiction writer on Medium? I’d love for you to share your experience with getting readers for your stories on Medium. Please share in a response below.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider reading some of these others: | https://medium.com/personal-growth/how-to-get-started-as-a-fiction-writer-on-medium-25704047d23c | ['Tom Farr'] | 2020-03-19 05:48:26.576000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Creative Writing', 'Medium', 'Fiction', 'Writing'] |
The Pre-Sales Equation | Hello! My name is Charlie, and I work on the Presales team at SoftServe Inc. on the Customer Journey Navigation Team. My official title is Solutions Consultant, and it’s my role to help our sales team discover, qualify, manage, and close deals.
After reading this article, my hope is you will
Better understand the many factors that may impact a deal
Use the equation variables as a guide for conversations and deal design
Quick primer on the Enterprise Presale
During the first client meeting, it’s our task to establish a potential engagement between our two companies — this includes doing some legwork ahead of time to know the right angles of approach, and there’s also a deep conversation to be had¹ around framing client calls around business value (rather than purely technical solutions.)
A typical sales cycle has 1–10 meetings over 1–10 weeks before either closing or disqualifying. It is tempting to say Yes to whatever the client (or partner) requests, but it is important to say No where appropriate, otherwise we can easily begin setting the expectation that we will take on a deal that is not a good fit for us. I’ve uncovered several deals that worked for us, simply by saying “No” to the first request — and quickly finding that the client actually had other needs that were a great fit for us.
[1] The Five Whys is one great starting point for insights based selling.
Qualification and Deal Design: an example
In this article I’ll refer to an imaginary client, “Client, Inc”. We learn in the first meeting that Client Inc has an urgent need around migrating 10 users off an obscure technology, T, which would take just a few weeks to do (perhaps with a $XX,000 price tag). On the surface, this is not a deal for us. Our ROI including time, money, effort, and overhead only becomes positive above $XXX,000 in revenue over the next 12 months. Here’s the simple equation in pseudocode:
if ($XXX,000 ≤ $Expected_Value), then GO;
$Expected_Value = $XX,000;
Therefore, NO-GO
Note: I’m using “XX,000” here instead of real numbers, as this is a nonexistent example.
So, no-go, right? Well — not so fast! There is often more to the story. We expand the conversation: “What led you to needing this now?” Answer: “We aqua-hired a company and after an internal review, decided we needed to do a bunch of migrations. This is one of them.”
My ears prick up. A bunch of migrations, you say? Further questioning leads to a deeper business case: “We realized our employees could be roughly 2x more productive if they had a unified set of internal platforms and tools.” We end up discussing the horizon on when this 2x productivity boost is expected to realize (6 months), as well as the top line impact (we can reduce development costs by $X00,000/yr and invest an additional X000 hours into R&D). Let’s assume the initial need is $X0,000, but these additional migrations including a discovery and program management is worth a lot more. The client agrees that the first migration can be a Phase I of the total migration project. In the biz we call this the “tail” because it comes after the first deal. Let’s revisit the equation:
if ($XXX,000 ≤ $Expected_Value + $Tail), then GO;
$Expected_Value = $XX,000;
$Tail = $XXX,000;
Therefore, GO
Simple enough, right? :-]
The Equation
Ok, that was a simple example. Reality is often much more nuanced. Here’s a more complete picture: | https://medium.com/@vannorman/the-presales-equation-ce39703974f8 | ['Charlie Van Norman'] | 2021-03-04 19:26:16.654000+00:00 | ['Presales', 'Consulting', 'Sales', 'Solutions', 'Business Development'] |
Friendship and Its Obstacles | unforgettable
about friendship and its obstacles
We met in the schoolyard when times weren’t as hard. You’re a talker, I’m a listener so, it felt just right!
Illustration by Sofia Paz-D’África
Our conversations were endless, always filled with exciting things. Together, we weren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves. We didn’t fear the obstacles
in our way because we could always count on each other!
Illustration by Sofia Paz-D’África
However, as time went by, you met other people…I wasn’t mad about that, it’s only natural. But you slowly began to neglect our friendship.
Illustration by Sofia Paz-D’África
Regardless of the disappointment, I never stopped loving you! My very first friend, the one whose arms sheltered me when my world fell apart.
Life changed in several ways and so have we. Yet, the memories of our wonderful friendship will last forever! | https://medium.com/weeds-wildflowers/unforgettable-9797a58f53d6 | ['Sofia Paz'] | 2020-12-24 10:27:38.576000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Relationships', 'Friendship', 'Love', 'Memories'] |
Homeless Man I Saw In The Street Before The Quarantine Starts | The two-day curfew started as of 21:00 on Friday. I started walking on Istiklal Street from 20:00. “Coincidentally Alive” (Brek) was playing in my ear.
Although it was eight o’clock, the street was overcrowded. But still, the feeling of the crowd is a little anxious and a bit hectic as well, with the feeling that they should be at home in an hour. The police have blocked every street leading to Istiklal Street with iron barriers, but they allow people to pass. Many police officers with motorcycles roam the street with the flashes of their motorcycles.
Tourists have a lot of takeaway bags in their hands. They, too, will return to their hotels by lingering with the showcases, the shows made by the maraş ice cream shop and the chestnuts. Street music has not been around for a long time, so there is no street musician accompanying this whole scene.
The shopkeepers pretend they are too busy inside to close their shop later, which is supposed to close at eight o’clock but have no time to close it. The lighting of the street was very nice. This year everywhere is sparkling with Christmas decorations that none of us can possibly celebrate.
Everything and everyone is in motion. Then I saw a man sitting at the entrance of a store across the street. It was looking towards the Tunnel direction, not Taksim. His gaze stretched so deep that for a moment I felt that the place he was looking at was really a tunnel that led him far. The dullness in his gaze seemed to indicate just how far he was.
A man in his sixties, with his hair mixed in the wind, his beard unkempt, and wearing a jacket that could be considered stylish despite everything.
Looking more carefully, he conveys that his left palm is directed towards people and demands that they help him, and this request is now conveyed to people with a symbol that has now become a universal symbol. It is wordless, so it is internationally wide.
His hand turned to people to collect money seemed tired of hovering. It was as if his airborne hand rather than himself needed help to keep hovering. The crowd coming from the left was his target group, so he was facing them, that is, towards the Tunnel.
The street was getting deserted as there was little time left for the curfew to begin. As the people decreased, the old man became more visible on the street. After a while, he was the most prominent character of the street for me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
What would this man do when the curfew started in half an hour? Since no one is left on the street, there will be no one who leaves money in their hands. So he had to go home like everyone else. What I call home is a sidewalk corner in the side street just ahead. I started seeing other people in the same street, even the children living on the street.
We, those who have a home, have been preparing for days to stay home for 56 hours. Movies to watch are ready. If the plan has changed at the last minute, new plans are ready. As long as we stay at home, the homeless will wander the streets alone. The place we call outside is perhaps inside for them. It is forbidden to go out, but living on the street is not.
While we in our homes are busy with skills to improve ourselves during bans, the homeless develop their survival skills.
While we are confident and comfortable to stay at home and comply with the ban, the homeless always live this period illegally. There is a sense of anxiety brought on by illegality.
The world will look better when we learn to stop looking where we are and be where we look. | https://medium.com/illumination/homeless-man-i-saw-in-the-street-before-the-quarantine-starts-1b03e7e42d43 | [] | 2020-12-06 19:23:52.758000+00:00 | ['Quarantine', 'Covid 19', 'Homeless', 'Coronavirus', 'Lockdown'] |
Cartoonists Drawing Together | Cartoonists Drawing Together
It keeps us sane, and married
Last week, I volunteered to show my studio and draw on camera for viewers via the wonderful Society of Illustrator’s Instagram. After a half hour of talking shop, materials, ideas, and drawing, I invited my husband to join me. Michael Maslin is also a New Yorker cartoonist, such as myself, and we have been married for thirty two years. I got us a huge piece of paper and we drew together, almost frantically at times. Michael reminded me that it’s something we did on one of our first “dates.” You can see a bit how we both work, and get a glimpse into a cartoonist’s brain.
Here is the video.
Michael and I met because of The New Yorker, and we live and breathe the art of cartooning. Both of us love what we do, and even wrote a book about the institution of marriage — and ours — together, called Cartoon Marriage. The book almost made it into a sitcom; it didn’t get picked up, ultimately.
It helps to laugh in a marriage; take it from us. It’s manditory. | https://lizadonnelly.medium.com/cartoonists-drawing-together-bb1925e712a | ['Liza Donnelly'] | 2020-06-20 11:17:49.451000+00:00 | ['The New Yorker', 'Laughter', 'Drawing', 'Marriage', 'Cartoons'] |
On-Premise Tribes in Shiny Caves | As I took her by the hand to school this morning my 6-year old daughter Kiara looked up at Google’s giant Lego project in progress and excitedly reminded me of the latest 3 numbers marking the tops of their latest 3 towers .… “11th floor, ehh … 13, umm .. I can’t see that one Daddy!”. This time she didn’t ask me when I’m going to join Google’s 8,000 people in Dublin. There’s a new flavour of the month. Recently I took her into an event close to us in Airbnb. It’s a beautiful cave and had colourful free stuff in the kitchen and the staff were friendly. Now that’s where Daddy “needs to get a job”. AirBnB has just leased another big cave for 20 years. Facebook, 40 metres from our apartment, will lease another massive space soon for another 5,000 employees etc.
After I leave Kiara to school, I wander back near our apartment and enter a wonderful co-working space called Workbench in a Bank of Ireland branch in the heart of Dublin’s Silicon Docks. I enjoy the energy of having a few other founders around. Sometimes I go to my alma mater Trinity College’s library if I need super levels of concentration. Or switch to a cafe if I need a change or a walk to contemplate an idea, or if I simply feel like a better coffee. No matter where I go I’m a headset away from a state of deep focus. Sometimes I just work out of my apartment if the kids are out. My co-founder and great friend Mike Quill works out of his home in San Diego. He prefers the weather and lifestyle there to his native Dublin. We are both free to do deep work wherever and whenever we want. We evolved away from large luminous caves a few years ago.
“Remote work has opened the door to a brave new world beyond the industrial-age belief in The Office … If you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems … When you treat people like children, you get children’s work.”
Jason Fried & DHH
Richard Branson once said that in the future people will wonder why offices ever existed. Lots of big tech companies think otherwise. It’s 5 years since he said this, but companies are herding their people into towers punching ever bigger holes in the cloud. Arguments for enormous concrete, steel and glass caves with gorgeous interiors, filled with ever larger tribes of on-premise humans are being constructed all around me here in Dublin. And it’s happening in all the big tech hubs.
Remote 1st SaaS founders who evolved away from shiny-cave syndrome, Stephen Cummins
I worked in software caves in the high touch B2B SaaS world almost from the very start. One of these shiny caves eventually expanded into the 150+ on-premise people scale, with lots of free food, gorgeous furniture etc. That explosion in office numbers is one reason why I sold my allotment of Salesforce shares cheaply and left. Hyper-growth was in full gear and I believed it would become much bigger. And I had an exciting role. But I had enjoyed it so much more when they were smaller. I spent half my days abroad commuting on planes and trains and had complete control over my itinerary as the CSM covering continental Europe. Salesforce Dublin had created the first ever SaaS CSMs (evolving Vantive’s idea) and I was parachuting into companies from every industry and getting to use my languages. But for me the office in Dublin was now uncomfortably large.
More desks every month and more people and more noise and more meetings and more infernal interruptions. And all that chaotic jazz. Still loads of energy, but a slowly diminishing percentage of effective work being done as the numbers exploded. It wasn’t the fun, scrappy scale-up I had signed up for anymore. I wanted to leave before I stopped enjoying it. So that’s what I did.
Salesforce used to use high rise office blocks to explain the B2B SaaS model. We’d tell reams of sceptical prospects ad nauseam that these buildings had shared electricity, shared security, shared water etc., but tenant companies could configure their own offices any way they liked. That’s how we’d start to explain the benefits of multi-tenant architecture. We did it well enough because the utility model disrupted on-premise software far quicker than most would have predicted. The world has completely accepted that we don’t need servers in the building.
But I want to ask another question.
Jay Shaw for J.D.Ballard’s High-Rise film poster
Do we need employees in the building?
Most SaaS giants and hyper-growth scale-ups have very few remote workers. Yet we didn’t evolve to work in huge groups huddled together in a large building. Can you imagine 1,000 people sharing a giant cave in the stone age? Humans evolve slowly. It’s difficult to design a giant shiny cave that successfully overrides our evolutionary instincts.
I gave a talk a few weeks ago to open the SaaS Monster stage in the Web Summit about 100% remote SaaS companies. 100% Remote means all employees working in separate locations — using remote technologies and methodologies to communicate and collaborate. During the talk I asked how many people in the audience (of about 1,200) had worked in an office with more than 100 to 150 people? About half the audience raised arms. I then asked them to keep their hands up if they found it really challenging in that office to get stuff done. Hardly an arm dropped.
Most of us have experienced the issues around constant interruptions, someone noisy on the phone, social pressure to chat with colleagues, impromptu meetings that take 60 minutes to get 5 minutes’ work done. And that’s after ever-lengthening commutes, especially in tech-hubs. As companies scale, just being around, making the right noises, looking attentive, making political alliances, ‘managing upwards’ and other inefficient personal strategies take up far too much time and emotional disc space. It’s not always the way, but there’s a lot of toxic bullshit in a lot of giant offices.
After backpacking the planet with my better half Alicia Tejero and then doing photography for a couple of years, I went back to Salesforce.com to learn how to sell. I had decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and this was a hole in my skillset. And in a high touch B2B SaaS world, Salesforce is a school of excellence. By then the numbers had multiplied again and it was a very different company, but I thought I could block that out with single-minded purpose — despite the big open office and a role that demanded less travel.
To circumnavigate the noisy open floor, I ended each day by booking up time in various quiet offices for the following day, making sure I had at least one scheduled call in each 2-hour slot — to justify escaping the large open-office distractions. I’d vary the offices across the whole building so people wouldn’t notice and complain. I’d head outside for a walk a few minutes before ‘town-halls’ so I could dodge the herding process and sneak back into my small nested cave. So much wasted energy in the service of rewiring my interaction with a traditional on-premise-people system to get effective work done.
“Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.”
Edwin Way Teale
In an interview with David Darmanin on my podcast, he told me the story of how he rejected a big expanding office and left to found a 100% remote SaaS company called Hotjar (web session replay and feedback software). 4 of the 5 founders live in Malta, but David insists they do not socialise or meet with any regularity. They use their remote methodologies and technologies to communicate even though they are located close to each other. Hence they empathise with, and understand the working lives of non-founder colleagues.
David believes that one doesn’t create a company culture. Instead one devises shared values, develops ways to build alignment … and from there the culture will evolve as the company grows. Hotjar employees are deeply engaged in a culture that has evolved from shared values they helped craft. The employees have stayed and the company is approaching $20M annual recurring revenue (ARR) after just 4 years.
“The thing is, once you have a framework and a model like this which is very much built around trust and empowering people, they need to be able to have the drive to do that. We haven’t set up a company where we spoon-feed people. If they want to be spoon-fed, then it’s not going to work out.”
Dr David Darmanin, CEO and Founder of Hotjar
I also interviewed YouCanBook.Me’s Bridget Harris for14 Minutes of SaaS. Her company does online scheduling software. They built their success story with no sales, no marketing, and no funding. They eliminated marketing & sales by solving a big problem in blood red competitive water with a product that’s easy to use and easy to share. Product led marketing to produce a viral solution. They are now close to $3 million ARR and facilitate 1 million bookings a month. Profitable for the last 3 years too.
Bridget says that if on-boarding needs support, the product is broken. Now that’s not true for every business model, but that philosophy and that aim are fantastic. And in the future, when they do add on sales and marketing, Bridget maintains that the big challenges will have been worked out and they’ll be accelerating the acquisition of customers they know they’ll help make successful. The right customers. That is, of course, way better than boosting market position artificially with money and signing up quick-churn-customers they’ll piss off because they haven’t worked their stuff out properly. Bridget advises self-awareness, or understanding your own personal culture and wiring, is a key foundation for building a successful company.
“Culture eats hiring for breakfast and if you start with your culture, knowing who you are, you learn how that has to work through your processes and procedures.”
Bridget Harris, CEO and Co-founder of YouCanBook.me
Le Penseur (the Thinker), Auguste Rodin
A big part of many of the companies successfully adopting remote-working is about working in a better way and allowing people to have more meaningful and balanced lives, as opposed to chasing SaaS monster lottery tickets. It’s not about old-world carrot and stick nonsense. People who choose to tolerate being a slave to stress can easily become wired to only care about the money. That’s not good for anybody. Money is one very important part of the pie of course. Hiring in non-expensive places allows companies to reward employees generously. Hotjar gives employees 40 days planned vacation a year and YouCanBook.me pay their Spanish engineers double the local rates. And that’s the tip of a beautiful iceberg of rewards. As Bridget Harris says, it’s about jam today in some of your best years, rather than putting your life on hold.
“You don’t need to live in San Francisco to be a tech genius, or New York, or Austin. So why should you live anywhere if you don’t want to?”
Wade Foster, Co-founder and CEO at Zapier
A modest, but growing fleet of remote SaaS companies like Hotjar, YouCanBook.Me, Basecamp (project management), Zapier (iPaaS), Balsamiq (wireframing), Automattic (Wordpress ), InVision (software prototyping), Buffer (social media management), GitLab (version control hosting), Doist (task management & internal communications), Wildbit (several SaaS products) etc. are quietly landing on the shores of our business landscape.
And here’s the thing. These companies produce best in category SaaS solutions. If you don’t believe me, check their software against the X axis on G2 Crowd’s crowd sourced quadrants, the bit that’s labelled ‘Satisfaction’. G2 Crowd really needs to rename that ‘Customer Success’. These companies absolutely excel at customer success — many are number 1 in their competitive categories. The signs are that 100% remote SaaS companies consistently produce world class solutions. And unsurprisingly Glassdoor says they excel at employee success too.
For another indicator that an armada of these companies will slowly rise, look at the apparently shocking valuations for WeWork. Between 3 and 40 Billion USD depending on who you believe. Crunchbase did a meta-analysis of these disparate valuations and its guess is that the value is closer to $9B. Co-working spaces are a big enabler of remote. Hence the rise of remote is directly related to such stratospheric valuations.
Sophisticated companies like Plantronics have been producing hardware for enabling remote since long before big software enablers like Slack were born. It has known for decades that large shared work spaces are sub-optimal for effective work. And Plantronics has vast data to back that up. A Plantronics headset enabled the world to hear Neil Armstrong’s immortal words as he stepped on the moon for the first time in 1969. They’ve been doing this a long time and know a thing or two. And it was their customer, NASA engineer Jack Nilles, that coined the word telecommuting. Today about 60% of NASA’s staff work remotely.
Neil Armstrong on the moon (with a Plantronics headset)
So the next time you go to one of those open-office ‘we want to hire you’ events in a big SaaS company, and you see all those enormous cool spaces to collaborate & play, please don’t assume this is an efficient way. You might love being part of that scene. If you do, go for it. And actually, many of these companies are great places to start off in — especially if you can find a way to change role a couple of times early on.
Plantronics is a global enabler of all sorts of communication from executives on the move to remote workers to large call centres. It measures the effectiveness of workspaces across 4 ‘C’s; Communication, Collaboration, Contemplation and Concentration. And it does a lot more than headsets — it’s also a significant player in cloud software and works on solutions for many common issues with large spaces e.g. with habitat soundscaping.
Plantronics considers well designed office spaces to be optimal for collaboration. And there’s strong evidence to support that. when it comes to innovation, it’s obviously difficult to beat the likes of ServiceNow, Workday and Salesforce — the #1, #2, and #3 ranked companies for innovation according to Forbes World’s most Innovative Companies list. These are also the 3 largest pure-play B2B SaaS companies in the world. So innovation should not be underestimated. Even though some strong proponents of remote would say otherwise, I agree there’s a hit in 100% remote companies regarding face-to-face brainstorming.
Ticketmaster, London
However Plantronics also sees the strength of quieter, remote working spaces in the other three Cs, particularly concentration and contemplation, but also communication. Even in the most innovative successful companies, 99% of the work done is executing off stuff they already know. It has to be that way. Remote companies gain much more in terms of deep work with less interruptions. Otherwise it’s employees would fly around like a parliament of magpies in spring, chasing shiny ideas until they crash into some high rise windows. The vast majority of a company’s time, once a strong product-market fit and initial happy shiny paying customers have been established, is rinse and repeat. It keeps listening, learning and innovating obviously, but the ability to deliver effectively is almost everything. Deep, effective work gets done when one can concentrate and focus without fear of excessive interruptions, negatively multiplied by switch-tasking.
And even for innovation, remote can work well for some companies. It gives people time to think in advance and dismiss most shiny possibilities that don’t work before a web-enabled meeting. People who genuinely have something to say about the specific topic tend to pipe-up, rather than those who are simply good at speaking. And when communicating in asynchronous threads, team members tend to think carefully about input. They learn to value their colleagues’ time and that brings in a very positive dimension to collaboration.
“What I want inside my company is a sustainable culture where you can work for 20 years and be happy and have a life outside of work.”
Amir Salihefendic, Founder & CEO of Doist
Nicholas Bloom, Eberle Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford, ran an excellent study and gave a tremendous talk on remote working with Trip (formerly Ctrip), China’s largest travel agency. The company has 20,000 employees and agreed to a comparative study of remote versus in in-office employees. The teams were divided with a random selection method based on whether their date of birth was an even or odd number. The results were staggering. Remote workers tended to do their full hours (which the in-office employees tended not to do for various reasons) and remote workers showed a better ability to concentrate on the task in hand. This resulted in an increase of 13% in work effectiveness and halved the annual rate at which people left the company. The upshot was that Trip made $2,000 more profit per person working from home.
100% Remote SaaS companies develop and constantly evolve effective ways of hiring. They find employees that have a grown-up attitude to work, and that embrace transparency and trust. They are forced to focus on values and culture from day 1, and to a degree that office based companies will not feel compelled to do. The employees can live wherever they want and remote companies can often afford to reward them generously by hiring outside expensive locations like San Francisco, London, New York and Dublin. 100% remote SaaS companies tend to really value the work-life balance of their employees. I suspect they don’t agree with Jason M. Lemkin’s pinned tweet.
“Once or twice in life, someone will give you a shot you don’t quite deserve.
Work 100 hours.
Do whatever it takes…”
My perspective on this tweet? To hell with that. I’m not going to mortgage my life and my relationship with my family. Long hours are rarely an efficient or sustainable way to work. In fact the Basecamp founders do a great job in deconstructing the ‘Do whatever it takes’ narrative in their new book ‘It doesn’t have to be Crazy at Work’. I highly recommend it, even if you are not interested in remote. And if you are interested in this, read all their books. Especially ‘Remote’. Unless we’re unlucky or desperate or lost, we should work to live. I know I’ve lost myself before. Never again.
Family time. What dent in the universe can be more important to me than this?
Loneliness is another challenge for remote. We are social animals. The evolution of our brains depended on interpersonal contact with other humans. To reduce the negative impact of loneliness, hire for employees that are resilient and resourceful. People who get up in the morning with a clear ikigai, and who can access coping mechanisms if they feel down. Hiring people proximate to co-working spaces or good cafes can help.
Hiring the wrong person is the most expensive thing that can happen to your company so you work hard to avoid that.”
Bridget Harris, CEO and Co-founder of YouCanBook.me
Can you imagine Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal making wholesale changes to their game every month? Re-engineering the serve one week, switching to a one-handed backhand the next. They practise what they know well and reserve a small amount of time to evolve their games and innovate. And can you imagine them being interrupted mid-match constantly? How would that influence the effectiveness of their games? The rest of the human race is no different. When we focus, we are effective.
Focus. Rafael Nadal, eye on the ball as he serves.
“Gitlab started as a remote company from day one. I didn’t meet my co-founder until a year after we started this company. We are now 300 remote people across 40 countries.”
Dmitriy Zaporozhets, Co-founder & CTO at GitLab
Of course, remote is not the only way. I also interviewed Nicolas Dessaigne in Algolia for 14 Minutes of SaaS and he’s seeded hyper-growth and amazing office based culture in Paris & San Francisco. Algolia’s culture is one where customer problems are viewed as opportunities rather than reasons to panic. Nicolas cares deeply about a culture of transparency and honesty. Intercom have also achieved big growth with offices in Dublin & San Francisco. Intercom’s culture is so cool, it makes a personal comic book to celebrate the work anniversary of every employee. Every year, every employee receives a copy of a beautifully illustrated ‘intercomic’ with themselves as protagonist and hero. This forces the company to really know it’s employees very well. And amongst the giants Salesforce is still a growth and innovation machine, and generally stands for strong values around equality and social responsibility.
So I’m not saying 100% Remote companies have a monopoly on values and employee success. And I’m not saying there’s no place for beautifully constructed caves with focussed on-premise humans. I’m saying that we seriously underestimate how big and valuable and liberating the ever-improving possibilities for remote-working will become. Even if your company is not interested in having a significant percentage of remote employees, a huge amount can be learned from the various cultures and methodologies that have evolved in remote companies. The focus on effective work, clarity of values, efficient communication, and on empowering people to live great lives are amongst the most compelling.
But there’s one other big challenge with 100% remote companies.
Scale.
100% remote companies are often bootstrapped and sacrifice hyper-growth for slower, more sustainable growth. They hire extremely carefully and typically don’t artificially accelerate their growth with huge marketing and sales spend. Hence I doubt there will be a 100% remote SaaS company as big as a Salesforce, or even a Workday or ServiceNow within the next 5 years. I do believe it will happen eventually though.
However, as DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp says …. if you set out to create a unicorn, the odds are stacked against you from the start. Why not make a highly lucrative dent in the universe rather than trying to own the fucking universe.
There’s room for thousands of SaaS companies to succeed. Not just a few dozen. These companies can massively improve the lives of their employees, and by extension their employees’ families. It’s a philosophy that favours the quality of the work and rewards us when we are effective adults. And that’s good news.
So if you’re a founder that tends to be more of an author than a reader in the narrative of your own life, why not consider building a company that attracts other women and men who tend to take control of their own lives too.
Live long and prosper!
Stephen Cummins, 17th November, 2018
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If you found this interesting, then …
1. Listen to me interview the greatest founders in the world on the14 Minutes of SaaS podcast … you can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts:
14 Minutes of SaaS on Spotify / Apple podcasts / Google podcasts / TuneIn / Stitcher
2. Follow me on social networks you use: @Stephen_Cummins and @14MinutesOfSaaS and my LinkedIn profile
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
“There’s a crazy thing that happens as you’re growing a business … It tries to be real. It starts asking for things …The business isn’t real. We’ve invented it. We created it. It does not exist in and of itself … Our biggest challenge as founders is to tame the beast. To keep the beast from becoming the voice in your head. The beast is directly responsible for when it’s not fun anymore … It belongs to us and it needs to serve us.”
Natalie Nagele, Co-founder & CEO, Wildbit
“All that glistens is not gold —
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold…
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,…
Fare you well. Your suit is cold —
Cold, indeed, and labour lost.”
William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
This article is from my AppSelekt blog:
On-Premise People in Shiny Caves
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — | https://medium.com/understanding-as-a-service-uaas/on-premise-people-and-shiny-caves-remote-as-a-service-97cff86382b6 | ['Stephen Cummins'] | 2019-11-22 12:13:52.515000+00:00 | ['SaaS', 'B2B', 'Startup', 'Future Of Work', 'Remote Working'] |
Manifestation Meditation: Seven Steps To Manifestation | Here’s the open secret to manifestation: your success depends on where you place your attention. In everyday life, our attention is scattered. It’s on our bills, on whether we can get the kids to school on time, on whether we’re going to get a promotion, and dozens of other things, all at the same time. This is the Beta mind state: the everyday mind state, perfect for multi-tasking.
But — Beta is lousy for manifestation, because your attention is too scattered. If you’ve been trying to use a technique like affirmations to manifest, it’s hard to get your affirmations to create your dreams in a Beta mind state. Your affirmations have zero power.
You can create whatever you decide to manifest. In effect, you can create something out of nothing. You’re already manifesting the life and circumstances which currently surround you. You can change these circumstances and manifest something different. All it takes is a secret ingredient.
The secret ingredient to manifestation is meditation. When you meditate, you will find that it’s easy to manifest exactly what you want, because your attention is single-pointed: it’s focused like a laser beam. When your attention is focused, what your attention is focused on manifests, and often more quickly than you think possible.
In just ten minutes a day, or twice a day if you’re keen, you can change your life. You can manifest anything that you truly desire. This sounds like an outrageous claim, but it’s quite easy to test it for yourself. After all, everyone can spare ten minutes a day.
Manifest what you truly desire
Perhaps you’ve already tried affirmations to manifest a new car, or a job, or a better relationship. Then, when nothing changed, you stopped, convinced that affirmations were pointless. Affirmations do work. However they work when you’re in an accepting, meditative state when you repeat your affirmations, because in this state you’re much more powerful — your attention is focused.
When you start the manifestation process with meditation, you’re working with yourself, rather than against yourself. Experienced meditators say that they know when what they desire is on its way to them: there’s a “click”, a feeling of connection. When this connection happens they know that nothing can prevent their desire from manifesting. This connection always happens in a meditative state.
Ten minutes a day for seven days
This Manifestation Meditation takes just ten minutes a day for seven days.
To enhance the process, you can make meditation easy, by using a Brain Sync program to help. Just listen to your chosen program, and you will naturally access a meditative state. You’ll find some recommendations at the end of this article.
In just ten minutes a day, not only will you discover what you truly what, but also make the connection that lets you know that what you want is on its way to you.
Here we go: seven days to manifesting your dreams.
Step One: Emptiness and compassionate silence
In this manifestation process, you start with relaxation, silence, and with complete acceptance. In this silence over the next days, you will find that your true desires will come to you. So for today’s meditation, just relax, focus on your breathing, and let go.
Optimally, you’ll be listening to a Brain Sync program as you meditate, because you can achieve Alpha and Theta mind states more easily. Put on your headphones, and sit or lie down in a comfortable position with your spine straight, and relax.
Once you’ve completely relaxed, and your mind is calm, bring to mind a being, or a force, that you associate with compassion. This may be a spiritual figure, or a place in nature, or the earth, or the stars. Bring this being, or this place to mind, and allow yourself to feel the compassion, and the kindness, that’s extended to you.
Enjoy the compassionate presence for a few minutes.
Step Two: Intuition and ideas
Today, relax and become completely comfortable again, and let your mind clear. If you’re using a Brain Sync program, put your headphones on, and allow the program to carry you into Alpha and Theta.
Gradually, silence will enfold you. Then, ask for your compassionate being to extend kindness to you again — or allow yourself to feel this kindness from nature.
Now bring to mind what you want to manifest. You may know what this is, but don’t be surprised if you envision something completely different that you wish to manifest.
Breathe deeply. Relax. If you feel that you’re becoming uncomfortable, just focus on your breathing or a time, and listen to the music in your program. Sometimes you’ve got so much attachment to your desires that it feels uncomfortable.
Watch for synchronicity in your daily life
We’re all intuitive, but sometimes w suppress our intuition. Your daily meditations will lead to you encountering synchronicities in your daily life. Just take note of these events when they occur. They’re a sign that you’ve made a connection, that your meditation is working.
Step Three: Expression
In today’s meditation, access the silence, and the compassionate state again. Allow yourself to completely relax, and feel happy and serene. You may find yourself smiling during your meditation.
If you’ve decided on what you want to manifest, state it aloud, if you’re alone, or silently if you’re not: “I want to manifest a new car”; “I want to manifest a new job, with a salary 25 per cent more than I’m earning”; or “I want a new relationship — I want to find my soul mate.”
Step Four: Emotion
In today’s meditation, access the silence and the compassionate states again. State your manifestation-desire as though you already have what you want. Yesterday, you made the connection, and what you desire is already yours — it’s completely yours, so state it that way: “I now have my wonderful new car”; “I love my new job, with my enhanced salary”; “I and my soul mate have found each other, and life is wonderful.”
Allow yourself to feel happy and grateful that you have what you want. Give thanks that what you’ve asked for has already been given to you.
When your meditation is over, you may feel an impulse to do something — make a phone call, or speak to someone. This impulse arrives without emotion. This is your intuition at work. It has been triggered by your meditations, and will help you to manifest.
Step Five: Will
Today, you’re going to activate your will in your meditation. Your will isn’t what’s commonly thought of as will-power, that white-knuckle do-or-die feeling. Your will is decision and acceptance. It’s not as much an emotion as a feeling — a sense — of inevitability.
Access the silence and the compassionate states again as you’ve done before. And again, state your manifestation-desire as though you already have it. Say: “I now have my wonderful new car”; “I love my new job, with my enhanced salary”; “I and my soul mate have found each other, and life is wonderful.”
Now access your will, which is centered in your hara.
In martial arts the source of your will and power is your hara, a point inside your body, about two inches below your navel. It’s also known as the dan tien. It’s a major focus of chi, of life force energy in your body. Imagine this point in your body as a small area of red glowing light, like a candle flame, or a glowing golden ball.
Notice the bodily sensations that you have in your hara. Don’t try to change them in any way, just notice any tightness, or other sensation. Then allow the restrictions you have there to release, and allow the energy of your hara center to flow up your spine and out of the top of your head.
Step Six: Imagination
Begin today’s meditation, as you usually do. Access the silence and the compassionate states again. Then, state your manifestation-desire as though you already have what you want. Feel hapy and grateful for your new life — for the manifestation which is already yours.
Let your attention move to your hara. Imagine the light in your hara, and feel the sensations. Let the energy of your hara flow up your spine, and out the top of your head.
As you release this energy, imagine your manifestation — picture it in any way you can, whether it’s by visual images, by sounds, by feelings. Imagine your new life, with your manifestation as part of it. Imagine events, complete with sight and sound. What does your family think about your manifestation?
Step Seven: Manifestation
Today, your manifestation process is complete. Whether you realize it consciously or not, your manifestation is on its way.
In today’s meditation, follow the same process you’ve followed over the past days. Here it is in brief, so that you can memorize it:
1. Silence and compassionate acceptance;
2. Express: speak your manifestation aloud, or silently, and feel the emotion of its fulfillment;
3. Sense the energy of your will in your hara, and allow it to move up and out of your body;
4. Imagine your life with the manifestation complete.
Using your Manifestation Meditation
You can continue to use this process. Your life has already begun to change. Keep growing, and manifesting, by using this simple meditation. Over time, you can access this “manifestation mind state” within 60 seconds or less in your daily life. For example, if you’re about to give a presentation, use the meditation to both relax yourself, and manifest a wonderful outcome.
Click here to check this Brain Sync program to accompany your Manifestation Meditation. | https://medium.com/@zecobalogun/manifestation-meditation-seven-steps-to-manifestation-5820e58a888d | ['Zeco Turner'] | 2019-09-28 15:52:15.240000+00:00 | ['Manifestation Magic', 'Manifestation', 'Law Of Attraction', 'Law Of Universe', 'Meditation'] |
Yoga Essentials — A Checklist. Yoga has been booming in popularity for… | Yoga has been booming in popularity for years now. Offering a way to connect with yourself through exercise and relaxation. However, if you are new to the world of yoga it can get confusing. While many instructors will give you a list of what you will need, and what to expect. Some might not, which will still leave you with the question; what exactly do you need to practice yoga?
Well, with this yoga essentials checklist you no longer have to worry. Simply print it out, and bring it along on your yoga shopping spree. If you’d like to make it an even easier shopping trip, look around the store. There is everything that is a must-have with yoga, and many more accessories that will help to make it much easier.
* First and foremost you need to get at least a couple of yoga outfits. While it is a common misconception, that normal workout wear is fine. They can oftentimes be too cumbersome and loose to practice yoga, without having to worry about adjusting your clothes. Most yoga workout wear is snug-fitting and meant to help you achieve inner peace without worrying about your clothes.
There are shorts, tops, pants, and even capris that are produced for yoga. Giving you a wide variety of clothing to choose from. The one key to selecting the perfect yoga outfit is by keeping the weather in mind. Chances are, if it is snowing outside you don’t want to be caught wearing shorts. However, yoga pants will last throughout the year.
* Second, you have your yoga mat. Whether it is a Tai inspired mat or your standard issued yoga mat. They can be found almost anywhere these days, and are affordable for any budget. Some yoga mats have even been made to be somewhat sticky, which will keep the risk of slipping at a minimum. Try going organic! One of the major players in yoga is living with the world. Giving you more reason to go green.
* The third essential item you must have for yoga, is a few props. Depending on what your instructor plans for the day. It wouldn’t be wise to be caught unprepared. From bolsters to meditation stands, there are a lot of props and accessories that are essential for yoga classes. They can be found almost anywhere, from online yoga specialty shops like this one to local shops. However, be mindful of quality. Chances are if it is too cheaply priced you aren’t going to get the amount of use out of them that you’d want.
* The fourth essential yoga item is the yoga bag. Giving you the ability to keep all of your yoga essentials in check. There is nothing worse, than your yoga mat falling into a pile of mud before your lesson. Keep them all in one snug place, all with a little added style.
* Meditation cushions, while an accessory can help with your yoga practices. Giving you the ability to attune yourself from within. There is nothing worse than a sore bottom on the floor when you are trying to reach inner peace.
* Online Yoga Subscription to keep your lessons going. Can’t make your appointment this week for a yoga class? No problem! You’ve got an online yoga class subscription meant to keep you in the yoga mindset. They are essential for any yoga practitioner, especially those who are short on time.
* Foam blocks, while they would be considered props. Are by far one of the highest priority props for yoga. Thus giving them a spot on the essentials checklist. They can be found separately or in yoga essential kits.
* A yoga strap is your friend! They are utilized frequently throughout a yoga class, or at home on your own. Much like the foam blocks, they can be found both in a kit or stand-alone.
* The yoga ball and hand pump. While they can be found separately, they usually come as a pair. It will give you a leg-up at your class when you come prepared with these two fantastic yoga essentials.
There are countless amounts of yoga items available. This means that we have only begun to touch the basics on the yoga essentials checklist. There will always be something that you need or want with yoga lessons. Whether it is on the list or not, it is always a good idea to ask your instructor if you aren’t sure what you will need. Chances are, they will have an in-depth list of anything they require. Which will give you the ability to purchase your own, rather than utilizing their hand-outs.
Remember with all yoga items, you should try to go green. Many companies such as this one, will offer both an organic and non-organic version of all of these must-haves. Which will help you to keep our earth clean of chemicals, without having to skip a beat in your yoga lessons. Last but not least, the most essential yoga item is yourself. Keeping your body clean and free of chemicals and in tip-top shape, is by far the most important thing for yoga.
Try 3-days of FREE online Yoga classes LIVE from Rishikesh, India — Start Your Yoga Practice! | https://medium.com/nada-yoga-school/yoga-essentials-a-checklist-30a80973eb9d | ['Nada Yoga School'] | 2020-12-27 11:57:56.379000+00:00 | ['Yoga', 'Yoga Practice Checklist', 'Yoga Essentials', 'Yoga Clothes', 'Meditation'] |
Kavanaugh’s Confirmation And #MeToo At A Crossroads: Why This Moment Matters | “There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.”
- Lal Bahadur Shastri
Photo courtesy of Alex Brandon/the Associated Press
The end of my spring semester of my junior year at college, someone I knew was raped twice while she was intoxicated at a party off campus. I was the one who found her when I went to pick her up, discovering her in a state of undress and very visibly upset. Both assailants were men we knew, one in a position of arguable authority in our lives (he was our RA).
I will not go into further details of the incident itself as it isn’t my story to tell (she and I are no longer in touch and no one who knows me still from that period in my life will know who this person is or any of the others involved, so their anonymity is protected here). The day after the assault, she and I and her roommate (who was her childhood best friend) spent several hours in a group therapy session, after which she decided to file charges at the urging of the counselor. But she soon pulled out of the process shortly after reporting the assault to campus police, when some neighbors in our dormitory began to treat her with animosity and outright anger.
Ultimately, she didn’t think her story would be believed, and that her drinking would be used against her. She wasn’t willing to risk her reputation and make more enemies than she already had by just speaking up a little. The sad thing was she wasn’t wrong about the risks: statistics have consistently shown assault victims are rarely believed and their assailants almost always get off scot-free. In fact, it can cost survivors dearly to speak out — their jobs, their income, even sometimes their lives (as in, their literal lives).
Yet, while I was in college during the latter 1990s and very early 2000s, date rape was such a frequent experience among my friends as to be an epidemic. And the one thing they all had in common is that all these incidents were kept quiet, a secret stashed away by the women who had suffered them so as not to become a target of the abuse and shame society would surely further inflict on them for what they had been through.
While the aftermath of the Anita Hill hearings seemed to usher in a new era of consciousness, finally introducing terms like “sexual harassment” and “date rape” into mainstream lexicon, the actions of young men at my campuses and those across the country seemed to be taking much longer to catch up with the changing rhetoric.
We may have no longer been in the 1980s, with its rampant raunchy movies essentially encouraging rape and assault, but we were still being bombarded by conflicting messages as to where the line should be drawn when it came to consent and whose stories mattered more. During my freshman orientation, we even had to attend a whole seminar on date rape, in which I was first made aware of the concept that someone who has had too much alcohol (to the point of passing out and being incoherent) cannot consent. But nonetheless, assault of this nature seemed to happen routinely during my university years to more women I knew than I’d care to count.
While I myself managed to exit college and young adulthood without becoming a victim of rape myself, it was definitely not due to a lack of trying on the parts of some would-be assailants.
There is the man who sat in my classes and on the editorial board of the literary journal with me, who date raped my friend, and who followed me home from the bar one night, not leaving me alone no matter how many times I asked. When we got to my building, I made a mad dash for the door and ran upstairs to my suite, only for him to somehow get inside my building anyway and incessantly knock on my door for many minutes, insisting I invite him in and even let him “crash” there and that it was “rude” of me to refuse him access to my room.
There was a housemate’s drunk friend the summer of 2000 who stumbled into my room and sat on my bed at the crack of dawn, unzipping his pants and telling me everything would be okay if I let him jerk off for me (Instead, I screamed and started cursing him out).
There is the man I dated briefly in my early twenties a few months after I first moved to Massachusetts, who during a massage he gave me while I was between apartments and staying with him at his place (we were no longer together romantically at this time), pinned me down on the bed and did not listen when I said “stop” more than once as he continually kissed me and tugged at my clothing. I finally kneed him in his mid-section, sending him tumbling off the bed. I barricaded the bedroom door after he left and didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Luckily, I found my own place a couple of days later and we stopped speaking altogether. Our mutual friends to this day do not know why.
And so, I watched the confirmation hearings the week before last with mixed feelings of awe and misery, wishing it would go one way and yet mostly suspecting it would end in another. After all, the Anita Hill case had proven a powerful man could not be toppled by accusations of sexual misconduct no matter how credible. It was also worth noting the backdrop of these more recent hearings were now occurring with a man in the White House occupying the most powerful position in the nation who had been accused multiple times of sexual assault and who admitted (that is, bragged) about as much on a hot mic.
Yet, I still held out hope it would be different this time.
Because both the Hill hearings and Trump’s election to the presidency had occurred before the #MeToo movement took off, I was hoping its momentum would finally lend some much-needed leverage to the credibility of assault survivors in ALL instances, not just those the powers that be would allow. If anything, the Kavanaugh hearings served as a litmus test to #MeToo: could we crash the glass ceiling of our sexual oppression once and for all? Or would the highest ranks of our government —ruled this time around by the members of the GOP — smack us down and let us know we were striving for too much in wanting to be believed when we say we were assaulted?
As I wrote late last month on Medium, this hearing had the power to completely turn tide, changing the course of this country that seems to be heading backwards, to finally lead us on a path to embracing sexual equality and justice. Instead, the GOP not only voted for a man who perjured himself repeatedly (most notably, on the meanings of turns of phrase that referenced sex acts and drinking) and who was credibly accused of assault, but even took their cues from old, worn playbooks on victim-blaming the survivors.
Senator Orrin Hatch was personally affronted that something from someone’s teenage years could be relevant now (does he feel the same outrage when a black boy’s marijuana use is conjured after he’s killed by cops or civilians?). The insinuation here is that sexual assault can simply be a matter of a youthful indiscretion on par with playing hooky or toilet papering someone’s home. Senator Grassley even took to releasing the testimony of a former boyfriend of another Kavanaugh accuser, Julia Swetnick, alleging she had confided in him that she liked group sex. Senator Collins asserted that gang rape was such an egregious accusation that she indicated during her speech revealing her support of Kavanaugh that the excessive nature of the charge alone made it invalid.
Of course, it seems Grassley and his buddies didn’t get the memo that what one’s preferences are in their private CONSENSUAL sex life is not relevant to whether or not they were raped. A woman can both like group sex and be gang raped (though it is also likely this testimony is just horseshit, with the sheer purpose to slut-shame). It would seem the GOP believes rape is just sex women regret for some reason and that any accusations that arise, if they are not actually a case of mistaken identity, are then some sort of retribution for such regret. This follows the stereotype of women as naturally vindictive —carved out of the essence of the Old Testament’s Eve and so worthy of punishment of a Biblical proportion; that is, when women are capable of any sort of agency at all. After all, several of the Republican men who sit on the Judiciary Committee have been in the Senate since before marital rape was even federally recognized as a crime. When it came to women’s bodies, they were still more or less their husband’s properties on the legal level in quite a few states until well into the 1990s.
As for the sham FBI investigation — conducted in less than one week and only interviewing a tiny fraction of the dozens of people who came forward with relevant testimony (and conspicuously omitting to speak to either Ford or Kavanaugh at all) — it is actually somewhat of a snapshot of how survivors’ cases are often treated those few times they do come forward. For all the talk of fairness, it seems that the default presumption in most cases is that the woman is lying and as such, any investigation conducted is with the goal to prove the accused’s innocence. FYI: that’s not how “innocent until proven guilty works.” The burden is still on the system to consider ALL of the relevant evidence, not purposefully overlook or ignore that which might incriminate the accused.
Considering this deeply entrenched precedent, Kavanaugh’s hearing could be merely called par for the course, a continuation of business as usual. However, that he was confirmed at a historically low margin with more resistance than even marked Clarence Thomas’ confirmation after the Anita Hill hearings, should not be downplayed. It should be seized upon.
While Republicans are playing up to their base and Trump is taking to the media to warn of what a scary time it is for men in America, kicking up a potential backlash against the #MeToo, we actually can find a shred of hope and resistance in this darkness on which to build and bring in some light.
As Ford was testifying, there was an uptick in women coming forward to C-SPAN and other news outlets with their own stories of assault. While the final outcome of the hearing may have the effect of silencing some (or even many) survivors, I hope it will embolden more to share their stories. Whatever scare tactics the patriarchy may try to employ, it is too late to go back to the pre-#MeToo era. We’re here now, and there’s no way to go but ahead.
Progress is never linear….it’s always been one step forward and usually several steps back. But as Martin Luther King, Jr has noted, progress is neither automatic or inevitable. It takes sacrifice and dedication, but ultimately the path will bend toward justice. I hope survivors are not scared back into the shadows (though I don’t blame them if they are).
For those who will speak out, who will stand at the crossroads and decide to travel on toward a new path rather than be beat back: I will stand with you and I will speak up.
You are not alone. We can do this together. | https://lakiesel.medium.com/kavanaughs-confirmation-and-metoo-at-a-crossroads-why-this-moment-matters-46092603073b | ['Laura Kiesel'] | 2019-03-09 15:54:00.646000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Politics', 'Feminism', 'Metoo', 'Sexual Assault'] |
Bedside Rugs are Small Area Rugs. | A rug will seem balanced, and this size Bedside Rugs are small area rugs will even fit under nightstands. An area rug should always reach at least 18 inches to 24 inches from the sides and foot of a queen-size and king-size bed, according to a standard rule of thumb.
If your bed is flanked by nightstands, consider whether you want the rug to go below them all the way to the headboard or stop just before the front legs of the nightstands.
Running the rug all the way to the edge of your headboard allows you to step out of bed with the rug underfoot, instantly generating a sense of coziness.
Small area rugs can also be employed to add to the appeal of your bedroom by being placed on either side of the bed. This type of wool rug arrangement is ideal for larger bedrooms or rooms with the bed against the wall. The accent rug provides an attractive floor covering while also adding a decorative touch to the general ambiance of the space. Pair it with contrasting stools, indoor pots, and bean bags for a healthful and full visual result.
The Most Appropriate Rug Sizes for Small Beds.
Congratulations if you’re seeking the best rug size for a little bed. You’re living the dream, at least when it comes to bedding. Because little beds are the smallest of all, you’ll need a small area rug to match. Here are some of our suggestions: | https://medium.com/@ooptech123/bedside-rugs-are-small-area-rugs-3e3e55e0a73d | [] | 2021-12-16 16:33:58.014000+00:00 | ['Furniture', 'Rugs', 'Lighting'] |
Neither Content Nor Character: Resisting the Right-Wing Hijacking of MLK | One thing can be said for conservatives: they are nothing if not consistent when it comes to the things they say about race in America.
This truism was driven home yet again recently when I found myself in a debate over affirmative action with such a person, who insisted that folks like me, by virtue of our support for the concept, had abandoned the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.
King, I was assured for what seemed like the 11,729th time would have opposed affirmative action — what my detractor called “racial preferences” — because he believed that people should be judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Faced with yet another fool claiming to be the philosophical soul mate of a man his conservative forebears literally despised when he was alive, I weighed my options.
First, I thought of mentioning that King had endorsed the concept of affirmative action as early as 1961, upon returning from India where similar efforts had been instituted for the Dalit caste.
Or perhaps that he did so again in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait — which apparently no conservatives have ever read — in which he noted:
“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”
Then I considered pulling up the video on my phone, which shows King shortly before he was murdered discussing the importance of actual financial compensation — reparations one might say — for black folks long denied opportunity even as the government facilitated the building up of white wealth. That video (for those given to thinking of King as a mere integrationist who just wanted everyone to get along), is here:
But in the end I decided not to bother with any of this. Instead, I decided to address the issue on the grounds favored by the right, which so seems to covet the “content of their character” line while conveniently ignoring the rest of the speech from which it was taken: a speech in which King noted Black folks had been given a bad check by white America, which had come back marked insufficient funds.
So I asked plainly: If he believes “character” should be the determining factor in things like college admissions or procuring a job, exactly how would that be evaluated? And what do the “merit” standards people like him endorse— such as standardized test scores or even years of work experience— have to do with character?
Was he honestly suggesting that SATs, ACTs, LSATs and MCATs — or the quantitative experience listed on a resume — actually indicates something definitive about a person’s character or lack thereof? More to the point, was he of the opinion that whites, by virtue of our higher average scores, relative to blacks — or because of our greater work experience in various fields — are of superior character to these folks of color?
It quickly became apparent that no one had ever asked him that question before. No one had ever forced him to explain the correlation between his two vaunted principles: merit, as evidenced by SAT scores or experience, and character. He had simply been allowed to assume such a correlation, absent even a scintilla of evidence.
And this, despite the absurdity of the presumed correlation.
After all, work experience reflects not just ability and merit, but also access and opportunity. Most jobs are filled by way of networking and connections — especially for the highest paying jobs — neither of which ensure selection for good character so much as the extent to which someone is well-positioned to know about and apply for a job in the first place. To the extent people of color are less likely to be in the best networks for the top positions, they will remain excluded having nothing to do with ability, and surely nothing to do with the content of their character.
Likewise, even claiming standardized tests to be good predictors of academic ability is questionable enough — at most they are only capable of predicting performance (and even then not very well) in the next year of education after having taken them — but to think there is a correlation between test scores and character seems absurd on the face of it.
His reply? None at all to the question of acquiring jobs; and as for test scores and college? He insisted that higher test scores were indicative of superior intelligence and that intelligence represents an element of one’s character.
Well, actually, according to Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of character is, “moral strength, self-discipline, fortitude.” That says nothing about academic performance, or even intelligence however defined.
Indeed, how could it? The Nazis were led by men who probably would have scored highly on the SAT. So too those who designed napalm, or sanctioned the slaughter of America’s indigenous populations. So too Ted Bundy, or the Unabomber, who was a certifiable genius but rather lacking it appears in the character department.
So which is it? Should we judge people on the basis of character, or rather on the basis of previous academic achievement — no minor question, since the two have no necessary correlation to one another?
I, for one, would be happy to vote for character, but I doubt those who have misappropriated the concept from King would like where the notion leads.
Because when it comes to which students have exhibited the most fortitude — which remember, is one of the key elements of character — defined as “the strength to bear misfortune and pain patiently and calmly,” there can be little doubt that students of color and poor folks of all colors would come out on top.
Which students, after all, have had to persevere against the odds more often: rich kids who attended the best schools and whose parents could afford tutors, test prep classes and other enrichment materials? Or poor and working class kids whose schools had substandard resources, less experienced teachers, and whose parents struggled to make ends meet?
Which have had to bear the most pain? Whites whose membership in the racial majority allows us to go through life fairly oblivious to our own race and the role it plays in our everyday experience? Or students of color, whose minority status often reminds them that they are seen by many as perpetual outsiders, and who know of the negative stereotypes held about their group by the general public, usually no later than the time they are eight years old?
To ask the questions is to answer them.
For students who have faced obstacles of race and class to even partially overcome those obstacles and score, say, an 1100 (out of 1600) on their SAT says something rather amazing about their character. Despite having the odds stacked against them they refused to give up, they strove for excellence, and though they finished the K-12 race still behind their more privileged competition, they closed the gap nonetheless.
If one starts a race three laps behind and finishes only two laps behind, is it not obvious that such a runner is objectively better than the one who hit the tape ahead of them? Didn’t they run faster, harder, with more determination? Didn’t they demonstrate character? Or do we simply reward the one who finished ahead, even though their ability to do so was largely the result of a pre-existing advantage, and would have obtained even in the absence of character altogether?
And what of self-discipline, that other aspect of character to which Webster’s refers?
Could it be that blacks would here too bump whites from slots in elite colleges, if indeed the criteria for acceptance were the content of one’s character? Quite possibly: after all, blacks show far more restraint and self-control than their white peers when it comes to things like drug and alcohol abuse: the latter of which is a serious problem on American college campuses.
According to the data, whites in 8th, 10th and 12th grades are all more likely than comparable blacks to be current drinkers. In the past month, 1 in 9 white sophomores have been drunk (more than double the rate for blacks), and one-fourth of white seniors have been drunk: about 2.5 times the rate for black seniors.
In the past two weeks, 1 in 9 white 10th graders have engaged in binge drinking (drinking five or more alcoholic beverages at one sitting), as have 1 in 5 white 12th graders: in both cases rates of binging that are at least double the rates for comparable blacks.
White drinking relative to black drinking remains high in college as well. Neary half of full-time white college students binge drink, compared to less than a fifth of black full-time college students, and white college students are a full six times more likely than our black counterparts to binge drink on a regular basis.
Other studies have found somewhat lower rates of occasional binge drinking for all college students, regardless of race, but the disparities between whites and blacks even in these studies remains huge. One study, for instance, estimated that about 6.7 percent of black collegians binge drink compared to 35 percent of whites, a ratio of more than 5:1.
So might this data suggest a decided lack of self-discipline for an awful lot of college-age white folks, and thus, by definition, lesser character?
Although drug use is roughly the same across racial lines, white youth appear more likely to use heavier drugs than black youth. According to data from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, white 10th graders are a third more likely than their black counterparts to have used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, and by 12th grade, whites are 50% more likely than their black counterparts to have used hard drugs in the previous year.
In college, the disparities continue, with white students more than twice as likely as black students to smoke weed or use other illicit drugs like Ecstasy, twice as likely as black students to abuse prescription opioids and three times as likely to abuse stimulants, again suggesting a decided lack of restraint, and casting doubt as to the “character” of all these presumably “more qualified” white students attending institutions of higher learning.
So perhaps what all this means is not that affirmative action gets in the way of promoting “character,” but rather, that it actually helps facilitate it, by promoting opportunities for students of color whose restraint, self-discipline and perseverance far eclipse that of their heavy-drinking, hard-partying white brothers and sisters.
So by all means, let’s encourage schools to judge students on the content of their character. Perhaps over time, whites would even learn to assimilate to the black norm of hard work and sobriety, and begin to “act black,” which certainly couldn’t hurt their academic careers or our nation. After all, we would all reap the benefits of character-based standards, and an end to the damage done by smart but pathological members of the dominant majority.
But at the very least conservatives, and no matter what you decide about affirmative action, you need to take Martin Luther King Jr’s name out your mouth.
He was of the left, not the right. He is one of ours, not yours. You have no claim on him. You will have to make do with Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.
And good luck with that. | https://timjwise.medium.com/neither-content-nor-character-resisting-the-right-wing-hijacking-of-mlk-6bdadcc93588 | ['Tim Wise'] | 2018-03-19 15:21:16.609000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Martin Luther King', 'Affirmative Action', 'Equality', 'Racism'] |
The Past Matters while Driving | A car drives down the street. A pedestrian waits at a crosswalk. The pedestrian briefly looks up, makes eye contact with the driver and waves the car on, while the pedestrian continues to engage in a text conversation on her cell phone. The attentive driver watching the scene unfold is likely to conclude that they can safely continue to drive by the pedestrian because humans easily process scenes like this one; realizing that the pedestrian is aware of the car’s approach, and does not intend to cross the street. This seemingly trivial situation, which is frequently and easily “solved” by human drivers, poses a daunting challenge for autonomous vehicles.
Human drivers intuitively integrate the images of a pedestrian over time to understand the state of mind of pedestrians.
Hierarchical processing of information. Humans process visual scenes like the above relevant to driving, or any other visual task, through activity in a part of the brain known as visual cortex. Light beams reflected from the visual scene hit the retina in the back of the eye, where they are transduced into electrical impulses. These impulses travel via the thalamus — a relay station of sorts — to the back of our heads, where the visual cortex is located. The brain first detects edges and corners (basic building blocks of images), followed by detection and identification of more elaborate objects like pedestrians and the direction of their movements. The whole scene is analyzed, the direction of the car is estimated by calculating flow fields, and then finally the brain integrates all of the information together to form a cohesive perception of the world. Often, this information flow has been described as one that happens in a hierarchical or “feed forward” manner. That is, the images are processed at each consecutive stage independently, resulting in progressively more abstract representations. The understanding of hierarchical processing of visual scenes led to the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The information flow of CNNs is typically feed forward, and they are standard building blocks in the perception stack of self-driving cars.
Visual information is processed in the human brain using an abundance of recurrent connections.
Memory through recurrency at every stage. The human brain doesn’t actually employ a simple feed forward hierarchy. Instead, the majority of connections between neurons are recurrent and feedback connections. Recurrent connections are connections between neurons at the same hierarchical level; feedback connections transmit information from a higher to a lower hierarchical level. While the purpose of these connections is still not fully understood — evidence suggests that they may enable contextual modulation in early stages of processing. This fundamentally differs from how most CNNs work. In our brains, nearly every single processing stage integrates context from the past with new information from the present, adding built-in memory capacity throughout the system. Just like seeing the pedestrian with the cell phone in their hand — a human driver who has been driving for — say 10 years — has seen that situation thousands of times. The memory of those situations allows humans to create and maintain mental models of pedestrians. It is feasible that similar structures built into machine learning models can lead to performance increases on complex problems encountered by self driving cars.
Judging pedestrian State of Mind. At Perceptive Automata, we believe that a critical step for AI in autonomous vehicles is to mimic the natural human ability to judge pedestrians’ state of mind in a given situation. As humans, we intuitively understand that a single glance doesn’t provide enough information about a pedestrian’s intent. Often subconsciously, we factor in details about posture, their movement history, and awareness history that allow us to quickly understand what the pedestrian is currently doing and predict what they are going to do in the future. Drivers can typically recall a pedestrian’s behavior over a minimum of several seconds, which they intuitively use to build a mental model of the state of mind of the pedestrian. Someone walking home at a swift commuter pace and showing little sign of slowing as they approach a crosswalk, as they think about their delicious meal, indicates to any experienced driver that they should stop. At Perceptive Automata, intent to cross and awareness of the vehicle are two key factors that we are using to create a Human State of Mind signal for self-driving cars.
Integrating the past. In the brain, recurrency allows contextual integration even at the earliest stages of information processing. This is different from the typical autonomous vehicle (AV) software stack. For example, detection of pedestrians happens one frame at a time. The CNN that performs the detection has to start from scratch every time it processes an image. The detection module rarely integrates over time, rather it “perceives” a snapshot; integrating the information and predicting the future is performed later. Again, this differs from how humans process information. After we initially detect a pedestrian, the brain’s processed signals aren’t forgotten, but are continuously updated with incoming new information including that of the surrounding context. Importantly, this happens not at a late or abstract processing stage, but even within early perception stages (early visual cortices). Recurrency or other forms of short term memory, added to perception modules, should improve the inference quality of human behavior. At Perceptive Automata, we work on machine learning algorithms that take inspiration from the best known system, the human brain, to infer the state of mind of pedestrians to be able to predict their behavior.
If we want autonomous vehicles to be accepted on our roads, they need to drive like humans — preferably not humans in the driver seat for the first time! We need algorithms and machine learning modules that can not only understand pedestrians in the moment but also predict the future by remembering the past. These algorithms need to integrate and apply that information to the current context. At Perceptive Automata, we are building technology inspired by the human brain, to hopefully enable self-driving cars to not only emulate human driving, but also become better than a human driver. When the AV remembers that the pedestrian waved the AV on, or stood on the side of the road texting and not crossing, it will drive by the pedestrian without braking, allowing passengers to sit back and relax during the smooth ride. | https://medium.com/perceptive-automata/the-past-matters-while-driving-f347c11e4e16 | ['Till Hartmann'] | 2020-11-05 18:16:34.400000+00:00 | ['Autonomous Cars', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Recurrent Neural Network', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Pedestrians'] |
Amal Totkay | A growth mindset is an embodiment of the belief that the pool of knowledge and learning within you can expand, with the right attitude. Here are the five Amal Totkay that can help an individual develop a growth mindset.
1)Self-Talk
2)Get out of your comfort zone
3)Create new habits
4)Ask people for help
5)Fake it till you make it.
These tips are just some of the ways we can modify our thinking into a growth mindset. If we really look at them closely, each one of these is such a small action/thought. But the impact it makes in our lives is huge! This goes to show how a small act can reap massive benefits.
I have always had a problem with asking people for help. For some reason, it has always been a weakness within me. As I have recently entered my professional life, I have come to the realization that this weakness is a big obstacle in my way to success. It stops me from learning and expanding my knowledge. This is, thus, one of my favorite tips.
Another one of my favorite tips is getting out of your comfort zone. I have entered a professional field that I did not have an educational background in. Every day I push myself to the limits, and make sure I get out of my comfort zone so I can handle new problems/situations. You can’t always play safe. What will you learn if you do?
For me, I have already been applying tip 2 in my daily life. Its tip 4 that I really need to work on.
Moving forward, I will make sure to ask others for help wherever I need it and overcome my fear of being judged for not ‘knowing it all’.
I’m not Hermione Granger, sadly. But who says I can’t be? | https://medium.com/@komal-aziz173/amal-totkay-7146e6f03e56 | ['Komal Aziz'] | 2020-12-24 09:48:23.980000+00:00 | ['Growth Mindset'] |
The James Niu Wolfgramm Charitable Foundation (formerly First Hand) is building healthier tomorrows… | The James Niu Wolfgramm Charitable Foundation (formerly First Hand) is building healthier tomorrows and stronger communities around the world through individual medical grants and wellness programs, engaging volunteerism, community initiatives and strategic partnerships.“Thank you for giving us hope.” A patient said that to me at the first Operation Safe vaccination clinic, and the sentiment has been echoed by countless others throughout the 12 weeks, 32 clinics and nearly 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines administered since.Our covid-19 Vaccine program patients were guided every step of the way by dedicated volunteers. Whether directing traffic, registering patients, administering vaccines or sanitizing the recovery area, volunteers powered every component of Operation Safe. Led by the James Niu Wolfgramm Charitable Foundation team, volunteers from Jane Niu, coalition partner organizations, and the community worked together to deliver hope and ensure a world-class patient experience for all in Hawaii. | https://medium.com/@niuwolfgrammjames/the-james-niu-wolfgramm-charitable-foundation-formerly-first-hand-is-building-healthier-tomorrows-7302b1742f58 | ['James Niu Wolfgramm Foundation'] | 2021-08-27 07:12:35.971000+00:00 | ['Google', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'James Niu Wolfgramm', 'Google Image Charts', 'Google Analytics'] |
Time & Space Continuity in Film | Directional Continuity
permanent movement in one direction
do not cross plans
you can use a panoramic -travelling
2. Reverse Shots
3. Raccord
keep continuity
4. Action Axis
generic direction of movement
movement trajectory
visual continuity
5. Action Axis applied to the triangle principle
position of the actors
6. Continuity accordingly to the direction of the eyes
7. Time continuity
8. Fusions
starts with a black image
9. Threaded
combination of close fusion with opening fusion
10. Synthesis Sequence
short plans series | https://medium.com/@lisamchenriques/time-space-continuity-in-film-c17eb1f178e3 | ['Xxii Consultancy'] | 2020-12-21 08:14:13.345000+00:00 | ['Filmmaking', 'Film Directing Courses', 'Film', 'Directing', 'Direction'] |
Hybrid mobile apps in 2018: React Native vs Xamarin | What’s on the market
Business-wise, software must work, as well as be user-friendly and future-proof. Technology plays a second role. However, some technology choices have business consequences. Below, we’ve listed a couple of major decisions you can make when it comes to hybrid mobile apps.
Websites & progressive web apps (PWA)
Today’s websites are no longer just static content with a bunch of forms and links. Contemporary web apps compete with desktop and mobile software in fields of UX and functionality. And yet, not everything works the same way on a mobile phone. When it comes to working in the background, Bluetooth, battery information or iOS FaceID, web apps are a no-go.
A progressive web app (PWA) is a new concept which, to some extent, combines web and native approaches. It’s a web application that can work offline to some degree, with an icon visible on the home screen. Its limitations, however, stay the same. The app’s behaviour and capabilities depend heavily on the platform. It’s an interesting concept that can evolve and improve, but, first, it needs time to mature (iOS has just started supporting PWAs as of version 11.3).
You need to remember that PWA is nothing more but a website with push notifications pretending to be a mobile app (source: easternpeak.com)
Traditional (web) hybrids
For years, traditional hybrids have been the first choice for a quick MVP or very simple products. There are many tools to choose from: the most popular Apache Cordova, its cousin PhoneGap, Angular-based Ionic, and more. The pros of this approach are: a single code base plus a lower cost of development and maintenance. What’s more, such a product can have a web version out of the box. The cons are less obvious and not everybody talks about them point-blank.
But, the truth is, you can’t 100% mimic native apps with traditional hybrid mobile apps, no matter what their creators say.
You’ll experience worse performance, inferior UX, and a narrow set of ready-to-use features to implement. There will be myriads of little things working noticeably strange or slower. Even if you’re not able to put your finger on it, the app will always seem a bit off.
Fortunately, the supremacy of traditional hybrids has ended, as the recent months brought us superior alternatives. At least, that’s what we think.
Xamarin
With Xamarin, you can build native apps for many platforms. It allows C# and .NET developers to create native apps for Android, iOS and Windows. There are 2 ways of doing it in Xamarin. The first one is Xamarin Forms, which creates a single code base which is shared among the platforms with almost no changes. But there’s a cost: Xamarin.Forms is good for building simple MVPs, rapid prototyping or very, very simple apps. Even Xamarin states in its documentation files:
Xamarin.Forms allows for rapid prototyping of applications that can evolve over time to complex applications.
So, using Xamarin.Forms for more demanding projects might be difficult.
For complex hybrid mobile app development, there’s the Xamarin Native approach. Using Xamarin Native, you get the look and feel of a native app, plus you can work with only one technology (C# and .NET). It means you can have just one team of developers to pay. Drawbacks? There’s no longer a single code base, so you end up with two separate projects to create and maintain — one for each platform. Only portions of the code base can be shared (like business logic or communication services). UI implementations must remain separate.
If you have .NET developers, Xamarin Native is a great tool as you can assign available resources to mobile development. It’ll also work on Windows, perform well and provide good users experience. In conclusion, it’s better than traditional hybrids. So what’s the cost? Time. Mobile apps created with Xamarin Native will take more time to develop compared to a traditional.
React Native
Facebook has created React Native (RN) for JavaScript (JS) developers. Using RN, you can build iOS and Android mobile apps in React (JS library for building user interfaces). Smart move, as React is very popular and battle-tested.
If this sounds like a traditional hybrid description, JS is the only link here. In RN, you don’t build websites inside a native wrapper. You develop native applications in JavaScript (technically, React and a markup HTML-like language). RN translates the code into instructions for both iOS and Android. So, you “speak” React/JavaScript, and RN translates it on the fly. This way, mobile devices can easily display e.g. an Android-specific button. This is a modern hybrid — one code for all operating systems.
This results in a better user experience and the feeling of a native app. Hybrid mobile apps made with RN run more smoothly, and the user is quite often unable to tell the difference (unlike with traditional hybrids).
Disadvantages? Some platform-specific functionalities might be difficult to achieve. Not everything available for native apps is provided off-the-shelf by RN. On the other hand, developers can add a piece of native code for missing extensions, or use one of the thousands built by the RN community. RN is used even by big players, like Microsoft or Wix, which contributes to the community’s impressive size.
In the end, RN hybrid mobile apps can’t compete with native ones in some aspects. But, usually, the final effect is more than satisfactory. The framework is a huge improvement over traditional hybrids in terms of both user experience and performance. At The Software House, we believe that it offers good value for money.
NativeScript
NativeScript is a hybrid mobile app framework similar to RN but based on Angular (another JS framework). It tackles the hybrid problem like RN does — by using native components and classes based on your JavaScript code. There’s a bunch of ready-to-use multi-platform components available inside the framework and, just like with RN, it’s possible to extend it when needed.
If you have a team of JS developers who are experienced with Angular, NativeScript is definitely something to consider. Just keep in mind that, as for now, it has a significantly smaller community in comparison with RN. This equals fewer ready-to-use plugins and libraries. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/hybrid-mobile-apps-in-2018-react-native-vs-xamarin-a03540f99005 | ['The Software House'] | 2018-10-23 14:59:42.763000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Software Development', 'Xamarin', 'Hybrid App Development', 'React Native'] |
5 mistakes to avoid in your first project | New to programming? Ready to build your first ever project? Before you start, keep these points in mind:
1. Limit copy pasting from the web:
Anything in excess is a poison -Theodore Levitt
When you find a perfect block of code to solve your problem, refrain from copy pasting it in your program. Rather, you should study it, understand how it works and type it yourself. This will not only give you the how-to knowledge to solve the problem, but typing it will help you to remember it.
2. Don’t stop or pause:
Coding your first project can be a tedious task. You will encounter many different problems that you would have never encountered before. Don’t let this stop you from proceeding further. Keep trying out different algorithms to solve the problem. When you stop or start a new project because you are not able to solve a tiny part of your first project, you will never learn how to solve such problems ever. Face the problem head-on and stamp over it like a boss!
3. It’s okay to refer the web/ask a friend for help:
It is perfectly alright if you ask a friend for help if you can’t solve something. Even the most experienced developer can’t do everything without getting help from the internet. As long as you learn how to solve the problem, it doesn’t matter if you have learnt it by yourself or from somewhere else.
4. Once completed, ask your friend to review your program
You will never know about all the bugs in your program unless you ask another person to use it. Don’t shy away from asking your friend or a teacher to review your program. You’ll be surprised to know the amount of mistakes you have made.
5. Comment your code
Make your code easily readable/understandable by writing comments alongside it. This will not only make the reviewer’s job easier but it would also be very useful to you. After a long time, when you revisit your first project, it would be easier for you to understand what you’ve done.
Some useful websites that helped me complete my first project successfully: | https://medium.com/@sriram2002/5-mistakes-to-avoid-in-your-first-project-ef52be68aaf1 | [] | 2021-01-02 09:50:42.846000+00:00 | ['Beginner', 'Programming', 'Coding', 'Beginners Guide'] |
Containerize a Go Web Application | Go is getting more and more popular as the go-to language to build web applications. With this post, I hope to show you how you can containerize a web application written in Go.
The App
web application home page
I’ve written a go web application called IP Location Mapper which helps find the location of any IP address. It performs an API call to ipstack.com to fetch the location of the IP address. ipstack.com provides 10,000 API requests free per month.
Once the API request is made, the response is stored in a redis cache with a TTL of 24 hours for faster retrieval and thereby avoid the expensive API call (also remember, we have only 10,000 free requests).
You can clone the repository here.
Get a free api key from ipstack.com
We would need an API key from ipstack.com for this application. You can sign up for free here. Your API key will be available in the dashboard.
Not don’t be cheeky and try to use my api key, I’ve already reset.
Dockerfile
The Dockerfile for the application has comments in each line stating their intent. Run the below command inside the project to build an image tagged as jeshocarmel/ip_location_mapper.
docker build -t jeshocarmel/ip_location_mapper:latest .
The ‘ . ‘ at the end of the command indicates that you are building the image from the current directory. So make sure you are inside the project folder when you run the command.
Compose
Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications.
redis service
line 3 — create a service named redis .
. line 4 — pull a redis image from docker hub.
from docker hub. line 5 — Run a one-off command on the pulled redis image. Here we pass the command to start the redis server with a password from a .env file (explained later).
on the pulled redis image. Here we pass the command to start the redis server with a password from a .env file (explained later). line 6,7 — open port 6379 for application access.
for application access. line 8,9 — pass environmental variable required for this service.
line 10 — run the container with name as ‘ip_location_mapper_redis’.
app service
line 11 — create a service named app.
line 12 — the build represents that this service an image to be built from the current directory (.)
represents that this service an image to be built from the current directory (.) line 13 — the image which has been built to be tagged as ‘jeshocarmel/ip_location_manager’.
line 14, 15 — this service depends on the earlier redis service.
service. line 16, 17 — open port 8080 for web access.
for web access. line 18 — environmental variables for this service are listed line by line here.
line 19 — The redis host which the application needs to store/retrieve data is listed here. In docker-compose you can reach a service by simply mentioning the service name.
line 20 — Pass the redis password we used to start the redis service. This will be loaded from a .env file (explained later). The app will use it for authentication with the redis service.
line 21 — Pass the API_KEY from ipstack.com. This will be loaded from a .env file (explained later).
from ipstack.com. This will be loaded from a .env file (explained later). line 22 — run the container with name as ‘ip_location_mapper’.
.env file
By default, the docker-compose command will look for a file named .env in the directory you run the command. So create a .env file in your project directory and copy lines from the file below. Replace the IPSTACK_API_KEY with your API key from ipstack.
Running the application
docker-compose up --build
Thats all you need to start the application. Go to http://localhost:8080 on your local machine browser and you should be able to see the application up and running.
search result for an ip address
run docker ps in your command line and you should be able to see two containers running.
Next steps
In the next post, I’ll write on how to deploy the application in kubernetes with minikube. | https://medium.com/swlh/containerize-a-go-web-application-2cb2b96527a5 | ['Jesho Carmel'] | 2020-09-29 05:27:22.992000+00:00 | ['API', 'Web', 'Docker Compose', 'Golang', 'Docker'] |
In-App Ads Set to Boost Mobile Programmatic Ad Spend | In-App Ads Set to Boost Mobile Programmatic Ad Spend
eMarketer reports programmatic advertising is on the rise with a projected increase by nearly $10 billion in 2018 spend.
Earlier this week eMarketer reported that over $46 billion will be spent on programmatic advertising in the US in 2018, accounting for 82.5 percent of all US digital display advertising. That’s nearly $10 billion more than advertisers spent last year.
What role does mobile advertising play? In 2018, mobile advertising is projected to account for roughly 70 percent of all programmatic ad spend, climbing to almost 90 percent by 2020. This not only showcases the importance of this channel to programmatic advertising, but to the digital market at large. eMarketer attributes this growth to ongoing investments in mobile by social platforms and to industry-wide efforts to grow the in-app ad market.
Tapjoy is proud to play a considerable role in advancing the in-app ad market, through our investments in technology, creative, measurement and more. We firmly believe that in-app advertising — especially through value exchange-based ads — is not only the best way for brands and marketers to drive meaningful business outcomes, but when done correctly they provide the best experience for today’s tech-savvy consumers.
Significantly, eMarketer also reported that a majority of the nearly $19 billion additional dollars that will go into programmatic advertising over the next two years will be allocated to private setups such as private marketplaces (PMPs). Open markets will continue to suffer from issues related transparency and quality, eMarketer explained, while private marketplaces offer marketers greater accountability and higher value.
That’s exactly why we launched the Tapjoy Private Exchange in 2016. We opened up our premium in-app, opt-in mobile video inventory to programmatic ad buyers, while simultaneously maintaining strict control over where our partner’s ads are run. Thus providing the 100 percent transparency they deserve.
Programmatic advertising has clearly transformed the media buying landscape. As programmatic continues to shift towards mobile ads and private marketplaces, Tapjoy will be there to lead the way. | https://medium.com/tapjoy/in-app-ads-set-to-boost-mobile-programmatic-ad-spend-295ee60a8fe2 | [] | 2018-04-13 22:23:33.886000+00:00 | ['Programmatic', 'Marketers'] |
Your Body Sometimes Jerks As You Fall Asleep | Images by the author (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ahh… sleep. How nice. You turn off the lights. You close your weary eyes. You sigh. You relax. Your breathing slows down. Your mind begins to wander off, fading into the nightly oblivion.
Then…
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You stumble, trip, fall. Your body jolts. Your leg kicks. Your heart pounds. Huh? What happened? Did you mistakenly fall asleep on a trapdoor?
Nope. You simply experienced a hypnic jerk.
A hypnic jerk, or sleep start, is a phenomenon that occurs when your body transitions from wakefulness to sleep. It involves a sudden involuntary muscle twitch and is frequently accompanied by a falling or tripping sensation. It’s that strange muscle spasm that happens when you’re lying in bed, trying to sleep, and are suddenly jolted awake because you feel like you stumbled over something.
Hypnic jerks are common and benign.
But what causes them? Well, no one really knows. It’s still a mystery. However, researchers have come up with several hypotheses that may explain them, with the following two being the most popular.
Hypothesis 1: Your body twitches as daytime motor control is overridden by sleep paralysis
How is it that a bedfellow of yours doesn’t wake up pummeled and bruised if you have a dream about a boxing match? Is it because they’re having a complementary dream where they’re blocking all your jabs, hooks, and other punches?
Nope. The person sharing the bed with you doesn’t get pummeled because when you’re asleep, your body is paralyzed. This is due to something called REM sleep atonia, which prevents you from acting out your dreams.
REM atonia works by inhibiting your motor neurons. It does so by raising the bar on the amount of electricity the brain must send down a motor neuron to trigger a movement. So, for instance, the little bit of electricity that your brain sends to your finger to make it move when you’re awake is no longer enough when you’re under REM atonia.
When you’re asleep, your body is paralyzed. This is due to something called REM sleep atonia, which prevents you from acting out your dreams.
Now, the thing is that there is no single on/off switch in your body that inhibits all your motor neurons at once. Instead, the subsystems of your brain that handle sleep need to wrestle control from the subsystems that handle wakefulness. And sometimes, during this wrestling match, some motor neurons are fired randomly, causing your body to twitch.
Hypothesis 2: Your brain thinks you’re a monkey falling off a tree
Image modified by the author. Illustration source: Alessandro D’Antonio/Unsplash
Imagine you’re a monkey and the last rays of sunlight have just disappeared behind the green forest canopy. It’s getting dark, and you say to yourself: time for sleep. Your brain begins to ooze some melatonin into your bloodstream and you yawn. Drowsy, you settle down on a comfortable tree branch.
Your eyelids become heavy and your breathing slows. The outside world begins to fade. Sounds become distant.
At this point, the subconscious part of your brain takes over. “Perfect,” it says, “time to boot up the dream images.” Your brain initiates the dream procedure, and just when you’re about to nod off completely, it notices that all your muscles have suddenly and unexpectedly relaxed. “Holy Banana!” your brain screams panic-stricken, “Mayday! Mayday! We’re in freefall! Dammit! Wake up! Wake up! Shit, crap! Brace for impaaaact!”
As you’re probably aware, we humans descend from primates who lived and slept on trees. This means that we’ve inherited some monkey brain routines that no longer serve any purpose. Among them, according to the monkey-fall hypothesis, is a reflex that jolts you awake when you’re falling from a tree.
You see, when a monkey is unexpectedly soaring through the air, its muscles no longer have to prop it up and so they go limp. Confusingly, however, your muscles also go limp when you’re sleeping.
So, when you drift off into sleep and your muscles relax a little too fast, your groggy brain sometimes misinterprets this for falling off a tree. As a result, your brain freaks out and triggers a reflex that startles you awake in an attempt to prepare for an imminent crash onto the forest floor. Little does your brain know, in its sleepy state — and that you no longer live in trees.
What’s clear either way
Hypnic jerks are involuntary muscle contractions that occur during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. They’re most likely to occur if you’ve been gulping down too much coffee, have been stressed or sleep-deprived, or did some vigorous exercise before going to bed. About 70% of people have experienced them. Even so, they are not well understood.
Either way, hypnic jerks are benign and nothing to worry about. The worst that can happen is probably an occasional kick against the shin of whoever is sharing the bed with you. | https://medium.com/@abswartzwelder/your-body-sometimes-jerks-as-you-fall-asleep-299301e81088 | [] | 2020-12-23 13:19:16.805000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Health', 'Sleep', 'Biology', 'Science'] |
A letter to my first child | For those who don’t know yet, Sagnika and I are expecting our first baby in
January 2021.
This bit of news and the title of this piece should make perfect sense now but
I still want to explain why this article was needed.
It is only by looking backward that I realize that we were kids when we got
married. We got married with the expectation that it would be fun to stay
together. Boy, were we naive back then. It was a bumpy ride, to say the least,
but we never forgot to enjoy the view. Our five years of marriage can be summed up in one sentence as lots of food, lots of traveling, weekly quarrels, and monthly threats of divorce.
Parenthood has always been on our horizon but we never felt we were qualified or mature enough to have kids and take care of them. And then came the lock-down, and with it came lots of time to think and analyze and debate. But as they say, `too much analysis causes paralysis`. So one day the deed was done and the seed was sown. For those of you under 18, the deed was of course rays of light coming out of God’s hands and the seed was his blessings bestowed upon us granting us the gift of parenthood and eternal happiness.
Once I came to know that we were pregnant, I did not know how to react. I was a bit baffled, to be honest. You see, in my mind, I am still in college. The
first question that came to my mind was `how did this happen?` We had talked about this at length but nothing prepares you for the moment you hear the news. It was only after a couple of days that it dawned upon me that I was going to be a dad and this was not a dream, that I felt calm and happy. This was in May 2020.
A lot of time has passed since then and I have had some time to think. About a
lot of things. Things like what kind of a parent I want to be. What things I
want to teach my child. About things, I hope my child experiences. These are
not things that are easy to decide but finally, I think I know what I want them
to be. I know that things don’t turn out exactly as we want them to be, but
there are a few promises and a few hopes that I have, which should stand the
test of time. Hence this letter to my, yet to be born, child.
Here it goes.
—
Dear Child,
The first thing I want you to know is that I and your mother love you very
much. I have never seen you yet but still, feel love for you quite strongly. I
don’t remember the last time I cried out of joy and pure emotion and it also
doesn’t go with my current image but I will most probably cry a little when I
first hold you in my arms. I will stop only when you cry out louder from
the realization that you have an ugly father.
I know that it will take time for us to communicate verbally but till then I
will communicate with you using random gibberish that I have learnt from
parents before me. You might think `”Dad, I just don’t know the language yet
but I am not a chimpanzee. Why do you have to talk to me like that?”`. Please
bear with me for I do not know any better, it is the first time for all three
of us. Even if you are tremendously frustrated by my behavior please be
considerate enough to smile now and then, it will make my day.
I do not wish to give you everything that you want, let that be clear from now
on, or the things I did not have as a child but I wish to teach you all that I
wish I knew earlier. I want to teach you that there is a right and a wrong
answer to the question `What do you want to become when you grow up?`. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, actor, etc are all wrong answers. The only right answer is `I want to be happy`. Similarly, I don’t wish for you to have just a house, a shiny car, or a huge bank balance. These things are good to have but what I really hope you have is a purpose in life.
I will try my best to make you understand that is absolutely OK, even in this
polarized world, to disagree with someone and still be friends. It is OK to
say no to all options present. It is OK to think differently. What is not OK is
to make friends with people who believe that the earth is flat or 5G mobile
towers are spreading coronavirus. These people might be under the influence of highly potent drugs and might be dangerous but are definitely delusional.
I know that I will not be able to teach you everything or help you out in all
situations but you can count on me to be present for all events good or bad in
your life. Then there will be things that are beyond everyone’s control. I
hope that when you laugh, you do so heartily. I hope you fall in love with
someone who feels deeply for you. I hope that when someone loves you are able to reciprocate passionately. I hope you have friends who are true. I hope you have enough integrity to fight fiercely for your dreams. I hope you are kind to those less fortunate than you.
I hope you are able to realize that the nuances of a fine living are the things
that you don’t need to show off on social media. That an evening alone with a
book or some soft music can be equally or more enjoyable than a loud party with free-flowing drinks. That it is OK to sing a tuneless song or break into an
awkward dance if that makes you happy. I hope that you realize that good wine is poetry in a bottle. I hope that when you travel you choose a measly wooden hut with a breathtaking view over a 5-star hotel in a big city with a huge TV. I hope for a lot of things for you but most importantly, I hope, that you get all those things that you hope for.
I want you to know that this world is not all good but it is still necessary to
go through hardships of being honest, just, and kind because at the end of the
the day you can sleep better knowing that you did your best. You might not get a lot of encouragement in following the right path, but believe me it will all be worth it in the end.
To sum it all up, I am excited beyond crazy to meet you and can’t wait any
longer to meet you in person. I apologize in advance if the house we live in
is not as posh as the hospital room or as cozy as the amniotic fluid you are
floating in right now but I promise you this it will eventually get better.
The food will be better, the lighting will be better and there will be loads of
toys and all the love that you can hold in that tiny heart of yours.
Since I am unable to stress this point enough, I will say it again that I love
you very much and always will. Muaah. | https://medium.com/@nabarun-chatterjee/a-letter-to-my-first-child-4aaeed2247bd | ['Nabarun Chatterjee'] | 2020-12-23 04:02:18.393000+00:00 | ['Parenthood', 'Relationships', 'Children', 'Fatherhood', 'Self'] |
Doing the Right Thing | We all want to do the right thing and when times are good, such as they’ve been during the previous boom, many of us have. When times are good and unemployment is low, when customers are plenty and the overall outlook is generally rosy, human nature tends to seek a higher and often altruistic purpose. During those times doing the right thing aligns with our goals and objectives and becomes a norm as humanity rejoices. However, the real measure of a person and most definitely of a leader is tested when the chips are down when the economy just went from 90 mph to 5 mph in a matter of weeks, and then suddenly doing the right thing isn’t only difficult, but is also being advised against by your investors, your board, and most of your senior leaders.
Such are our times today.
Whether you’re part of a startup team, a team in a large enterprise, or a non-for-profit, doing the right thing today is immensely more difficult. Fortunately, there are some who understand the true nature of their leadership responsibilities and are living up to them on a daily basis. I’ve been so inspired to speak to some of these leaders and would like to share some of their thoughts.
People first — I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise that the most important responsibility of a leader isn’t the shareholder value, instead, it’s the person who has entrusted their time-for sure the most valuable asset any of us have-to that leader. When the times are good, like an admiral, the leader is responsible for stirring the ship toward a “True North”-toward the vision, the reason that the organization exists. They are also responsible for helping their people to grow, for treating them with respect and fairness, and for representing the collective values of the whole organization.
But in a time of crisis, the main responsibility of a leader is her employees and their families, her customers, and even her partners and service providers. Her people have to come first. This could mean anything from simply being completely honest about the risks and the available runway to covering virtual homeschooling for employee’s kids, to offering equity instead of salary or collective salary cuts over layoffs. I believe it’s important to make every effort of preserving your people’s employment, this includes closing additional funding at a potentially lower valuation, since your public comps have likely taken a significant hit, to considering completely new sources of revenue.
One silver lining of a crisis is its ability to harden our resolve and with constraints in time and resources to create a laser focus on a do or die objective. Consider how productive something like hackathons held over a single weekend can be. Many have been able to pivot e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and your company could too.
While ultimately you may not be able to keep all of your people employed, before laying off anyone you owe it to them to consider all options. Consider Toyota, who has famously paid their people working in the factories to come to work even when there was no work to be done, instead of laying them off. During those times they asked these people to instead figure out a way to improve their factories and processes, to make them more efficient. As a result, when the downturn ends, as it always does, Toyota was able to come out of those periods much faster and stronger than their competitors.
The specific way in which you can respond will of course depend on your organization and the impact from this crisis, but doing the right thing will be remembered and will create trust and real prosperity for your organization. While not doing the right thing will also never be forgotten and will undoubtedly lead to significant damage to the organization’s values and irreparable hit to the reputation of its leaders. | https://medium.com/livevisceral/doing-the-right-thing-a039835d5a28 | ['Dan Richter'] | 2020-04-06 16:45:35.400000+00:00 | ['Startup Lessons', 'Leadership', 'People Management', 'Economic Downturn', 'Startup'] |
Workozy Dashboard Redesign | This Case Study was part of my intern at WORKOZY LLP as a UX/UI Designer, the hiring manager asked for a Dashboard redesign.
DURATION: May 20 — July 20
🎯 ROLE
I was the sole UX/UI designer on this project, working closely with a dedicated product owner, the business development and a tech team.
💭 The Brief
Workozy started out as a tool to simplify the business cases that hadn’t seen the bright side of technology either because of their unique contexts or the absence of any relevant solution. The existing solutions either were too detailed or too short-sighted for the given business cases. Our mission is to empower businesses and organisation to reap the value of technology during field tasks.
⚡ Challenge
The current Dashboard platform is being used by several enterprises, each with its own department’s structure, staff levels and different process.
1. The main challenge was to change the look and feel of the dashboard & hierarchy by changing the user interface to help the company win new customers. 2. The second challenge was to improve the experience of Report Creator focusing on the need of the users.
🧩 Process
The process started with an understanding of context, design concept, what a dashboard may look like and in what conditions the user will use a dashboard. To help the client scale their products easily while maintaining consistency across all platforms I also created a design system. The system included a style guide, component library and more.
Let’s first focus to improve the experience of Workflow/Report Creator. I will talk about design systems later on.
A more detailed restructure came into play in the creator section, which proved to be one of the most troublesome for users to create report and workflows.
💡Context
The ultimate goal of any dashboard should be to increase productivity.
Dashboard should be aesthetically appealing and at least eliminate boring factors.
The dashboard should be promoting the most important insights upon the user’s needs and should be customizable.
Empathy Map
Pain Points
✍🏻 Design Concepts
Keeping in mind Empathy Map; users pain points and motivation I came up with sketches shown below.
LAYOUT
Introduction of a stepper view, which dramatically decluttered the whole interface.
user can edit any step any time
2. Improved steps and colour-coding created instantly identifiable events, especially for those users on the move who required fast and easy access make reports and workflows daily.
card including report type with icon and short information
3. One of the steps contains tabs; based on the requirements while creating the report.
Paper sketches
🌈 Creating a design system
To bring professionalism into charts and numbers, I chose a calm color palette which creates an appealing and clean look. For primary colors, blue and purple were chosen; for additional accents, the pink color was picked. The choice of the background color turned on the light to make the layout airy and easy to scan. Sans-Serif Google fonts — Inter was chosen for better legibility and corporate touch. Material Icons were chosen for dashboard Design System. | https://medium.com/fizday/workozy-dashboard-redesign-edac51dddcdf | ['Ashish Rangwala'] | 2020-12-29 05:47:47.606000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Dashboard', 'UX', 'Design', 'UI'] |
Christmas trees are on sale in Saudi Arabia for the first time | For the first time, Christmas decorations and decorative lights in different colours are on sale in a shop in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh. Today, in a souvenir shop in the Saudi capital, you will find Christmas trees and decorations, in a scene that was difficult even to imagine years ago in the Islamic Conservative Kingdom.In recent years, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vowed to lead a kingdom “moderate and free” of radical precepts, these sales have begun to appear steadily in Riyadh as a sign of easing social constraints.
In its jurisdiction, Saudi authorities ban the practise of religious rituals other than Islamic ones. In addition to Christmas trees, Santa Claus, lights, reindeer, gift boxes, and home decorations for Christian Eve are sold in the gift shop. In Saudi Arabia, I never thought I would see it.”I never imagined I would see it in Saudi Arabia.”Recently, Riyadh saw the end of the position of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Sin, functioning as a religious police force. Christmas products have been purchased almost secretly from a neighbour in the United Arab Emirates for decades, while Christians from the Philippines, Lebanon, and other countries celebrated Christmas behind closed doors or in places where foreigners live.
Mary, a Lebanese woman living in the capital of Riyadh, has mentioned in the past that similar products have been difficult to find in the kingdom, especially during Christmas. “Many of my friends use to buy them from Lebanon or Syria and then secretly took them to Saudi Arabia.” She added. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman undertook several reforms, enabling concerts, reopening cinemas, and allowing women to drive as part of his plans to modernise the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.The shop manager selling Christmas decorations in Riyadh confirms that in the past, in the midst of the scepticism of their local clients, they have sold Halloween costumes.
In its latest study, the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom states that while Saudi Arabia has made some fundamental legal reforms, especially with regard to women’s rights, the underlying systemic impediments to religious freedom in the country have not been addressed.In April, at the time they reportedly committed their crimes, Riyadh carried out a mass execution of Shia Muslims, including some minors. No public worship for non-Muslims is permitted in the country, and the government continues to harass and surveil members of these groups.
“Women, such as Loujain al-Hathloul, who dissent from the government’s mandatory religious guardianship laws have been detained and subjected to severe mistreatment,” Washington reports, highlighting that the Saudi government released content on social media referring to feminism as a form of extremism on several occasions in 2019.USCIRF Religious Prisoner of Conscience Raif Badawi was refused access to books and medication at the end of 2019 and then went on a protest hunger strike. USCIRF recommended in its 2019 Annual Report that the U.S. Saudi Arabia is designated by the State Department as a “country of special concern” (CPC) because of its systemic, continuing and egregious violations of religious freedom. | https://medium.com/@benjaminrichards707/christmas-trees-are-on-sale-in-saudi-arabia-for-the-first-time-2ff79b4b1122 | ['Benjamin Richards'] | 2020-12-22 11:40:08.530000+00:00 | ['Middle East', 'Christmas', 'Riyadh', 'Saudi Arabia'] |
Mengenal Proses Asinkronus dan Implementasi Worker Thread di Express JS | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/javascript-indonesia-community/mengenal-proses-asinkronus-dan-implementasi-worker-thread-di-express-js-22b65fa351a4 | ['Rian Yulianto W'] | 2020-12-17 01:01:04.315000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Multithreading', 'Jwt Token', 'Expressjs', 'JavaScript'] |
Twice as Many Appointments in Mali | Umu Bouare isn’t the only hairstylist in her village, but she has to be the most likable. Sitting on the quiet, well-shaded porch of her home, she welcomes customers in with an infectious smile; it’s no surprise that she has multiple appointments each day.
For women in this community, coming to see Umu isn’t just about having their hair styled for an event or a feast — they also come to relax.
“I do their hair and we talk together,” Umu explains, laughing.
“Because of the water taps, we have time to earn money and do other things — even take a rest. We didn’t think this day would ever come.”
That’s the part of her job she loves: the social aspect.
Sure, it provides income that she can use to buy clothes, food and shoes for her family, but the real highlight is the chance to connect with other women in the community, to make them feel beautiful. | https://medium.com/charity-water/umus-story-99e7f6ce7a0e | ['Charity'] | 2015-02-25 18:58:56.804000+00:00 | ['Clean Water', 'Africa', 'Hair'] |
Konka expands from budget-priced smart TVs to basic smart home products | Konka expands from budget-priced smart TVs to basic smart home products Chris Jan 20·3 min read
The burgeoning smart home market needs to make room for another budget player: Konka is expanding from inexpensive 4K smart TVs to a relatively full line of smart home products.
The company hasn’t announced any prices yet, but we’re guessing its video doorbell, security camera, and smart lighting products will come in at the lower end of the spectrum. “Our [price strategy] will be the same as our televisions,” Konka North America senior vice president of marketing Scott Ramirez told TechHive. “We’re in that middle range.”
[ Further reading: The best smart plugs ] Mentioned in this article Konka U5-series 4K UHD Android TV (50-inch class, model 50U55A) Read TechHive's review$279.99See iton RCWilley We were relatively impressed with the price-to-performance ratio of Konka’s U5-series smart TV, so we’re cautiously optimistic about its new product line. The smart home devices Konka announced at CES connect over Wi-Fi and support both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa support. The company is also courting smart home enthusiasts by building in compatibility with IFTTT. Buyers will use the same Konka SmartApp that works with its Android TV products.
Konka Konka announced two smart home security cameras ahead of CES, one with a built-in floodlight.
Smart camerasKonka will release four smart cameras this spring, all with 1080p video and night vision, two-way audio, noise cancellation, and 128-bit encryption. The flagship wired Video Doorbell sports a 140-degree field-of-view, along with camera-based motion and human detection. The battery-powered Anywhere Video Doorbell will have 130-degree motion detection, with passive infrared motion detection with adjustable sensitivity. The AnywhereCam sports the same functionality as the Anywhere Video Doorbell, but will include a wall-mounting bracket. The Floodlight Cam adds dual-LED floodlights and a 90dB siren.
Customers with Konka TVs will be able to view their smart camera feeds directly from their sets, while IFTTT can be used to connect to other services, according to Ramirez. Each of the cameras is outfitted with an SD card slot for local storage, with a subscription-based cloud storage service available as an option. Here again, pricing for that service has not yet been announced.
Smart lighting Konka’s smart lighting effort will be limited to A19 and BR30 smart bulbs, plus a 5-meter LED light strip at launch. These will be both tunable white (2800 to 6500K) and color, with the A19 producing 750 lumens of brightness (60-watt equivalent), the BR30 producing 1,300 lumens (90-watt equivalent), and the LED light strip producing 700 lumens.
Three smart plugs are also in the officing, including single- and dual-outlet models and a power strip. These will all model include built-in surge protection, and the multi-outlet models will have individual outlet control.
Availability Konka expects to have its products in consumer’s hands by March or April, although the smart plugs will release later in the spring. There will also be additional devices to come, Ramirez said, which the company hopes to release throughout the year.
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/@chris85616579/konka-expands-from-budget-priced-smart-tvs-to-basic-smart-home-products-b0c7945e65ba | [] | 2021-01-20 01:56:02.565000+00:00 | ['Services', 'Chargers', 'Audio', 'Home Tech'] |
Hacker Rank- Day 8th Challenge solved in javascript- Dictionaries and Maps | function processData(input) { let phoneBook = new Map(); let arr = input.split('
'); let stringValue = ''; for(var i=1; i<arr.length; i++){ let valueSplit = arr[i].split(' '); if(valueSplit.length>1){ phoneBook.set(valueSplit[0], valueSplit[1]) } else{ if(phoneBook.has(valueSplit[0])){ stringValue += valueSplit[0]+'='+phoneBook.get(valueSplit[0])+'
'; } else{ stringValue += 'Not found'+'
'; } } } return stringValue; }
I hope you can find your way with this solution!
Happy Coding! | https://medium.com/@kaurdeep419/hacker-rank-day-8th-challenge-solved-in-javascript-dictionaries-and-maps-615ef91a0741 | [] | 2020-11-11 04:57:10.077000+00:00 | ['Hackerrank', 'Hackerrank Solution', 'Javascript Development', 'Javascript Tips', 'JavaScript'] |
12/13招募徵選基本功與心法 by張峻豪老師 | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@g20120202/12-13-%E6%8B%9B%E5%8B%9F%E5%BE%B5%E9%81%B8%E5%9F%BA%E6%9C%AC%E5%8A%9F%E8%88%87%E5%BF%83%E6%B3%95-by%E5%BC%B5%E5%B3%BB%E8%B1%AA%E8%80%81%E5%B8%AB-5531f9223d42 | ['Hsin'] | 2020-12-13 13:32:48.130000+00:00 | ['HR', '人資小週末', '招募與徵選'] |
The travel industry STILL DOESN’T GET IT! Diversity in travel report card | On Jan.3, 2019 I released a diversity in travel report card that graded travel brands, tourism boards, travel conferences and the overall marketing in the industry. For those of you that don’t know this topic is EXHAUSTING and as an African American woman I constantly feel disrespected and ignored due to lack of representation.
For the last year I’ve been speaking out on this issue on podcasts, at conferences and private travel events. I’ve expressed my concerns to the “guilty” parties directly on social media, I’ve emailed them, I’ve called their offices. I have reached out to them every way I know how and I know they have heard me, yet no change has occurred. They are continuing to show me that, MY TRAVEL DOLLARS do not matter!
In my opinion, this makes no financial sense considering African American’s spend 63 billion annually in travel dollars. To take it a step further Mexican Americans spend $73 billion annually and by the year 2020 Muslims spend $170 billion annually in the travel industry! Even with all this cash spent we are still not represented in any marketing.
If you think it stops there IT DOESN’T! There are so many niche travelers who are left out of the discussion it is ridiculous. If one were to simply search online travel communities that advocate for LGBTQ, Native American, veterans or disabled travelers you’d find tons! Yet none of these people show are visible in these advertisements.
I believe part of this problem is due to a lack of diversity within travel brands. When there is not diversity internally we can’t expect to see it externally. If the company is not multicultural how can their marketing be?
This leads me to the report card.
Using letter grades native to american grading systems the following grades were given based off incidents that happened in 2018. I will recreate this every year until I see all A’s .
Diversity in ads & promotions
I gave a letter grade of a D because not much has changed. I recall an incident where black and brown travel industry professionals were outraged at Visit Maine’s promo video. We viewed it at an amazing travel conference where we spent all weekend speaking to issues in the industry regarding diversity and after all that the video was played and it showed nothing but white travelers.
I felt bad for the Visit Maine representative because they bombarded her with complaints. She probably had nothing to do with that video but since she was there representing them she took all the hits. Fortunately, she took our feedback back to Maine and implemented changes. A few months later Maine held a press trip and had multicultural representatives. Should I be happy about this? Its hard to say, because I’m not impressed, but I do appreciate them realizing this was an issue, and they took action to address it. At the end of the day I do not understand why we had to point this out to the in the first place. If we would have never voiced our concerns they wouldn’t have even noticed.
Diversity on social media
This also get’s a D. Again although 8% of accounts are starting to listen to complaints of multicultural travelers the majority of travel accounts only show white travelers. This is the reason why groups surrounding the Black Travel Movement were started.
There are now a variety of travel movements online that cater to diverse travel niches. In my current capacity I serve as the creative lead at NOMADNESS Travel tribe. It was created in 2011 to have a place/ resource for black and brown travelers to see themselves reflected so they could be inspired and encouraged to travel. Since then other accounts like Travel Noire, Black and Abroad, Soul Society , My Travel Crush and countless others have entered into the industry and are supporting black wanderlusters throughout the globe. There are also other accounts dedicated to minority groups like Travel Latina Somali Travel Feed, Same Sex Quad Travel, Asian Travel Squad to name a few..
With all these social communities there is no reason large travel accounts cannot display travelers of all ethnicities, religions, sexual preference or disabilities. Brands like Matador network who have some diversity on their team was the first account where I noticed change. Last January their social manager Sam O’Brochta released a message looking for multicultural content creators to do Instagram story takeovers. It was such a breath of fresh air because FINALLY all people were going to be reflected on a major social account. I had the chance to do two takeovers in 2018 and I will also do one the first week in February. Matador taking action on this issue opened the door for Phillip Calvert a.k.a Philwaukee to have his own travel show with them ‘’Phil good travel’’ which premieres Janaury 21.
Do you understand how monumental that is for black travelers everywhere to see someone who looks like them? I wish other accounts would get a clue. Thank you to everyone who has made a step towards diversity and inclusion.
Diversity in traditional media
This receives a D for the same reason! Dear media outlets, not only white people travel. When releasing stories show families of color traveling and interview them. When doing segments on solo travel stop talking to the same white woman we’ve seen a million times. When speaking about TSA interview the Muslim traveler that has anxiety every time they have to go through TSA because people are rude and racist. Are your viewers only white? I don’t think so. Do better.
Diversity in travel programs and events
The first F! The industry received an F because in many cases it’s not until a brand is called out about the lack of representation before it changes. A lot of brands apologize and say we were unaware of this issue. It’s mind boggling to me that you can’t see that everything you do looks one way. When you walk down the street do you not see people of color? You’re telling me the whole worlds white? I won’t accept that.
Last November during WTM London travel brand Lonely Planet hosted an event ‘’Diversity in travel writing’’. Now what brands don’t know is that there are tons of groups dedicated to diversity in travel and once the news spreads about an issue, conference or event we will come together and support, whether that means attending or boycotting! We brought everyone we could to Lonely Planet that night, so they could know that we are writers, we are travelers, we are influencers. After that event, it changed the way Lonely Planet did things. They opened all of their resources up for us to take part in. I will NEVER forget that! Now I fully support Lonely Planet because it’s a step in the right direction.
Diversity in travel conferences and trade-shows
This is the second most exhausting issue to me. It received an F because not enough representation is at these conferences. It’s not enough to say well that’s because there aren’t any people of color who fit into these categories because there are, and they visit these conferences!
In December I received a text from another travel professional that was highly upset at yet another travel conference announcement that only showed a white line up. The travel and adventure show a show that has been going on for years, 15 to be exact, and it has always only showed a majority of white people in the industry. I saw it and I said I’ve got to do something. I called their offices. I spoke with a young lady who answered the phone. Poor lady. She had to hear my frustrations and she encouraged me to send my feelings via email. I asked her to transfer me to the marketing director, I left him a voicemail and sent an email and NEVER received a response.
I was hoping for some sort of acknowledgement and dialogue about the lack of diversity in their shows and a response on how they plan to fix this issue. You can say ‘’well maybe they never got it’’ but they did. Linkedin proved that when I saw their director of marketing had viewed my profile. I sent him a request ,he accepted it but did ignored the direct message I sent and did not initiate any conversation.
Thank you to conferences like The Women in travel summit and Travel Con who celebrate diversity in every way. We will always support you.
Diversity in influencer trips
This has been the most frustrating one for me because this is my area of expertise. I had to start creating trips specifically for minority influencers because we were not offered a seat at the table.
Aruba tourism did an ‘’international’’ influencer trip with people who looked one way. They claim to have selected influencers from South America but none of them were in the afro-latino demographic. It was disrespectful and quite frankly I’m confused on why Caribbean tourism boards choose white faces for their representatives. The only time we see people of color is when they are showing the locals as if people of color don’t visit those places.
Being that I am the voice of the people I commented on Aruba Tourisms post . I named a dozen different international influencers that represented a dozen different travel niches, and because of that everyone chimed in. The original post was had about 3k views and it jumped to 9k after we brought attention to it. About 60 travel professionals commented on this post and the Aruba Tourism Board did not reply. Instead they laid low for about 4 days deciding that silence was the best response and probably hoping that it would all boil over. It has not. We all have taken notice and WILL NOT BE SUPPORTING ARUBA until they change. The best way to affect change is with our dollars and platforms to speak out against this. Turning a blind eye is not a good way to go about things. I’m disappointed in Aruba Tourism and will continue to speak out against this exact example during the different speaking opportunities I have this year.
I shared this issue on my social media and an influencer who was on the trip reached out to me and thanked me raising awareness about this particular instance. This influencer admitted that the group of influencers lacked diversity and they brought up the issue while on the trip. The influencer stated that the guides on the ground understood completely but it’s the PR companies who create these trips who are out of touch. I appreciated his message so much because it gave insight to where the issue starts. I felt Visit Aruba should have issued a statement and they did not which is a public display of cowardice in my opinion.
Thank you to brands like Sidewalker Daily and Jettsetter air who both have listened to multicultural influencers and have acknowledged that the lack of diversity in influencer trips is an issue. You are appreciated. Thank you to brands like Norwegian Air and Four Seasons who have constantly made strides in this area.
Diversity and inclusion at travel companies
This received and F for obvious reasons. As long as there’s no representation within companies, there will be none in anything they do. Start hiring diverse candidates because representation does matter. Everyone is on Linkedin so you have the ability to recruit. Hire a headhunter, do something! An alternative is to contract diverse freelancers to sit on this team that you confide in for marketing purposes. I know a ton of industry professionals that would gladly do this, there are no excuses.
Thank you to the companies that display this like Hilton , Pandora for brands and iFLY Luggage.
Overall sensitivity to diversity in travel
Although I gave this a D, I look forward to this changing over the course of 2019 because I really believe this industry can and will do better. The lack of acknowledgement of this issue is very sad but multicultural travel professionals are starting to get opportunities that allow us to spread this message. Brands are starting to not be afraid to ‘’rock the boat’’ in the words of Evie Robinson founder of NOMADNESS, and are making a commitment to being leaders in this industry by showing diversity in everything they do.
It’s not enough to say we care anymore, we need to see it. Show us in your marketing, show us at your conferences, show us with the people you hire to represent your brand. When you know better, you should do better, I look forward to a change. | https://marty-25022.medium.com/the-travel-industry-still-doesnt-get-it-diversity-in-travel-report-card-9fa847d73a84 | ['Martinique Lewis'] | 2019-01-24 21:09:56.704000+00:00 | ['Traveling', 'Travel', 'Marketing', 'Diversity', 'Inclusion'] |
Importance of Employee Recognition at Workplace | Creating a great place to work is a big challenge. A place where employees can thrive can be created only when there is an appreciation of their efforts and recognition for the work put in. Recognized employees translate into happy employees who are productive at their workplace and satisfied with their job role.
Recognition should not be a one-off activity in an organization. In fact, there is no specific need to allot a single day for employee recognition. Recognition can be in day-to-day activities and daily tasks. When you take the time out to appreciate your employees and their efforts, it demonstrates how much of a measurable impact they’re having on your business.
Among employees who received no recognition, only 48 percent indicated they trusted their higher-ups.
Appreciation is a fundamental human need. More than that, employee recognition helps to retain the top talent, increase productivity levels, and drive employee engagement.
How to show employee appreciation at your workplace?
Be timely Be specific Remember that every small effort counts Make recognition an important event Make meaningful gestures of gratitude
It is important for every organization to have its own employee recognition program that aligns with its goals and values. Lack of such an initiative will lead to distrust amongst the employees, make them feel undervalued and appreciated. This can further lead your top employees to join your competitors which can prove detrimental in the long run.
The significance of employee recognition simply cannot be ignored.
Visit the top choice Payroll Software in the MENA regional countries. | https://medium.com/@abhijit-ray/importance-of-employee-recognition-at-workplace-de6398b78181 | ['Abhijit Kumar Ray'] | 2020-12-14 10:56:25.016000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Hrms Software', 'Payroll', 'Employee Recognition', 'Employees'] |
One Of The Biggest Challenges For Purpose-Driven Founders | I always see founders in purpose-driven organizations as a bit more intrinsically motivated.
And the thing with these values minded entrepreneurs is that they often care more about their mission than anything else.
And that is a good thing.
Except with this level of passion, hustle and growth mindset, they are so often BURNED OUT.
I often hear the same complaints:
“I can’t trust anyone to do it for me”
“I hired a (team, agency, consultant) and they screwed me.”
“My salary range is low and the talent I find lackluster”
“We are growing so fast I often have no time to think”
The beautiful part of business is that you can be insanely successful and altruistic.
I don’t talk about self-care, or work life balance or any other burn out cliché in these moments.
I change the conversation to the real issue at hand.
It’s desperation.
The problem with desperation is… it’s not a place to make decisions from.
Your last bad hire, agency relationship, poor VC partner or project was most likely caused because you felt like you were running out of time for progress and threw your effort at the first solution that landed in your lap.
No wonder it failed.
Now — as a founder myself — I know my worst decisions were made in times that felt desperate. But if I had given myself more room and time to make changes, I would have been able to avoid those hail Mary pitfalls.
I now always triage potential clients for the desperation. We peel back the layers to uncover the real goal they want to fix and start there.
That’s how you run an effective business. That’s leadership. That’s a winning strategy. That’s the ultimate secret to success.
What do you think is the biggest factor in stopping desperation in this fast-paced world?
Tell me all about it. Hit reply and share your story with me.
Karen | https://medium.com/@marketing-magnet/one-of-the-biggest-challenges-for-purpose-driven-founders-62ba4c4772ba | ['Marketing Magnet'] | 2020-12-18 17:20:59.032000+00:00 | ['Purpose Driven', 'Founders', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Business Challenges'] |
FACT: Bears don’t urinate while they hibernate. | Did you know that bears don’t urinate while they hibernate? Their body converts the urine into protein, and they use it as food. Although I subscribe to the idea of not having to go to the bathroom during my sleep, not sure I am on board with the whole urine consumption… | https://medium.com/curious-facts/fact-bears-dont-urinate-while-they-hibernate-618c554e8a69 | ['Jacob Vandersluys'] | 2020-12-30 08:06:39.504000+00:00 | ['Animals', 'Education', 'Facts', 'Nature'] |
English 101 Students Help Their Professor Reconsider His Will To Live | I started the fall semester this year by asking my 101 students a fun question: “If you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”
It was an ice-breaker, far better than the usual awful name-games, a gift to them.
I imagined them thinking, Wow. What an agreeable time we had answering that imaginative question. Our professor is the greatest ever. Why do other professors even get up in the morning?
Let’s listen in on that first class:
“All right, guys, if you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”
“Are we invincible?” they ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, can nothing stop us from living to the age we pick? If we got stabbed or got bitten by a poisonous spider, we’d be fine?”
“No, you’d die,” I say. “It’s just like now: if no disaster happens, you live.”
“What if we got a disease?”
I ponder, then decide: “No diseases.”
“But you said we can die.”
“You can, just not from disease. So, what age would you live to? And why?”
“What if someone gave us a disease,” they ask, “like on purpose? Say they inject us with something. Can we die of a disease then?”
“No. You die of old age.”
“No such thing,” they say. “You’re sugarcoating it. Are we talking pneumonia, a stroke?”
A student’s hand shoots up, “Or diabetes!”
“Guys, it’s just a peaceful death. You slip away in your sleep and that’s that.”
A student says, “So, if we pick three hundred, we’ll be super old for like two hundred and sixty years?”
“No, it’s proportional,” I say, “like your life now.”
They consider. And while they’re considering, I consider the number they just offered: three hundred. And what they said next: we’ll be super old for like two hundred and sixty years?
300 minus 260 = 40.
“Hold on,” I say, “you think being old starts at forty?”
The students look confused. “Uh, yeah,” they say.
“Forty is not old.” And in my mind, I say, I am thirty-seven.
A student raises his hand. “Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five…what?” I ask.
“Twenty-five years old,” he says. “That’s my number.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Why twenty-five? You can live to any age.”
He says, “After twenty-five, it’s all downhill.”
“I’m thirty-seven,” I say.
I expect him to look at this youthful specimen of a man who clearly has so much good life left to live, but the student doesn’t budge. In fact, looking at me only seems to confirm his choice. Judging by the sour expression on his face, if he was me, he would definitely want to be dead twelve years ago.
“Anyone else?” I ask. “What age would you live to? Try thinking outside the box. Sky’s the limit.”
“It’s a trick,” a student says. “Think about it. It’s a trick question.”
“It’s not a trick,” I say. “Just answer.”
“I did,” says the student who wants death at twenty-five.
“How is it a trick?” I ask.
“If it’s proportional,” the student says, “and you pick a thousand years, that means you’ll be a baby for like two hundred years, and horribly old for five hundred years.”
“Listen,” I say, “shut up. How about this; the baby years and the deep-old-age years are the same length as they are for us right now. Okay? It’s just the middle part we’re talking about. Better?”
“You can’t change the question,” they say.
“What are you talking about. I can change it…why can’t I change it?”
“Because it’s not realistic if you keep changing it.”
“What about any of this is realistic?! Just pick a number.”
“Nineteen,” a student says.
“You’re eighteen right now,” I say.
“Correct,” she says.
“So, you want to die next year?”
“I feel like I’m peaking this year.”
I bitterly pinch the bridge of my nose. “You guys are the worst.”
Another hand goes up. “Can I be eighty?”
“That’s how long people live now.”
“I know. That’s what I’m hoping for. I just want a full, long life.”
The rest of the class agrees.
“People,” I say, “I’m giving you a magic question. Magic. The answer can be anything you want. A thousand years. Ten thousand years. Just pick a number. What if the question was about money? Cash. What would you say then? How much money do you want? Tell me.”
“I’d give it to charity,” one student says.
“Stop. You would not give it to charity. Screw charity. Be honest. How much?”
The students look shocked and happy at the same time. They hold up their phones.
“Would you say that again?” they ask.
“What?”
“The screw charity thing.”
“Scr…wait. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you trying to get me fired?”
“What?” The phones are still up, recording.
“I’m not saying it. Listen, if I asked you how much money you wanted, you’d say billions, trillions. Think of age the same way.”
“You can’t spend age,” they say.
“Yes, you can. You spend it doing wonderful things. Reading books. Traveling. Meeting incredible people.”
“A hundred?” one student says.
“Now we’re talking,” I say. “A hundred years old. Keep going.”
“No, I meant a hundred dollars. That’s all I’d need.”
“A hundred? What about when it’s gone, what then? You’ll remember you could have had any amount, and you’ll hate yourself.”
“No. I’d put it to good use. A hundred makes two hundred. Two hundred makes four. Wait, what about taxes?”
“What do you mean?”
“Taxes on the money. If we say a billion, the government gets half that.”
The students agree. “More than half,” they say.
A raised hand. “My dad says you might as well not even win the lottery, because the government takes so much. It’s like them winning the lottery.”
The class nods. They speak as one: “Amen.”
“I’d pick zero,” a student says. “I don’t want handouts. You’ve got to make it on your own. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
But another student turns to this one and says, “But pretend. Just for fun. Like if you could have any amount of money.”
“A billion,” he says. “Fifty billion.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” I yell. “It’s pretend. Just for fun. You can pick any number.”
“Ooooh.” They’ve had an epiphany.
“Good,” I say. “So, what age would you live to?”
“Five hundred?” a student says.
“Great, keep going.” I don’t dare ask why five hundred. They’re finally on track. I’ve got to keep this going. “Who else?”
“Seven hundred.”
“Excellent, more.”
“A thousand.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Twenty-five,” he says again.
“Anyone else…wait.” I can’t help myself. “Why twenty-five?”
“I’d get bored. Life is boring.”
“So instead of doing something to be not bored, you’d just die?”
“Yeah.”
“You are going to be twenty-five someday. You’ll have a family, probably. Kids. What then?”
“Play with my kids. Live life. The American dream. What else?”
“And not die?”
“Of course not. I’m not leaving them. I would never do that.”
The students celebrate his nobility.
“So, in your real life, you’ll live it and enjoy it, but in your dream, magic-question life, you’d die? What about your kids then?”
“It’ll make them stronger.”
“No, it won’t! They need you. Don’t you think they want to spend time with their father?”
“No guarantees in life,” he says.
“I’m giving you a guarantee in life! You can live to any age. That’s the guarantee.”
“But you said we can die.”
“Yeah, if it’s a tragedy. Like a bus hits you.”
“So, there’s no point,” he says. “If I pick ten thousand, a bus hits me when I’m twenty-five. Why pick anything? Why even live?”
The class agrees.
“Guys, you could step outside and get hit by a bus today.”
“I’d sue,” a student declares. “I’m pre-law.”
“You can’t sue,” I say, “you’re dead.”
“My cousin did it,” a student says.
“Did what?”
“Got hit by a bus.”
Everyone turns to listen. “Really?”
“Yeah, she sued Greyhound. A quarter of a million dollars. Can you imagine?”
The students are smiling. Imagining. “Man,” they say, “what would you do with that kind of money?”
“Pay off college debt,” someone says.
Their eyes light up. “Yeah!”
“Wait,” I say, “so if I gave you a quarter of a million dollars, that’s what you’d do with it? Pay off debt? What about something fun?”
“I’d give it to charity,” a student says.
The phones go up.
“I’m not saying it.”
“Not saying what?”
A quiet student raises her hand. “What about you?” she asks. “What age would you pick?” Then she qualifies the question: “It can be any age. You don’t die of diseases, only disaster. And it’s not exactly proportional, but — ”
“I know how the question works,” I say. “It’s my question.”
“So,” she says, “what age would you choose?”
I smile. I love answering this question. It occurs to me that I only ever ask it so eventually I’ll get to answer it.
“Not a thousand,” I say. “Not twenty-five. Not ten thousand. I’d choose to live forever.”
A student asks, “Won’t we have destroyed the planet by then?”
“We’ll have moved on,” I say. “To the moon. Or Mars. Wherever we go, I want to live and live.”
“Why would you ever want to live that long?” they ask.
“Think about it,” I say. “If you set out to read every book ever written, you’d never reach the end. People are always writing new books, and books can be read over and over. Or say you want to know every place. It takes a hundred years to know even a small town, and still, you don’t really know it. It’s always changing: people coming and going, dying and being born, constantly transforming the old place, turning it into someplace new. You’d never run out of new experiences, even in a small town. You’d be endlessly learning, endlessly growing wiser as you take in more and more of this magnificent existence.”
Unfortunately, they’ve heard none of this. I made the mistake of saying it fifteen to twenty minutes before the end of class, a time when students begin violently repacking their backpacks.
I want to stop them, tell them we have plenty of time left, but they’re professionals.
They cover one another in military fashion, the left side of the room laying down a suppressing fire of sound to distract me from the students on the right who are slowly standing. When I go to tell the right side to sit, the lefties are rising. When I go to tell them to sit, the righties are gone. When I, enraged, try to tell the lefties, “Stay right where you are,” they send up a representative who offers me a mind-bendingly complex explanation as to why his laptop will not allow him to print homework assignments on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, talking on and on until all the lefties have escaped, and then he says, “Wait, never mind. I think I just answered my own question. Bye.”
And the room, like my heart, is empty.
I trudge back to my office and sit there thinking about my answer to the magic question, the long, long life I always choose. I think about teaching and how I feel at the start of every fall semester: hopeful. Excited. Overflowing with joy as I imagine interacting with minds lit up by the thrilling fire of youth, minds eager to rush for the goal of becoming more than they were, more than they ever dreamed they could be, and by some impossible luck, I get to help them!
Suddenly, Facebook sends a notification. I discover a meme created by my students. It’s viral. I see an image of me at the blackboard. Above my head floats a cartoon bubble filled with the following words: “Screw charity.”
I consider my age-question and decide to answer it again, but this time I select a new number:
Me: “If you could live to any age, what age would you choose, and why?”
Me: “Yesterday.”
Me: “You want to live until yesterday?”
Me: “Yup.”
Me: “Why? Never mind. I know why.” | https://medium.com/down-in-the-dingle/english-101-students-help-their-professor-reconsider-his-will-to-live-e874c962fe27 | ['Daniel Williams'] | 2019-11-21 06:41:11.157000+00:00 | ['Teaching', 'Humor', 'Students', 'College', 'Comedy'] |
Implementing Voice over Slideshow : Fast and Portable | Context : I will discuss about the server side tech internals of a platform which can be used to generate optimised basic Voice over Slideshows and deliver them as a video.
In the domain of content management and learning systems, Voice over Slideshow is a crucial medium for facilitating streamlined information delivery which is easy to consume. ‘Voice over Slideshow’ as the name says, is a content package where a presenter narrates while moving over a bunch of slides, to convey some information. But what’s going on under the hood? How is this managed, how is this delivered consistently across platforms? If you have thought about these questions at any point in your head after stumbling through the title of this article, you’re in the right place!
Most CMS Platforms support Voice over Slideshow and have their own way to packaging and delivering it. I’ll walk you through my way of standardising and delivering this creating a video from the presentation and voice. This simplifies delivery over a wide variety of platforms like mobile phones, tablets or web, is fast and easy to maintain. .
Step-1 : Getting the Primitives Together
Images and Audio Files will be your bread and butter in this technique.
But your user probably uploaded a presentation (ppt, pptx etc.), hence your first task becomes getting images out of the presentation. This is done best at host machine where the presentation is generated, using the tool itself to export each slide as in image. This is because the formats and fonts any presentation tool uses may not be standard and can cause rendering issues in a different environment. If you can ask your user to do so, you’re in a good place. Images taken as an input on your platform in lieu of a presentation, will generate better results at cost of an inferior UX.
If you can’t ask your user for images, don’t worry. Another way of getting images from a presentation is using services like Box and Filestack. These services offer APIs and SDKs to transform a presentation to images. I personally have achieved good results from Filestack using Box as a backup system
Yet another way is using Open Office headless. But it comes with it’s own maintenance. You can choose any of the ways mentioned above to get your images.
Coming to audio, audio for every slide can be recorded using the browser, and can be shipped to server for storage. Preserving mapping for audio track to slide number is crucial here as you’d need it to know what goes where
Step-2 Stitching the pieces
Here comes the sauce, FFMPEG
FFMPEG is a powerful media processing tool which can help stitch an image and audio together to form a video snippet. You’d leverage this tool to generate a final video. There are wrappers written for this tool for almost all programming languages, and even if there are no good ones for yours, you can always fire a plain old shell script from your code. There are two approaches here that you may take depending on the use case and resources available
If you have a machine with high compute resources available (possibly with GPU): FFMPEG is a resource intensive tool which can also use a GPU for video processing. You can concatenate the audio files using ffmpeg concat filter. You can use the filter again for stitching images and creating a video. { ffmpeg -concat -i conf.txt -c copy output.mp4 }. conf.txt will contain the mapping for images to audio duration. The time this process will take will depend on the resources made available to ffmpeg. Since you’ve a big machine, this shouldn’t be much Multiple small machines : You can stitch every image to its audio generating small video snippets using ffmpeg concat command in a concurrent fashion. You then finally stitch individual videos together to generate a final video. This requires multiple small hosts to do things in parallel, state management to track the status of each process. So a fair level of complexity will be involved to track these processes and build around it. But I have something to help you around this, AWS Serverless!
Scale with AWS
AWS offers powerful services like AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda that can be used to generate videos in the aforementioned fashion.
You will need two Lambda functions for this, one to concatenate a single image and a single audio into a video snippet, second one to stitch multiple videos into a single video. I used FFMPEG Lambda layers to run ffmpeg on AWS Lambda. Both the functions are fairly straight forward ffmpeg commands that you need to invoke
To mix it all together, create a step function to orchestrate the two beautiful lambdas you just created above. Use Map Reduce paradigm of Step functions for this. Using map reduce, you map your job into multiple jobs of one slide each to create a video snippet. Once all the mapping is done, reducer (your second lambda function) triggers. This lambda can stitch all your videos together into a single video.
Since AWS lambda can scale to great lengths, using AWS infrastructure will allow you to generate a video in (almost) constant amount of time for a very large range of slides. However, this comes with certain caveats. Since Lambda has limited disk space (512mb as of now), stitching a big video will be an issue. In my test, I found that a 30min audio snippet (256 kbps) over a 720p image generated ~2 mb of video with my desired settings. This will limits you to 125 slides (250mb) videos (equal space for final stitched video is required).
125 slides with 30min audio per slide was a fairly decent number for my use case. Although it can be increased further by streaming output to S3 directly instead of storing on disk (2x size in this case). Even if that does not suffice, AWS lambda offers good amount of RAM for a function. This can be leveraged for mounting a RAM disk and writing on this. I did not try this out, but should be possible.
I hope you will try this out and let me know any caveats you found in the comments. S this was one way of creating a Voice over Slideshow media package in a portable manner that can serve well in at scale in a production environment with performance guarantees when coupled with AWS. | https://medium.com/techmindtickle/delivering-voice-over-slideshow-bbc44535cf7 | ['Vikalp Singh'] | 2020-05-24 14:51:19.885000+00:00 | ['Mapreduce', 'Aws Step Functions', 'AWS Lambda', 'Ffmpeg'] |
Data science collaboration: Why it’s often difficult and how cloud services can help | In these strange times, we’ve been forced to adapt our ways of working to accommodate our new reality of isolation. It’s difficult for those who are used to sitting side-by-side, pair programming the day away. However, there are some silver linings to be found. Society may become more flexible when it comes to working from home after this is all over. We could all do with a little more flexibility around our working hours and location. Furthermore, we will have found better ways of collaborating, with greater resilience in what we create, better integrated systems, and collaborative practices which will last beyond Covid-19.
When I look back, my journey in becoming a data scientist was a hodgepodge of experiences. My first programming language was VBA. I learned R mostly through Stack Overflow. I ran too many focus groups to remember. I almost got a PhD in graph theory. I’ve never officially taken a computer science class and now I code in Python most days of the week. There are many other data scientists like me, and many who aren’t.
I’ve worked in multiple consulting firms, startups, a food unicorn, and one of the world’s biggest tech companies. There’s one thing that I see over and over: collaboration struggles, both amongst data scientists and between data science and engineering.
The reason is this: data scientists come from a really wide variety of backgrounds. Data touches everything.
In one team, I worked with an astrophysicist and rocket scientist (he literally built rockets for his country’s space program). In another team, I worked with an MD-PhD with little coding experience and a backend engineer who coded only using VIM and didn’t believe in IDEs. My background is in behavioral studies. And we all called ourselves data scientists.
How I imagine my former colleague’s past life
As much as data bonded us together, our different experiences and processes drove us apart. We were used to doing things “the way we’d always done it” and this meant for some of us, adhering to the git flow bible. For others, it meant writing 10,000 lines of code in a single python file on one’s local machine.
We argued over speed (yes, writing 10,000 lines of code in a single file technically is faster than splitting it into folders and files) and resilience (but no, it’s bad practice to store that code on a laptop that you lost yesterday, plus no one can read your code). We argued about security (no, you can’t have admin access to install this random package you found in the depths of the web which hasn’t been updated since 1996). Most of all, we argued about working together (“Pair programming is a waste of time!” But you want to spend an extra week explaining it to me when it took you two days to write?). | https://medium.com/swlh/data-science-collaboration-why-its-often-difficult-and-how-cloud-services-can-help-a71f1fbcfee3 | ['Cindy Weng'] | 2020-05-22 12:34:00.025000+00:00 | ['Azure', 'Collaboration', 'Machine Learning', 'Cloud Computing', 'Data Science'] |
Thank you for writing and sharing this! | Thank you for writing and sharing this!
I am completely with you about the reasons for the addiction: Knowing the reasons will not necessarily end the addictive behavior.
Only ending the addictive behavior ends it.
I am sure, it is helpful to look into the reasons for the addiction regarding your overall healing, after you have found your routines and pleasures without addictive behaviors. Dive into it, dry.
Trying everything at the same time will probably even worsen the results and cement the addiction. | https://medium.com/@karmela05/thank-you-for-writing-and-sharing-this-a8877e1df3f1 | ['Karmen Jurela'] | 2020-12-26 08:31:50.453000+00:00 | ['Sobriety', 'Recovery', 'Why', 'Addiction', 'Obsessions'] |
Teamwork story: The ants’ secret formula to success | There is a world that humans don’t know exists, well at least not in such a capacity. This is the world of insects in which way more is going on than humans understand and believe. In this world, insects live their lives similarly to humans do. They have responsibilities, jobs, hobbies, holidays, friends and most importantly they have their sports games which they take very seriously. The most important of them all is the great acrobatic balloon competition which occurs only a couple of times every year. Every insect near and far had been training hard, and now the day of the competition had finally come. The humans had a birthday celebration for one of their kids and the insects only had a few hours before the parents would come back and clean what was left after the celebration. Each time, the flying insects were favorites to win at this competition, because they could grab the balloon strings and fly off in all directions, creating all sorts of patterns in the air. However, on this occasion, there were some rather unusual insects taking part that had never done so. It was a group of ants. Of course, no one expected that they’d do anything special. They were too light and they had no experience at competitions of this kind. When the other insects asked them why they even bother competing, the ants would simply reply, “Our formula to success is teamwork.”
Other insects would laugh and make fun of the ants, “You silly ants. You can’t be more wrong. Your “formula to success” will get you nowhere. Facts show that in every event one of the flying insects that fly alone wins the competition.” The ants just stood quiet and waited for their turn. The competition began, and the insects took their turns, performing beautiful maneuvers with the balloons. As always, the butterfly and the firefly left everyone amazed with their twist and turns, and their wonderful colors. When it was time for the ants to perform, it seemed like the competition had already been decided in the favor of the butterfly. That was until when all the ants started their performance together as one. One by one they climbed up the balloon string forming a thin black thread of ants. When all the string was covered, the last ant climbed over his teammates to reach the balloon. Once there, the ant climbed right under the balloon right where the balloon was tied with the rope and waited a bit for everyone to gather. Of course, this strange spectacle attracted everyone’s curiosity, and soon more and more insects gathered to see what would happen next. Some of the flying insects even started making fun of the ants, “This is their formula to success… holding together while walking up the line”.
The ants again ignored such remarks and continued their performance. Finally, the time came when the ant at the top opened its jaw as wide as it could and bite the balloon. The bite caused a hole in the balloon and air started blowing out, “Pssshhhhhhh!!!” The result was tremendous! The balloon began flying wildly all over the place, doing a thousand pirouettes, while the perfectly synchronized ants, made all kinds of beautiful shapes out of the string. Luckily the ants were the last competitors as at the end of the act the balloon was empty. But none of the insects cared about that because the performance was so magnificent and original that all the insects agreed the ants should win. From then on, in that garden, everyone understood how much could be achieved by working together. In the years to come, the balloon competitions were full of displays carried out by teams, and they put on many wonderful routines. The insects even started to work together in other everyday activities and flourished way more than insects in other gardens. Soon the formula to success was out for all to know and implement, even in the furthest gardens, but only a few of the insects actually did so.
You can find more stories at this link.
What lesson did you get out of this story? | https://medium.com/@purposefocuscommitment/teamwork-story-the-ants-secret-formula-to-success-bfc6baf82ee4 | [] | 2021-06-17 20:11:57.475000+00:00 | ['Strategy', 'Teamwork', 'Storytelling', 'Success', 'Stories'] |
I Made Happiness You (Now It’s Me) | Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
It can be so easy to pass the responsibility for our own happiness into someone else’s hands.
After all, it stands to reason that if someone can make us very happy, they can also cause us to feel unhappy. We can become so addicted to those feelings of happiness that we can forget that we don’t have to have them to be happy.
I like to blame oxytocin. After all, when we cuddle with another person, our bodies naturally secrete this hormone. It’s what causes us to feel love and attachment. But oxytocin is also what makes up Pitocin, the drug used to stimulate labor for child birth.
Now, I’m not a medical professional, but just a quick search of oxytocin and its Pitocin derivative will tell you that the side effects can include loss of appetite, stomach pain, nausea, and memory problems. Those also sound like the symptoms of both love and heartache, which are sometimes synonymous experiences.
It’s easy to allow these feelings and the hormones that are connected to them to take over, flooding us with strong feelings that aren’t always pleasant.
We love them when it’s all about that floaty, happy feeling, but then we hate them when it all comes crashing down. When the love story comes to a grinding halt, it’s time that we remembered something we may have forgotten: our happiness is not dependent on our relationship status.
When we sign over our happiness to someone else, we forfeit the ability to make ourselves happy, but we also put a pretty big responsibility in someone else’s hands, a responsibility that no one can live up.
It’s not their job to make us happy, any more than it’s our job to make them happy.
Yes, we should want the people we love to be happy, but happiness really is an inside job.
And because happiness is an inside job, it’s not based on external values. It doesn’t come from having a certain salary or living in a bigger house. It doesn’t magically appear when we buy a newer car or go on a fancy vacation. It’s not that things we buy can’t make us feel a little happy, but happiness isn’t something that we can pick out, purchase, and take home with us. It’s something that has to come from a much deeper place.
If that sounds tough, it is, and it isn’t. When we get distracted by the external things like a bad day or a difficult life experience, it can be very difficult. But when we learn to focus on the small things that bring joy, we see how easy it can be.
We’ve all heard stop and smell the roses, but how many of us do this? I love that my son, who’s 3, always stops to smell flowers when we’re taking a walk. He’s learned to stop and take the time for something little because it brings him great pleasure. My daughter likes to do the same, pausing to notice a detail I might have missed otherwise. I try to do the same, noticing beauty everywhere I go.
Beauty doesn’t have to be a big thing. I find most of it in nature, but I also find it in a smile or a laugh. I see it everywhere. It can be so easy to see the bad driver, the rude customer, and the bad experience. But when we can find our way to seeing the small, wonderful things that are overlooked, we are much more likely to feel happy.
It works that way with self-esteem, too. We can focus on the things that we don’t love about ourselves, or we can stop doing that altogether and put the focus on the things we do like. Most of my hangups about my appearance actually originated when someone else made a comment about how I look. Once I heard the negative comment, I internalized, believing that if someone else pointed it out, it must be true. Then I became self-conscious about that feature, thinking it must not be acceptable because someone else said it wasn’t.
Every single thing I got hung up on came from a source outside of myself. Which means that I have the power to decide that I like all those things about me, even if someone else judged those features as less than worthy. Why have I let other people create the standard by which I judge myself?
If the body is a temple, why do we disrespect it by poor choices and constant criticism?
It’s the home we live in, a place there’s no escaping as long as we live. It’s taking home is where the heart is literally. We are all our own home. That’s where our heart is. Shouldn’t we do a better job of loving and caring for ourselves?
This philosophy of focusing on beauty works with families, too. When I used to practice as a family counselor, I would advise parents to look for the good things that there children would do in a week and write them down. Then I would tell the children, separately, to do the same with their parents. At the end of the week, we would talk about those lists, and it gave the families an opportunity to see the positive aspects of each member of the family rather than focusing on the qualities that lead to friction. If we focus in and praise someone for the good things about them, we’re more likely to see more good things in them. The opposite is also true.
That’s why happiness comes from within us. It’s all about how we choose to view and react to the things happening in our lives. We can choose to find a positive focus, or we can wallow in a negative one. The effort is usually about the same.
We can give up our power to someone else, expecting them to make us happy, or we can reclaim it for ourselves, choosing to live the kind of lives where we do things that we enjoy.
It’s particularly important when we’re recovering from a difficult experience. I went through a breakup that rocked me with grief. The ending was so sudden and unexpected that I had a hard time functioning. I went through the motions, tripping every day on memories and a constant sadness that things had gone the way they did. I gave my happiness up, as if it was something I couldn’t have since what I wanted was out of reach.
For a little while, I let someone else dictate my happiness, or in this case unhappiness.
Then I gathered my inner strength and summoned my resourcefulness. I remembered myself and my ability to see the beauty in small things. At first, I would get small moments of happiness, but then they began to last a little longer and feel a little stronger. I made it my business to build a new life and choose new dreams that would make me happy. While I can’t say that there aren’t ever moments of unhappiness, I’m glad to say that they aren’t as frequent as they once were.
We can make happiness another person or a different job or even a certain social status. We can define it as something that we’ll have one day, just not now. Or we can reclaim it, understanding that the power never belonged to anyone else. We can be the happiness we want, but first we have to realize we’re capable of it already. | https://crystaljackson.medium.com/i-made-happiness-you-now-its-me-a2190deb5cd8 | ['Crystal Jackson'] | 2019-12-19 02:05:36.272000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Self', 'Love', 'Mental Health', 'Happiness'] |
Introducing TellusR for Solr search enhancements | Part I − Implementing features that Solr lacks
According to a report from Forrester Research, 43 % of all visits in webshops start by using the search. I have previously discussed how webshops are improving their search functions, but there still is a gap between the performance of site internal searches in e-commerce and that of search engines that are not part of a webshop.
In Sannsyn, we work a lot with this. We have customers in the public sector and in web commerce, retailers and wholesale businesses, and they all need help with their search. Most of our assignments concern Apache Solr, which is one of the most popular search engines in the world. Solr is extremely fast and highly customizable. In fact, its very high number of customizable features and its enormous amount of toggleable buttons and levers are in themselves part of the reason people need help.
The Solr dashboard with various technical details
Solr has a visual dashboard where users can inspect various parts of the search engine: consult key figures, try out searches, read error descriptions etc. But all of this is for the IT technicians, who check to see that the installation is doing all right, that it is not using too much of the server resources, etc. The webshop manager, on the other hand, would rather know what people search for this month, which searches result in the highest share of convertions, how many searches simply fail, etc. But this is not visualized through the Solr web interface.
TellusR to the rescue
So we set out to create a dashboard that could make Solr useful for both techies and webshop managers: show graphs for conversions per search, alert about searches that yield zero hits, give information about what search terms are trending etc. We also wanted to enable non-tech staff to add synonyms to a Solr search or to elevate certain search terms or use some of the other features of Solr that are otherwise only available to those who know the Solr vocabulary and master the art of XML editing.
The result is TellusR. We call it a Solr Refiner.
The TellusR Solr Refiner consists of three parts. There is a graphical user interface (TellusR/Central); a component doing natural language processing (TellusR/NLP); and finally a Solr integrator, which brings information back and forth between your Solr installation and the two other components. | https://medium.com/@hallvard-ystad/introducing-tellusr-for-solr-search-enhancements-1c498c9e7252 | ['Hallvard Ystad'] | 2021-08-27 17:14:47.586000+00:00 | ['Solr', 'Tellusr', 'Search'] |
What Executive Compensation and Tenure Have in Common | What Executive Compensation and Tenure Have in Common
Or: What Nagel’s theory of “moral luck” can teach us about performance-based reward systems
We begin with Kant:
A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself… Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a step motherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose — if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control) — then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it — Immanuel Kant, 1784
I’ll first apologize on Kant’s behalf. He’s a terrible writer, but the concepts he proposes are interesting. To translate the above quote into plain english: Actions are good or bad regardless of outcome, what matters is the intent and reasonable expectation behind the action.
This quote is used by another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, in his essay on “moral luck”. In it, Nagel proposes two scenarios:
A man leaves the bar late at night, drunk. He gets in his car and drives home, swerving back and forth as he does so. At one point in his journey, he veers into the sidewalk for a brief moment before he steers himself back onto the road. He is later apprehended by a police officer. A man leaves the bar late at night, drunk. He gets in his car and drives home, swerving back and forth as he does so. At one point in his journey, he veers into the sidewalk for a brief moment and hits a child before he steers himself back onto the road. He is later apprehended by a police officer.
The only difference between these scenarios is that in option 2, the man hits a child with his car. Nagel rightly asks: why do we punish these two men differently? In both cases, the intention, action, and expectation of outcome is the same: Both men are assuming the same risk by driving drunk; Both men make the same swerve onto the sidewalk; All that’s changed is their external environment — the presence of a child.
To punish the second man harsher than the first is to punish him for things outside his control. Framed differently, letting the first man off easier is to reward him for there not being a child walking on the sidewalk — something outside of his control.
I suspect the reason is related to the structure of our legal system, which is focused more on providing adequate compensation for victims than for perpetrators of bad actions. Regardless, this example illustrates an important point: in our society, we reward and punish people for things they cannot control, by evaluating actions based on outcome instead of processes.
For a more in-depth explanation, here’s a Crash Course video focused entirely on this concept:
For now, I’d like to focus on where we see Moral Luck-type problems in management and academia. Let’s start with management.
Moral Luck in Management
The management strain of moral luck is less concerned with morality, and more focused on financial reward. This is particularly evident in executive compensation.
Per a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: “Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs on the TSX index earn the average Canadian [annual] wage by 11:47 a.m. on January 3.” A huge chunk of this compensation is in the form of bonuses and stock compensation — both of which are subject to Moral Luck-type problems.
Bonuses
Suppose you are the CEO of a gold mining corporation. You get paid a large salary for your work, but also have a compensation plan intended to reward you for meeting company targets. Some of these targets will be related to revenues, others to costs, and still more to profit — along with a host of other governance-oriented goals.
One of the single biggest factors in the revenue — and by extension, profits — that the company earns is dependent on the price of gold. The following graph shows US gold prices for the past 5 years:
As you can see, there’s significant fluctuation in gold prices. As a commodity store of value, gold is often used to hedge against inflation, or to diversify portfolios in bad times. Notice how none of this is in any way impacted by the behaviour of a gold company’s CEO — yet they may still be compensated differently in years where gold prices are high versus when they are low.
Much like Nagel’s driver example, the CEO of a gold company may find their bonuses contingent on factors outside of their control. We need to ask ourselves if this is fair?
To be fair, there are complicating factors here:
Compensation may be more related to retention than performance, and high gold prices may mean other companies have cash to spend on poaching a CEO, so their compensation should rise to defend against this.
A CEO can still greatly improve on cost efficiency — which is relatively untethered from the external environment — and thereby improve profits
Note that I’ve presented a heavily-simplified example. Many gold-mining companies are aware of this problem and have programs in place to focus on measurable CEO-specific activity rather than strict outcomes subject to external fluctuations. Regardless, I hope this example has helped you build an intuition for how moral luck may work in executive compensation.
Stock Compensation
Similar to bonuses, the value of stock compensation and stock options can be highly susceptible to fluctuations outside the control of any specific employee. A Tesla employee, for example, can’t predict what Elon will tweet next, yet would have different outcomes in total compensation based on Elon’s tweets:
I’m sure this tweet was not well received by those with stock options looking to cash out.
Musk’s tweeting aside, a host of factors can influence the valuation of a company beyond the control of individuals holding the stock. Shifting external environments incentivizing certain portfolio items, an acquisition the stock-holder was not involved in, or random market corrections can all impact the value of a stock in uncontrollable ways.
I’ll note that the appeal stock options and stock compensation more generally is in part driven by the external variation in stock prices — so in a way people are buying into a system driven by moral luck-type problems. Regardless, this is something we should be thinking about when considering the “fairness” of various compensation schemes.
Moral Luck in Academia
Let’s split reality again like we did with Nagel’s driver:
A psychologist comes up with a clever experiment that would resolve an important — but untested — belief in her field. She conducts her experiment properly and goes to analyze the results. She cannot reject the null hypothesis and submits her findings to the top journals in her field. Her paper is rejected. A psychologist comes up with a clever experiment that would resolve an important — but untested — belief in her field. She conducts her experiment properly and goes to analyze the results. She has a significant result and submits her findings to the top journals in her field. Her paper is accepted to great acclaim — securing her path to tenure in the process.
In fact, suppose there wasn’t just 2 scientists. Maybe there’s 100, 99 of which follow the path of the first scenario, and one who finds a significant result.
If the true “effect” of what they were testing was 0 — or the proposed intervention had no effect — then we might see a bell curve of these various scientist’s results that looks something like this:
The shaded part at the right? That’s the second psychologist — the one who did find an effect. She found an effect where others didn’t by sheer virtue of small variations in study design, or participants, or a host of other factors. Publication bias is strong, and no journal wants to publish a null result, so only the psychologist who achieved a significant result gets published.
Why should we reward the second psychologist for getting “lucky”? Again, I’m simplifying a great deal, but this dynamic feels unfair. Many people could use the same methodology and get a different result. This is why we use meta-analyses and tools like funnel plots to see the overall “shape” of the literature on any given effect — yet we still reward researchers for success in individual studies that we implicitly acknowledge aren’t valid on their own.
We use publications as a metric for determining the worth of new academic hires, the tenure prospects of existing professors, and the level of eminence we grant them. No wonder publish or perish culture has created a plague of so-called “questionable research practices”.
Takeaway
Like Nagel, I don’t see a good way to resolve this seeming unfairness. All I can offer is that, when possible, we should try to reward people based on their process and validity of decisions rather than the outcome they achieve. The scientists who get null findings in well-designed experiments and the CEOs who see falling profits due to environmental fluctuation should perhaps be treated more similar to their more successful counterparts — provided their methods are just as good. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/what-executive-compensation-and-tenure-have-in-common-ff9806ce1177 | ['Ethan Milne'] | 2020-07-29 02:34:19.705000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Luck', 'Academia', 'Management', 'Executive Compensation'] |
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#leatherbags #trendybags #womenhandbags #satchelbags #menswallet #mensfashion #womenfasion #vintagebags #leathertrendybags #girlsfashion #partybags #officebags #schoolbags #outingbags #fashionova #fashionista #brownbags #madeinIndia | https://medium.com/@bludust-official/latest-jet-black-ladies-bag-for-daily-use-59a3791177e | ['Blu Dust'] | 2021-06-08 08:39:03.204000+00:00 | ['Modern Life', 'Modernism', 'Bags', 'Home Decor', 'Luxury'] |
Keeping track of what we eat, part 1: Pre-processing the Receipts | Keeping track of what we eat, part 1: Pre-processing the Receipts
So I decided to find out what we, a family of four, consume. Apart from pure curiosity on how many bananas we eat each year, I wanted to find out where our cumulative nutrition lies relative to the official recommendation in the US and Europe. Since more or less everything we buy comes with a detailed receipt, I thought it would be the easiest to extract data from them.
Two assumptions here are: there is a detailed receipt for everything we eat; and we do not throw away food. Neither is entirely correct but you know.
Pipeline Sketch
The pipeline sketch looked like this:
Take photos of the receipts, and transfer them to the PC. Pre-process the receipts. Extract the information. ???? PROFIT!!!
Step 1 currently looks like this. My wife and I just send pics to a Telegram chat. Then I manually download them to the computer. It works fine in the meantime, and I might substitute this with a Telegram bot that would feed the pics automatically to the pipeline in the future, but first: receipt pre-processing.
Receipt Scanning Tool
Constructing a Scanning App has become a standard exercise to get oneself familiar with image processing libraries. There are several articles and posts about how to do that: [1], [2], [3], [4]. But the general plan usually is the same and goes as follows.
Step 1: Thresholding and Smoothing
Import the pic in grayscale -> convert to black and white (literally) via thresholding -> dilate to remove small artifacts
# path to image
path = 'img/IMG_0108.JPG' # Load an color image and transform to grayscale
img = cv2.imread(path)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) # thresholding
ret, thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_OTSU) # dilate thresholded image - merges top/bottom
kernel = np.ones((3,3), np.uint8)
dilated = cv2.dilate(thresh, kernel, iterations=3)
Step 2: Finding Corners
Find the contour bounding the largest area -> reduce the number of points in the contour -> approximate the contour with four points. These four points serve as the corner points of the quadrilateral that bounds the receipt.
# find contours and choose the largest one
contours = cv2.findContours(dilated,cv2.RETR_LIST,cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
#contours = imutils.grab_contours(contours)
contours.sort(key = cv2.contourArea, reverse = True) contour = contours[0]
peri = cv2.arcLength(contour, True)
approx = cv2.approxPolyDP(contour, 0.02 * peri, True)
Finally, warp and crop the pic so that the quadrilateral becomes a rectangle.
The code worked beautifully on the first two examples I had. Then I ran it on the receipts that accumulated during the coding time. And it did work in most cases, but sometimes things went wrong in different ways:
For example, here the final contour approximation step outputs less than four points. This was resolved by switching to Otsu’s threshold instead of a constant in the thresholding step.
Here the program just totally missed the receipt on the pic. This happened because out of all contours on the pic I was choosing the one with the most points, while the more reasonable choice is the one bounding the largest area.
Conclusion: I don’t need it
After I pre-processed the pic, I fed to Tesseract. Turns out that the result didn’t differ much from the one I got without preprocessing the receipt. So I decided to just skip the preprocessing part. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Links | https://medium.com/@k-golubev/keeping-track-of-what-we-eat-part-1-pre-processing-the-receipts-5de6b56e474e | ['Konstantin Golubev'] | 2020-12-03 16:14:43.218000+00:00 | ['Image Processing', 'Scanning', 'Preprocess'] |
Moondrop Starfield Review | Accessories: The accessory set looks pretty fleshed upon first inspection. You get 6 pairs of eartips of S/M/L sizes, a glitzy cable that apparently has SPC Litz structure, a clamshell carry-case, some spare dust-filters and a tweezer (surprise!) to help you install them. The latter two are practically bonus at this price point so kudos to Moondrop.
However, the stock cable is bad. It has an overall poor in-hand feel and I just never found it comfortable once worn. The overall fit and finish of the cable is also subpar, and this is one of the worse cables I’ve seen bundled with IEMs in this price range.
Then there is the carrying case which is a bit too small for the Moondrop Starfields. The eartips are also mediocre.
3.5/5
Comfort and Isolation: The Moondrop Starfield is heavier than your typical IEM but is mostly comfortable for long listening sessions. The weight can be a bit of a bother if you smaller ear-canals but for most people I think it’ll be fine. With the right eartips and a better cable the fit is seamless with above-average isolation. In stock form — not so much.
4/5
Now, onto the sound.
The Moondrop Starfield is a single Dynamic Driver design with a 10mm diameter Carbon Nanotube (CNT) diaphragm. Moondrop also employs a dual-cavity design here where the driver magnet, voice coil and driver diaphragm are concentrically arranged between two cavities, which basically looks like two end-caps.
The driver structure
CNT drivers have become sort of a popular thing lately, with both the BLON BL-03 and Tin T4 using them (albeit at different price points).
The general sound signature can be described as balanced with rolled-off treble. The Moondrop Starfield mostly follows the Harman curve, so you get a somewhat boosted low-end (though nowhere near basshead level), a nicely balanced midrange with the signature 3KHz peak and then it slowly tapers off in the treble region to avoid any harshness or treble fatigue/sibilance. All nice on paper, but reality can be… strange.
The following impressions were made with the Azla Xelastec eartips, though I did try with Spinfit CP-100 and Final E-type (Black) tips as well. The general signature remained similar, however.
Bass: The lows on the Moondrop Starfield are rather balanced sounding upon first-listen. There’s a slight mid-bass boost to give a sense of warmth and the sub-bass is decently extended with good enough rumble up to 30Hz and slight rumble until 26Hz (after which it rolls off). All fine and dandy in terms of quantity.
And then we get into the quality of the bass response.
The bass has slow decay, which won’t be too much of an issue had it not been the general lack of texture in the bass response. Especially everything between 60–30Hz sounds monotonous. Bass punch is there, but it’s more of a hollow thump and lacks density. Bass notes lose their definition during fast flowing bass sections. Some may call it polite bass but the lack of texture in the bass makes the whole low-end sound lifeless. Snare hits and bass pedals lack their usual authority in many songs, e.g. Billy Talent’s Surrender.
The bass is boring despite not being anemic. It’s a strange sensation, almost as if the bass is muffled at certain frequencies (no, it’s not a sealing or eartip issue, I’ve confirmed with multiple tips).
3/5
Mids: Definitely the best aspect of the Moondrop Starfield and their calling-card. The midrange is really well-tuned, with the vocals being the highlight (both female and male vocals). Lower mids are full enough to give baritone vocals their signature heft without making them sound boxy (check out Ben Howard’s Cloud Nine). Female vocals meanwhile never got shouty and has a particular smoothness to them that is hardly found in the chi-fi land. Vocal articulation is also well portrayed as you can pick up breathing patterns etc. though they are not as evident as certain vocal specialist IEMs (e.g. Final E4000).
The issue with the midrange lies in its general lack of “attack”. Everything sounds dull and blunted. String instruments lack bite as notes are rounded off, as can be heard on The Paper Kite’s Nothing More Than That (the guitar squeaks for example). It’s not evident initially but the more you use them you notice the missing pieces.
There’s no snap, that is.
Sorry.
Tonally and in terms of timbre the midrange is pretty flawless, it’s the other technical aspects where the Moondrop Starfield falls short.
4/5
Treble: And lastly, the treble response aka the highs. The Moondrop Starfield has a rolled off lower treble which helps in avoiding listening fatigue/harshness/sibilance but then you also lose a lot of definition in the upper registers. The downturn from 3KHz onwards is too steep in my opinion. Ironically, it’s not a dark sounding set, rather the abrupt roll-off results in cymbal hits abruptly disappearing into the void. It can give rise to a sensation of “fast transient response” but that’s misleading I’d say.
The lack of air in treble is also another issue. And of course — the overall resolution is poor. It can’t hold a candle to many lower-priced IEMs when it comes to detail retrieval, even at 1/4th the price. I’m not a detail junkie but the Moondrop Starfield is technically outdone by a number of its competition and that’s a shame.
In short: mediocre treble response, nothing to write home about. At least it’s not harsh or sibilant.
3/5
Soundstage: Due to the elevated midrange the soundstage is mostly intimate in terms of width. However, soundstage depth and height is also subpar.
2.5/5
Imaging: Imaging is mostly left-right and while the spatial cues are alright, the instrument placement, separation and layering leaves a lot to be desired. Ordinal imaging (placement of instruments at corner positions) is also non-existent for the most part.
3/5
Bang-for-buck: This is one criteria which confuses me about the Moondrop Starfield. It doesn’t really do anything better than any of its competition, not to my ears. The imaging/soundstage is strictly average, the midrange is great but there are others with similar/better midrange performance, it’s not a detail-retrieval monster, it’s not even especially cheap.
What it does is hit a specific target curve to some degree and that’s that. It’s got the tonality right but everything else is a big question mark.
2.5/5 | https://medium.com/10hztech/moondrop-starfield-review-f0c9dd47b8f4 | ['Kazi Mahbub'] | 2020-10-07 02:20:45.482000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Tech', 'Headphones', 'Moondrop', 'Starfield'] |
The Top 20 Films of 2018: #1 — PHANTOM THREAD | Courtesy of: Universal Pictures International
Phantom Thread eludes being pinned down, with beguiling mastery. From the word go, you are never quite sure where it is heading, or exactly what sort of film you are watching, but — much like leading lady Alma — you are drawn inextricably into its still and disquieting depths.
To describe Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest (and possibly best) film as having a dual nature would be to merely scratch the surface of its myriad and mirrored themes, styles and tones — each pair interweaving to form a thick tapestry. Here is a study in order and disarray, restraint and abandon, intimacy and distance; it’s a love story that’s tense, supernatural and — dare I say — bizarrely sexy.
Spoilers ahead.
Courtesy of: Universal Pictures International
PTA has always excelled at bringing eccentric characters to life with compassion, whether it’s Adam Sandler’s volatile pudding-coupon collector in Punch-Drunk Love, or Joaquin Phoenix’s traumatised war veteran in The Master, but the scope and dexterity of Phantom Thread elevates this tale of intrigue, control and unconventional passion to a higher plane.
An early scene in the film shows couturier Reynolds Woodcock (played with wit and fervour by the incomparable Daniel Day-Lewis) escaping the stifling dying throes of his latest transient infatuation, as well as the self-imposed restrictions of his orderly life, by fleeing to a country retreat. We see Reynolds gripped with intent as he motors down country lanes at night, his face lit dramatically, as if magically transported from a Hitchcock film.
It’s only natural at this point to assume we’re watching a thriller; the audience is primed by the score, angles and lighting to expect the unexpected. What could be more unexpected, then, than the subsequent meet-cute between Reynolds and his new muse, Alma (an enchanting Vicky Krieps)?
The intensity is still there as the characters lock eyes across a quaint dining room, but the tone, as Alma bumbles into a nearby table with flustering charm, is distinctly sweeter. Reynolds flirts in a decidedly oddball fashion by placing the world’s longest — and most particular — breakfast order, before inviting Alma out to dinner. As Alma notes playfully on his bill, Reynolds is a “hungry boy”, and hunger — for control, creative expression and other people — forms an inescapable element of the film.
Courtesy of: Universal Pictures International
Along with its notes of thriller-esque tension, strains of nostalgic romance and crisp, pithy repartee, Phantom Thread is also, believe it or not, a ghost story. The invisible spectre of his mother’s memory haunts Reynolds figuratively throughout, but also literally, thanks to a poison-mushroom-induced hallucination — providing a moment as unsettling as it is touching.
The fact that Anderson directly follows this otherworldly encounter with one of the film’s few vocal declarations of love underscores his impressive ability to flit deftly between genres in a blink, all while maintaining a pervasive, consuming intensity that keeps you trapped in the taut bubble of Alma and Reynolds’ relationship.
Incidentally, it would be criminal to dissect Phantom Thread without giving due credit to the immersive score by Jonny Greenwood, which effortlessly mirrors the film’s unnervingly enticing mood. It swerves from sparse, rumbling piano lines into sharp, soaring strings, gliding and undulating like a sweeping skirt one moment, plucking and pointed as a needle the next, echoing Beethoven or Debussy — all with as much winsome ease as Anderson’s visual aesthetics evoke a bygone glamour.
The dialogue is clever, prickling with pent-up energy, and delivered fluidly by Day-Lewis, Krieps, and Lesley Manville, in a brilliant turn as Reynolds’ shrewd, unflappable sister. The film is also surprisingly funny, in part thanks to how fully Day-Lewis inhabits his character. Reynolds’ fastidiousness and repressed rage are conveyed with such earnestness that he reflects every uptight curmudgeon you might know in real life with perfect clarity.
To watch Reynolds seething, tight-lipped, while the neckline of one of his beautiful creations is smeared across the wearer’s hot chin before she passes out in a drunken stupor is subtly hilarious (albeit poignant); but when he snaps and marches up to the Countess’s bedroom, to demand the dress is returned to him directly from the unconscious woman’s body — “Take the fucking dress off, Barbara, and bring it to me or I’ll do it myself!” — it is both absurd and sublime.
Courtesy of: Universal Pictures International
This sequence is key to illustrating the dynamic of Reynolds and Alma’s relationship. It is upon Alma’s insistence — that the Countess “doesn’t deserve” the dress — that Reynolds finds the impetus to retrieve his work, rather than just pouting sourly and stewing in his own juices. For all Reynolds’ power within his microcosm, he lacks Alma’s nerve and determination. It becomes a twisted match made in heaven. After reclaiming the gown, now slung casually over its creator’s shoulder like the loot from a heist — another instance of control within the film; it was never about the dress being spoiled — they kiss passionately, the Bonnie and Clyde of 1950s haute couture.
Likewise, the film’s couple waver between passionately captivated with each other and wilfully antagonistic. Alma tests Reynolds, purposefully pushing all his buttons to ascertain his breaking point. And despite his initial veneer of charm, Reynolds rapidly proves to be domineering, selfish and downright rude. He’s therefore an unlikely choice for a romantic lead, and indeed the couple’s dynamic is about as far from the archetypal onscreen romance as you’re ever likely to see.
Yet somehow it’s impossible to deny the strength of their connection, with moments as devastatingly lovely as when Reynolds goes to find Alma in the debauched throng of a New Year’s Eve party. His frustration and urgency are tempered by his clear and overwhelming need to be reunited with Alma, and they are drawn to each other like magnets.
Courtesy of: Universal Pictures International
It’s easy with sequences like this to get swept up in the alluringly soft colour palette and ardent gazes, and forget the glaring imbalance between the pair, right down to their backstories. After all, we know so much about Reynolds’ past and present in exacting detail, whereas we learn little to nothing about Alma, whose very birth country remains a mystery. But if knowledge is power then Alma might have the upper hand.
Indeed, when Reynolds complains to his sister of how his entire life has been thrown into chaos since Alma’s arrival, she appears behind him, a silent apparition in a starched white seamstress’ gown, leaving an “air of quiet death” in her wake. In this way, Reynolds has made himself vulnerable; he freely relates intimate details of his outlook and personal history to her on their first date, requiring nothing in return, which she gladly provides. And so, from the earliest stages, seeds of the shifting power dynamic have already been sown.
What this, and all of the film’s concurrent themes, amounts to is equilibrium. At times, the dynamic appears to teeter on a precipice, before diving in one direction and then the other — Reynolds the unstoppable force, Alma the immovable object — but the characters ultimately find their balance. This perfect bubbling cocktail of moods is so consistent throughout that we are not sure until the very last scene what its overarching theme is, and perhaps not even then.
One of Reynolds Woodcock’s peculiar habits (and there are many) is to sew hidden words into the inner lining of his garments. While Phantom Thread is as much an unsettling tale of destructive power play as it is a yarn of genuine, fated romance, maybe its real message is hidden, a wry wink buried in its lush, layered swathes.
N.B. As our site is UK based, we work off the selection of films released in cinemas in the UK in 2018.
So to recap, here’s our Top 20 to 1!
=20th — SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE
=20th — LEAVE NO TRACE
19th — HEREDITARY
18th — SHOPLIFTERS
17th — FIRST MAN
16th — SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
15th — AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
14th — BLACK PANTHER
13th — BLACKKKLANSMAN
12th — COLD WAR
11th — ISLE OF DOGS
10th — WIDOWS
9th — FIRST REFORMED
8th — MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — FALLOUT
7th — THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
6th — ROMA
5th — ANNIHILATION
4th — LADY BIRD
3rd — YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE
2nd — THE SHAPE OF WATER
1st — PHANTOM THREAD
By J B Queree | https://medium.com/one-room-with-a-view/the-top-20-films-of-2018-1-phantom-thread-4219ec9b81be | ['One Room With A View'] | 2019-01-02 16:09:09.934000+00:00 | ['Phantom Thread', 'Features', 'Fashion', 'Movies', 'Masculinity'] |
What would you tell your 15-year-old self? | The question is often asked in varying ways, but the sentiment is always the same. Given a chance to meet, what ground breaking word of wisdom would your enlightened current self offer to your younger counterpart?
I get it from time to time and have given it some thought.
To be honest I wouldn’t tell him much. That kid was a grade A jack ass. He wouldn’t listen to no one for any reason. Hell bent on blazing his own way and downright determined to make his own decisions no matter how foolish. Most days annoyingly stubborn and selfish.
At best I would simply give him my love and let him know I cared deeply for him. It’s all going to work out just fine anyway. | https://medium.com/halftruths/what-would-you-tell-your-15-year-old-self-cb809c80d875 | [] | 2017-09-26 04:21:48.934000+00:00 | ['Growing Up', 'This Happened To Me', 'Life Lessons', 'Reflections', 'Personal Growth'] |
Matplotlib Cheat Sheet 📊 | Making the bar graph horizontal is as easy as plt.barh( ). Let’s add one more attribute to our graphs in order to depict the amount of variance.
Within you code add the following code
varience = [2,4,3,2,4]
plt.barh( sectors , sector_values , xerr = varience , color = ‘blue’)
The xerr= allows us to indicate the amount of variance per sector value. If need be yerr= is also an option.
Next we will create a stacked bar graph. It may appear that there is a lot of code for this graph but try your best to go through it slowly and remember all the steps we took while creating every graph until now.
sectors = [‘Sec 1’,’Sec 2',’Sec 3',’Sec 4',’Sec 5']
sector_values = [ 23 , 45 , 17 , 32 , 29 ]
subsector_values = [ 20 , 40 , 20 , 30 , 30 ] index = np.arange(5)
width = 0.30 plt.bar(index, sector_values, width, color = ‘green’, label = ‘sector_values’) plt.bar(index + width, subsector_values,width, color = ‘blue’, label = ‘subsector_values’) plt.title(‘Horizontally Stacked Bars’)
plt.xlabel(‘Sectors’)
plt.ylabel(‘Sector Values’) plt.xticks(index + width/2 , sectors) plt.legend(loc = ‘best’)
plt.show()
Without making much modification to our code we can stack our bar graphs one atop the other by indicating, for example, bottom = sector_values within the plt.bar() method of the plot that we want to be on top. Be sure to get rid of the width variable and any instance where it was called further down into our code.
index = np.arange( 5 )
plt.bar( index , sector_values , width , color = ‘green’ , label = ‘sector_values’ )
plt.bar( index , subsector_values , width , color = ‘blue’ , label = ‘subsector_values’ , bottom = sector_values )
Next let’s create a pie chart. This is done easily by using the pie( ) method. We will start with a simple chart then add modifying attributes to make it more unique. Again don’t be overwhelmed with the amount of code that this chart requires.
plt.figure( figsize=( 15 , 5 ) )
hospital_dept = [ ‘Dept A’ , ’Dept B’ , ’Dept C’ , ’Dept D’ , ’Dept E’ ]
dept_share = [ 20 , 25 , 15 , 10 , 20 ]
Explode = [ 0 , 0.1 , 0 , 0 , 0 ] — — Explodes the Orange Section of Our Plot
plt.pie( dept_share , explode = Explode , labels = hospital_dept , shadow =’true’ , startangle= 45 )
plt.axis( ‘equal’ )
plt.legend( title = “List of Departmments” , loc=”upper right” )
plt.show( )
Histograms are used to plot the frequency of score occurrences in a continuous dataset that have been divided into classes called bins. In order to create our dataset we are going to use the numpy function np.random.randn. This will generate data with the properties of a normal distribution curve.
x = np.random.randn( 1000 )
plt.title( ‘Histogram’ )
plt.xlabel( ‘Random Data’ )
plt.ylabel( ‘Frequency’ )
plt.hist( x , 10 ) — — — plots our randomly generated x values into 10 bins.
plt.show( )
Finally lets talk about scatter plots and 3D plotting.
Scatter plots are vert useful when dealing with a regression problem. In order to create our scatter plot we are going to create an arbitrary set of height and weight data and plot them against each other.
height = np.array ( [ 192 , 142 , 187 , 149 , 153 , 193 , 155 , 178 , 191 , 177 , 182 , 179 , 185 , 158 , 158 ] )
weight = np.array ( [ 90 , 71 , 66 , 75 , 79 , 60 , 98 , 96 , 68 , 67 , 40 , 68 , 63, 74 , 63 ] )
plt.xlim( 140 , 200 )
plt.ylim( 60 , 100 )
plt.scatter( height , weight )
plt.title( ‘Scatter Plot’ )
plt.xlabel( ‘Height’ )
plt.ylabel( ‘Weight’ )
plt.show( )
This same scatterplot can also be visualized in 3D. To do this we are going to first import the mplot3d module as follows:
from mpl_toolkits import mplot3d
Next we need to create the variable ax that is set equal to our projection type.
ax = plt.axes( projection = ‘3d’)
The following code is fairly repetitive of what you’ve seen before.
ax = plt.axes( projection = ‘3d’ )
ax.scatter3D( height , weight )
ax.set_xlabel( ‘Height’ )
ax.set_ylabel( ‘Weight’ )
plt.show( )
Well if you’ve made it this far you should be proud of yourself. We’ve only gone through the basics of what matplotlib is capable of but, as you’ve noticed, there is a bit of a trend in how plots are created and executed. Check out the Matplotlib Sample Plots page in order to see the many more plots Matplotlib is capable of.
Next we will discuss Seaborn. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/matplotlib-cheat-sheet-51716f26061a | ['Mulbah Kallen'] | 2019-10-10 05:11:00.196000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Python', 'Matplotlib'] |
22 August 2020 Song/Poem of the Day — Without You | Photo source: roses-142876_1920 pixabay
Without You
It’s just a matter of fact that without you I’m lost
I’m lost in space with no compass to point me in any direction
It’s just a matter of truth that you light up my day
Without you I’m just a drop of water in the vast sea
It’s all but a blur when you’re not with me
I look for you in everything I see
I feel your warmth when you sat in this chair
I feel your touch when you slept in our bed
Without you a fog lingers all around me
I follow your voice in the mist
The smell of your perfume lets me know you’re there
I’ve come to you when you called
I’m here to continue this journey with you
Wake up my darling I know you can hear me
I know you can feel my touch
Stay here with me
Without you there’s no where to go
You can make it my darling, just follow the sound of my voice
Follow me this time
Take my hand for without you I can’t make it on my own
Wake up my darling, it’s not your time
I know because the way you’re holding my hand
I know you can hear my voice
There’s something to be said for a love such as ours
Without you our history of love is forgotten
You’re smile tells me you’ve decided to return to me
I’ll be here when you wake up my darling
For without you love will cease to be
Suzanne Mondoux
22 August 2020
Year 2020 collection Song/Poem of the Day captured on my website (https://suzannemondoux.com/blog/). Thank you to all my readers and followers. Very much appreciated. List of my novels also available https://suzannemondoux.com/ | https://medium.com/illumination/22-august-2020-song-poem-of-the-day-without-you-fec033745fd8 | ['Suzanne Mondoux'] | 2020-08-27 04:08:30.138000+00:00 | ['Illness', 'Lyrics', 'Poetry', 'Love', 'Life'] |
Leadership by Integrity, Freedom, and Enrollment Series — Part 2 | Blind Spot
In this part, I will share with you something about Blind Spot concept and how do you know the Blind Spot in yours.
Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash
Actually, I have shared a little bit about the definition of Blind Spot a long time ago in my blog (see appendix) with the perspective of a startup guy. In that blog, I suppose your knowledge is separated into 3 parts:
Photo on planningengineer.net
And the blind spot is the red area: what you don’t know you don’t know.
Another perspective that I’m sure is easier on the eyes and can find a lot of sharing articles on the internet: getting out of your comfort zone to succeed.
Photo on leadthechange.asia
On the other hand, the blind spot concept can be known as Karma’s definition in Buddhist learning.
Karma is sufficient for karmic retribution, that is, cause and effect results are matched, and results come sooner or later when conditions are met. Karma is the energy, the action of thinking, and then generating intentional, deliberate words that are repeated many times and become habitual. It is that habit that has the dominant power, which attracts us to follow. Talking about karma refers to our total decision-making power. No one can bless the calamity and disposition, but we are the master of many blessed things.
Photo by Jay Castor on Unsplash
After that, the question is how do you know your blind spot? In my last share, I said that to know your blind spot, the only way is ACTION.
And many people think that the ACTION more, the more RESULTS will come, but the reality is not necessarily so. Because of that inaccurate perception, they focused on strategies, theory, principles, habits to create good ACTIVITIES for good RESULTS.
Action is right, but sometimes I guess you will ask yourself: what that you are trying to impose on yourself REALLY makes you feel more comfortable and develop?
First, we should consider Action Flow that I believe its a function for your all action.
This process has been going on for a very long time and has even been ingrained into your subconscious mind. A few of them are present and you may also have realized them which is acknowledged as a habit, belief. It also means that most of them are in the dark and that’s the blind spot in you.
Back to the question of how, I believe there are 3 things that can help me and you: integrity, meditation, intellectual. And I will share these topics in the next parts.
In the end, I hope you can get an idea about the blind spot concept & action flow. The things that I believe are extremely important for us to imagine life as if we were looking away from our own life.
Appendix | https://medium.com/hoaihuongbk/leadership-by-integrity-freedom-and-enrollment-series-part-2-636671646de3 | ['Huong Vuong'] | 2020-04-26 14:20:21.311000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Life', 'Freedom', 'Enrollment', 'Integrity'] |
How One Entrepreneur is Using Technology to Innovate Fitness and Nutrition | Garnysh Your Cravings
If there is a struggle any new mother faces following a pregnancy is getting back into shape and Meeta Vengapally knows this struggle all too well. As a new mother herself throughout her graduate school program, soon after, Meeta found herself with the challenging task of putting together a fitness plan that accommodates her needs.
Although, at first overwhelming, she discovered CrossFit and was able to exceed her fitness and nutritional goals. It was not easy; however, she was dedicated. Throughout her journey, she connected with athletes and trainers understanding the full process between what is made in the kitchen and what is made in the gym. She found one aspect particularly frustrating and downright annoying — tracking her fitness progress manually and spending too much time deciding which nutritional plan would meet her overall goals.
“Tracking everything from food intake to workout regimens manually on a pen and paper was just frustrating. There had to be a more efficient way,” Meeta claimed. “It is just not right.”
Her own experience and frustration led to the idea and founding of Garnysh, a technological platform that utilizes a machine learning algorithm designed to analyze user input and their fitness goals, measuring their macros (i.e. protein, carbs, fats), and analyzing that data to create the proper nutritional plan to accommodate those goals.
“Finding the right type of nutritional meal plan, as I had experienced, could be such an overwhelming process because of all the types diets out there, and this could easily cause many to give up even before they start,” Meeta explained. “I want to change that”.
Her mission is to simplify the fitness and nutrition process so that it is convenient, accessible and empowering users in the process to improve overall well-being. What makes Garnysh so special is not only its comprehensive platform on the fitness front but its partnerships with local verified healthy eateries in creating customized nutritional plans to supplement each users’ respective fitness goals. The eateries are all vetted, verified and approved all on Garnysh’s platform. Subscribers could make additional adjustments tailoring their suggested meal plans towards specialty diets such as vegan, vegetarian and paleo abiding by the macro restrictions.
Meeta Vengapally, Founder and CEO of Garnysh
Garnysh is quickly making strides having been founded less than a year ago and already cash flow positive. “When we take charge over our health, it is such an empowering feeling and we want to be the ‘go-to, all-in-one’ platform that covers all bases, guiding each user through their fitness journey,” Meeta stated. Building that community among fitness, training and food enthusiasts and developing that connection with users to improve overall well-being is the ultimate vision Meeta strives for and reinforces into Garnysh every single day.
With great reason too, having gained her graduate degree in Psychology with a special emphasis towards mental health — she understands that maintaining a healthier lifestyle improves overall well-being especially more so in developing a positive, healthier mental frame. She credits not only her firsthand experiences but her educational background in being able to direct Garnysh to understand its end user on an in-depth level propelling its growth.
Garnysh is currently based in the Silicon Valley area with less than 10 employees, and excitement about the company is rapidly spreading their database quickly growing. The platform is currently in beta testing mode within the Valley and a full release expected in the very near future. Meeta has been featured by Forbes, Smart Hustle as well as an upcoming special feature on Entrepreneur Media. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-one-entrepreneur-is-using-technology-to-innovate-fitness-and-nutrition-bf75622b215b | ['Ahmed Muneeb'] | 2018-08-01 00:06:09.632000+00:00 | ['Nutrition', 'Entrepreneur', 'Fitness', 'Wellness', 'Startup'] |
Agility — a superpower for Human Resource Professionals | A few years ago during an HR Summit in Vancouver, I heard the term Agile in HR for the first time and it piqued my curiosity. Until then Agile to me was a technology followed by software engineers, essentially people on the Delivery side of things in my organization, proven to increase value to customers and the default team approach we had followed for a long time.
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It has made an even bigger impact now as a lot of these functionalities have been embraced during the remote working norms the pandemic has created for us. HR leaders across the world became crisis managers at the onset of this pandemic trying to decipher ways to transition to a remote workspace and thus embracing agile ways of working even though it may have been thrust upon them. HR folks across big and small organizations started incorporating what our Tech peers have been following for decades and bring agility in our functions. We have adopted our ways to be quick, nimble, innovative, and have a customer focusses, entrepreneurial mindset.
Speaking to HR peers in organizations across India, I could see that a vast majority of them have fully embraced Agile in the ways they work post the COVID lockdown in India. Very few companies had remote working options before the pandemic and working from home was something the majority of the Indian workforce was not used to for a longer period of time. And now, 8 months into the lockdown, India Inc has fully embraced the new norm of working from home, amidst the difficulties of living in larger families, poorer internet connection, power outages, and so forth.
However, people have experienced this new way of working, managing the way they work in their own time and knowing it’s manageable, hence making it difficult for businesses to go back to their old ways. COVID has redefined how people work together and how success can be achieved even in the most unforeseen of scenarios. Tools like Slack, MS Teams, GMeet, and ZOOM made all the difference enhancing the agility quotient of all teams.
Few items that have helped us incorporate an agile methodology into our teams were:
Understanding the business and the workforce: Understand your workforce strength inside out, how many permanent, contractors, consultants work for you, who can you reskill/upskill, how can your redeploy the workforce in a moment, encourage role flexibility, knowing the talent pipeline, recruiting and onboarding faster.
Over-communicating: Having frequent connects, town halls, breakout sessions, 1:1 to motivate people, hear suggestions, and bring them together to do their best. Being transparent.
Planning and forecasting: Laying out everything before the start of any project or task. Understanding what is and what cannot be achieved and having succession plans for your key talent. Encourage a bootstrapped, entrepreneurial way of looking at things and managing with limited resources.
Being people-centered: Address anxiety and stress. Assure. Reassure. Having employee assistance programs, wellness sessions, meditation, and yoga session s help. Value people’s times and the fact that we are now working in an environment and family and work needs are entwined. Be humane and considerate of the difficulties they face. Encourage employees to destress outside of work. Create a culture of empathy, sharing, and being human.
Embrace the new: Look for new ways to work together, embrace new tools. With practice, we learn to juggle work easily using the tools easily available in the market. Embrace Digital. Have a digitally enhanced hiring and recruitment process, being agile on having information about your teammates at the tips of your fingers, using AI to enhance the employee engagement experience.
Transforming the HR workforce into being fully agile is critically needed to survive the changes that this pandemic has brought upon us and to make sure that the HR function is considered to be more than just recruiting, onboarding, and retaining employees.
The shift into agile ways that COVID has thrust upon us will make sure we have a compelling reason to look outside the box, redesign our minds, and focus on things that matter most.
Author: Neethu J | https://medium.com/@ficherswalters/agility-a-superpower-for-human-resource-professionals-10871215d92c | [] | 2020-12-04 16:04:31.375000+00:00 | ['News', 'Government', 'Minister', 'Love', 'President'] |
Gifts of the Season Come in Many Forms | Gifts of the Season Come in Many Forms
Photo by Karolina Badzmierowska on Unsplash
Happy Thanksgiving!
Hope this finds you well and safe! Please continue to be extra specially careful as the holiday season unfolds — especially as you go out and about making things merry and bright!
Each one of our wonderful writers brings gifts galore to you, our readers. Though it may not look like it at first blush, dig a little deeper and you will find the nuggets of wisdom, experience, and charm.
Sharing who they are, what they’ve been through and any lessons learned are treasures to be cherished. Our writers put a lot of loving attention into these stories. Our editors took time and care to polish them into the gems you’ll enjoy here.
Show your appreciation by reading and if moved, commenting and clapping. We thank you in advance for your support.
If you haven’t yet checkout out our podcast, STOMP! by all means do so. If it’s valuable, please share it with friends and family.
And now, without further ado, the stories…just for you!
When You Find Just the Right Gift, You Unleash Magic — Marilyn Flower
‘Why would the menopause hurt? It’s perfectly natural’ — Helen Clare
I Killed My Basil Plant — Can I Still Call Myself a Gardener? — Mary Gallagher
Tinnitus Can Feel Like a Wicked Form of Torture — Daniella Mini | https://medium.com/middle-pause/gifts-of-the-season-come-in-many-forms-762fb0e51c6f | ['Marilyn Flower'] | 2020-11-27 17:15:52.378000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Women', 'Menopause', 'Gardening', 'Wisdom'] |
Ethical Startup Playbook | 17 Sustainable Development Goals from The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Adopted by All United Nations Member States in 2015.
IMPACT
Ethical Startup Playbook
On April 11, 1953, Mark R. Sullivan, president, and director of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. said,
Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here’s my prophecy: In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other if they want, as they talk.
On June 7, 2010, Apple launched FaceTime, and Mark’s prophecy came true. It only took Steve 57 years, two months, and four days to change the way people communicate forever.
The lesson here is that sometimes dreams do come true.
Humanity is in trouble, and most people don’t like to talk about it.
We rely on nonrenewable resources not just for energy but for life-saving medical equipment, virtually all manufacturing, transportation, batteries, and so much more. In other words, when oil eventually runs out, the world will time travel back to 1859 virtually overnight — unless we discover ways to replace this non-renewable resource completely.
People also don’t like to talk about many other existential threats to our future, such as coordinated social uprising following the proliferation of automation, a third worldwide war, the rise of the machines after the merge, an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, significant meteoroid impact, and countless other potentially catastrophic events.
I believe that we, as a species, can pool our collective brainpower to solve the world’s most significant challenges and massively extend the average length of life. Although I don’t think we can do it any time soon. This change will take generations and radical public education reform. And it won’t come from any government. Modification of this magnitude will require a private sector that adopts a triple bottom line framework into the fabric of it’s being.
I have a dream for a new kind of startup that follows a code of conduct explicitly designed for the advancement of humanity and planet Earth over the next century and beyond. This playbook outlines beliefs and practices and invites others to join the cause.
An Ethical Startup is radically ethical, and they lead by example for the entire world to see and follow. They are mission-driven and put society and Mother Nature ahead of shareholder profit.
Requirements of an Ethical Startup
The corporation must be a Public Benefit Corporation. The corporation must obtain B Corp Certification within three years of founding. Any board of directors of five or more members shall have no more than two white male members. Any board of directors of five or more members shall have a female majority. Any board of directors of five or more members shall reserve one board seat for an employee elected non-executive representative. Offical board meetings must be silently observable by any employee. Individual employee salaries and bonuses must be transparent to all other employees. Employee benefits shall extend to all employees equally with no exceptions. The corporation must follow regenerative design practices wherever applicable, and especially as it relates to construction, infrastructure, and agriculture. The corporation shall not leverage single-use plastic, palm oil, or other environmentally destructive resources. The corporation must measure its social and environmental impact on at least three different sustainable development goals approved by the United Nations. The corporation shall split profits from data monetization equality with the data providers. The corporation shall opensource all AI that is responsible for protecting human life. The corporation shall not force employees to do anything they do not agree to do. The corporation may only revoke an employee’s salary and access privileges upon recommendation from a company-approved 3rd-party arbitrator as part of a formal dispute resolution process. The corporation shall offset all carbon output from operations and all employee transportation. The corporation shall make every attempt to ensure all supply chain partners and vendors adhere to Ethical Startup practices.
A Path to Change
Every startup created at the AARRRG startup studio will be an Ethical Startup. Eventually, each Ethical Startup will leverage a software protocol and business operating system to facilitate transparent adherence to these practices. We also plan to opensource a set of corporate bylaw addendums so that any corporation may legally adopt these principles.
Through the practices above, Ethical Startups will eliminate wage gaps, discrimination, gender inequality, ethical fading, abuse of natural resources, and so much more. We hope these radically ethical startups will lead to impactful change for humanity, bringing about more significant levels of peace and prosperity than have previously been imagined.
We invite you to join our cause. Subscribe to AARRRG to follow our story, and comment with any concerns, criticism, support, or other thoughts that you’d like to share. | https://medium.com/aarrrg/ethical-startup-playbook-faa3bab9ea48 | ['Ryan Reece'] | 2019-12-22 18:31:11.926000+00:00 | ['Impact Investing', 'Sustainability', 'Sustainable Development', 'Startup', 'Impact'] |
Deep learning losses for classification & probabilities | An unified view
Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash
Classification & Probability
Classification & Probability? Why mix both? Well, because classification indeed can be thought as fitting a probability distribution, bear with me. I’ll comment a bit about how to fit distributions and then relate it to classification.
Probability
The loss used for fitting a probability distribution is the negative log likelihood, I explain it with more detail here. What it does is given a distribution defined by some parameters (obtained from the output of a NN in this case), what is the probability of observing, (the target / label) Y? And then update the parameters through backpropagation in the direction where we maximize the probability of observing Y with a different set of parameters.
The observation Y won’t change obviously, as we want something that can fit as best as possible the generation of those observed Y (for future inference), we will change the parameters towards increasing the likelihood of obtaining those observations if sampling from the probability distribution.
One last time, we want a probability distribution parameterized from past data to predict some future data Y given some input X.
Each probability distribution have a different maximum likelihood estimation function, so I’m not going to enter into more detail here but we can reduce the general case to the following, where “p” is the maximum likelihood estimation function (I’m omitting the parameters of the distribution) (some examples gaussian, categorical, poisson…):
And we are lucky because deep learning frameworks already provides them!
Classification
Classification can be seen as using probability distributions, for the binary case we have the bernoulli distribution, for multi-class we have the categorical distribution, and you can think on the binary case as a special case of the multi-class classification.
If we have a probability distribution we know we can fit it with the negative log likelihood as mentioned above.
Also you probably already know we also have cross entropy and binary cross entropy. More weirds terms! Why?! :’(… Don’t worry, although cross entropy and NLL isn’t the same, for our case it’s the same (very well explained here), or better say the math formulas at the end simplify to the exact same thing, therefore cross entropy = binary cross entropy = NLL. They just exposes different apis, but they are the same at the end. Don’t you believe me? Take a look on the following code:
Why so many options for doing the same thing? Depending on the use case you want to use one or the other. Binary? Multi class? Logits? Normalized? …
Why negative on the “negative log likelihood”? Because the frameworks usually only implements miniziation, so we maximize the likelihood by minimizing the negative value. | https://medium.com/deeplearningmadeeasy/deep-learning-losses-for-classification-probabilities-154f6d98fe61 | ['Alvaro Durán Tovar'] | 2020-12-01 20:36:04.503000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Pytorch', 'Loss Function', 'Classification', 'Probability'] |
How to Build Your Portfolio as a Content Writer | What are Portfolio and its need?
A writing portfolio possesses your finest writing as a freelance writer. It manifests your writing skill in your desired topics. It shows your potential as a content writer.
A client won’t hire you unless they have read your script in the niche they need. Hence the need for the portfolio.
Ways to Build Your Portfolio
Here’s what you need to do to make your portfolio more alluring:
1) Discover Your Pet Themes
Here is the fun fact, you don’t need to add in all the writings you’ve composed to your portfolio. Instead, your portfolio must embody your brand. Dig up your perfect potential and write about it.
For example, if you’re marketing yourself as a finance writer who can explain twisted ideas in an exciting, fetching way, you’ll want to include your best specimens; ones that mirror your exceptional voice and ones that are straightforward.
2) Create Your Blog
Start your blog. Write about the areas you are passionate about, publish them on it now and then. Make it a habit.
You can use them as models. You can showcase your work whenever a client demands it.
There are a lot of free as well as paid websites where you can begin your blog.
3) Your Perfect Bio Portion
Your Biography is the place where you sell yourself without selling your soul to the devil. Oh, dear! That was melodramatic. It must express why clients should hire you while sustaining your integrity.
Here are the musts to enter:
i. Pen name.
ii. Job title. Are you marketing yourself as a “freelance writer,” “journalist,” or “content marketing specialist?”
iii. An abridged description of your work course. Make sure this part brandishes your writer’s voice.
iv. Social media links. Facebook, Twitter, or anything related to your work and how to contact you.
v. Something about your personality.
4) Work on Freelancer Sites
Set up a profile on freelancer sites like Fiverr and Upwork. Take orders from clients, give your best shot with honesty and punctuality. In the long run, you will get good reviews and ratings. It will also serve as your portfolio.
5) Write Editorials for Publications
This will also be a healthy addition to your portfolio. If you are diligent and keep up with the rules and regulations of publications then you are good to go.
Begin searching for some best publications according to your proficiency, tell them that you want to write an article for them, and follow the procedure.
What not to Add in a Portfolio?
Don’t clutter your portfolio with all your writings. Include the ones that show your passion and represent your potential to the fullest.
It’s Time to Build Your Alluring Portfolio
You are good to go!
Remember that you have teeming potential, the only thing you need is hard work, consistency, discipline, and honesty. With all these qualities you can Conquer the World!
Best of Luck with Your Endeavors! | https://medium.com/@fariah-faisal/how-to-build-your-portfolio-as-a-content-writer-5710c92cb390 | ['Fariah Faisal'] | 2020-12-26 09:48:58.027000+00:00 | ['Portfolio', 'Freelancing', 'Content Writing'] |
Data Manipulation using DPLYR : Part 1 | In this blog, you will learn how to easily perform data manipulation using R software. We’ll use mainly the popular dplyr R package, which contains important R functions to carry out easily your data manipulation. The dplyr package(written by Hadley Wickham) provides us with several functions that facilitate the manipulation of data frames in R. Some of the most useful include:
The select Function: facilitates the selection of records (rows)
2. The filter Function: facilitates the selection of variables (columns)
3. The arrange Function: facilitates the ordering of records
4. The mutate Function: facilitates the creation of new variables
5. The rename Function: facilitates the renaming of variables
6. The summarize Function: facilitate the summarization of variables
At the end of this blog, you will be familiar with data manipulation tools and approaches that will allow you to efficiently manipulate data.
What is Data Manipulation ?
If you are still confused with this ‘term’, let me explain it to you. Data Manipulation is a loosely used term with ‘Data Exploration’. It involves ‘manipulating’ data using available set of variables. This is done to enhance accuracy and precision associated with data.
Actually, the data collection process can have many loopholes. There are various uncontrollable factors which lead to inaccuracy in data such as mental situation of respondents, personal biases, difference / error in readings of machines etc. To mitigate these inaccuracies, data manipulation is done to increase the possible (highest) accuracy in data.
At times, this stage is also known as data wrangling or data cleaning.
Required R package
First, you need to install the dplyr package and load the dplyr library then after you can able to perform the following data manipulation functions.
install.packages('dplyr') library(dplyr)
Demo Datasets
student <- data.frame(Student_Id = c(1012301, 1012302, 1012303, 1012304, 1012305),
Firstname = c('John', 'Jeff', 'Ronald', 'Jennifer', 'Jessica'),
Lastname = c('Novak', 'Barr', 'Lum', 'Forbis', 'Connor'),
Subject_Id = c('SAE6A', 'SAE6B', 'SAE6C', 'SAE6G', 'SAE61'),
Age = c(20, 19, 20, 19, 20),
Sex = c('M', 'M', 'M', 'F', 'F'))
print(student)
Output:
1. The select Function
The select function allows us to choose the columns to keep within a dataset. This can be done by simply specifying the column names (or numbers) to retain.
You can perform data manipulations on either dataframe or CSV file.
Now, you can choose any number of columns using select function. Here, columns 1 to 3 and 5 columns are chosen using both column name and number which shows in below snippet:
You can use negatives to select columns to drop:
There are a number of additional supporting functions you can use in order to identify columns to select or omit, such as “contains”, “starts_with” and “ends_with” :
2. The filter Function
The filter function allows us to choose specific rows from a data frame. You achieve this by specifying a logical statement:
3. The arrange Function
The arrange function allows us to sort the data on 1 or more variables. You provide values which specify the variables by which to sort in ascending order:
You can use the desc function to specify that a variable be sorted in descending order:
4. The mutate Function
You can create new variables within a data frame using the mutate function:
Tip: the ifelse function can be used for conditional logic when creating variables.
5. The rename Function
The rename function provides a neat and highly readable way to rename columns:
You can also rename multiple variables at once:
Tip: The new name is on the left and the old name is on the right.
6. The summarize Function
Often when analyzing a dataset we want to calculate summary statistics; You can do this with the summarize function, in conjunction with several basic summary functions:
Standard summaries such as mean, median, min, max etc.
Additional functions provided by dplyr: n, n_distinct
Sums of logicals, such as sum(x > 10)
If you have missing data we can add an option na.rm = TRUE that will find the summary value even if there are missing values.
Notice that the default column names are equal to the call that was made. You can replace these by specifying a new column name:
Summary
In this blog on data manipulation in R, we discussed the functions of manipulation of data in R. The dplyr package provides us with several functions that facilitate the manipulation of data (e.g., select, filter, arrange, mutate, summarize, rename).
When calling the functions:
The first argument is the input data frame,
The remaining arguments describe what to do to the data frame
The function outputs a data frame.
The next part of the series part2 will cover the data manipulation using tidyr package.
If you like the blog or found it helpful please leave a clap!
Thank you | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/data-manipulation-using-dplyr-part-1-fc0706c3c51f | ['Margi Patel'] | 2020-06-26 11:30:16.870000+00:00 | ['R Language', 'Machine Learning', 'Technical Writing', 'Data Manipulation', 'Data Science'] |
I Want to Travel Without Killing Polar Bears | Glacier National Park, where many glaciers are melting and more have already disappeared
Recently I read this New York Times article that broke down global warming, and in particular how it is affected by aviation, into digestible information that alarmed me.
Did you know that one passenger on a 2,500-mile flight is responsible for melting 32 square feet (or, for those who are metrically challenged: 3 square meters) of Arctic summer sea ice cover? Now we both do.
This article popped up on my Facebook feed shortly after having a conversation with a friend about this exact topic (the creepiness of that deserves its own post — I digress). In the time that has passed since the two of us last saw each other, my friend has adopted a vegan lifestyle, forsaken his car, and has now decided that after one “last hurrah” flight to hike the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal next year, he is swearing off transport by plane for good — and he encouraged me to do the same. Basically for the reasons that I’ve just read about in this NYT piece, with the thumbnail image of a sorrowful cartoon polar bear perched on an ice floe as airplanes fly overhead.
I was primed to read this article after last week’s conversation with my friend (following which I of course desperately googled the topic, hoping I would find a goldmine of information telling me that flying isn’t all that bad, really. I failed to find the goldmine.)
Recently I purchased a one-way flight from Sri Lanka (where I’ve been living and working for the past year) to India. In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be beginning my 5 month tour of Asia (perhaps more on that later). Like many other privileged millennials, I love to see new places, meet interesting people, eat weird food. Get out of my comfort zone.
But does my desire to see the world (and my western lifestyle in general) justify that, according to this study by John Nolt,
“the average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people”?
A while ago, I read a BBC article explaining why brain biases prevent action on climate change issues. I can see the effect of many of these biases in my own life and my attitude towards world travel — particularly hyperbolic discounting, and the bystander effect. For example, I choose to believe that the present is more important than the future and that it is the job of governments and companies to take climate action, while it is my job to travel the world now, while I’m young (and before it’s all destroyed).
I asked another friend his opinion on the topic. His point was essentially that we need better technologies to mitigate these issues, but one thing is certain — humans refuse to downgrade their quality of life. The rest of the world is catching up to the standards of the west, which is a problem because we aren’t practicing sustainable living.
I watched a Ted Talk called “100 Solutions to Reverse Global Warming” by Chad Frischmann of Project Drawdown, which claims to be the world’s leading source of climate solutions. “Drawdown” refers to the point when greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere level off and then start to decline, thereby reducing global warming. Through its research, Project Drawdown has identified 100 solutions that will make drawdown possible, all of which exist today and can be fully utilized with technology. By proposing real, attainable solutions, they aim to change the negative narrative surrounding the topic of climate change into one of opportunity and hope.
Out of all the solutions to reversing global warming laid out by Project Drawdown, aviation was not at the top of the list (it’s #43). So what tops the list?
While diving into this website and clicking through many other links, I realized that I didn’t know too much about global warming, what’s causing it, and what can be done to prevent it. But as I read, I began to feel much more optimistic about these proposed solutions and saw how I could be putting many into practice in my own life. A plant-rich diet and reducing food waste? Of course I can do that! Turn off the AC? I live in the tropics, but still I know I can vastly cut down here. Supporting programs to educate girls and promote family planning? Quite easy to get involved.
I liked and saved this Instagram post by Sophia Bush, an activist who I admire, also generally relating to this topic:
BUT, I still feel a nagging sense of guilt when I think about the damage that the flight from Sri Lanka to India will incur, or the continuing negative impact that my 5 month tour of Asia could potentially cause if I’m not intentional about the way I travel.
So, what’s my point in all of this? Honestly, I’m not sure. But with the wealth of knowledge at my fingertips, I can’t use the excuse of ignorance. If I’m going to travel and see the world, I need to make sustainable travel my top priority. What I’ve realized is there are many ways that I can adapt my lifestyle, without downgrading my quality of life, that will in turn help my planet and my fellow humans. But that first requires me to be aware, to care, to learn, and to make changes. As Aziz Ansari put it… | https://sarahngottshall.medium.com/i-want-to-travel-without-killing-polar-bears-f3c711a6c91 | ['Sarah Gottshall'] | 2019-08-23 14:59:30.122000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Environment', 'Millennials', 'Sustainability', 'Travel'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/friday-blucat-8ee5b18f53bc | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2018-09-14 00:41:01.373000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Illustration', 'Friday', 'Italy', 'Watercolor'] |
Roku Publishing Made Easy. | Now available at www.mediarazzi.com
New Book Reveals All the Secrets to Publishing a Profitable Roku Channel
By Mediarazzi Staff
It goes without saying, with video marketing at its highest point ever, Roku and Connected TV channels are, “the new website.” At least, according to Mediarazzi founder/CEO Phil Autelitano they are. In his new, “Publish Your Own Roku Channel” book and program, he reveals all the secrets he’s learned over nearly a decade of publishing profitable Roku TV Channels.
If you’re one of the five people left in this world who’s never heard of Roku, you should check out their website before reading any further — www.roku.com
If you know Roku, then you know it’s the future of television. The Connected TV industry, led by Roku, over the past ten years has EXPLODED from just a few thousand active viewers in 2008–9 to tens of millions now. And it’s STILL growing strong! Every day, millions of viewers tune into Roku for everything from TV and movies to music, sports, news, weather, politics, food, and a host of other exciting content. Roku has become a household name in many homes across the nation, and has cemented it’s place as the platform of choice for streaming television viewers.
That said, with all those viewers, content creators are coming out of the woodwork to develop their own Roku “channels” to distribute and profit from their content in ways they just can’t on other platforms or online with sites like YouTube. There’s never been a better time in history to distribute your content to millions of viewers, quickly, easily — and downright inexpensively — than now. Roku has dropped the barrier-to-entry for television viewership down to the ridiculous, and because advertisers are quickly catching on, there’s never been a better time than now to PROFIT the most from your content. Of course, it all starts with creating (publishing) a Roku Channel…
In his “Publish Your Own Roku Channel” book and program, Phil Autelitano takes you step-by-step through the process of designing, building, monetizing and publishing your Roku Channel live to millions of Roku users nationally and worldwide. He simplifies the process to the point ANYONE with reasonable computer and Internet skills can do it — with zero coding knowledge or experience required. Heck, you don’t even have to have CONTENT, because he tells you where to get that, too, by offering dozens of sources for free and easy-to-acquire content for your channel.
There’s never been a more comprehensive instruction manual to publishing a Roku Channel than now. “Publish Your Own Roku Channel” includes absolutely everything you need to do it:
Comprehensive Roku-building instructions
Easy-to-use graphics templates
Pre-built JSON channel feed template
Free Content Sources
Monetization Sources (for making money with your channel)
Easy-to-follow coding guide
Hands-on instructions
Ongoing advice and guidance
And more!
“Publish Your Own Roku Channel” is more than just a “book” — it’s a complete program, or course, better yet, a virtual “Roku Channel-in-a-box.” And it’s not just for beginners. The advice, strategies, tips, tactics and techniques Phil Autelitano reveals in this program will benefit even the most advanced Roku developer or publisher. He’s literally taken out all the stops and revealed EVERYTHING he’s learned over nearly a decade of developing and publishing Roku Channels for clients that include major brands and celebrities like Paula Deen and boxing legend Oscar de la Hoya, and more.
There’s no argument Phil Autelitano has earned his place as one of the foremost experts on Roku publishing and monetization, and in this book/program he proves it. It’s a value at ten times the price and it’s available exclusively at www.mediarazzi.com.
And if the book and program aren’t enough, Phil is now offering hands-on instructor-led training and one-on-one Roku coaching programs. He works with clients small and large to develop and produce quality, revenue-generating Roku Channels.
Before you spend ONE DIME on Roku development, you need to read “Publish Your Own Roku Channel” by Phil Autelitano. It will give you the knowledge, insights and even the skills you need to create a professionally-designed Roku Channel that MAKES MONEY for you.
Learn more at www.mediarazzi.com. | https://medium.com/business-marketing/roku-publishing-made-easy-e5c857d4d2f9 | ['Phil Autelitano'] | 2018-11-19 07:44:55.543000+00:00 | ['Video Marketing', 'Roku', 'Content Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Branding'] |
The Literally Literary Weekly Update #4 | One Last Note
We have 27,551 followers at Literally Literary. We have approximately 200 writers. Even with these tremendous numbers, most of the submitted works get less than 20 views. Why? Algorithms.
How do we combat this and support each other? Bookmark our homepage and once a day, come here and see what you missed. The only way we can be the kind of community we all want to be is to support each others’ works by reading them.
Our homepage has a Top 25–30 that is updated every single day with new works published in the last month. Below that, you will find our trending works and then the latest ones that you may have missed. Be a participant and read works from amazing writers that maybe you don’t follow yet, but might want to. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-literally-literary-weekly-update-4-e2d437a18cd7 | ['Jonathan Greene'] | 2020-01-15 15:48:17.831000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Nonfiction', 'Ll Letters', 'Fiction', 'Essay'] |
Legend of Owney the postal dog | In the autumn of 1888, a shaggy mutt found his way to the post office of Albany, New York. The mail workers there fell in love with the friendly pooch’s cute antics and named him Owney.
Little did they know that it was the beginning of a legendary chapter in the history of postal services. Rather than chasing a mailman, this dog was about to turn one.
Owney the postal dog
Owney loved the smell of mailbags and soon began following them around. He would act as the dutiful guard and would only allow the designated mailman to access them. Soon, he started moving with the mail — on trains and coaches, first within the state and later across the country.
Since none of the trains and wagons he was on ever met with an accident (derailments were quite common back then), the postal staff, as well as the railways, considered Owney as a good luck charm.
No matter where Owney went, mail carriers would adore him as one of their own — making him the unofficial mascot of the postal service.
As Owney travelled farther, his friends at the Albany Post Office feared he might wander too far to find his way home again so they purchased a leather collar with a tag reading “Owney, Post Office, Albany, NY.”
They would record Owney’s travels by attaching metal baggage tags to his collar to identify the rail lines he travelled on. Since he travelled far and wide, to dozens of destinations, soon he got weighed done by his collection of tags.
Owney accumulated over a thousand medals and tags — earning each one of them. This included his 1895 international trip when he boarded — steamers, ships and reached as far as Asia!
Postmaster General John Wanamaker was one of Owney’s fans. Upon realizing that the dog’s collar was weighed down by an ever-growing number of tags, he gave Owney a harness to display his ‘medals’.
By some estimates, Owney travelled over 143,000 miles in his life.
Death and legacy
In the June of 1897, Owney boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio. He was shown to a newspaper reporter by a postal clerk and it is said that Owney bit the clerk and was put down (although the exact circumstances were not satisfactorily reported).
Mail clerks who were ordered to bury the dog declined and said he deserved better. They raised funds to have his body preserved to create a lifelike replica of the dog using his own fur and it was given to the Post Office Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In 1911, the department transferred Owney to the Smithsonian Institution. From 1993 onwards he is on display at the Smithsonian’s new National Postal Museum, becoming one of the museum’s most popular attractions.
120 years and counting, the legacy of this hero dog lives on.
Complement the heroic story of Owney the postal dog with other canine heroes who are excelling in various job fronts. | https://medium.com/@kaalicharan/legend-of-owney-the-postal-dog-2d5e0c2bc482 | ['Abhishek Joshi'] | 2020-12-03 04:18:08.114000+00:00 | ['Dogs', 'True Story', 'Interesting', 'Postal Service', 'History'] |
Designing Beyond 2020 | Photo by Douglas Sanchez on Unsplash
Designing Beyond 2020
The Future of UX Design is Already Here
This is that time of year where the ritualistic end-of-year articles begin popping up — Looking Back at 2020 or 2020 in Retrospect. There always seem to be scores of articles predicting future design trends and the future of the user experience. That’s not what this is.
While I do harbor a certain fascination with our species’ ability to establish temporal landmarks and treat December 31st as distinct and different from January 1st, I don’t entertain any fantasies around the clean slate idea of closing out one year and beginning another. History seems to bear a continuity that bleeds beyond the margins of a well-structured calendar.
We’ll still have the same lives and the same problems tomorrow as we have today. 2021 will probably be a lot like 2020.
Sorry if that last line was the equivalent of pissing in your Cheerios but don’t stop reading yet. There’s an optimistic element to what I’m getting at here.
So while 2021 may not be much different than 2020, there are certain defining events in any year. They aren’t always easy to identify — especially where change is concerned. It’s sort of like gaining or losing weight. You don’t even notice it’s happening despite looking at yourself in the mirror every day. It’s a subtle change that is easier to identify well after the fact. That’s what I think might be happening in 2020 to the design community.
I’ve recently noticed a parallel between the design profession and current events of the world. I am mostly referring to UX design here while also recognizing this encompasses all types of designers. There is a burgeoning interest in events that are larger than us, larger than our community.
Over the holidays, I spent some time catching up on podcasts I had let build up, largely due to my lack of a commute this year. It was interesting to look at the variety of topics and how they mirrored current events of the world. There were episodes covering design’s role in inequality, eco-friendly digital design, addressing misinformation and all sorts of topics around ethics.
It wasn’t always like this. Ten years ago we were mostly talking about design methods and how to increase our footprints in organizations. It is as though our profession has become mature enough to begin recognizing our place in the world and using the tools we have at our disposal to make a difference. Or, at least we’re having conversations about those things.
It’s kind of like UX is growing up — no longer a tween or a teen but rather a young adult. We’re reaching that point of maturity where we are more self-aware. We’re considering our place in the world, our impact and our ability to change the world for the better (or sometimes for the worse). We’re considering our work in the context of current events tackling topics like the environment, social inequalities, political misinformation — issues that affect our lives deeply.
Of course, there are those who would make the point that we were talking about these deeper issues many years ago, that this isn’t a 2020 thing. Maybe that’s true. But we weren’t talking about these issues at this level in 2010 or even in 2015. We didn’t seem to have that self-awareness we’ve begun to develop over the past few years — that sense of place, belonging and purpose.
I don’t know that 2020 represents the boiling point around social inequalities or misinformation or any other ethical issue. I don’t think there is a clear line of demarcation on these sorts of things. But 2020 has had more events packed into it than many of the years preceding it. It is a year that will likely spawn changes beyond its existence — maybe for the good, maybe for the worse. It’s also a year where our roles as designers in a greater society have never been more clear.
And we’ve been talking about it.
That’s good. Dialogs allow us to work through issues as a profession. It’s where awareness is cultivated and the seeds of change can be planted.
People often say, design can’t change the world — that we shouldn’t, as designers, expect to make the largest splash. I have often said this as well. But when we look at the world around us, it is almost completely by design. You can choose almost any topic in current events or at a global scale and find that it is by design.
Environmental issues, for example. We designed the machines that burn fossil fuels and the systems they operate in — everything from assembly lines to our network of connected roads. We design the devices and machines that use electricity. We are a very large part of what exists on the internet. While it is clear we have played a very large role in the contributing factors to environmental harm, some of the solutions will likely fall at our feet.
National and local elections in America (and across the globe) are by design. The voting process, establishing constituent boundaries (to include the manipulation of those boundaries) and the campaigns themselves all have rather large design components to them.
Social inequality is largely by design. We have gerrymandered, put certain laws in place to keep castes in power and designed systems to exclude those who are not. Urban design often results in the displacement of residents, unaffordable housing and diminished access to key resources such as transportation, education and healthcare. Designers are sprinkled throughout this entire process. Decisions are by design. We even design the tools that support the existing castes.
We may not be the sole voice in the room. We are often not the decision-makers around some of these issues. But I think we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t recognize the large part we play and the influence we have in shaping decisions around these issues.
If you work hard enough to pick something apart, just to see how it works, you’ll often find design as a primary culprit to either a good or bad outcome. That soap dispenser that doesn’t recognize your skin because it is too dark to reflect enough light? I can hazard a guess as to how that happened.
The product was either not tested at all or it was tested but not with a representative sample (i.e. there were no darker-skinned humans used in the study). Perhaps it was built from a set of existing specifications, a set of standards, that determine how much light the sensor needs to engage. Maybe budget money was slim and testing was pushed off to the end when it was too late to implement any research discoveries. Regardless, you can see how this outcome could have been significantly influenced by a pesky designer pushing for earlier testing or a representative sample.
I am not laying blame for the woes of the world on designers here. Nor am I suggesting we have any sort of absolute power over our ideas. I’m merely underscoring our importance. I’m underscoring our ability to influence small parts of the world and that those small parts eventually bubble up into a larger whole. | https://chriskiess.medium.com/designing-beyond-2020-44fd644d7e5c | ['Chris Kiess'] | 2020-12-31 16:11:35.123000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UX', 'User Experience', 'Design'] |
The Most Problematic Things Men Have Ever Said to Me | In Maggie Lupin’s story “I Ditched My Date in the Middle of Dinner”, she faced a scenario familiar to many women. A man made an inappropriate comment, but he was convinced his words were actually a compliment. He couldn’t understand why his date was so offended that she walked out of the restaurant on their first date.
I’m proud of Maggie for keeping her cool and having the courage to walk out on him. It wasn’t her job to sit him down and explain all the things wrong with his backhanded compliment. Not on a first date. Not at his age. He should know better. Her story got me thinking…
Is it our job to explain to someone we’ll never see again why their behavior or words are problematic?
When we don’t call someone out and tell them why we’re offended, we’re only sending them off to talk to someone else in that way. I understand the benefit of making an effort to show someone why their words are inappropriate. But how much of a difference can you actually make?
I’ve heard backhanded compliments and sexist comments from a casual fling or first date many times.
It’s happened so many times I’ve realized trying to tell a 36-year-old man why he shouldn’t say things like that is not really my job.
It’s not my responsibility to sit a grown man down like a child and hand them a bulleted list of reasons.
I wanted to share some of the messages I’ve received over the last few years. They’re not pretty messages, and it doesn’t feel good to repeat them. In every one of these texts, I just blocked the sender while wondering, “How have you made it this far in life?”
If a man or woman is a grown adult, and they haven’t learned how to respect others yet, then I wish them the best of luck. But it’s not my job to teach them. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/is-it-my-job-to-explain-to-a-man-why-his-words-are-problematic-1e12ae585740 | ['Jessica Lovejoy'] | 2020-08-09 16:12:59.199000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'This Happened To Me', 'Women', 'Dating'] |
Role of smaller states in the two world wars and Indo-Pacific lessons for China | We have known the two world wars to be between major powers of the world, the first one between the allied powers led by Britain, France, the US, Italy, Japan and Russia and central powers led by Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Germany, while the second one between allied powers led by the US, Britain, France and the USSR and the axis powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan. However, it was always the smaller nations which caused the spark that ignited the two world wars, while the complex web of alliances which took it forward to the scale as we know it.
World war I
It was fought between the allied forces and the central forces mentioned before. But, what brought these major nations into the war? The central powers did not have colonies all around the world like the allied forces did. This caused them to look for expansion within Europe. The allied powers on the other hand had alliances with smaller nations, against whom the aggression of central powers was focused. This caused them to enter the war. It began when Serbian nationalists, who were Slavs(an ethnic group), assassinated the archduke of Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia, as they wanted Bosnia to be a part of a future Slav nation, Yugoslavia. Austria-Hungary then attacked Serbia. Russian Czars, who were Slavs, then entered to protect Serbia. This caused Germany to enter in defence of the Austria’s Habsburg, which was a German empire. Germany, which was aware of Franco-Russian alliance, planned to invade France. The invasion plan required them to invade Belgium first(see map). The invasion of Belgium caused Britain, which had guaranteed Belgium borders, to enter the war. Then Japan entered to defend its ally, Britain. The US entered to protect its own interests. The result was a humiliating loss to the central powers which lost most of its territories(see map below) and also a change in their regimes.
World war II
Britain and France had guaranteed the borders of minor powers like Poland and Czechoslovakia. Adolf Hitler, through negotiation in Munich conference, had secured Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia, but that resulted in unrest and law and order problems in the rest of Czechoslovakia and the latter was forced by Germany to invite it to control the unrest, when the latter annexed it. The allied powers did not act blaming Czechoslovakia for inviting Germany. This emboldened Germany to invade Poland. It was at this time that the allied powers declared war on Germany. Italy under Benito Mussolini and Japan joined the axis powers. Russia which was on the axis side, shifted to the allies when Hitler invaded Russia. The US joined the allies. The result of which was a devastating loss to the axis. Germany divided between Russia, the US, Britain and France.
Indo-Pacific
Source: Forbes
China has been increasingly aggressive in the South China sea. The claims of various nations have been shown above, where China claims the entire sea through its nine-dash line. Philippines approached the UNCLOS to claim sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal, where it got the ruling in its favour. The ruling is binding on the member nations. China, despite being a member nation did not accept it. It has been stopping oil drilling by Malaysia and Vietnam, preventing Philippines’ poor fishermen from fishing, building artificial islands in the sea to claim the sea.
Artificial island built by China
It has to be noted that the islands are just rocks with no economic value. Its the sea that carries value. Trade worth 5.3 trillion dollar passes through the South China sea . It has proven reserves of 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil.
China has to understand that bullying of smaller nations has not gone down well in the recent history as shown before. Germany and Austria have only lost territory in the world wars. It has to be noted that the US has pledged its support to nations neighbouring the South China sea. In its greed for more territories, China, along with disturbing the world peace, might also end up with the same fate as Germany in the two world wars. | https://medium.com/@shreyaskenganal145/role-of-smaller-states-in-the-two-world-wars-and-indo-pacific-lessons-for-china-c6da754584e1 | ['Shreyas Kenganal'] | 2021-10-31 07:19:59.111000+00:00 | ['South China Sea', 'Philippines', 'China', 'Vietnam', 'World War II'] |
Steps to making an outstanding LinkedIn profile | LinkedIn is THE place to go for both job-seekers and employers. It allows you to share your skills and experiences while building a network of contacts. Recruiters use the platform to source candidates. This means that having a compelling LinkedIn profile can help you stand out of the crowd and ultimately land a job.
Here are some guidelines and tips that can help you create an outstanding profile.
Header
Profile Picture: Use a recent, high-resolution photo of yourself as the profile picture. You should be dressed appropriately and portrayed alone. Choose a picture with a simple background, good lighting, and a smile.
Cover Photo: Use your cover photo to make a good impression! Show your personality and interests. It could be a landscape picture of your favorite place, a picture of yourself hiking (or any other hobby), or a picture of your tools of trade. You could also go one step further by customizing a banner that shows your key strengths, professional accomplishments, or passions. Canva has a lot of free templates you could utilize!
Headline: This is a tagline that communicates who you are as a professional. This sentence or two will show up along your name in a Google or LinkedIn search. Highlight specific skills or accomplishments, such as “Java/Java Script Developer” or “B2B Customer Experience.” Showcase your goals by saying something like “seeking a full-time sales job.”
Pro Tip: Get a custom URL. LinkedIn will use random numbers in your URL when you first create your profile, but you should set a custom URL instead. Try to use your name or initials so that it’s easy for you to remember and share. You can do this by going into ‘edit public profile & URL’ and clicking ‘edit URL’ on the right.
Summary
Think of the summary as a 30-second pitch. Summarize who you are, your background, and career goals. Highlight your key experiences and achievements in paragraph or bullet form. You can also share something about yourself outside of work, such as an interest that might resonate with your future connections.
Experience
List your internships or leadership experiences in this section. Describe what you did in a clear and concise manner in the form of 1–2 bullets. In the description, emphasize the skills that are most relevant to the jobs you are applying for. Try to quantify your contributions so that recruiters can see the scope of your work.
Pro Tip: Add links and media to your experience section. Showcase projects, case studies, portfolios, or awards that are relevant to each role. Bonus points if you can include any metrics/data about your work and the impact (e.g. 200% increase in site traffic, etc)
Recommendations
Recommendations can increase your credibility as a professional; they should support the brand you have created in your profile. Seek out recommendations from coworkers, supervisors, and mentors. Communicate the skills or experiences that you want to emphasize with the recommenders. Lastly, keep your recommendations current.
Pro tip: The best way to receive recommendations is to give some first. If you write a recommendation for others, there’s a higher chance that you will get one from them. Start with your friends and branch out to colleagues at your previous job.
Skills & Endorsements
Skills can increase the searchability of your profile because they act as keywords. Maintain a list of relevant skills that are relevant to your career field and match your strengths. Your connections can endorse your skills, which will help you move up the LinkedIn search results.
Remember that you are creating a personal brand. Your LinkedIn profile is a representation of who you are as a professional. So make sure that different sections of your profile create a cohesive image of who you are and what you can offer to future employers. | https://medium.com/@sagecorps/steps-to-making-an-outstanding-linkedin-profile-c785fe0ef711 | ['Sage Corps'] | 2021-07-02 16:32:35.441000+00:00 | ['Career Development', 'Job Hunting', 'LinkedIn', 'Linkedintips', 'Career Advice'] |
Indeed, a few minutes here and there of an activity adds up. | Indeed, a few minutes here and there of an activity adds up. Looking at those minutes from a goal perspective, even when taking just 20 minutes a day to work on your goal is already a wonderful step towards reaching that very goal! Keep your steps digestible and attainable to increase motivation and to keep that momentum going. | https://medium.com/@mshudofsky/indeed-a-few-minutes-here-and-there-of-an-activity-adds-up-600bbed1f13b | ['Melanie Shudofsky'] | 2020-12-27 20:56:13.552000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Motivation', 'Goals', 'Life', 'Personal Growth'] |
Balancing gRPC Traffic in K8S Without a Service Mesh | One of the challenges some users (like me) face when trying to implement gRPC services into a Kubernetes cluster is to achieve a proper load balancing, and before diving into the way of balancing gRPC we first need to answer the question why do I need to balance the traffic if Kubernetes already does that job.
this article is focused on Kubernetes and Golang.
Why gRPC traffic is not properly balanced in Kubernetes?
The main reason why is difficult to balance the gRPC traffic is that people see gRPC as HTTP and here is where the problem begins, by design they are different, while HTTP creates and closes connections per request, gRPC operates over HTTP2 protocol that works over a long lived TCP connection making more difficult the balancing since multiple requests go through the same connection thanks to the multiplexing feature. However, this is not the only reason why balancing issues happen when configuring gRPC services in Kubernetes and these are some of the common mistakes:
Wrong gRPC client configuration
Wrong Kubernetes service configuration
Wrong gRPC client configuration
The common case when setting up a gRPC client is to choose the default configuration, which works perfectly for a 1–1 connection type, however, for a productive environment it does not work as we would like to. The reason behind this is because the default gRPC client offers the possibility to connect with a simple IP/DNS record which creates just one connection with the target service.
That’s why a different set up needs to be done for connecting with multiple servers, so we move the connection type from 1-1 to 1-N.
Default set up
func main(){
conn, err := grpc.Dial("my-domain:50051", grpc.WithInsecure())
if err != nil {
log.Fatalf("error connecting with gRPC server: %v", err)
}
defer conn.Close()
cli := test.NewTestServiceClient(conn)
rs, err := cli.DoSomething(context.Background(), ...)
.
.
.
}
New set up
func main() {
address := fmt.Sprintf("%s:///%s", "dns", " my-domain :50051")
conn, err := grpc.Dial(address,
grpc.WithInsecure(),grpc.WithBalancerName(roundrobin.Name))
if err != nil {
log.Fatalf("did not connect: %v", err)
}
defer conn.Close()
.
.
.
}
there are two major changes to take a look here:
the address: the final address parsed will look like dns:///my-domain:50051 and the reason why this format is used is that the Dial function allows us to use a target conformed by Scheme://Authority/Endpoint , in our case I am skipping the authority. So first I added dns as scheme because I want to resolve a domain and keep watching the changes over it, the resolver options are pass-through (default), dns, and manual, more details here.
the final address parsed will look like and the reason why this format is used is that the Dial function allows us to use a target conformed by , in our case I am skipping the authority. So first I added dns as scheme because I want to resolve a domain and keep watching the changes over it, the resolver options are pass-through (default), dns, and manual, more details here. balancer option: in the case our client gets connected with multiple servers now our gRPC client is able to balance the requests according to the balancing algorithm chosen.
Summing up our gRPC client is now able to create different connections if and only if the domain resolves multiple A or AAAA records, and not just that, now is able to balance the request evenly to the different servers.
Now let’s see the missing piece in the puzzle to make it work with Kubernetes.
Wrong Kubernetes service configuration
Creating a service in Kubernetes is pretty straightforward we just need to define the service name, the ports, and the selector so the service can group the pods dynamically and automatically balance the request like so:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: my-service
spec:
selector:
app: my-app
ports:
- name: grpc
protocol: TCP
port: 50051
targetPort: 50051
so what is the problem with the previous set up?, it is simply that the default Kubernetes service creates a DNS record linking just one single IP, thus, when you do something like nslookup my-service.{namespace}.svc.cluster.local what is returned is a single IP, which makes the connection graph in a common gRPC implementation something like this:
e.g connection graph with a default Kubernetes service
the green line means the active connection with the client, the yellow is the pods not active. The client creates a persistent connection with the Kubernetes service which at the same time creates the connection with one of the pods but this does not mean the service is not connected with the rest of the pods.
Let’s solve it using a headless service:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: my-service
spec:
clusterIP: None **this is the key***
selector:
app: my-app
ports:
- name: grpc
protocol: TCP
port: 50051
targetPort: 50051
After creating the headless service the nslookup looks like a bit different, now it returns the records associated with it (the pods IPs grouped into the service) giving to the gRPC client better visibility of the number of servers that need to be reached.
Now that you have seen the gRPC client configuration you must know why it is important that the Kubernetes service returns the IPs associated with the set of pods, and the reason is that the client can have visibility all servers that need to establish the connections. There is one caveat that you probably already realized at this point and is that the balancing responsibility is now in the client part and not in the Kubernetes side, the main task we need from Kubernetes now is to keep up to date the list of pods associated to the service.
e.g connection graph with a headless Kubernetes service
As you can see in the picture the connection changes a little bit, now we do not go through the Kubernetes service to reach the pod, instead we use the Kubernetes service to retrieve the list of pods linked to the domain and then we make the connection directly with the pods, but do not get scared about connecting directly to the pods since we set the DNS resolver type in the client that will keep watching the changes against the headless service, and will keep up to date the connections with the pods available.
Why not using then a service mesh?
If you can, please do it, with a service mesh all this set up is transparent, and the best part is that it is language agnostic. The key difference is that the service mesh leverage the sidecar pattern and a control plane to orchestrate the inbound and outbound traffic also has visibility of all the network and traffic type (HTTP, TCP… etc) being is able to balance the request properly. In a nutshell, if you are not using a service mesh you need either to get connected to multiple servers directly form each client or to connect to an L7 proxy to help to balance the requests.
Bonus
Although the previous set up works I had a problem trying to re-balance the connections when pod rotation or scales-up happened in the cluster in alpine linux images, and after some research, I realized that I was not the only with the same kind of problem, check here and here some github issues related. That’s why I decided to create my own resolver that you can take a look here, the custom resolver I created is a very basic but functional now the gRPC clients were able to listen for domain changes again, adding to the library a configurable listener that does X period of time a lookup to the domain and updates the set of IPs available to the gRPC connection manager, more than welcome if you want to contribute.
On the other hand, since I wanted to go deeper I decided to create my own gRPC proxy (and I learned a lot), leveraging the http2 foundation that gRPC has I could create a proxy without changing the proto payload message or without even knowing the proto file definition (also using the customer resolver aforementioned).
As a final comment, I would like to say that If your gRPC client needs to get connected with many servers I highly recommend using a proxy as a mechanism of balancing since having this in the main application will increase the complexity and resource-consuming trying to keep many open connections and re-balancing them, picture this, having the final balancing in the app you would have 1 instance connected to N servers (1-N), yet with a proxy, you would have 1 instance connected to M proxies connected to N servers (1-M-N) where for sure M<N since each proxy instance can handle a lot of connections to the different servers. | https://medium.com/swlh/balancing-grpc-traffic-in-k8s-without-a-service-mesh-7005be902ef3 | ['Andrés Pérez'] | 2020-10-02 12:32:44.810000+00:00 | ['Golang', 'Grpc', 'Load Balancing', 'Proxy', 'Kubernetes'] |
Why innovation matters and how to harness it effectively | Innovate: to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products
In other words, innovation is about managing progress.
As we face up to the looming challenges of monumental technological, ecological and social disruption, our collective ability to embrace change and harness our innate creative adaptability will determine our future chances of success.
What does success look like?
The first and most important step in any project is to identify the particular problem it is aiming to resolve, for only with clarity of purpose is it possible to define the metrics by which success can be measured.
If modern secular society is a project, the most fundamental measure of success is the maintenance of civility — our tacit social contract by which individuals live alongside one another without resorting to the use of physical force for the resolution of disputes.
Institutions are the vehicles in which we, as individuals, place our trust to regulate our interactions with others and so it is upon our institutions that we rely for the delivery of the innovation which will maintain social order in an era of disruption.
So, society’s highest priority goal must be to ensure the predominance of institutions which hold innovation at their core.
Institutions come in many guises but trading corporations are of increasing importance. Up to the end of the 20th century only a handful of companies achieved scale, wealth and influence to rival nations. The 21st century has seen the meteoric rise of many more in just a few years.
This radical change has been brought about by extreme technological shifts that have impacted all areas of life. However, with the trend of power vesting in trading corporations set to continue, they and the work we do for them will be the most important seat of innovation in future — corporations will scale the ideas to help us meet the known and as yet unknown challenges ahead.
Within those corporations, the rate of development required to remain competitive in the 21st century requires the adoption of new approaches to managing change — embracing uncertainty, cross-pollinating ideas and shedding the shackles of hierarchical decision making.
Success is ensuring survival. Survival depends on a system which is resilient in the face of inevitable change. Innovation is the method of ensuring change is progressive rather than regressive.
How can companies harness innovation?
Technology can scale exponentially, people cannot. People can think creatively, technology cannot.
Traditionally people have been regarded as just another asset to squeeze with an absolute focus on shareholder value maximisation. This over simplified approach has manifested in dramatically reduced engagement at work, increased stress and anxiety, reduced productivity and wavering confidence in the future amongst the largest part of the workforce (the ‘millennial effect’).
The challenge of organisations in the 21st century is therefore to create a culture which stimulates bold thinking, motivates human productivity and harnesses the scalable power of technology.
Leaders must focus on creating long-term value for all stakeholders by adopting an approach which respects the organisation’s position within a wider ecosystem — systems thinking. By providing meaningful work for employees, valuable relationships for partners and useful products for customers businesses will become more robust in an ever changing, technology driven landscape.
Of course, culture and people are separate but symbiotic elements. One cannot exist without the other and first having good people in place is essential in designing, creating and maintaining an organisation’s culture.
Examples of a whole system approach and its benefits
The encouraging thing is that systems thinking is gaining traction and we can expect it to become common parlance in board and meeting rooms. The following are just a few examples of organisations and ideas leading the way and which I will be exploring in more detail in future posts: | https://medium.com/@ed.garrett5/why-innovation-matters-and-how-to-harness-it-effectively-29ee4de06a5a | ['Edward Garrett'] | 2020-01-14 12:40:29.937000+00:00 | ['Sdgs', 'Innovation', 'Millenials', 'Esg', 'Corporate Culture'] |
What makes strong branding and how does it influence a company’s success? | In its simplest form, branding is the practice of influencing and controlling a set of associations with a company to help the business’s performance. Done successfully, an organization’s identity will be tied to select attributes—promoting its image or popularity.
While absolute control over a brand is not possible, it can be influenced through deliberate design, advertising, and marketing. By these means, companies can clearly communicate the principles they stand for to target audiences. Considering the power of this practice, it’s crucial that an organization masters the pillars of creating a strong brand to get ahead.
What is strong branding?
A strong brand adds value to your product.
It differentiates you from competitors by helping you achieve recognition and clarifies expectations for customers. The key is in highlighting the contrast between what you can offer and what already exists in the market.
Effective branding elevates a product or organization by adding unique character and promise. In crafting an emotional resonance, the brand forms a lasting image in the minds of consumers. | https://uxdesign.cc/what-makes-strong-branding-and-how-does-it-influence-a-companys-success-a046d4471204 | ['Michelle Chiu'] | 2020-08-12 01:51:49.914000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Branding', 'Design', 'UX', 'Tech'] |
Medium | There are tons of corporate blogs that produce a lot of informational and thought-leadership style content. Medium is one among them and its tough to choose one since there are several different blogging platforms out there.
Medium believes that the best ideas can change who we are. Medium is where those ideas take shape, take off, and spark powerful conversations. They are an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Their purpose is to spread these ideas and deepen understanding of the world.
They are creating a new model for digital publishing. One that supports nuance, complexity, and vital storytelling without giving in to the incentives of advertising. It’s an environment that’s open to everyone but promotes substance and authenticity. And it’s where deeper connections forged between readers and writers can lead to discovery and growth. Together with millions of collaborators, they are building a trusted and vibrant ecosystem fueled by important ideas and the people who think about them.
Anyone can write on Medium. Thought-leaders, journalists, experts, and individuals with unique perspectives share their thinking here. You’ll find pieces by independent writers from around the globe, stories they feature and leading authors, and smart takes on their own suite of blogs and publications. | https://medium.com/@keekeeblogs/medium-15df58cb6f33 | ['Keerthana Chalikandy'] | 2020-12-22 15:49:43.567000+00:00 | ['Blogging Website', 'Articles', 'Blogging', 'Medium', 'Blogger'] |
Artha India Ventures invests in Kredily, leads Pre-Series A round | Kredily is a one-stop platform for managing employees digitally while enhancing their engagement and supporting high-quality data. It streamlines the HR workflow by offering services like data management systems for employees, payroll management, attendance management, video conferencing, and remote working support for its customer base.
After identifying a gap in the HR and Fintech industry, Kredily aims to be the most significant workplace platform that integrates the HRMS and Fintech ecosystems for employees. Kredily offers a digital workplace platform to SMEs and MSMEs through a freemium product. Kredily caters to around 140 million salaried employees in India in a space where the existing HRMS platforms do not cater to 90% of the market.
The decision to invest in Kredily by AIV is backed up with its unique partnership-driven model of offering a full-stack HRMS platform and building revenue from the financial products on the platform. The partnership-driven distribution model ensures a zero CAC (customer acquisition cost) and a zero-member sales team, in comparison to a high CAC and low retention rate prevalent in the HRMS industry. Kredily has also integrated the HRMS platform with the Fintech market, making it a highly scalable model.
The revenue model of Kredily is built on a long-term investment vision and engages with employees beyond HRMS and payroll management. It manages various other heads for its customers’ employees like credit, insurance, and investing.
Devendra Khandegar, Founder & CEO, Kredily said, “We are delighted to have Artha India Ventures on board along with other marquee investors like Rainmatter Capital & Fosun RZ. They bring to the table a deep understanding of Consumers & Businesses in Fintech & SaaS spaces. Kredily has disrupted the HRMS Industry in India by offering a Freemium HRMS & Payroll Platform. This is highly relevant in the current lockdown, where companies are trying to cut down costs & manage remote working. Kredily offers companies an HRMS, Payroll & Payout Platform along with communication & collaboration tools to achieve best in class user engagement.”
Commenting on the investment Ashok Kumar Damani, Director, Artha India Ventures said, “Kredily’s SMB offering is the need of the hour as we restart the world’s 5th largest economy. I believe every employee and employer would want to be on Kredily — not just locally, but globally! We now have a fintech portfolio with companies like Tala and Lenden Club that are cumulatively valued at approximately USD 1 Billion. This is helping our portfolio work with a huge amount of synergy and grow exponentially with internal experience and connections.”
AIV envisions Kredily to develop into one of the most trusted marketplaces for financial products in India with a full-stack HRMS platform offering a complete digital suite of products catering to over 2 lakh SMBs. | https://medium.com/artha-india-ventures/artha-india-ventures-invests-in-kredily-leads-series-a-bridge-round-313163281121 | ['Aiv Pr Team'] | 2020-10-14 08:00:44.061000+00:00 | ['Hrtech', 'Startup', 'Funding', 'Venture Capital', 'Investors'] |