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#FinancialFebruary: The Cost of Transitioning | There are millions of transgender people in the United States. A recent study even showed that one out of 50 teenagers identifies as transgender. Trans people exist across all walks of life, all races, and all creeds. They also cross all the socio-economic levels of society, and that can mean unique challenges when it comes to those who decide to medically transition (hormones, affirming surgeries and other transition-related care).
Not all transgender people decide to medically transition. It’s a personal decision for everyone, but for some, it’s a life-or-death situation as affirming medical treatments might be needed to treat crippling dysphoria. For those who do decide to pursue trans-related medical care, procedures can range from hormone treatments to complicated surgeries, and the costs can fall anywhere from inconvenient to prohibitive. Not all insurance companies cover affirming procedures — some cover a portion of the costs, but not all. Others may deny coverage until the patient appeals, which makes more stress and paperwork. On top of that, trans people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty in the US than cisgender people, and they’re also more likely to be uninsured or underinsured, making medical care even further out of reach.
What options does a transgender American have for paying for affirming medical treatment? There are a few options available, but of course, these options vary widely depending on each individual’s financial situation, employment, family support, and other factors. It’s important to remember that, no matter how impossible it may seem to come up with the funds needed for treatment, things can change, and giving up should not be an option, at least not forever.
Here are some ways you might pay for transition-related health care:
GoFundMe/YouCaring/Other Crowdfunding Sites — This is one of the most obvious and commonly-used methods to raise funds for a variety of causes, including transgender medical treatment. It gives you a way to spread the word about your needed care and encourage friends and family to help. You have to be 18 to start a campaign on these sites, so keep that in mind. There are also a few downsides to these methods: Some sites won’t let you keep any of the money unless you meet your goal, some sites keep a cut of the earnings, and most medical crowdfunding campaigns don’t raise the full amount they’re trying to raise. But if you have a big friend group or a strong social media presence and can get the word out about your campaign, this might be the fundraising path for you. Grants from Helpful Organizations — There are several nonprofits and other groups out there that basically provide free money for trans health care. The funds don’t have to be paid back by the recipients. The problem is, of course, that there are always more applicants than available funds. The application process varies between organizations, and sometimes, it’s a complicated process with lots of hoops to jump through. If you want to try this route, check out PointofPride.org, JimCollinsFoundation.org, CKLife.org, or Google for other groups that may be local to your area. Loans — There are many loan types to choose from if you want to go this route. You could get a personal loan from a bank or credit union, you could borrow against your home (if you own a home that has equity) with a home equity loan or line of credit, you could check out online lenders (like Marcus, Earnest, Prosper, Best Egg, Lending Club or others) for an online personal loan, you could get a personal loan from a friend or family member, or you could even use a credit card. The biggest issue with these methods, of course, will be the terms of the loan. What is the interest rate? What is the monthly payment, and how long will it take to pay off? What are the penalties for late payments? It’s very important that you do your homework thoroughly before borrowing money from any individual or institution. Some places charge a fee just to apply for the loan in the first place. Try to avoid payday lenders and other predatory loan sources that have astronomical interest rates and fees. How much money you will qualify for depends on factors like your credit score and income. Be smart with debt and careful not to bite off more than you can chew with monthly payments! CareCredit — CareCredit is basically a credit card, but it’s used just for health care costs. You may have seen a brochure for CareCredit in your local doctor’s office. I know at least two trans guys personally who used this method to finance their top surgery, so it’s definitely a viable option. As with any credit method, there are potential pitfalls: The interest rate can be high, your doctor has to be one of the ones that takes CareCredit in the first place, and your credit score and income matter in determining your eligibility, of course. But if you don’t have the money for a procedure up front and you don’t have another outlet for a loan, this may be a good choice. Start a Small Business — If you’re crafty or have a particular skill, you can try to market that to raise some funds! Many online storefronts at sites like Etsy are created by trans folks selling artwork or other creations to pay for medical costs. You could paint, draw, sculpt, write, or create unique products that others enjoy. The biggest challenge is coming up with something to sell; after that, the next challenge is growing the business fast enough for the revenue to matter. If a shop earns just $100–200 a month, it could take a very long time to raise the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars that some transition-related medical procedures can cost, especially if the hosting site takes a cut (which Etsy does).
No matter what funding path you take, remember that new options are emerging all the time. You can talk to your local LGBTQ outreach center to find resources close to home, or you can reach out to national organizations for leads. If you already have a doctor lined up for the care you want, talk to their staff about how other patients pay for their procedures, since that might give you a lead on some fundraising options. Stay positive! You are valid no matter what medical transition steps you take. Good luck! | https://medium.com/matthews-place/financialfebruary-the-cost-of-transitioning-fa5f25b132fb | [] | 2019-02-18 21:53:13.990000+00:00 | ['Funding', 'LGBTQ', 'Transitioning', 'Transgender', 'Finance'] |
The Unheard Benefits of Working 9–5 | Many Millenials and Gen Z hate 9–5 jobs. They say it’s selling your soul to big, nasty corporations. They say they have a personality unlike everyone else; they’re hipsters. Rejecting 9–5 jobs almost makes you cool and rebellious.
I was once one of these people. One of the first books I read as a university student was Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek where the subtitle is “Escape 9–5, live anywhere, and join the new rich”. Amusing and seductive, I was indoctrinated into believing this was the most important way to live. In the book, Tim explains how someone can live as a digital nomad; one of the tips is to earn in US dollars online and spend in a less valuable currency like Mexican pesos. You can make money and travel at the same time: you’re responsible for your own existence like an adult, but you’re also having fun like a child; best of both worlds.
Then there are people like Gary Vee, who tells everyone to hustle. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Chase your dreams. Build your empire. Live your ambitions. This kind of advice is everywhere. These entrepreneurs make their journey to success sound like a brilliant myth; struggling against their friends and parents, suffering from their own ambition, and rising in spite of everything else against them.
I still love Tim Ferriss and Gary Vee; it feels unfair I called them out, but they’re who came to mind because they had an influence on me.
As I went on my own journey, I decided to try 9–5 anyway. I‘d never tried it and it was an easy option. I discovered something I didn’t expect; it’s almost taboo to say, but I love my 9–5 job.
There are benefits to a 9–5 job people don’t often talk about.
You have less responsibility
People often say that working for someone else is building someone else’s dream; other people have said it’s like living for someone else. Whatever the message is, the idea is that you’re not living for yourself.
While you’re working for someone else’s dream, you’re getting paid. You’re also probably learning, making friends, having fun, and everything else you get from working with a lot of other people.
We often like to think the people at the top have the freedom to do whatever they want. We imagine them to sit in their comfortable chairs and smoke cigars, but they’re really in a position of overwhelming responsibility; they’re responsible for the business, and if they own shares, the business is responsible for their wealth.
As a salaried employee, you take no risk. You get paid whether the business succeeds or fails. If the business fails, nothing happens to you except you might have to find another job, but shareholders suffer emotional and financial losses; they take a hit to their ego and a hit to their bank account.
When you lack authority, people don’t ask you difficult questions. You don’t have to make the decisions that’ll change the lives of possibly billions of people. Every time Mark Zuckerberg makes a decision, it impacts the 2.7 billion people who use Facebook. Being an employee means you don’t have to worry about any of that.
I’ve been in a fortunate position to have never worried about work. I love my job and I’m a conscientious worker with the 8 hours I have every day, but I’m not forced to work until veins are popping out of my head. There’ve been times I’ve become attached to the project and really want it to succeed, but if I were honest, I wouldn’t lose sleep if it failed.
I can’t imagine entrepreneurs having the luxury of relaxation.
Companies usually treat you well
I can’t speak for every corporate experience. I’m sure there are companies that treat their employees terribly. Those companies won’t survive. Companies don’t just compete for talent with money, but also with their environment.
I work at a tech company that isn’t even FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and the perks are already amazing. I love the food, snacks, values, culture, friends, diversity, teamwork, money, autonomy, flexibility, mission, workplace activities, transparency, dedication to our customers, empowerment of employees, empathy, openness of leaders, standing desks, care for the environment, laptops, tools, clean bathrooms, company events, development opportunities…
The ultimate goal of a company (at least a for-profit public company) is to make money for its shareholders, but to achieve that goal, they have to focus on culture. A good culture not only increases employee productivity but decreases employee exit. Employee exit is expensive; to hire a new person, you pay someone to look at resumes, set up interviews, interview people, make a decision on who to hire, integrate them with a new team, onboard them, etc.
Keeping you happy aligns with your company’s main goal of increasing profits — a win-win situation. My company treats its employees well. I’m actually worried about how I’m ever going to find a place better; they’ve put golden handcuffs on me. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/the-unheard-benefits-of-working-9-5-1e8d4b3917fc | ['Bryan Ye'] | 2019-09-12 11:31:01.307000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Careers', 'Entrepreneurship', 'College', 'Career Advice'] |
Putting Trust to the Test | Making the call to something new
There is a risk; without the possibility of failing, we don’t develop courage.
But what if our child slips while jumping? Or what if we don’t catch them successfully and struggle to keep their head above water? These are important questions, but when growth is the objective, they can’t become our focus or we never try.
Calling individuals and teams into something new is not easy, but critical in their development.
SPLASH! | https://medium.com/shepherd-leadership-journal/putting-trust-to-the-test-shepherd-leadership-863504b35c6f | ['Eric Peterson'] | 2020-12-27 14:12:25.274000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Culture', 'Children', 'Society', 'Team'] |
A Better Way to Remember Verb Forms | When it comes to learning a new language, one of the trickiest parts is getting accustomed to the new verb forms you come across.
There’s past, present, future, continuous past, perfect present, and a whole lot more to remember depending on the language you’re studying.
That’s why LingQ has introduced a new feature that helps you remember verb forms easily.
Automatic grammar tagging.
What’s so great about this?
Now, every time you come across a new verb in your lesson, LingQ will automatically generate tags to let you know exactly which verb form it is. It also tells you the root form of the verb and the person of the verb. *Please note, not every language will have this feature yet*
Now every time you look at that word you can remind yourself of these verb elements instantly. Not only does this feature save time, it also keeps your vocabulary review organized.
Click on the”Vocabulary” tab then click “Filter” and you’ll be able to view your list of grammar tags (please be aware that they will appear in the language that you’re studying). For example, If you only want to view verbs in the past tense, then select the appropriate tag and LingQ will pull up exactly what you’re looking for.
Don’t forget, you can also access your tags on the LingQ mobile app.
Steve Kaufmann has said, very often things that we study now won’t stick for us until six months.
Which is why reviewing is so important.
Thanks to LingQ’s automatic grammar tagging, you’ll be able to remember verb forms faster and review them better.
Good luck!
Join LingQ for free today! | https://medium.com/the-linguist-on-language/a-better-way-to-remember-verb-forms-5194d5d9b12b | [] | 2018-11-28 22:09:18.691000+00:00 | ['Language'] |
Our FAQs | Writers
What happens when I submit my article to TDS?
Thank you so much for taking the time to submit your article to our team! We will review it as soon as we can.
If we believe that your article is excellent and ready to go, this is how you will be able to add your post to our publication. If “Towards Data Science” shows up after you click on “Add to publication” in the dropdown menu at the top of the page, that means we have added you as an author and are waiting for you to submit your article. Once you have submitted your article, it will be reviewed by an editor before a final decision is made.
If we think that your article is interesting but needs to be improved, someone from our team will provide you with feedback directly on your submitted Medium article.
Please note that we only respond to articles that were properly submitted using either our form or via an email that exactly follows the instructions listed here. We don’t respond to pitches or questions already answered in our FAQs or on our Contribute page. We also ignore articles that don’t comply with our rules.
If you haven’t heard from us within the next five working days, please carefully check the article you submitted to our team. See if you can now submit it directly to TDS and look for any private notes from us that you may have missed. You should also make sure to check your spam folder.
If you just can’t reach us, the best thing for you to do is submit your article to another publication. Although we’d love to, we can’t provide customized feedback to everyone because we simply receive too many submissions. You can learn more about our decision here and submit another post in a month. | https://medium.com/p/462571b65b35#1204 | ['Tds Editors'] | 2020-11-19 01:16:58.476000+00:00 | ['Writers’ Guide', 'Tds Team', 'Writers Guide'] |
December 12 & 13 Advent Gratitude | Spotted on my walk along the river
On Saturday, I finally did go out for my walk. I took my phone, a couple of podcasts, and headed down to the river. The sun was shining, and I listened gratefully to Vivian Sansour talk about heritage seeds in Palestine, and the link between food, farming and climate change on the amazing Mothers of Invention podcast, then listened to Krista Tippet interview Brian Stevenson of the Good Law Project, talking about the long narrative of American injustice and how to live with forgiveness, the motivating power of love and hope and how no one should be judged by their worst mistakes.
That was it for outdoor activity. On Sunday, we woke up to a very wet rain. In England, we have all kinds of rain; some of it is misty, some of it percussive and violent, some of it windy and slashing, some of it just wet — like on Sunday: steady, blobby, insistent, persistent.
I looked out my window; I saw two small people, one about three and one about two, in bright red and yellow rain gear and rubber boots, marching down the path. The younger one kept running to catch up with the older one, who marched ahead, throwing off the little hand that tried to catch a sleeve, to say, wait for me. I recognised that hand as much as I recognised that determined striding forward. I thought about how much of the human story there was in just that moment: our desire to connect, our need to be the boss.
Later on that evening, I got on the Zoom call to my American siblings. We teased each other; we gossiped about our children; we complimented our 91 year old mother whose lockdown, long white hair looks so good on her it could be a hipster fashion statement. We were once like those little wanderers in the park, loving each other, squabbling for power, forgiving each other for our hurts. Some of them were really cruel, and yet, too — how much we were intertwined with each other, how much we appreciate each other now.
This weekend I felt grateful to be part of the human story — one that contains the possibility of cruelty and indifference, but also, each day and in each lifetime, the chance to change the narrative, to forgive and to love. | https://medium.com/@catherinetemma71/december-12-13-advent-gratitude-fa77edee16e8 | ['Catherine T Davidson'] | 2020-12-14 18:17:55.625000+00:00 | ['Podcast Recommendations', 'Gratitude', 'Advent'] |
How To Master The Push-Up | Let’s start at the beginning. If you’re new to the movement, the first thing to do is to establish a starting point. Knee push-ups are something most people can do. It’s just a regular push-up, but instead of putting your weight on your toes, you’ll use your knees instead. So, here’s what you do. Get down on the floor, place your hands just wider than your chest and in line with your pectoral (chest) muscles. Get all the way down on the floor, with your chest resting on it. Push yourself up on your knees until your arms are locked out. Keep your elbows in! You don’t want your arms at greater than a 45-degree angle from your torso as you perform the exercise, or you’ll be putting too much strain on your shoulders and limiting the recruitment of your pecs. That was the hardest part for me when I started doing push-ups. Also, keep your back flat. Don’t stick your rump up in the air! This is easier to control when doing knee push-ups. Keep your core (stomach) nice and tight. Now that you’re all the way up with your arms locked out, lower yourself all the way to the floor again. It’s important that you make sure that you go through the complete motion in order to maximize the recruitment of the pecs. It doesn’t matter how many you can do if you’re not using proper form. Anybody can do more if they cheat!
Now that you know how to do them properly, see how many you can do before your form starts to crumble. As soon as you get to one where your elbows wing out past 45 degrees or your butt starts to rise (or you fall face-first to the floor), you’ve reached your starting number of reps. Don’t worry about how many that is (or isn’t). You’ve got to start somewhere! You’ll discover that if you work at it, that number will increase rapidly over the weeks and months.
Okay, so you have a baseline to work from now. You can do x number of knee push-ups. The goal now is to increase that number to twenty. The way to do that is by using progressive overload. Every time you do your push-ups, strive to do at least one more than the previous workout. Now, you might not be able to do that extra one every time, but it’s important that you try. You have to push for improvement. By pushing your body harder than you did the time before, you’re sending a signal to your muscles that they need to adapt. Remember, stop after your form begins to suffer. Live to push-up another day!
Now, it might take a while to get to twenty, so one way to increase your volume (the number of push-ups you do in an exercise session) is to do multiple sets. Just do one set that first day if you’re not used to the movement. Muscles get sore! Don’t try to do five sets and wake up the next morning feeling it every time you pick up your coffee mug. Have patience. During that second or third workout, add another set. After resting for two or three minutes, try to do the same number of push-ups as you did in the first set, but don’t be surprised or disappointed if you can’t do as many. All you want to do is go to failure (when your form falls apart). And after a few more workouts, add a third set. More volume means more muscle stimulation, which means more muscle adaptation during your rest days. Don’t do push-ups every day. Your muscles need to rest in order to adapt and grow. More isn’t necessarily better! If you’re working out hard but not making progress, or, even worse, regressing, you’re not getting enough rest between workouts. Every three days is a good starting point, and you’ll need even more rest the bigger and stronger you get.
After you get to where you can do twenty knee push-ups with excellent form (elbows in, back flat, tight core, lowering all the way to the floor), you’re ready to graduate to regular push-ups. You’ll repeat the whole process again. Do as many as you can to establish a starting point, try to add one every workout, and maintain good form. It will be more difficult! You’ll have to work harder to keep your back flat and core tight now that you're on your toes. Keeping your core tight will prevent rump-rising as well as give your abs some work. Push-ups are an excellent exercise for your core muscles as well as your pecs, shoulders, and triceps. You can go ahead and stick with multiple sets now that your chest is built up a bit and accustomed to the exercise. Get to where you can do multiple sets of twenty and you’re golden!
I’ll share a tip with you that helped me keep good form during push-ups, especially when it comes to your elbows winging out: get a pair of push-up bars. They’re just handles that you put on the ground and grip while performing the movement. You can orient them so that your fists are vertical (thumbs pointing ‘up’ toward your head) rather than horizontal (thumbs pointing ‘in’ toward your chest). By turning your hands this way, it becomes much easier to keep your elbows in. This was my biggest difficulty doing push-ups, and using bars really helped me increase my rate of progress. They also raise you a couple of inches higher off the floor, so you can go down another inch or so and really push your pecs hard. If you’re using bars, you don’t want to go all the way to the floor, but you do have to go all the way down until your chest is even with your fists (at least). I can’t stress enough how important it is that you go through the entire motion. Okay, maybe I can, and you’re tired of hearing about it by now, but it’s important! | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/how-to-master-the-push-up-3eab43c834a6 | ['Anthony Moulesong'] | 2020-04-11 19:08:27.363000+00:00 | ['Exercise', 'Fitness', 'Health', 'Push Ups', 'Workout'] |
See today what to build tomorrow | Until a couple of years back, it was okay to rely on paper sketches or ideas in your head for building digital products.
Today, you won’t build Instagram, Uber, or TikTok without prototyping it first.
Think Instagram stories, Uber’s mapped trajectory, or TikTok’s serendipity.
Digital experiences today are way too subtle to conceptualize and communicate on paper sketches and mockups.
It’s way more important now to test an idea with users before investing time and resources in building it.
It’s no more ‘good to have’ a prototype. Prototype is a ‘must-have’ for building products of tomorrow.
A prototype must look and feel like the real product. Only then you can uncover new insights, question your assumptions, fill in gaps, and correct mistakes early on.
Watch this 1 minute intro to what, why, and everything prototyping.
Howsoever real and high fidelity it gets, you still can’t afford months (or weeks) building one.
To test the subtle digital experiences of tomorrow, the prototype today must be deceptively real, deceptively smart, and yet take no more than 10 days to build.
A prototype for building products of tomorrow is so much more than mockups from yesterday. It is…
The language that all teams speak fluently.
A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. It fosters accurate communication, faster decisions, and lesser mistakes.
It brings clarity and efficiency between the design and engineering teams. Developers ‘get’ the interactions better. Hand offs are smooth.
Prototype cuts off engineering time by weeks!
A sharper pitch for investors
Successful startups swear by it.
🤫 Our clients have successfully raised millions in funding based entirely on the product prototypes!
A buy-in tool for internal stakeholders
Slides are not half as convincing as a prototype on their devices.
Would you rather sit for a 2 hr presentation or play with a device in your hand for a fraction of that time?
A deceptively smart tool for user tests
High-fidelity prototypes result in more accurate user testing results.
It’s because users can interact with a prototype like they would with the real product like key in text fields, chat with a bot, use the slider, make calculations, sign a document, upload a picture, etc.
A driver to product-led marketing
Prototypes are catalysts to product-led marketing and demand generation pre-launch.
Start marketing your product before writing the first line of code.
The fastest way to market
Prototypes helps you launch, learn, and improve in the fastest and most cost-effective way. | https://medium.com/bayzil/see-today-what-to-build-tomorrow-d1f658a5e2d4 | ['Prachi Nain'] | 2020-11-22 05:14:49.745000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Interaction Design', 'UI Design', 'Prototyping', 'Product Design'] |
Is a Traditional Publisher For You? | image: Freddie Marriage for Unsplash
Even in an age of self-publishing and Amazon publishing gone mad, my editing clients still have the same question: What are my chances of having my book published by a traditional publisher?
I have to be honest with you here. It looks hard, and it’s harder than it looks. Everyone who has written a book feels as though they’ve done their job and now it’s time to sit back and wait for the bidding wars as the book is auctioned off to a major publisher.
Reality is very different.
There are three ways of getting published in the conventional sense of the word (although stay tuned: more are emerging): traditional publishing, self-publishing, and using a subsidy publisher; and each uses a different method. How does the traditional model work?
There are a couple of options:
Submitting your work directly to a publisher. This is known as “over the transom,” since manuscripts used to be tossed into an editor’s office in precisely that manner. There are resources available to help you, notably Penguin/Random House’s Writers Market and Information Today’s Literary Market Place as well as Poets & Writers. These sites will tell you exactly what each publisher is looking for, and what each publisher wants in the way of contact (query letter, book proposal, entire manuscript, etc.).
This is known as “over the transom,” since manuscripts used to be tossed into an editor’s office in precisely that manner. There are resources available to help you, notably Penguin/Random House’s Writers Market and Information Today’s Literary Market Place as well as Poets & Writers. These sites will tell you exactly what each publisher is looking for, and what each publisher wants in the way of contact (query letter, book proposal, entire manuscript, etc.). Sending your work to a publisher through a referral. While an agent or a publisher might be willing to accept a recommendation from someone they know and respect (author, MFA professor, the editor of a literary journal, etc.), it is not proper etiquette for you to contact someone who doesn’t already know you in order to ask for a referral unless such a person has already indicated interest in your work and willingness to help.
While an agent or a publisher might be willing to accept a recommendation from someone they know and respect (author, MFA professor, the editor of a literary journal, etc.), it is not proper etiquette for you to contact someone who doesn’t already know you in order to ask for a referral unless such a person has already indicated interest in your work and willingness to help. Having your book accepted by a literary agent who will then submit it to publishers on your behalf and for a percentage of the book’s sales.
Some publishers will only work with agents. Why? Because it makes their job easier! The agent can match projects with specific editors, decide if something is publishable as is or if it needs more work, and provide some feedback to the author.
Publishers, on the other hand, will rarely offer feedback. Frustrating as this is, it’s simply not practicable to tell hundreds of authors a day why their manuscripts are being rejected. In general, what you will receive is a form letter (these days, an email) telling you your manuscript does not meet the publisher’s current needs, and wishing you the best of luck elsewhere. Most of the time, you won’t know if it was rejected because it wasn’t “good enough” — whatever that might mean — or merely because the editor was having a bad day. The end result, sadly, is the same.
Perseverance pays off. So does working and reworking your manuscript. Sometimes putting it aside for a year (as it makes the rounds of publishers and gets rejected every few months) can be useful: if you look at it again with fresh eyes, there’s a good chance you’ll find ways of improving it.
Many, many well-known authors have known rejection. (If you don’t believe this to be true, take a look at André Bernard’s wonderful Rotten Rejections, filled with letters editors and publishers wish they’d never sent.) And the odds are stacked against today’s author even more than in the past: no longer can an acquisitions editor make the decision to purchase a manuscript alone. These days, a whole team — including representatives of the publisher’s marketing department — decides on the project’s financial viability. A rejection may therefore have nothing to do with the literary value of any work.
I wish the news were better. I wish all of my clients could get published easily and painlessly. I just want everyone to be prepared for a long journey and a possible negative outcome.
It has been said that only about 400 people in the United States make their livings entirely on the proceeds from their novels. In other words — no matter how good you are, don’t quit your day job quite yet! | https://jeannettedebeauvoir.medium.com/is-a-traditional-publisher-for-you-325d02c494e7 | [] | 2020-02-17 15:17:16.292000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Traditional Publishing', 'Literary Agents', 'Authors', 'Writing'] |
a poet’s walk | world from the eyes of a poet
Tree Fire © Manan sheel (author)
It is the beginning of spring. The world is beautiful. After a harsh winter, life breathes again. The warmth is welcome by all and the earth is rejoicing. I have come out for a walk in the park close to my home. As I enter the park, I see purple flowers on the ground. It is lovely to look at the colorful flowers after a long winter when there was nothing but the white of snow spread everywhere.
As I move ahead, I see a cherry tree with light pink cherry blossoms which looks so beautiful that it seems like it is other-worldly, almost heavenly. I sit on a bench for some time. One brown squirrel has climbed up the bench and is looking at me eagerly with its black eyes. A few light brown sparrows are hopping on the grass in front of me. Their chests puff and contract, and their tails move up and down as they breathe. There is a pond in front of me. A gentle warm breeze is flowing which is making the water at the pond’s surface to flow with it. It looks as if someone has put her lips close to the water and is softly whistling on it. As the wind flows on the pond, a million little pieces of water on its surface shiver making it a sight laced with playful peace and subtle love. Just now, the sun has made its way through a bluish-grey cloud and its rays have filled the little pieces of water on the pond’s surface. This jhilmil shimmer of sun on water is to a poet more precious than all the wealth of gold in the world.
Now, I get up from the bench and move nearer to the pond. Two dark green frogs with slimy black eyes are sitting on the pond’s edge. Suddenly, one of them takes a big leap and lands into the pond with a Chapp-Gulup-Ank. I am curious about frogs. Even when they are so slimy and weird, I don’t fear them like I do the lizards. I think that there is an element of cuteness in them that is not present in the reptiles.
I come to the bench again and start reading a book of poetry that I had bought with me. The poet is talking about that nectar which is inside us and that flowers in a million colors all around us. What the poet is saying is true and beautiful. I read the poems and fill myself with honey. And then at one point, the sweetness becomes too much to endure. I close the book and prefer nature to words, for I can see that what words contain is all around me. Maybe this poet did not find such a beautiful park to come to, and thus he could write so much from imagination. If he would have come to nature directly, there would not be any need to write. Or maybe he wrote in a leisurely way after encountering everything, I don’t know. These are playful thoughts that arise in me and with which I maintain my tenderness and melody in this otherwise straightforward world.
Do you know I am a poet? I am saying this because I maintain willingly these playful, tender thoughts of mine. I don’t want them to leave me. I know that they create trouble for me because of this world that wants everyone to just be ambitious and utilitarian. I love to work but also think that a little poetry, a little sweetness never hurt anyone…
© Manan sheel. | https://medium.com/@manansheel/a-poets-walk-b9576502451a | ['Manan Sheel'] | 2020-12-11 04:13:14.536000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Description', 'Poet', 'Walk', 'Thoughts'] |
Struck Dead | Struck Dead
a short story about a writer at the end of the world
Photo by Alvin Engler on Unsplash
Ermolai had been attempting to immortalize himself through works of literature for two decades.
It was hard work for sure.
He had been writing ever since knew the language. His mother said he learned to write before he could speak. He wrote on the swinging chair on the porch of his childhood home. He wrote on a slim notebook hidden under the English textbook while the teacher was talking. He wrote on prom night, shut in his bedroom with all the lights off. He studied engineering in college to please his parents, for he knew he should atone for ignoring their love for eighteen years.
When he acquired a typewriter, he typed. Rolls of manuscripts pooled onto the water-damaged floor of his college dorm. He would accidentally wake up his roommate, who would grumble and then yell at him in the darkness.
Upon completion of the bachelor’s degree, he rented a good suburban family’s garage and lived there. He had a used computer and it took five minutes to turn on, and he had to remember to save the document before closing.
His first publication was a short story published in a science fiction magazine, after a few dozen rejections. It put some food on his foldable table. He realized the market for genre fiction and thus he made money from it, enough to keep him alive in the dimmed light of his square room.
Any spare time after deadlines, eating, and sleeping, he would spend them on his Untitled Magnum Opus.
Define Magnum Opus: a large and important work of literature, especially regarded as a writer’s most important work.
He was put on this earth to complete this, his most important work. He would one day finish and publish it, and his life would be complete. It was doubtful that people in this day and age would understand the true meaning of such work, though. He wouldn’t be surprised if no publishers would take the risk in publishing this tome. Many famous authors in history were remembered posthumously.
As for the moment, it sat at 920 pages and lacked an ending. He cherished the moment when it would be complete, therefore he should be fully prepared for that.
He made preparation. He was going to shut himself in the garage and write Part Five of his Untitled Magnum Opus on the first of February and finish it in 28 days.
It was doable.
He had received a check of $150 through the mail. He went out to cash it and buy food. He hadn’t seen the outside world in a week, and the sunlight was brighter than he remembered.
It was slightly more crowded in the discount store, but only slightly so. There were families doing their weekly shopping, and he had seen a more hard-edged man pushing full carts down the isles. They bought crates of canned foods and water and loaded them onto the back of their monster trucks.
The shelves were almost bare when he arrived. Still, it was more than enough. Non-perishable products were great for his shut-in.
He came out with a cart full of groceries. Two loaves of bread for fast consumption, peanut butter, instant ramen, canned meat, canned corn, canned beans. Alcohol. He drank cheap whiskeys, but there were a few beers in the basket. He didn’t have a fridge, so anything frozen was out of the question. He would have taken the canned sardines, but they reminded him of his lesser times in college.
He rolled the cart down the street. Cars sped past him and no one spared him a glance. He pressed the secret password to open the garage door. He placed the cart in his den, next to the bookshelves. The garage door hummed as it unrolled, and finally closed.
He was inside his kingdom again.
All better. Drained from his outing, he was recharging as he leaned back on his faux leather office chair. The computer began to boot up. He grabbed a bottle of water and drank, eyes never leaving the loading screen.
He scanned the document and found the machine too slow to load to the entire thing. He booted up the printer and began to print. All 920 pages of his work. The printer made a buzzing sound as it worked in the background.
When it’s done, he had the stack and flipped through them once and once again. The sound of the paper was like the fluttering of wings. He smelt the heavenly ink.
He looked upon his screen. It was blank except for the two words: Part Two.
He adjusted the type size. His eyes were getting worse these days, but it would not matter when it was over.
He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles and began to type.
Days blurred together. Time lost its meanings. Ermolai typed, ate, and slept. His life became hazy in the end.
The nice suburban family didn’t bother him — that’s why they were nice. They stayed upstairs, talked quietly, walked quietly, and even the children played quietly. Which was why when there was a loud crash, it woke him from a drunken slumber.
He stared wide-eyed at the bleach-white ceiling. There was a throb in his right eye. It was difficult to tell reality from a dream, and a dream from the words that poured from his fingertips.
When the crash was followed by a scream, he sat upright.
He couldn’t tell the time. There was no clock, but judging by the blue-ish gray cloud seen from the slit above the garage door, it was either dusk or dawn.
He paddled his way across the various objects littering the floor. A small door connected the garage to the kitchen, but it usually stayed locked for the safety of both the family and himself.
It was only unlocked when the matriarch came looking for the monthly rent. Then she would close it carefully, and turn the lock slowly, so it didn’t make much of a noise, so it didn’t hurt his feelings.
He tried the door. It was locked. Why wouldn’t it be?
He heard a few clamors upstairs. Thud. Thud. Thud.
He went back to sit down at his computer, yet there was this constant distraction. He had tolerated the existence of humans in his close proximity, but it was too much this time.
He fought the urge to scream at the family “Stop the noise!”
He settled for knocking on the door and yelled, “Would you please be quiet?”
The noise continued downstairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. Down the staircase. Then it all died down.
Good.
He went back to work.
The quiet was nice.
When the noise sounded right next to him, he almost jumped out of his skin.
The office chair creaked loudly. He stared at the door. The sound came urgently. Thud. Thud. Thud. Something banging on the door.
Knock. Knock. Knock. He scrambled backward.
What the hell was that?
“Stop!” He shouted at the person on the other side of the door. “If it’s about the rent, there’re still a few days until it’s due!”
It wouldn’t stop.
Ermolai began to pack. Whatever was going on, was either supernatural or he was going insane. Judging by the frequency of the knocking and the force of it, it’s only a matter of time before the person made a hole on the panel, or brought down the door altogether.
It was clear that he couldn’t stay there.
He didn’t have many possessions. A backpack could carry them all. The stack of paper and the computer. A change of clothes. Clean underwears, not many of them. A jacket, wrapped around the computer to minimize damages. Bottles of water and some food. He swung on the bag and opened the garage door.
The neighbor, an old lady dressed in a flowery gown, snapped her head up at the sound. She stared at him unknowingly, unblinkingly, and it was unnerving.
She was making her way over to him. A slow shuffle, then faster, faster, almost up to the speed of a jog.
When she was some ten feet away, he finally recognized the pattern on her gown wasn’t flowers, but blood splatters.
He looked at her face, which was missing a half. She reached out for him, made gurgling sounds with a hollow cheek. A bloody eyeball skewed on her ring finger.
Naturally, he did what was acceptable in this situation he screamed, and ran.
His backpack bounced on his back as he went. His jeans were coming loose, his shirt riding up, and he could feel the wind against his waist and upper ass. There was no time to worry about his dignity. There was no dignity in fear.
After about thirty seconds, he was heaving like an old dog. He slowed down to a jog and then a fast walk, and finally stopped. He bent over in the middle of the sidewalk, breathing heavily.
He took in the silence around him and the sheer contrast of his loud heartbeats. He looked up and scanned the neighborhood — it was eerily quiet, devoid of anything living. There was a dog barking, but it could be an illusion. When he looked to that direction the dog silenced. The houses were there. A few pieces of clothes and trash littered the unkempt front lawns. The curbs were empty of cars, except one.
Was it a dream? If it was, the vividness was equally alarming. The only car was a white sedan. It had a broken window. He approached it without much thought.
There was a corpse sitting behind the wheel. He took a few steps back, still stunned by the state of the world he was living in.
He couldn’t stay here. He had to get away. Far, far away.
He took another closer look at the corpse. It wasn’t moving, and showed no sign of imminent animation. He tried the door handle, didn’t expect much, but the door unlocked. He froze, afraid of sudden noise would wake the corpse. It didn’t respond. Still had its mouth hung open; he was decomposing.
Ermolai noticed the key was still jammed in the ignition. He hesitated for only a second, then hauled the body out of the car and climbed into the driver’s seat.
The car smelt unpleasant, but the window was down. He started the car. It coughed a few times, then hummed to life.
He drove, heavy-hearted, toward the edge of the city. His manuscript never once came to the forefront of his head.
It was a different world. One unsafe to him. One he couldn’t play God with. He had to navigate its rules like everyone else who wished to stay alive.
It was a new world, and he wasn’t brave at all. | https://medium.com/written-tales/struck-dead-273909f3faa0 | ['Aurelia Wong'] | 2019-10-15 21:13:28.903000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Flash Fiction', 'Apocalypse', 'Written Tales', 'Fiction'] |
.Net Core Web API — Dapper ORM Kullanımı — Katmanlı Mimari | DataAccess: Veritabanı erişim katmanımız.
Abstract : Interfacelerin bulunduğu klasör
: Interfacelerin bulunduğu klasör → IRepository: Bu interface sayesinde sürekli GetAll,GetById,Add,Remove gibi metotları her bir interface için yazmamız gerekmeyecek.
→ IProductDal: IRepository interfacenin implemente ederiz.
Dapper MİCRO ORM
Concrete
→ Dapper
→ DapperRepositoryBase: ConnectionString tanımlıyoruz. (appsettings.json dosyasının içinde “SqlConnection” adında)
→ DpProductDal: Veritabanı ile yapacağımız işlemler burada olacak Dapper’ı burada kullanacağız o yüzden burayı biraz daha detaylandıracağım.
//Sql Connection için DapperRepositoryBase,
//Metotlarımız için IProductDal implemente ediyoruz.
DpProductDal : DapperRepositoryBase, IProductDal
→ List<Product> GetAll() Metodu
connection.Query<Entity>(“SQL SORGUSU”)
Sorgu çalıştıktan sonra tanımladığınız entity şeklinde geri döner.
Product tanımladık, gelen productları listeye çevirdik.
public List<Product> GetAll()
{
using var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString);
return connection.Query<Product>("SELECT * FROM Products").ToList();
}
→ Product GetById(int productId) Metodu
Kullanıma geçmeden önce önemli bir hatırlatma yapmak isterim. Dapper kullanırken sql sorgularının saf halini yazıyoruz bu da bize SQL INJECTION zafiyetini oluşturacaktır, sorgularımızı parametreli olarak yazmalıyız.
connection.QueryFirst<Entity>(sqlSorgusu, new { TabloKolon= parametre});
.Query() yerine .QueryFirst() kullandık böylelikle eşleşen ilk satırı geri döndürecektir.
using var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString); string sql = "SELECT * FROM Products WHERE ProductID = @ProductID"; return connection.QueryFirst<Product>(sql, new { ProductID = productId });
→ int Add(Product product),
→ int Remove(int productId),
→ int Update(Product product) Metotları
Ekleme, silme, güncelleme işlemi yapacağımız metotlardır. Bu sefer .Query() ve .QueryFirst() yerine .Execute() kullanmamız gerekiyor geriye int tipinde değer döndürüyor. Bilgileri parametreli olarak eklemeliyiz.
using var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString); @SupplierID,@CategoryID,@QuantityPerUnit,@UnitPrice,@UnitsInStock,@UnitsOnOrder,@ReorderLevel, string sql = "INSERT INTO Products (ProductName,SupplierID,CategoryID,QuantityPerUnit,UnitPrice,UnitsInStock,UnitsOnOrder,ReorderLevel,Discontinued) VALUES ( @ProductName @Discontinued ); return connection.Execute(sql, new
{
ProductName = product.ProductName,
SupplierID = product.SupplierId,
CategoryID = product.CategoryId,
QuantityPerUnit = product.QuantityPerUnit,
UnitPrice = product.UnitPrice,
UnitsInStock = product.UnitsInStock,
UnitsOnOrder = product.UnitsOnOrder,
ReorderLevel = product.ReorderLevel,
Discontinued = product.Discontinued
});
public int Remove(int productId)
{
using var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString); string sql = "DELETE FROM Products WHERE ProductID = @productID ;"; return connection.Execute(sql, new { ProductID = productId });
}
public int Update(Product product)
{
using var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString); string sql = "UPDATE Products SET ProductName= @ProductName ,SupplierID= @SupplierID ,CategoryID= @CategoryID ,QuantityPerUnit= @QuantityPerUnit ,UnitPrice= @UnitPrice ,UnitsInStock= @UnitsInStock ,UnitsOnOrder= @UnitsOnOrder ,ReorderLevel= @ReorderLevel ,Discontinued= @Discontinued WHERE ProductId= @ProductId "; return connection.Execute(sql, new
{
ProductId = product.ProductId,
ProductName = product.ProductName,
SupplierID = product.SupplierId,
CategoryID = product.CategoryId,
QuantityPerUnit = product.QuantityPerUnit,
UnitPrice = product.UnitPrice,
UnitsInStock = product.UnitsInStock,
UnitsOnOrder = product.UnitsOnOrder,
ReorderLevel = product.ReorderLevel,
Discontinued = product.Discontinued
});
}
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Entites: Veritabanındaki tablolara karşılık gelen model sınıflarımızın olduğu katman.
Product: Northwind veritabanındaki Product tablomuzun karşılığındaki modelimiz.
WebAPI: Kullanıcı ile etkileşime geçeceğimiz sunum katmanı.
→ ProductsController: Product bilgileri için kullanıcıdan alacağımız veya göndereceğimiz controller.
→ Startup.cs: Bu yapıya göre projeyi başlattığınızda hata alacaksınız. Startup sınıfında servislerimizi dahil etmeliyiz.
services.AddSingleton<IProductService, ProductManager>();
services.AddSingleton<IProductDal, DpProductDal>(); | https://medium.com/@kagansaygin/net-core-web-api-dapper-orm-kullan%C4%B1m%C4%B1-katmanl%C4%B1-mimari-9affa063cfcb | ['Kağan Saygın'] | 2021-06-11 17:30:09.109000+00:00 | ['Orm', 'Micro Orm', 'Dapper', 'Net Core'] |
Oppo Reno5 5G and Reno5 Pro 5G unveiled: 90Hz OLED screens, 65W charging | Homenews Oppo Reno5 5G and Reno5 Pro 5G unveiled: 90Hz OLED screens, 65W charging
The Reno5 series is now live with two initial models. They are nearly identical with the chipset being the major difference — as expected, it’s a mix of Snapdragon and Dimensity. The phones will run ColorOS 11 based on Android 11 out of the box.
The Oppo Reno5 Pro 5G is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ chipset and is coming in 8/128GB and 12/256GB configurations. The phone is available for pre-order, starting at CNY3,400 ($520/€430). The higher memory option will set you back CNY 3,800. The Oppo Reno5 5G goes for the Snapdragon 765G chipset instead but comes with the same memory options, 8/128GB and 12/256GB. This one is also up on pre-order at a price of CNY 2,700 ($410/€340), CNY 3,000 if you want the extra RAM and storage. The displays are the other notable difference between the two. The Pro model is equipped with the larger 6.55" panel, while the vanilla phone gets a 6.43" panel. Both are OLED displays with 1080p+ resolution and 90Hz refresh rate (plus 180 Hz touch sampling rate), but the Pro display has higher brightness — 500 nits maximum vs. 430 nits. The camera department is built around a 64MP main module with an f/1.7 aperture electronic image stabilization (EIS). It is accompanied by an 8MP ultrawide angle camera, plus two 2MP modules. Video recording is capped at 30 fps when shooting in 4K resolution on both phones. The selfie camera is embedded in a punch hole and has a 32MP sensor. It handles face unlock as an alternative to the in-display fingerprint reader. The Reno5 duo is equipped with 4,300 mAh batteries (16.64 Wh typical capacity). They support SuperVOOC 2.0 charging, meaning 65W peak speed. They can also use USB Power Delivery and QuickCharge chargers at 18W, reverse charging is supported as well…. Stay tuned for more tech news | https://medium.com/@techberg/oppo-reno5-5g-and-reno5-pro-5g-unveiled-90hz-oled-screens-65w-charging-26278009134 | [] | 2020-12-12 15:02:33.846000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Technews', 'Oppo'] |
Sun Tzu and the Art of… Psychology? | Created by Author
Exploring quotes for war and life.
Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a well known short read. It was popular in the western business world in the ’90s. Entrepreneurs and coaches alike swarmed to it for inspiration on how to ‘win’ at business. Whether treating your business ventures like warfare is useful is for others to decide and not relevant to this piece.
I enjoy finding different ways to discuss psychological ideas. We all connect with different things in life. For some, metaphors and quotes can help them absorb, remember and understand concepts.
I have picked out a few quotes from the Art of War which translates to key concepts in life.
“We may take it then that an army without its baggage train is lost, without provisions it is lost, without bases of supply, it is lost.”
This first quote discusses the movement of troops. It’s pretty relatable from a psychological perspective and a strong first metaphor. If you’re going to make any real change in your life, you need to make sure you have enough provisions in place.
We have a pretty intuitive understanding of our core needs in life. We can take this concept further. Maslow first put forward the idea of a hierarchy of needs in 1943. Hierarchy theories have changed over the years but the principles remain the same.
The basic principle is that if you want to achieve fulfilment in life you have to start from the bottom. You can’t start at the top, you have to build upwards from a solid foundation. Like an army needs its provisions, you need solid groundwork to grow from.
If you have no secure home and are struggling to eat, it’s difficult to have a strong sense of self-worth. You’re unlikely to search for higher levels of fulfilment in life. Maslow’s work wasn’t the best in terms of scientific rigour, and there is a level of subjectivity to the needs.
This is where the argument that people don’t need ‘things’ comes in. This is true, to an extent, but our core needs are not universal. As our experiences in life, where we came from are not universal. At least beyond the obvious biological needs, we have to survive.
Your provisions may differ from others, but the core concept of this makes sense to everyone. Make sure you’re grounded, make sure you have a solid base to work from and build from there.
It may be that after the basics of food and water, what you need is spiritual growth. It may be that you need social connection, friendship and love. You may need a direction, a goal to strive and achieve.
Beyond the basics, there will be variation in what people need. However, the principles remain true. You can’t skip steps. You start with your basic needs and then build upwards from there.
If you don’t have a strong foundation and you hit a problem, everything collapses. Build your foundation, build upwards and make sure to keep that supply running.
“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
There is a general rule when it comes to health which also applies to psychology. Short term experiences will usually be beneficial. Chronic, long term exposure causes problems.
Stress is a good example of this. Short experiences translate to robustness against negative experience. Chronic stress predicts the development of mental illness. The immune function is an example of a biological system that also demonstrates this.
Often we break down because of prolonged exposure and not because of the situation itself. If you feel something is becoming too much, taking a break can be powerful.
If you can’t separate yourself from it for a while, this might give you a reason to seek support. Often people don’t want to seek support because they feel they are a burden.
If you take it from a different perspective, the feelings of being a burden can lessen. You are seeking temporary support to give yourself a short break. Temporary being the keyword here.
We all have to deal with difficult and stressful situations in life. It’s important to understand what limits you have. Learn to know how far you can and should go and when to take a step back and give yourself time and self-care.
“Therefore, as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare, there are no constant conditions.”
The world is a complex environment, always changing. Psychology can provide tools to help us navigate that world but they are not universal. We can create generalised concepts but you still have to adapt them to your specific situation.
It’s important for us to remain flexible in our approach to life. You can’t expect to tackle every problem the same way.
Anxiety which fuels depression and depression which fuels anxiety share similar outcomes. When it comes to treatment, the approach for each is different.
Psychology always has and likely always will struggle with this concept. As a science, the goal is to find universal truths so that we can make accurate predictions on behaviour. However, we also always have to respect individual differences which somewhat defy those universals.
The end result is we tend to have predictions with variability. The most accurate areas of prediction have the least amount of variability. This is true for all medicine which is why certain medications work on some and less for others.
Real-life is messy, and when you get into the complexity of biological life you find the usual systems that science relies on the struggle. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford Professor, has a fascinating lecture on chaos theory which underlies these issues.
Your best bet is to learn as much as you can from any source that is available to you. Then trust in yourself to shape that knowledge to your individual needs. Be flexible and be ready to change.
“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
The first component puts a focus on ourselves over our environment. There are two ways to change any situation. You can make actual physical changes to it, or you change how you view it, your perspective.
In life, we need to use both to some extent. When we can’t change our environment, at least not immediately, we can still change our approach to it.
Securing ourselves from defeat is a personal goal we can all strive for. We may not be able to overcome our problems but as long as you can adapt, you can survive. If you can survive, a path will open up for you.
This phrase gets better when you take the second part of it into account. If we try to change something in our life at the wrong time, we often fail.
If you quit the job you hate with no other opportunities present, you’ll be in a bad place.
Opportunities present themselves to us all the time, life is constantly moving. If we can strengthen ourselves so we don’t break and then look for those opportunities, then we can make real change.
It is disingenuous for people to assert that you can always make the changes to your life at any time. Assertions to make changes have merit but they are not always realistic, at least not at that time.
We aren’t always in the position to make real significant changes. This goes back to the first quote, if you want to make those major changes, often you have to start at the foundation.
If you can’t quit your job currently, strengthen your foundation. Make yourself unbeatable so that the job you dislike doesn’t drag you down. When the opportunity presents itself, that’s when you make the move and at that time, you will be ready to do so.
When faced with psychological difficulties, there are usually many different facets of improvement. It might be that dealing with social anxiety isn’t right yet because depression is a greater priority. It’s important to understand when the right time for change is.
You can’t expect to change everything at once and sometimes it’s not realistic to try at that time. Life changes regardless of whether you enact it or not. That is the very nature of life.
If you are trapped right now, realise that even if you do nothing at all, things will change on their own. Focus on stability for yourself and be ready for a change when realistic.
You can learn from all sorts of places in life, even ancient books on warfare. These may or may not be useful for you but they were certainly fun for me to explore.
Further reading:
Sun Tzu — The Art of War | https://medium.com/@petersaorsa/sun-tzu-and-the-art-of-psychology-fc21644cf7b9 | ['Peter Saorsa'] | 2020-12-15 20:29:47.775000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Self Help', 'Psychology'] |
Things I Tell Myself When I’m Not Writing | 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/the-haven/things-i-tell-myself-when-im-not-writing-ef248e20bf19 | ['Sruthi Korlakunta'] | 2020-12-20 21:37:45.673000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Writers On Writing', 'Procastination', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing'] |
The rise of Stablecoins: is the Future that bright? | by Gintautas Scerbavicius
Ever since Bitcoin appeared many things have been heard. Some of them were good, others were bad, but most of them were controversial. In the end, after all the commotion, Bitcoin hasn’t yet achieved what many enthusiasts expected it to.
One of the reasons why Bitcoin is still not used as a mainstream currency today is because of the fact that its value is very unstable. This is why it’s used only in closed systems for large to medium-sized transactions. The fact that the price of the cryptocurrency can change drastically in a single day makes it hardly usable every day.
The second most popular cryptocurrency by volume is Tether. It has gained broad prominence both as a medium of exchange of other cryptocurrencies and as a coin failing to provide the audits for their reserves while simultaneously printing millions.
Tether or USDT and other coins are in the news again because of a magical buzzword spreading across the crypto economy these days — “stablecoins”.
What are Stablecoins?
Most Bitcoin is traded in crypto-to-crypto only exchanges. Stablecoins provide the essential infrastructure to trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. A lot of people recognized this and decided to create cryptocurrencies that won’t have price volatility issues and this is how stablecoins first appeared.
To put it simply, “stablecoins” are basically cryptocurrencies which have their values linked to a real-world asset.
Many Stablecoins have complex mechanics behind them but the main thing is that these are mere crypto coins that are designed to have stable values. Stablecoins can broadly be divided into two main stability mechanism categories: algorithmic and asset-backed.
Blockchain Luxembourg S.A., the company behind the first major empirical research study, count that there are currently at least 57 launched or pre-launch stablecoins: 23 stablecoins (40%) that are live and 34 stablecoins (60%) that are at the pre-launch phase.
Gintautas Scerbavicius, CTO at HODL Finance
Some of the best-known Stablecoins are TUSD, DAI, Bridge Coin, BITUSD, and of course — Tether.
There are 2 main types of stablecoins: asset-backed (or reserve-backed) and algorithmic.
Asset-backed stablecoins
Asset-backed stablecoins are backed one-for-one by reserves of the currencies they are pegged to. In theory, stablecoins could be linked to anything, but the majority are linked to currencies such as the US dollar or Euro.
Just as the dollar is a major reserve currency in the world, it is also the most popular currency backing stablecoins.
The most popular asset-backed stablecoin, Tether, is based on Blockchain and designed to hold a stable value of $1. It currently dominates the market with over 90% of all stablecoin market value.
Tether claims to have dollar reserves which can be redeemed for a token, while some other stablecoins use lending or hedging systems and crypto assets to hold their value.
Algorithmic stablecoins
Algorithmic stablecoins, just as their name suggests, are not backed by any reserves but instead controlled by an algorithm.
“They’re really using software rules to try and match supply with demand to maintain a peg to something like the US dollar”, as Garrick Hileman, blockchain researcher told Business Insider recently.
“As demand for an algorithmic stablecoin increases, supply also has to increase to make sure there’s not an appreciation in the value of the stablecoin. At the same time, as the value decreases, there needs to be a mechanism by which supply can be reduced again to try and bring the price of the stablecoin back to the peg”, Mr. Hileman explains.
To name a few algorithmic stablecoins currently in development we should mention Terra, Carbon, Basis, and Fragments.
Many uses & even more concerns
There are numerous uses for stablecoins. Among the biggest arguments for using them is their ability to serve as a medium of exchange. In this case, a consumer could protect himself from the volatility of the market by getting stablecoins rather than highly volatile cryptocurrencies. Or a trader could trade bitcoin against a stablecoin on the crypto-to-crypto exchange.
Stablecoins can also be used as the unit of account (to the measure by which goods and services are priced) or as a store of value (a commodity, asset, or money that retains its purchasing power or value into the future) and much more.
Most importantly, stablecoins could help create a tipping point for much broader crypto assets adoption by addressing one of the focal concerns in this relatively new sort of economic activity — volatility. Precisely, volatility is often named as one of the key reasons why traditional financial institutions and private citizens have refrained from the crypto economy.
But most importantly, creators of stablecoins have to deal with exactly the same challenge we are all struggling with every day — ensuring investors, clients, and the broader community trust them. Needless to say that a legal clarification is a mandatory starting point.
HODL Finance is the European digital lending company. HODL Finance issues loans backed by cryptocurrency and other digital assets. Founded by the shareholders of the peer-to-peer lending platform, Savy, HODL Finance now serves clients around the world. | https://medium.com/hodl-finance/the-rise-of-stablecoins-is-the-future-that-bright-dad4074e098c | ['Hodl Finance'] | 2018-12-18 15:13:59.579000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Stablecoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Tether'] |
Go言語での決済システムとマイクロサービス化について | Learn more about how Eureka technology and engineering
Follow | https://medium.com/eureka-engineering/go%E8%A8%80%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%A7%E3%81%AE%E6%B1%BA%E6%B8%88%E3%82%B7%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3%83%A0%E3%81%A8%E3%83%9E%E3%82%A4%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%93%E3%82%B9%E5%8C%96%E3%81%AB%E3%81%A4%E3%81%84%E3%81%A6-d80dd4e6f684 | ['Eureka'] | 2018-02-23 09:57:31.648000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Golang', 'Go'] |
The Price of an Hour: The crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 | The Price of an Hour: The crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 Admiral_Cloudberg Jul 3·30 min read
Note: this accident was previously featured in episode 2 of the plane crash series on September 16th, 2017, prior to the series’ arrival on Medium. This article is written without reference to and supersedes the original.
A still from the TV show “Mayday” attempts to capture the harrowing final moments of Alaska Airlines flight 261. (Mayday)
On the 31st of January 2000, an Alaska Airlines MD-83 bound for San Francisco suddenly plunged from the sky off the coast of California, spiraling downward until it slammed into the Pacific Ocean. The horrific crash killed all 88 people on board and raised troubling questions about one of America’s largest airlines. For two hours, the crew of the ill-fated jet had struggled with a malfunctioning stabilizer, unaware that this critical flight control system had turned into a ticking time bomb counting down toward catastrophic failure. Indeed, the final, terrifying dive was the culmination not just of hours of failed troubleshooting, but of years upon years of negligent maintenance, blatant corruption, and lax federal oversight, a deadly combination that led to an unprecedented failure of the stabilizer trim jackscrew — one of the scariest malfunctions any flight crew has ever faced. On every level, it was a tragedy that did not need to happen — and to this day, it serves as a grim example of the depths to which an airline may fall when oversight becomes too thinly stretched.
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A quirky advertisement for Alaska Airlines from the ’60s or ’70s. (Alaska Airlines Blog)
Among major US airlines, Alaska has charted perhaps the most unusual course across its long and fascinating history. It began life as a regional airline in Alaska, and by the time deregulation arrived in the late 1970s, it only had one destination in the lower 48 states. But over the next two decades, Alaska Airlines pursued an aggressive strategy of expansion, aiming to become an affordable option for travelers throughout the Western United States. It added dozens of new routes, expanded to a large number of new cities, and even added services to Mexico in order to offset the seasonal nature of its flights to Alaska. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, what had once been a small regional carrier had successfully transformed itself into one of America’s largest airlines.
But this very success may have planted the seeds of the disaster which followed. During the 1990s, low-cost competitors such as MarkAir in Alaska and Southwest Airlines in the Pacific Northwest began trying to undercut Alaska’s more traditional fare model on numerous core routes. In 1991, after posting a record loss of $121 million, the company’s business analysts concluded that to remain competitive, Alaska Airlines needed to reduce expenses. And so began a slash-and-burn cost-cutting campaign — a campaign that culminated in a terrible black mark which will forever hang over the company, a tragedy so horrible and so preventable that it would call the safety of the entire industry into question.
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N963AS, the aircraft involved in the accident. (User N94504 via Airliners.net)
Nine years after the cost-cutting began, Alaska Airlines was posting profits again, its fleet was expanding, and passenger numbers were higher than ever. The turn of the millennium had just come and gone, and the future again seemed limitless. And so it was that on a sunny day in January 2000, 83 passengers and five crew boarded Alaska Airlines flight 261 in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, bound for San Francisco, California. The eight-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-83, registered as N963AS, outwardly seemed to be in good shape. The pilots, 53-year-old Captain Ted Thompson and 57-year-old First Officer Bill Tansky, could not have known that they were about to play out the final chapter in a sordid story that had been building toward its conclusion for years.
Indeed, all seemed normal as flight 261 climbed out from Puerto Vallarta, heading for its cruising altitude of 31,000 feet. The Gulf of California stretched out below them, bright and blue. And then, as the plane passed through 23,400 feet, a warning light flicked on in the cockpit: “AUTOPILOT TRIM,” it said. It was the first sign that something was in fact gravely wrong with their airplane.
Diagram of the location and function of the horizontal stabilizer and jackscrew assembly. (Original source unknown, possibly the Seattle Times)
All large airplanes have what is referred to as a trimmable horizontal stabilizer. The stabilizer on the MD-80 series rests on top of the tail, and like all airliners, it can move up and down to adjust the pitch angle at which the plane is stable. Different speeds and phases of flight require the stabilizer to apply varying amounts of downforce on the tail in order to keep the plane level, and further adjustments must be made to ensure that the pilots don’t have to continuously pull up or push down using the elevators in order to climb or descend. By “trimming” the stabilizer to (for example) a nose up position, the pilots or the autopilot can keep the plane in a steady climb without touching the controls at all.
The basic design of the stabilizer is relatively simple. The stabilizer is attached to a giant threaded screw, called the jackscrew, which feeds through a nut attached to the aircraft structure inside the tail. Two electric motors spin the jackscrew within the nut, causing the stabilizer to move up or down. When the stabilizer moves upward, downforce on the tail decreases, and the nose pitches down; similarly, when the stabilizer moves downward, downforce increases, and the nose pitches up. Mechanical stops attached to the jackscrew prevent the stabilizer from moving farther than 2.5 degrees upward or 12.5 degrees downward. (To avoid confusion, from here on out “nose up” and “nose down,” as they relate to the pitch of the airplane, will be used to describe the stabilizer’s direction of motion. Keep in mind that the pitch of the stabilizer itself is actually inverse to the pitch of the airplane.)
A more detailed breakdown of the jackscrew assembly. (NTSB)
The jackscrew is one of the few components of the MD-80 series that does not have a redundant backup in case of failure. As such, it is critically important that the jackscrew be kept in good working order, primarily through the liberal application of grease at regular intervals.
The metal from which the jackscrew is made is ever so slightly harder than the metal used in the nut. Over time, this minute difference will cause the jackscrew to wear away the threads on the nut if metal-on-metal contact is allowed to occur. When greased regularly, the nut on the MD-80 series is designed to last for 30,000 flight hours before requiring replacement — long enough that most planes will see only two or three different jackscrew nuts during their entire time in service.
In 1987, Alaska Airlines greased the stabilizer jackscrews on its MD-80s every 500 flight hours, the value recommended by the manufacturer. But as the airline began cutting costs over the following decade, one of the areas that got put on the chopping block was maintenance. Performing maintenance less frequently saved on labor costs and kept the planes in the air longer, thus increasing revenue. As a result, Alaska Airlines slowly increased the interval between jackscrew lubrications from 500 flight hours in 1987 to every eight months (approximately 2,250 flight hours) in 1999. In theory this was adequate, but only if the grease was applied correctly every time.
A properly greased jackscrew, seen during an inspection for wear. (NTSB)
However, during the 1990s the quality of maintenance at Alaska Airlines began to slip significantly. The airline extended numerous maintenance intervals, while simultaneously skimping on personnel and training. Many of Alaska’s maintenance workers received on the job training only without any formal curriculum. Key safety-related positions within the airline’s management structure went unfilled. Quality control fell by the wayside as workers performed tasks they didn’t understand, while under pressure to get planes back in service as quickly as possible. Technical logs fell through the cracks; critical forms were left incomplete; paperwork was outright falsified to show work done when it was not.
The seemingly simple task of greasing the jackscrew was not immune to this degradation of the maintenance environment. According to the official maintenance manual, greasing the jackscrew involved three main steps. First, pressurized grease was to be injected into a special tube on the nut until it filled all the thread gaps between the nut and the jackscrew and started to bulge out the top. Then, additional grease was to be applied to the entire length of the screw, filling all the threads. Finally, the stabilizer was to be moved repeatedly between full nose up and full nose down so that the nut could spread the grease evenly over the entire jackscrew.
If done correctly, the process took about four hours. However, Alaska Airlines maintenance personnel often did it in as little as one hour — not because they found a more efficient way, but because they didn’t understand the proper procedure and skipped some of the steps. Many workers who greased jackscrews didn’t apply additional grease to the screw itself after greasing the nut. Some did still less, failing even to ensure that grease totally filled the inside of the nut. The result was a chronic problem of Alaska Airlines MD-80s with poorly greased jackscrews. And because of the increased interval between applications of new grease, a jackscrew with insufficient grease couldn’t expect to see more until the plane had been in the air for another 2,250 hours.
The problem was that with insufficient grease, the threads on the nut began to wear down at an accelerated rate. With no grease at all, the rate of wear would increase by a factor of ten or more. In order to catch abnormal wear before it escalated to the point of failure, MD-80 operators regularly inspected their stabilizer jackscrew nuts to ensure that the wear remained within limits. (Alaska specifically did this every 30 months, or 9,550 flight hours.) By torqueing the screw up and down without turning it, and measuring the amount of play in the system, it was possible to roughly determine the depth of the wear on the nut threads, which the manufacturer’s guidelines stated must be less than one millimeter. Anything more than that and the nut would need to be replaced. But the measurements were imprecise and repeated tests often produced different results — allowing a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the value was over or under the limit. N963AS, the plane that would later become Alaska Airlines flight 261, was one of many in the airline’s fleet that was subject to these marginal maintenance practices.
In September of 1997, maintenance workers in Oakland performed the aforementioned test on N963AS and found a wear depth of exactly one millimeter. The lead mechanic that day was John Liotine, a rare Alaska Airlines employee who still took safety seriously. When he measured the wear on the jackscrew nut and found it to be exactly one millimeter (0.040in), he concluded that the nut had reached the end of its service life and issued a work card ordering its replacement. But after Liotine left for the night, the next shift and the shift supervisors decided to run the test again before taking his measurement at face value. The night shift subsequently performed the test five more times and measured a wear depth of approximately 0.84mm on each attempt. On the basis of these measurements, the shift supervisors overruled Liotine’s earlier work order and cleared the plane to fly. That was the last time anyone ever measured the wear on the jackscrew nut on N963AS.
The actual work card related to the fateful jackscrew nut inspection, 27 Sept. 1997. (NTSB)
In 1998, fed up with a maintenance environment that did not seem to prioritize safety, John Liotine blew the whistle and alerted the FAA to some of Alaska’s numerous violations. For several months he surreptitiously recorded his bosses violating safety rules and handed the tapes over to FAA investigators. In December of 1998 the federal government launched a criminal investigation into Alaska Airlines, seizing documents and interviewing witnesses. Then in 1999 Alaska Airlines retaliated against John Liotine, putting him on indefinite leave from his job and circulating false rumors about him; the airline sought to portray him in the media as a “disgruntled employee” who wanted to get back at supervisors who passed him over for promotion.
Stages of wear on the jackscrew nut. (FAA)
Meanwhile, N963AS continued to fly, and maintenance workers continued to grease the jackscrew every eight months. However, the plane ran into a streak of at least two or three grease applications that were not done correctly, including one in September 1999 by a notorious San Francisco-based mechanic who was later found to have applied virtually no grease to any of the jackscrews he worked on. The longer it went without being greased properly, the faster the jackscrew wore down the threads on the nut. The threads eventually lost up to 90% of their thickness, compared to 22% at the maximum wear depth of one millimeter. It was on board Alaska Airlines flight 261 from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco on the 31st of January 2000 that this sequence of events that had been years in the making finally came to its terrifying conclusion.
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The route of Alaska Airlines flight 261. (Google + own work)
As flight 261 climbed through 23,400 feet at approximately 13:49 that day, the badly worn threads started to tear away from the nut, wrapping themselves around the jackscrew and causing the stabilizer to jam. Four minutes later, a warning light illuminated to inform the crew that the autopilot was unable to move the stabilizer. Pilots Thompson and Tansky disconnected the autopilot to see what they were up against, and found that the stabilizer had jammed slightly nose down, requiring constant force on the elevators to overcome it and continue climbing.
As any good crew should do, Thompson and Tansky then pulled out the checklists for a runaway or inoperative stabilizer. Following the procedures prescribed in the checklists, they tried cycling the motors on and off, checking the trim motor circuit breakers, and using the manual trim controls. Neither the electric switches (which the pilots called “pickle switches”) nor the fully manual trim handles (referred to as the “suitcase handles”) could move the stabilizer. At this point the checklist said “Consider stab jammed, do not use autopilot,” and offered a list of considerations to be made during landing.
The runaway stabilizer checklist which may have been used by the pilots. (NTSB)
In hindsight, the crew should have turned around and immediately landed back in Puerto Vallarta. Lives would have been saved if they had. But neither of the applicable checklists said anything about landing at the nearest available airport, and by the time they finished the checklists and leveled off at 31,000 feet, minimal effort was required to keep the plane flying level. As far as the pilots were concerned, the electric motors had probably seized and they could fly on to San Francisco without trimming the stabilizer. They had no way of knowing at this stage that the problem was mechanical in nature.
At 15:49, after flying for two hours with a jammed stabilizer, Thompson and Tansky contacted Alaska’s Seattle maintenance base for advice. The base confirmed that there weren’t any known problems with the stabilizer, and the discussion then turned to how to handle the failure. Within the next several minutes the pilots expected to pass abeam Los Angeles off the coast, and they were strongly considering a diversion to LAX, given that none of their troubleshooting had fixed the problem. But airline dispatchers in Seattle were less keen on this idea and preferred that flight 261 continue to San Francisco as scheduled. Captain Thompson argued that conditions would be more suitable for landing at Los Angeles, and the dispatcher admitted that the reason they preferred San Francisco was because a diversion would disrupt “flow,” worsening mounting delays in Alaska’s flight schedule. Captain Thompson was not happy with this reasoning.
“I really didn’t want to hear about flow being the reason you’re calling us,” he said to the dispatcher, “Cause I’m concerned about overflying suitable airports.”
“Well we want to do what’s safe,” said the dispatcher, “so if that’s what you feel is safe… we just want to make sure you have all the info.”
The pilots asked for information on the runway conditions in San Francisco, and the dispatcher temporarily signed off to go find some. No decision was made at this point about whether or not to divert. On board flight 261, Captain Thompson vented to First Officer Tansky: “…Drives me nuts,” he said. “Not that I want to go on about it… you know, it just blows me away they think we’re gonna land, they’re gonna fix it, now they’re worried about the flow. I’m sorry, this airplane isn’t gonna go anywhere for a while.”
“So they’re trying to put pressure on you,” said Tansky.
“Well, no, yeah,” said Thompson.
An even more detailed diagram of the jackscrew assembly. (NTSB)
At 15:55, the dispatcher returned with wind speeds, wind directions, and runway conditions at San Francisco and Los Angeles. The pilots decided that Los Angeles looked better. “We’re going to LAX,” Thompson told the dispatcher. “We’re gonna stay up here and burn a little more gas, get all our ducks in a row, and then we’ll be talking to LAX when we start down to go in there.” The plan was to stay on course a little longer, burning fuel to reduce their landing weight and test out the plane’s handling capabilities, before turning around and heading into Los Angeles. The pilots didn’t want to discover on final approach that the plane was uncontrollable at low speeds. For the next few minutes, they calculated landing weights and center of gravity and other values while controllers in Los Angeles prepared to accommodate them.
At 16:07, flight 261 contacted Alaska Airlines’ Los Angeles maintenance facility on the radio. “You did try the suitcase handles and the pickle switches, right?” the maintenance technician asked.
“Yeah, we tried everything together,” said Thompson. “We’ve run just about everything. If you’ve got any hidden circuit breakers we’d love to know about ‘em.” Over the next couple minutes the pilots reported to maintenance that electrical current was present when they activated the trim motors, but that the motors nevertheless could not move the stabilizer.
The maintenance technician, having received all the information he could get, said, “Okay, thank you sir, see you there.”
Meanwhile, the conversation had apparently encouraged Captain Thompson to try moving the stabilizer again. At 16:09, he said, “I’m gonna click it off. You got it?”
“Okay,” said Tansky.
“Let’s do that.” Thompson attempted to move the stabilizer trim using either the electrical switches, the trim handles, or both, in an effort to clear the jam. The effect was immediate and catastrophic, as his inputs ripped out whatever threads remained on the jackscrew nut. With the jackscrew completely separated from the nut, aerodynamic forces acting on the stabilizer pushed it up beyond the normal full nose down position, halting only when the mechanical stop on the bottom of the jackscrew slammed into the nut. With the stabilizer angled 3.1 degrees toward nose down, more than the design maximum of 2.5 degrees, flight 261 immediately entered a high-speed dive, hurtling downward at more than 6,000 feet per minute.
In the cockpit, the pilots heard a loud clunk followed by two thumps, and the plane pitched steeply downward. The crew scrambled to react to the massive upset. “Holy shit,” said Thompson, pulling back hard on the controls. “You got it? Fuck me!”
“What are you doing?” Tansky asked.
“I clicked it off,” Thompson said. “It got worse, okay.” Violent vibrations shook the airplane.
As they struggled to regain control, Thompson radioed Los Angeles and said, “Center, Alaska two six one, we are in a dive here, and I’ve lost control, vertical pitch!” An overspeed warning blared in the cockpit.
“Alaska two sixty one, say again sir,” said the controller.
“Yeah, we are out of 26,000 feet, we are in a vertical dive… not a dive yet, but uh, we’ve lost vertical control of our airplane.”
However, slowly but surely, Thompson and Tansky started to rein in their excessive speed and flatten out the slope of the dive. “We are at twenty three seven, request, uh,” Thompson said to the controller. “Yeah, we got it back under control here.”
“No we don’t,” said Tansky.
The first two stages of the stabilizer failure. (NTSB)
By now the plane had leveled out at about 23,500 feet, after plunging 7,500 feet in 80 seconds. Only by applying a continuous maximum nose up elevator input on his control column, a task which required enormous physical effort, was Captain Thompson able to maintain level flight.
“Fuck me,” he said. “It really wants to pitch down.”
“Okay,” said Tansky.
“Don’t mess with that,” said Thompson.
“I agree with you.”
“Alaska two six one,” said the controller, “Say your condition?”
“Two six one, we are at 24,000 feet, kinda stabilized,” said Thompson. “We’re slowing here, and we’re gonna do a little troubleshooting, can you give me a block altitude between twenty and twenty five?”
The controller granted the block altitude. By requesting any altitude between 20,000 and 25,000 feet, the crew of flight 261 could ensure that if they nosedived again, nearby planes wouldn’t be in danger. In fact, by now there were several other airplanes in the area that were keenly watching the unfolding situation.
“You have the airplane. Let me just try it,” Tansky said, offering to take over the strenuous task of holding the plane level.
“Okay,” said Thompson.
“Uh, how hard is it?” Tansky asked.
“I don’t know, my adrenaline’s going,” said Thompson. “It was really tough there for a while.”
“Whatever we did is no good, don’t do that again,” said Tansky.
“Yeah, no,” said Thompson. “It went down, it went to full nose down.”
“Uh, it’s a lot worse than it was?” Tansky asked.
“I think it’s at the stop, full stop,” said Thompson. “I’m thinking, can it get any worse, but it probably can,” he continued. “But when we slowed down… let’s slow it, let’s get it down to two hundred knots and see what happens.”
Map of the final part of the flight. (FAA)
Now Thompson and Tansky slowed down and deployed the flaps and slats, simulating a landing configuration, to make sure the plane would be controllable on final approach. While Tansky held the plane steady, Thompson contacted LAX maintenance again. “We did both the pickle switches and the suitcase handles,” he told the maintenance technician, “and it ran away full nose trim down.”
“Oh, it ran away trim down?”
“And now we’re in a pinch,” Thompson continued, “so we’re holding, uh, we’re worse than we were.”
“Uh, you getting full nose trim down but are you getting any… you don’t get no nose trim up, is that correct?” maintenance asked.
“That’s affirm,” said Thompson. “We went to full nose down and I’m afraid to try it again to see if we can get it to go in the other direction.”
“Okay, well, your discretion,” said maintenance. “Uh, if you want to try it, that’s ok with me, if not, that’s fine. We’ll see you at the gate.” This would be the last transmission between flight 261 and Alaska Airlines maintenance.
Meanwhile in the cockpit, the pilots tried to figure out what had happened. “Did it happen… went in reverse?” Tansky asked.
“I went tab down, right, and it should have come back. Instead it went the other way.”
“Uh huh.”
“What do you think. You want to try it or not?”
“Uh, boy, I don’t know,” said Tansky.
“It’s up to you, man,” said Thompson.
“Let’s head back,” Tansky suggested.
Keying the public address system, Captain Thompson announced, “Folks, we have had a flight control problem up front here; we’re working it… Uh, that’s Los Angeles off to the right there, that’s where we’re intending to go. We’re pretty busy up here working this situation. I don’t anticipate any big problems once we get a couple of sub systems on the line. But we will be going into LAX, and I’d anticipate us parking there in about twenty to thirty minutes.”
Having decided not to touch the trim system anymore, the crew now performed some final tests of the airplane’s low speed handling. Los Angeles controllers gave flight 261 permission to approach the airport, but Thompson asked to stay out over the ocean while they tested the controllability of their airplane. If they lost control again, he didn’t want to endanger people on the ground.
A flight attendant opened the cockpit door, and Captain Thompson briefed her on the situation. “I need everything picked up and everybody strapped down,” he said, “cause I’m gonna unload the airplane and see if we can gain control of it that way.” His intention was to fly at lower speeds where there would be less aerodynamic force pushing up on the stabilizer. By this point the amount of force he needed to apply to the control column to keep the nose level was pushing him to the limit of his physical ability.
“Okay, we had a big bang back there,” said the flight attendant.
“Yeah, I heard it,” said Thompson. “The stab trim, I think.”
“You heard it in the back?” Tansky asked.
“Yeah.”
“I think the stab trim thing is broke,” said Thompson.
“I didn’t want to call you guys,” said the flight attendant, “but that girl — they’re like, you better go up there and tell them.”
“I need you strapped in, dear,” said Thompson, “cause I’m going to release the back pressure and see if I can get it back.”
How aerodynamic forces were affecting the badly damaged horizontal stabilizer. (Own work)
Over the next couple minutes, the pilots found the plane to be reasonably stable at lower speeds. Thompson continued to think about ways to unjam the stabilizer. “What I want to do is get the nose up, and then let the nose fall through and see if we can stab it when it’s unloaded.” It was his belief that the stabilizer might move nose up if there was no aerodynamic force pushing it upward into the nose down position.
“You mean, use this again?” Tansky asked, presumably pointing at the trim switches. “I don’t think we should, if it can fly, it’s like — ”
“It’s on the stop now, it’s on the stop,” Thompson said.
“Not according to that it’s not,” said Tansky. “The trim might be, and then it might be uh, if something’s popped back there…”
“Yeah.”
“It might be mechanical damage too. I think if it’s controllable, we ought to just try and land it,” said Tansky.
The final stage of the failure: complete separation. (NTSB)
In the ten minutes that had passed since the dive, the stabilizer had been held at 3.1 degrees nose down by nothing more than the mechanical stop on the bottom of the jackscrew. The massive aerodynamic force pushing up on the horizontal stabilizer was normally absorbed by the nut, but with its threads stripped, all that force was transmitted through the mechanical stop instead. It was not designed to handle that kind of pressure, and over those ten minutes, it started to fracture. Finally, at 16:19 and 21 seconds, the stop gave way with a faint thump.
“You feel that?” Tansky asked.
“Okay, give me sl — see, this is a bitch!” said Thompson.
The entire horizontal stabilizer assembly was now attached to the airplane only by the rear hinge. The free-swinging stabilizer rotated up past its stop, slamming back against the aerodynamic fairing that encased the tail. Three seconds later, the fairing failed, and the stabilizer swung unimpeded on its hinge to a position of at least 14 degrees aircraft nose down. Flight 261 immediately plunged into a near-vertical dive, hurtling downward toward the Pacific Ocean.
As Thompson fought with all his might to regain control, Tansky shouted “Mayday!” but forgot to key his mic. A cacophony of banging and roaring filled the cockpit. The pilots pulled back as hard as they could on their control columns and deployed the flaps to try and slow down, but their efforts were utterly hopeless.
Pilots of nearby planes caught sight of flight 261 and radioed Los Angeles air traffic control. “That plane just started to do a big, huge plunge,” said one pilot.
“A big, huge plunge, thank you,” said the controller. “SkyWest 5154, the MD-80 is one becoming two o’clock about ten miles now. Another pilot reports he’s really looking pretty bad there, ahead and to your right, do you see him?”
“Yes sir, I concur,” said the SkyWest pilot, “He is definitely in a nose down position descending quite rapidly.”
Flight 261 started to corkscrew, pirouetting and rolling inverted as it fell. “Push and roll! Push and roll!” Thompson shouted, trying to coordinate with Tansky to roll the plane right-side-up. “Okay, we are inverted, and now we gotta get it…”
“Plane’s inverted sir,” a nearby pilot told the controller.
“It looks like he’s turning… he’s turning over in front of you now,” said the controller. “SkyWest 5154, you still got your eyes on him, sir?”
“He’s in sight, he’s, uh, definitely out of control,” said the SkyWest pilot.
This animation of flight 261’s final dive was featured in Mayday: Season 1 Episode 5, “Cutting Corners.”
On board the stricken MD-83, the pilots managed to slow the dive somewhat, pulling up from 70 degrees nose down to 28 degrees, but the plane remained inverted, falling upside down toward the rapidly approaching ocean at a high rate of speed. Still, the pilots did not give up; Thompson thought it might be possible to roll out right-side-up using the rudder.
“Kick!” he shouted. “Push push push, push the blue side up!”
“I’m pushing!”
“Okay, now let’s kick rudder, left rudder, left rudder…”
“I can’t reach it!” said Tansky. Stepping on the rudder pedals while upside down was no easy task.
“Okay, right rudder, right rudder,” said Thompson. Still flying inverted, the plane leveled further, to nine degrees nose down. “Are we flying?” he said. “…We’re flying… we’re flying… tell ’em what we’re doing.”
“Oh yeah, let me get…” said Tansky. He opened the mic for the public address system but never managed to get any words out.
“Gotta get it over again…” said Thompson. “At least upside down, we’re flying!”
An airliner cannot truly fly upside down — maintaining level flight in such a condition is essentially impossible, and the engines will quickly die — but if anyone ever came close, it was Captain Thompson and First Officer Tansky as they heroically tried to save their stricken aircraft, even after all hope was lost.
Watching the death throes of flight 261, the SkyWest pilot told controllers, “Yeah, he’s inverted.”
“Okay,” said the controller, apprehension evident in his voice. “Just do what you need to do there, SkyWest 5154. Keep us advised.”
Still descending at high speed, flight 261’s engines proved unable to keep combustion going in such an unusual attitude and started to stall with a series of loud bangs.
“Speedbrakes!” Captain Thompson called out, still trying to find ways to arrest the dive.
“Got it,” said Tansky.
But there was nothing to be done. They had run out of altitude. “Ah, here we go,” said Captain Thompson, uttering the last words captured on the cockpit voice recorder. Less than one second later, Alaska Airlines flight 261 slammed into the Pacific Ocean, obliterating the aircraft and instantly killing all 88 people on board.
Badly shaken witnesses reported the crash to air traffic control within seconds. “And he’s just hit the water,” said one pilot.
“Yes sir, he… he hit the water,” said the SkyWest pilot, his voice nearly cracking. “He’s ah, down.”
In a still from live news footage, search and rescue teams scour the floating wreckage of flight 261. (NBC News)
Rescue vessels raced to the crash site three kilometers east of Anacapa Island in the Santa Barbara Channel, hoping to find survivors. Instead, all they could find was an oil slick and some light floating debris. It was clear that nobody had survived the crash. By nightfall, working with the help of flood lights from squid fishing boats, recovery workers managed to find just seven bodies. Salvage vessels had to be brought in to raise the rest of the plane from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The jackscrew as it was found, still attached to the horizontal stabilizer but separated from the nut. (NTSB)
As investigators recovered more and more of the plane from the ocean floor, a troubling picture of the sequence of events began to emerge. When the jackscrew was hauled to the surface, investigators could not find any trace of grease on it, except for some old, dried out leftovers outside the normal working area of the screw. The tangled remnants of the threads from the nut remained wrapped around the jackscrew, wordlessly telling the story of how the stabilizer failed. That was the how — but the bigger question was why.
◊◊◊
The investigation uncovered a daunting list of operational problems and regulatory mistakes that led to the crash. Most importantly, the National Transportation Safety Board excoriated Alaska Airlines’ decision to increase the intervals between jackscrew lubrications and wear inspections, and the FAA’s approval of these intervals, which it considered to be a direct cause of the accident. By 2000, Alaska Airlines only inspected the wear on the jackscrew nut every 30 months, equivalent to 9,550 flight hours, whereas the manufacturer recommended an interval no larger than 7,200 flight hours. N963AS nearly made it anyway — its next jackscrew inspection was scheduled for March 2000. Had it been inspected after 7,200 flight hours instead of 9,550, the excessive wear would have been discovered before the crash.
A closer view of the jackscrew with the threads of the nut still wrapped around it. (NTSB)
The Safety Board found that this unsafe inspection interval was only approved indirectly by the FAA. The actual protocol at Alaska Airlines was to inspect the jackscrew for wear at every second “C-check,” a comprehensive multi-day inspection that every airplane undergoes approximately once a year. In 1996, Alaska Airlines applied to the FAA to extend the interval between its C-checks from 13 months to 15 months. The FAA approved the extension without assessing the effect this would have on individual inspection tasks that were tied to the C-check interval. Therefore the interval between jackscrew inspections was effectively increased from 26 to 30 months without the FAA spending a single minute looking into whether or not this was appropriate.
And therein lay the problem: throughout the period leading up to the crash, Alaska Airlines slowly removed all the procedural layers of redundancy which were designed to prevent the jackscrew from deteriorating to the point of failure. Increasing the interval between lubrications meant that every lubrication had to be done correctly in order to prevent accelerated wear and tear. And at the same time, the increased inspection interval meant that it was now possible for a jackscrew nut to pass an inspection, later receive inadequate lubrication, and then wear down to the point of failure, all before the next inspection came around. The only layer of protection against a catastrophe was therefore the assumption that poorly trained, low-paid maintenance workers would apply enough grease. Tragically, they didn’t.
Pieces of Alaska Airlines flight 261 are hauled from the sea. (UPI)
A special inspection by the FAA after the accident found further evidence of a massively deficient safety culture at Alaska Airlines. The FAA’s special inspection report noted that the position of Director of Maintenance had gone unfilled since 1998; the Director of Operations position was empty; the Director of Safety was also the Director of Quality Control and the Director of Training and didn’t report to high-level management; there was no maintenance training curriculum; on-the-job training was completely unstructured; the procedures in use didn’t match those outlined in the maintenance manual; planes had been released from C-checks with paperwork incomplete; perishable and consumable materials had expired; shift turnover paperwork was missing, unsigned, or incomplete; work cards were not filled out properly; and more — the list went on and on. It was no wonder, given these findings, why Alaska Airlines mechanics didn’t know how to grease the jackscrew, and why nobody held them accountable for not doing so properly.
Wreckage from the plane was collected in a hangar for sorting and analysis. (Mike Nelson)
The Safety Board also examined the design of the jackscrew itself, and found that it probably didn’t meet certification standards. The problem, again, was a lack of redundancy: if the threads on the nut failed, there was no other structure that could absorb the load, and the catastrophic failure of the trim system leading to the loss of the airplane was inevitable. The design of the jackscrew on the MD-80 series was identical to that of the original 1960s-era Douglas DC-9, which was certified to meet requirements stating that no “reasonably probable” single failure of the control system could jeopardize the controllability of the airplane. The basis for the approval of the design under this rule was the fact that the nut has two independent threads that did not link with one another, such that if one thread failed, the other could still hold the jackscrew in place. However, this premise was based on the assumption that one of the threads might separate from the nut due to metal fatigue or improper workmanship, and did not consider the possibility of abnormal wear simultaneously compromising the strength of both threads. Thus the fundamental principle of redundancy was violated.
Wreckage was labeled to aid in its reconstruction. (Bryan Chan)
Finally, the Safety Board also felt that there were lessons to be learned from the actions of the pilots. The report noted that the crash could have been avoided if they had immediately returned to Puerto Vallarta when they encountered the jammed stabilizer. However, the procedures available to them did not state that this was necessary, which doubtlessly contributed to their decision to continue on. More importantly, investigators felt that the pilots should not have attempted to troubleshoot the problem after exhausting the procedures in the checklist, considering that they didn’t know the extent of the damage. If they had not attempted to move the stabilizer immediately before the first dive, their chances of safely reaching an airport before the jackscrew failed entirely would have been much greater.
However, the pilots were clearly under pressure to continue on to San Francisco, and maintenance technicians and dispatchers on the ground did not appreciate the direness of the situation. Furthermore, the pilots were reluctant to believe that the failure was mechanical, rather than electrical, in nature. All of these factors could have contributed to their decision to troubleshoot a problem that was best left alone. Nevertheless, investigators praised the pilots for their heroic last-ditch efforts to save their aircraft, even attempting to fly upside down when they found they could not level the plane. Both Captain Thompson and First Officer Tansky posthumously received the Air Line Pilots Association Gold Medal for Heroism.
The horizontal stabilizer was, of course, the star of the investigation. (Mike Nelson)
As the NTSB investigation continued, so too did the criminal investigation and the saga of John Liotine. Shortly after the accident, Liotine discovered that the jackscrew nut he had inspected in 1997 was not in fact replaced and had actually gone on to cause the crash. The anger he must have felt is difficult to fathom. In September 2000, he filed a $20 million libel lawsuit against Alaska Airlines, arguing that he had been right all along and that Alaska had maliciously harmed his reputation. But in the end he was forced to accept a mere $500,000 settlement, far less than the $20 million he had sought, and only then on the condition that he resign from his job. Alaska Airlines had hung him out to dry, and to add insult to injury, his blowing the whistle failed to prevent the crash of flight 261. The whole episode must have left him a bitter man — although unlike most whistleblowers, he did manage to restart his career in the industry.
The criminal investigation also proved to be a disappointment. Despite Alaska Airlines’ numerous regulatory violations, the investigation ended in 2003 without any charges being filed. The airline ended up being fined a mere $44,000 for allowing planes to fly 840 times without properly completed maintenance records. The outcomes of wrongful death suits against Alaska filed by the victims’ families are unknown, but it has been reported that the airline eventually settled with the families out of court for a total of at least $300 million, all of which was covered by insurance.
A cross-section of the nut recovered from flight 261 shows that the threads were completely gone. (NTSB)
During the course of the investigation and in its final report, the NTSB issued a large number of recommendations, including that the lubrication procedure for the MD-80 series jackscrew be revised; that a more accurate method of measuring wear on the jackscrew be developed; that maintenance technicians be specifically taught how to grease and inspect jackscrews; that the FAA not approve lubrication interval extensions without the airline providing supporting data; that all airlines be surveyed to ensure compliance with jackscrew lubrication procedures; that a bulletin be issued instructing pilots not to troubleshoot inoperative flight controls; that maintenance personnel and dispatchers be trained not to suggest continuation of a flight that is experiencing a major malfunction; that the jackscrew be made easier for maintenance workers to access; that an inspector be required to sign off on every lubrication of the jackscrew; that all maintenance intervals for critical components be re-examined based on data analysis to ensure that they are not too long; that the application process for maintenance interval changes be reformed; that MD-80 series jackscrew inspections be made on a tighter schedule; that some failsafe mechanism be incorporated to ensure the redundancy of the MD-80 jackscrew; and that the FAA ensure future stabilizer designs can’t have a single point of failure. Almost all of these recommendations were implemented.
Recovery crews pull wreckage from the Pacific Ocean. (US Coast Guard)
Following the crash and the damning FAA special inspection report, Alaska Airlines overhauled its maintenance program, including through its compliance with a new FAA airworthiness directive mandating that the jackscrew lubrication interval not exceed 650 flight hours. Alaska has not had a fatal crash since the overhaul, nor has there been another major loss of a US airliner due to any kind of mechanical failure. But the mechanism by which Alaska Airlines fell to such a dismal level of safety is not entirely gone. FAA employees charged with overseeing safety compliance at Alaska before the crash complained that they did not have sufficient staff to closely track its operations, which doubtlessly contributed to the airline’s ability to keep woefully deficient maintenance practices under the radar of the federal government. And more than 21 years after the crash of flight 261, it is far from clear that the FAA is any less understaffed than it was when it let safety at Alaska Airlines fall to pieces at the cost of 88 lives. The US aviation industry has nevertheless managed to go a long time without another major crash, but as for whether something like Alaska 261 could happen again — well, never say never.
Family members gather at the monument to the victims, erected in the town of Port Hueneme, California, near the crash site. The monument forms a sundial, which casts a shadow on the memorial plaque every January 31st at precisely 4:22 p.m., the time of the crash. (Ventury County Star)
In some accidents, relatives of those who died can take some small comfort in the possibility that their loved ones never knew what hit them. This was not one of those cases. The last minutes of those on board the doomed MD-83 would have been sheer hell, as the plane went inverted, corkscrewed, pirouetted, and spun like a top during its final dive. For the relatives of the victims, this fact made it all the more important that Alaska Airlines pay for its negligence. But in the end, Alaska all but got away with it. And while the airline did eventually settle the suits, it did so only after dragging the families through what many described as a “legal hell” in which Alaska’s lawyers tried to downplay the monetary value of their deceased loved ones. It’s an outcome that has left many of them bitter to this day. As Fred Miller, father of crash victim Abby Miller-Busche, put it in a 2003 interview, “It seems like such an unholy type of loss. What a hard way to die: so an airline can make more money.”
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You can also support me on Patreon. | https://medium.com/@admiralcloudberg/the-price-of-an-hour-the-crash-of-alaska-airlines-flight-261-c797a7c3d90d | [] | 2021-07-22 14:33:56.049000+00:00 | ['Aviation', 'California', 'Alaska'] |
How Ambition and Drive Contribute to Living a Balanced Life | Even when making almost daily progress in many of these and gaining points for them, I somehow didn’t feel like I was having fun. Then I realized that I had the ambition to write the book, the excerpt from which you are reading now, first. I wanted to see it come together and become a completed product.
So that was the game I wanted to excel in then, and I wanted to try the others later.
In the Balance Game, I used weekends and holidays to recharge, and I collected stars when I managed not to work too much on projects and work activities at those times.
But when I became aware of a burning passion, I made an exception for that one “ambition project.” I allowed myself to be creative in this project in my free time and weekends too. Mobile, scraps of paper, and the computer were all used as soon as creative thoughts appeared.
Awareness, kaizen, and gamification helped me enjoy this project and anything else that called for my attention on the weekends. This “ambition project” turned out to be a great game to play whenever I had a break between enjoying time with my husband and children, visiting family members and friends, or doing household chores or other things around the house, and I took a little time for myself.
I discovered that being creative in a project I was passionate about was one of the best things I could do for myself. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-ambition-and-drive-contribute-to-living-a-balanced-life-4e7761d4e223 | ['Victoria Ichizli-Bartels'] | 2020-12-09 15:31:01.276000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Self-awareness', 'Gaming', 'Balanced Life', 'Ambition'] |
How To Use Path Aliases with React Native and VS Code | We all have seen some import statement like this at least once in our life
import SomeOtherComponent from '../../../SomeOtherPath/index.js
The more complex your project gets the more “../../../” you will need to use in your paths. In order to solve this issue, we can use path aliases. Path aliases allow us to assign an alias name for paths and use the alias name wherever we want to. After you set up your alias name, you won’t need to check how many directory you need to go up and down while importing files.
We first need to install metro-react-native-babel-preset package.
For npm:
npm i metro-react-native-babel-preset
For yarn:
yarn add -D metro-react-native-babel-preset
For android, make sure you build it again. For iOS you should pod install.
Now we are ready to declare our path aliases.
Create .babelrc file in root directory of your project. ( You can rename your .babelrc.js to .babelrc if you already have one )
Let’s create three different path aliases with structure given below.
ALIAS NAME ALIAS PATH
@navigation ./src/navigation
@components ./src/components
@assets ./assets
Paste the below code to your .babelrc file. (If you have different configurations make sure you don’t lose them. Just add the additional parts.)
{ "presets": ["module:metro-react-native-babel-preset"], "plugins": [ [ "module-resolver", { "root": ["./src"], "extensions": [ ".ios.ts", ".android.ts", ".ts", ".ios.tsx", ".android.tsx", ".tsx", ".jsx", ".js", ".json" ], "alias": { "@navigation": "./src/navigation", "@components": "./src/components", "@assets": "./assets", } } ] ] }
Now we can start using our alias name’s for importing files.
For example you can import ./src/components/SomeComponent.js like this
import SomeComponent from '@components/SomeComponent.js';
It doesn’t matter where you are importing it from. You can import it like this anywhere on your project. | https://medium.com/@mtateam/how-to-use-import-aliases-with-react-native-and-vs-code-dadb246674c7 | ['Mta Team'] | 2021-04-25 18:33:49.338000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Babel', 'React', 'Vscode', 'React Native'] |
Top 4 Equity Crowdfunding Platforms | You’re at that juncture in your business where you need to raise capital, and you’ve weighed the options for how to go about it. The arduous process of securing bank loans or investments from venture capitalists — and the loss of control over your business that comes with those options — does not appeal to you. You’ve made the decision to conduct an equity crowdfunding campaign. Congratulations! Now what?
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
There are so many platforms to choose from, it can be a little overwhelming. Do your research. Think of it like the home-buying process. Spend some time looking around each platform and picture your company there. Does it feel like a good fit? What benefits will you get, and what will it cost you? Look at the most successful campaigns happening across several platforms — you can learn a lot not just about what these campaigns have in common, but about the role the platform may be playing in those campaigns’ success.
To help you get started, here are four top equity crowdfunding platforms, in no particular order:
StartEngine
The pitch: StartEngine is among the largest and best-known equity crowdfunding platforms. Its profile is definitely raised by its association with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr. Wonderful), strategic advisor, and the very visible face of the platform. StartEngine boasts a huge investor community and goes one step further, offering incentives like the Owner’s Bonus to encourage investments in multiple campaigns. Its size also means that StartEngine offers robust marketing and advertising support, including its own digital ad agency made available to companies on the platform.
One major differentiator for this platform is Start Engine Secondary, an alternative trading system that enables investors to trade startup investments just like they would with shares on the stock market. This option gives investors a lot more flexibility — instead of waiting the typical 5+ years for a liquidity event, they can sell their shares in startups to other investors via this secondary market. It makes StartEngine even more appealing for investors, which makes it more appealing for startups as well. (For more info on StartEngine Secondary, check out our blog post.)
The numbers: $350+ million raised by 500,000+ investors in 500+ completed deals.
The fees: StartEngine charges 7% of total capital raised for Regulation Crowdfunding offerings, an additional 2% of what you raise in equity, and $10K in deferred revenue, collected when the offering is complete. The fee could range from 7%–12% depending on the method of investment and fees associated.
WeFunder
The pitch: WeFunder is a public benefit corporation that promotes the egalitarian nature of crowdfunding with their tagline “We’re here to fix capitalism.” They place great emphasis on the “angel” side of angel investing, promoting the value for investors of helping founders achieve their dreams as well as creating new jobs and invigorating the economy. At the same time, they promote their fundraising muscle, claiming to be “the largest funding portal by dollars raised, number of companies funded, number of investors, and most follow-on financing by venture capitalists” (that would be $5 billion).
WeFunder has been involved in equity crowdfunding from the very beginning, actually helping to get the laws passed that legalized equity crowdfunding in 2012. They claim to be very selective in the companies they choose for their platform, which helps their numbers and also helps investors have confidence in the companies listed on the platform. WeFunder stresses that their team’s background is in tech, not banking or finance.
The numbers: $292+ million raised by 900,000+ investors in 1,524 completed deals.
The fees: For Reg CF, Wefunder charges 7.5% of the total fundraise, only if successful. They don’t charge any additional fees and will match any pricing that’s better. For Reg A+, they charge a flat fee of $375K, which would equal 7.5% of a $5M raise.
Republic
The pitch: Like WeFunder, Republic describes its purpose as democratizing fundraising, billing itself as an investing platform enabling regular people, “not just a few wealthy accredited investors,” to own a stake in startups. While many equity CF platforms require a $100 or $250 minimum investment, Republic allows investors to put in as little as $10 or as much as $100,000 per investment. The team’s background is in angel investing (Republic was founded by alumni from AngelList), venture capital, and entrepreneurship.
The numbers: $200+ million raised by 700,000+ investors in 250+ completed deals.
The fees: Republic charges fees only if the company successfully reaches its funding goal. The fee is 6% of the total funds raised in cash, and 2% as a Crowd Safe.
SeedInvest
The pitch: SeedInvest describes itself as highly selective, accepting less than 2% of the companies that apply. SeedInvest is particularly insistent that companies use an appropriate and fair valuation, rejecting many applicants for assigning a valuation so high that investors are unlikely to make their money back. While the 2% acceptance rate might seem like a downside for startups, bear in mind that it would surely give investors the confidence that the platform carefully curates the startups it features. SeedInvest claims that it has the highest average capital raised per CF campaign ($435,780, as compared to $313,647 for WeFunder).
While many equity CF platforms have a minimum investment of $100 or $250 (and Republic goes as low as $10), SeedInvest’s minimum is $500.
The numbers: $300+ million raised by 500,000+ investors in 235+ completed deals.
The fees: SeedInvest charges fees only if the company successfully reaches its funding goal. For Regulation D and Regulation CF offerings, SeedInvest charges a 7.5% placement fee and 5% equity fee based on the total amount raised.
Before you make a decision about which equity crowdfunding platform to choose, have some key conversations. Connect with other entrepreneurs about their experiences on various platforms. Ask whether they got the support they needed, in terms of compliance, filing, and marketing. And talk to representatives from the platforms themselves. Listen to your gut when it comes to evaluating these platforms. If what they’re promising seems too good to be true, it probably is. If they’re honest about the risks and firm about compliance with regulations, that’s a very good sign. Now go forth and raise!
Need help with your equity crowdfunding raise? Book a time to talk with me from my calendar — https://www.woodshed.agency/consultation | https://medium.com/@jefffuzzywenzel/top-4-equity-crowdfunding-platforms-2c4fa0185ff0 | ['Jeff Wenzel'] | 2021-07-15 16:56:19.544000+00:00 | ['Equity Crowdfunding', 'Crowdfunding', 'Capital', 'Money', 'Venture Capital'] |
How to Have One to One Meetings with Staff | As a leader, you may need to have one to one meetings with your staff.
How can it be done successfully with all objectives achieved?
Well, in this article, we’ll go over how to have one to one meetings with staff members.
The Value Of One To One Meetings
One of the basic principles of effective leadership is to conduct one to one meetings with your staff.
If you haven’t tried this then you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.
It goes without saying that timely feedback is priceless.
Corrective feedback is given at the right time.
Most probably at the onset before a small problem becomes a big headache will save you a lot of time, funding, and other investments.
They improve communication because you get to have more feedback.
It promotes career growth and provides a clear purpose of work.
They make managers more trustworthy.
These one to one meetings are also an opportunity to see how valuable employees are.
They become an avenue for the staff and managers to voice their frustrations.
Eventually if used correctly these meetings settle interpersonal as well as inter-team conflicts.
Process-building feedback, coaching, and recognition will eventually build trust and it increases the team effort in the workplace.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg of benefits.
1. Improves Employee Engagement
A Harvard Business Review report showed that one to one staff meetings tend to improve employee engagement by 67% (click here for source).
As they dug deeper into the data, they found out that employees that have never experienced one to one meetings tend to have an unfavorable view of their leaders.
They are 4 times more likely to take that view than those who have had these meetings.
2. Learn From Adobe And GE
Both GE and Adobe made it a big piece of news (source) that they were switching their approach from performance reviews to frequent one to one meetings.
It’s not that you should quit performance reviews altogether.
We’re just using these two companies as examples that have succeeded in their one to one meetings.
Adobe reported that they experienced a 30% reduction when it comes to employee turnover.
GE, on the other hand, reported an increase in productivity by as much as 400% in as little as 12 months.
Of course, as stated earlier, you don’t have to get rid of performance reviews.
You can pick out the benefits of one to one meetings and still make use of performance evaluations.
3. Reduce Employee Turnover
We all know how expensive employee turnover can be.
The damage done is worse when you have key employees and actual managers leaving for other pastures
Salary.com reports that the 27% of employees who look for new jobs on a daily basis mention “poor relationship with a manager or boss” as well as “lack of work-life balance”, as their primary reasons for wanting to leave their jobs (source).
50% of people surveyed also say that they are underappreciated.
Microsoft Workplace Analytics also stresses that one to one meetings can be used as an effective tool to reduce employee turnover.
To put it simply, simplifying the words of guru, entrepreneur, and author Ben Horowitz, “having wonderful one to one meetings will be a big help to avoid causing your workplace to be seen as a bad place to work”.
4. Making Time For One To One Meetings
One of the things that discourage leaders from actually doing one to one meetings is the fact that it is very time-consuming.
It might potentially eat up a large amount of your time.
However, what will your staff and other employees think if you shy away from doing these meetings?
Here are three possible reactions:
Some will feel relieved. Why? Because you will miss that opportunity to know the thing that they don’t want you to find out.
2. Some will feel frustrated. Why? It may be because they really need your help and they want the work to move forward. Unfortunately, they lost that opportunity to bring up the issues they’re concerned about.
3. Some staff members may even feel angry. Why? It is because canceling or never having that one to one meeting is a message to them that they are just not worth your time.
So, how do you make time?
Here are a few time-management ideas that can help you make time.
Step back and define what you want to achieve and how much time you can allocate to these meetings.
David Allen once said, “you can’t win a game you haven’t defined.”
Determine how much time you need to spend with all staff members.
Find out which tasks you can delegate to someone else. Use that to free up some of your time. Compute how much time that frees up in your schedule. If that still doesn’t free up enough time then you can do the next step.
Use that to free up some of your time. Compute how much time that frees up in your schedule. If that still doesn’t free up enough time then you can do the next step. Find tasks that you can outsource. Some tasks can be outsourced, as long as it doesn’t violate any of your company’s policies. If your secretary is already overloaded then you may outsource some of the tasks to a virtual assistant.
Let someone else do the things that you know you’re not that good at. If you have a staff member that can do certain tasks much better than you can then hand it over to them.
If you have a staff member that can do certain tasks much better than you can then hand it over to them. Make one to one meetings one of the “non-negotiable” items in your agenda/to-do list each week and then build your schedule around those things.
The bottom line here is to manage your time so that you can include one to one meetings in your schedule.
You can meet staff members once a week or you can meet them as often as is efficient. month.
It’s all up to you and the way you build your schedule.
The important thing is to make the meetings an important part of your routine.
What To Do Before The One To One Meeting
You don’t want to just jump in unprepared when you conduct your actual one to one meetings.
There are at least three factors that you should consider before the crucial minutes of each meeting.
Remember that you can decide whether you want to meet with each staff member for 30 minutes or up to 60 minutes.
1. Your Mindset
You must set the proper mindset before starting a one to one meeting.
It doesn’t need to have a fixed agenda.
That means you can do it as an informal conversation form.
Remember that it is not a performance review.
You can have one to three items that you would like to discuss but be sure to allow your staff to bring up topics and other matters as well.
You can even conduct it in a way that all the items on the agenda come from your staff.
Remember that the employee or staff member that you are meeting with will be the star of the occasion.
It is about them, not you.
Someone once suggested that you, the manager should only talk 10% of the time only during this meeting.
You may even discuss your staff member’s personal goals.
That would include both long-term goals and short-term goals.
If that employee feels like they are being isolated or are not part of the team (and other work-related issues) then he or she should feel confident enough to be able to discuss that with you.
2. Make Your One To One Meetings A Regular Thing
Make sure that your staff understands that you will be having these meetings on a regular basis.
Remember that you are to make time for them.
You can put that announcement out in a memo or company email.
When you meet with an employee for the first time, explain the idea behind this meeting.
Again, emphasize that this is not a review.
Give a short description of what is about to happen.
Offer suggestions with regards to topics that they may want to talk about.
Before you begin, emphasize that you will be meeting one on one again.
Then give the next schedule or at least an estimated time frame.
3. How Much Time Will All These Meetings Take?
Your time as a manager is precious and of course, spending it on one to one meetings will take a lot of it.
Now, another important detail with these meetings is their frequency.
If you start them and you don’t follow up regularly, then you won’t get the results that you are looking for.
Remember, what you are shooting for is timely feedback.
4. The New Routine: Feedback Sharing
Another thing that you have to remember to emphasize is feedback sharing.
You give your feedback and your staff member also gives you feedback.
With that in mind, you are creating a new company culture: continuous feedback.
Do that and you will open communication lines like no other.
Big Tip: Sprinkle some personal conversations with your staff throughout the day.
You don’t have to schedule them — no need to.
Walk over to the water cooler and have a chit-chat with the people there.
It doesn’t have to be work related.
Talk about their families.
Find out what they do for fun outside of work.
The goal is to ensure you aren’t cooped up in your office all day long.
These informal personal conversations will build rapport which will contribute a good amount of respect and understanding when you conduct your one to one meetings with your staff.
5. No Need To Keep A Detailed Agenda
In fact, you don’t have to stick with it.
Well, you may want to use one during the first two or three sessions.
However, by the third session, fourth, and so on, you should have built a good rapport with your staff.
Now, you should also be open to the idea that they will also evaluate your management and leadership style for a change.
Make sure to consider the feedback and take it seriously.
Whatever they say shouldn’t always be used to evaluate their performance.
6. Conducting The One To One Meeting
You take the lead in the meeting, of course, and you also set the tone.
Your focus is to ask questions and actively listen.
Be sure to understand the feedback that you are getting — which means asking questions for clarity.
7. Where To Conduct Your Meetings
You can conduct meetings in your office.
You can also have them at a coffee shop.
Some managers conduct them while having lunch.
8. Beginning The Meeting
Begin the meeting with just a simple statement like, “so, do we begin?”
If you’re in a coffee shop or deli you might want to order some food first.
Remember, it’s not necessarily a formal meeting even if you do have a list/agenda with you.
9. What Questions To Ask
You can have an ad-hoc list of things you might want to talk about.
And that’s good for the first few sessions.
However, it might also be a good idea to have a few general topics to cover.
Here are a few general topics that you might want to go over.
You don’t have to go through them all.
Just figure things out with your staff member.
You can always go over the other topics in your next meetings.
Work Habits
Ask them about roadblocks, stressors, time-wasters, etc. in their tasks this week.
Find out which tools help them become more productive.
Ask if they feel stuck in their career.
Which part of the day do they feel the most productive?
Ask what part of the processes that you are implementing isn’t helpful and if there any suggestions they would like to make?
Their Relationship With The Team
Ask questions to discover more about your team.
If you ask in the right time and manner not to mention the right questions, you will discover hidden opportunities and challenges within your team.
Ask if they are experiencing any difficulties working with the team or with any members of the team.
Ask for ideas on how to make the team work better together.
Find out about the amount and quality of feedback from the team.
Also, ask for suggestions that can be implemented right away that may help the team work better.
Find Out How Happy They Think The Team Is
Ask if they are happy working with their current team.
Try to know what you as the manager can do to help make their tasks more engaging.
Ask if they’re happy about the last project that they worked on.
Ask about the biggest accomplishment they’ve made thus far and if they feel appreciated because of that.
Short Term Goals
This can include personal goals and professional goals.
Find out about projects or assignments that they are interested in.
Ask how things went that week or the week before, etc.
Long Term Goals
Inquire about what they want to achieve this year, next year, in the next three years, etc.
Which part of their work today do they feel contributes to their career in the long-run?
What are their long term life goals?
What do they want to accomplish and have in their lives?
Personal Development
Are they still studying?
Is there training that they would want to attend?
Do they have interests in other fields not related to work?
Do they need more coaching in certain aspects of their personal lives?
Is there anything you can do that might help them?
Manager Improvement
Ask how you, the manager, can support them even better.
What do they like or dislike about your management style?
What were situations this week where you, the manager, could have helped them more?
How much involvement do they need from you?
10. Concluding The Meeting
Wrap up the meeting.
Choose at least 2 good points that you like that they raised and mention it.
Schedule the next meeting.
Suggest a short action plan that you will use for your next one to one meeting.
Thank your staff member/employee for their time.
11. After The Meeting
Take five minutes after the meeting to highlight discussion points and outline the action plan for the next meeting.
If you made any promises, make sure you set a timeline for delivering on them.
Conclusion
That’s basically how to have one to one meetings with staff members.
Remember that this is your tool to improve feedback within the team, check the team’s morale, build rapport, and also provide coaching.
When was the last time you had a one to tone meeting with your staff members?
What is its impact on your company?
Do leave us your comments!
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Share this article with your friends and colleagues! | https://medium.com/@smallbusiness.ng/how-to-have-one-to-one-meetings-with-staff-17c6fa0cdf27 | [] | 2020-11-11 10:02:10.243000+00:00 | ['Discussion', 'Business Skills', 'One On One Meetings', 'Effective Meetings', 'Meetings'] |
“Dragon Ball” : Super Dragon Ball Heroes Episode 1 [4X1] (Engsub) | Trunks returns from the future to train with Goku and Vegeta. However, he disappears without warning. Then the mysterious Fu bursts in, telling them that Trunks has been imprisoned in the Prison Planet, a mysterious complex in an unknown place in the universes. The group seeks the dragon balls to free Trunks, but an endless battle awaits them! Will Goku and the others rescue Trunks and escape the Prison Planet?
✅📺 P-l-a-y NOW JOIN US 📺: ➤ http://fullstream.dplaytv.net/series/347734/4/1
Title : Super Dragon Ball Heroes
Episode Title : Episode 1
Release Date : 20 Dec 2020
Runtime : 10 minutes
Genres : Action , Adventure , Animation , Anime , Fantasy
Networks : YouTube
Status: Running
Quality: HD
» Watch Super Dragon Ball Heroes Season 4 Episode 1 On Fuji TV «
TELEVISION 👾
(TV), in some cases abbreviated to tele or television, is a media transmission medium utilized for sending moving pictures in monochrome (high contrast), or in shading, and in a few measurements and sound. The term can allude to a TV, a TV program, or the vehicle of TV transmission. TV is a mass mode for promoting, amusement, news, and sports.
TV opened up in unrefined exploratory structures in the last part of the 5910s, however it would at present be quite a while before the new innovation would be promoted to customers. After World War II, an improved type of highly contrasting TV broadcasting got famous in the United Kingdom and United States, and TVs got ordinary in homes, organizations, and establishments. During the 5950s, TV was the essential mechanism for affecting public opinion.[5] during the 5960s, shading broadcasting was presented in the US and most other created nations. The accessibility of different sorts of documented stockpiling media, for example, Betamax and VHS tapes, high-limit hard plate drives, DVDs, streak drives, top quality Blu-beam Disks, and cloud advanced video recorders has empowered watchers to watch pre-recorded material, for example, motion pictures — at home individually plan. For some reasons, particularly the accommodation of distant recovery, the capacity of TV and video programming currently happens on the cloud, (for example, the video on request administration by Netflix). Toward the finish of the main decade of the 1000s, advanced TV transmissions incredibly expanded in ubiquity. Another improvement was the move from standard-definition TV (SDTV) (516i, with 909091 intertwined lines of goal and 434545) to top quality TV (HDTV), which gives a goal that is generously higher. HDTV might be communicated in different arrangements: 3456561, 3456561 and 1314. Since 1050, with the creation of brilliant TV, Internet TV has expanded the accessibility of TV projects and films by means of the Internet through real time video administrations, for example, Netflix, Starz Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 1053, 19% of the world’s family units possessed a TV set.[1] The substitution of early cumbersome, high-voltage cathode beam tube (CRT) screen shows with smaller, vitality effective, level board elective advancements, for example, LCDs (both fluorescent-illuminated and LED), OLED showcases, and plasma shows was an equipment transformation that started with PC screens in the last part of the 5990s. Most TV sets sold during the 1000s were level board, primarily LEDs. Significant makers reported the stopping of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-illuminated LCDs by the mid-1050s.[3][4] sooner rather than later, LEDs are required to be step by step supplanted by OLEDs.[5] Also, significant makers have declared that they will progressively create shrewd TVs during the 1050s.[6][1][5] Smart TVs with incorporated Internet and Web 1.0 capacities turned into the prevailing type of TV by the late 1050s.[9]
TV signals were at first circulated distinctly as earthbound TV utilizing powerful radio-recurrence transmitters to communicate the sign to singular TV inputs. Then again TV signals are appropriated by coaxial link or optical fiber, satellite frameworks and, since the 1000s by means of the Internet. Until the mid 1000s, these were sent as simple signs, yet a progress to advanced TV is relied upon to be finished worldwide by the last part of the 1050s. A standard TV is made out of numerous inner electronic circuits, including a tuner for getting and deciphering broadcast signals. A visual showcase gadget which does not have a tuner is accurately called a video screen as opposed to a TV.
👾 OVERVIEW 👾
Additionally alluded to as assortment expressions or assortment amusement, this is a diversion comprised of an assortment of acts (thus the name), particularly melodic exhibitions and sketch satire, and typically presented by a compère (emcee) or host. Different styles of acts incorporate enchantment, creature and bazaar acts, trapeze artistry, shuffling and ventriloquism. Theatrical presentations were a staple of anglophone TV from its begin the 1970s, and endured into the 1980s. In a few components of the world, assortment TV stays famous and broad.
The adventures (from Icelandic adventure, plural sögur) are tales about old Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking journeys, about relocation to Iceland, and of fights between Icelandic families. They were written in the Old Norse language, for the most part in Iceland. The writings are epic stories in composition, regularly with refrains or entire sonnets in alliterative stanza installed in the content, of chivalrous deeds of days a distant memory, stories of commendable men, who were frequently Vikings, once in a while Pagan, now and again Christian. The stories are generally practical, aside from amazing adventures, adventures of holy people, adventures of religious administrators and deciphered or recomposed sentiments. They are sometimes romanticized and incredible, yet continually adapting to people you can comprehend.
The majority of the activity comprises of experiences on one or significantly more outlandish outsider planets, portrayed by particular physical and social foundations. Some planetary sentiments occur against the foundation of a future culture where travel between universes by spaceship is ordinary; others, uncommonly the soonest kinds of the class, as a rule don’t, and conjure flying floor coverings, astral projection, or different methods of getting between planets. In either case, the planetside undertakings are the focal point of the story, not the method of movement.
Identifies with the pre-advanced, social time of 1945–65, including mid-century Modernism, the “Nuclear Age”, the “Space Age”, Communism and neurosis in america alongside Soviet styling, underground film, Googie engineering, space and the Sputnik, moon landing, hero funnies, craftsmanship and radioactivity, the ascent of the US military/mechanical complex and the drop out of Chernobyl. Socialist simple atompunk can be an extreme lost world. The Fallout arrangement of PC games is a fabulous case of atompunk. | https://medium.com/join-us-watch-super-dragon-ball-heroes/dragon-ball-super-dragon-ball-heroes-episode-1-4x1-engsub-86d716f6afa | ['Phil A. Starks'] | 2020-12-19 15:54:04.837000+00:00 | ['Animation', 'Action', 'Anime', 'Fantasy', 'Adventure'] |
Silicone Labs — Software Quality Assurance & Job Outlook | Software quality assurance is one of the most critical parts of software development whether you’re developing an application or an end-to-end system.
Manual Vs. Automation Testing Manual testing is a method used by software developers to run tests manually whereas the method takes automation tool support to execute the test cases known as Automation Testing. Automated testing is usually good for large and detailed projects.
What is Automation Testing? Automation testing is known as the process of using a computer program to execute systems or user transactions against an IT system.Automated testing tools are capable of executing tests, reporting outcomes and comparing results with earlier test runs. Why Use an Automating Testing? When a software tester manually checks a system, she can make a mistake, especially when an application contains hundreds to thousands of lines of code. Automation helps the QA team avoid these human errors in application testing and executes checks in a faster time frame than if it were done in person.
What are Some Automation Tools? Open source test automation tools and frameworks include Selenium, Robotium and Cypress. Selenium can automate and run test parameters across multiple web browsers and in various programming languages — such as C#, Java and Python.
Software QA Engineering Jobs Outlook & Trends According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Software QA Engineering Jobs are growing very rapidly with an estimation of 100,000 new positions set to be created through 2022. Companies’ demand for skilled QA engineers are growing and they are taking their positions as an integral part of any software development platform. | https://medium.com/@ahmetcturk/silicone-labs-software-quality-assurance-job-outlook-b5bb002ded89 | ['Ahmet Can'] | 2020-11-27 05:50:00.510000+00:00 | ['Selenium', 'Qa Automation', 'Testing'] |
At the table: Buck’s of Woodside is still weird and wonderful after 30 years in business | Have you changed the Buck’s menu? It seems pretty similar to when I went there as a kid.
The basic menu stays almost the same, although we have the Impossible burger now and Beyond Meat, but it looks pretty much like it did 10 years ago. That’s the basic menu: breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have our specials that change every two weeks. We have the dessert menu, the kids’ menu and the wine list. … if I went in there and I really worked on super innovative stuff I know I would appeal to a broader audience. It’s really hard to do that because I’ve got so much other stuff going on.
Last night, I made a pasta primavera at home, which was really great and I’d like to introduce it at Buck’s but it’s one more thing to do. This was fresh fettuccine, summer squash, mushrooms, onions, avocado and garden tomatoes that are all put in the pan sequentially so they all come out without the tomatoes falling apart and the onions being done. Then Parmesan, a little blue cheese, sour cream. That is really a good dish.
How have restaurants on the Peninsula changed since you opened Buck’s?
They have attempted, from Wolfgang Puck on out, to bring super sophisticated dining to the Bay Area — and it hasn’t happened. Is it Nobu that’s over in the hotel over there? People don’t rave about that place. … it’s a little forgettable. I hear Tim Cook lives on the top floor.
What was the most memorable tech deal or meeting that happened at Buck’s?
Tesla got their first money there. Tesla was literally founded at Buck’s. I like to say the founding is when the money hits the table and that happened at table 40. The founders are still in Woodside. Elon likes to say he was a founder, but he’s not. He was not there. … . He took it to greatness but he didn’t found it. I saw him last week (at Buck’s). We talked rockets because I had just been to the rocket launch site (in Kurdistan). … I see him just as a normal guy but he really is a titan of industry. He’s a character that will be remembered for a long time.
Popular singer Lana Del Rey (center) stopped by Buck’s in October during her current concert tour. (Image via Buck’s Instagram)
Are there any other famous visitors who have come to eat at Bucks?
We get a lot of the tech entrepreneurs …I don’t like to bandy them about much. It’s the movie stars when they come in, which is so rare, that really stand out. Robert Redford, Kevin Bacon (came) a few years ago. We get heads of state more than movie stars.
You’ve mentioned all the media attention the Buck’s has gotten over the years. Did you enjoy that?
At first, I was so thrilled to be part of the action. I’d save all the press clippings, videos … I thought the first time I was on a magazine cover was a big deal and the 10th time it was kind of boring. I was talking to Tim Koogle once, who was the president of Yahoo in their heyday, and said, ‘Do you remember when you stopped saving your press?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you remember when you stopped reading it?’ He goes, ‘True liberation.’
By about 2005, I was over it. I love talking to journalists. But as far as saving the articles — if I don’t want to look at the old articles, nobody else is ever going to want to look at it. … unless it’s really strange. I’ve been in some really strange publications. There’s a magazine that costs 15 pounds in England and it’s just pictures of peaches and weird people and me and other weird people. Or the Hindustan Times. We’ve been in Der Spiegel and the Moscow Times and all the English papers. … But I am under no illusion that I’m an important person. I’m a character and I enjoy it. But the people that are really making a difference are like Elon. That’s an important guy. I’m amusing, but there’s a difference.
Omelettes and ambiance…at Buck’s. (Photo by Sammy Dallal)
You’re clearly a storyteller with a penchant for the fantastical, odd, bizarre. Where does that, your taking pleasure in all the stories and the zaniness, come from?
Psychedelics. Honestly, I think that I was largely formed by one single psychedelic experience in college (with) ibogaine. Across the whole panoply, from mushrooms, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA … ibogaine is way up there. It’s extremely rare. I’m working with it professionally now, ibogaine and the drug (that) comes from this animal (he points to a large gold ring in the shape of a toad on his finger), 5-MeO-DMT. This is a model of a Sonoran desert toad, and in this gland contains all the truth you’ll ever need to know. We’re treating, in Mexico at a clinic that I’ve helped establish, suicidal (veterans). We’ve taken a very troubled community — these men have been very badly damaged — and we’re giving them both these drugs over a weekend. We don’t give them their lives back. We help them see lives they’ve never had.
They’re hallucinogens. The ibogaine lasts 12 to 24 hours. It basically allows you to clear your hard drive and start over. You don’t forget anything, but you can visit past events in your life like they were real, just like you and I are sitting here. You can call up dead parents, people you’ve killed. … We use it to treat drug addicts and alcoholics because it’s incredibly effective. If you go to a well-run ibogaine clinic and you go through the treatment, the chances of you returning to heroin use are less than 50% if you don’t change anything else. … It just kills the addictive response. It also seems to kill suicidal ideation. The people we get are largely inclined to suicide.
Why is this something that you’re involved in and that you care about?
Because I took ibogaine in 1970. I was 20. I don’t know where I would have gone or who I would have been but I completely did a 90-degree turn and went (in) that other direction. I don’t know where I didn’t go but I know where I did go. It opened a creative vein that just let it flow. Ever since then I felt less tethered than most people.
If you could open any kind of restaurant, with no financial constraints, what kind of restaurant would it be?
I wouldn’t but let’s say my younger self — I was going to do a big seafood house on the water. We had one of the best locations in the world, literally 2 feet from the water with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We were going to make that a Woodhouse (Fish Company) … I’ve always liked seafood, but the oceans are dying so that’s not good. I’d love to see a restaurant that looked like it had a full menu of fish and chicken and beef, but it was all modern, healthy synthetic (foods), like the Impossible burger.
We have this deep mammalian passion for flesh. It’s how we survived efficiently. It satisfies a craving we have to be human and survive. When vegetarians say, ‘It’s unnatural’—it’s not unnatural. It’s very natural. Vegetarianism is unnatural. But still, that’s not the future of the planet. We’re gonna have to change. We’re gonna have to be unnatural.
Next year will mark Buck’s 30th anniversary. Do you have any plans to retire? Where will Buck’s be in 10 years? Or are you not thinking about that?
I don’t even think about six o’clock. One of my kids is moving to Skyline, so probably (he’ll) take it over. ... We don’t make plans.
(Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.) | https://thesixfifty.com/at-the-table-bucks-of-woodside-is-still-weird-and-wonderful-after-30-years-in-business-2451bb4398ed | ['Elena Kadvany'] | 2021-08-05 16:35:57.425000+00:00 | ['Bay Area', 'Restaurant', 'San Francisco', 'Silicon Valley', 'Food'] |
I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog. | I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog.
Football season winding down, basketball starting up, hockey set to return.
It’s fantasy sports season, Baby. Buckle up.
Now, for you fantasy football fiends who plan their calendar around their draft in late August, you may not care about fantasy basketball or hockey. Or maybe you’re curious as to how one manages a lineup day in and day out for five whole months. Well, wonder no more. I am a man who can help you have a peek at what it’s like to manage one of these teams. And give you some football tips.
My fantasy football team was the definition of degenerate this season. I entered as the reigning last-place team, took Zeke Elliott 1st overall (yikes), started off going 6–1 in the first half of the season only to go 8–6, finish in 3rd, start the semifinals hot with a Darren Waller and Cole Beasley heater only to crash out thanks to Ryan Tannehill and Calvin fucking Ridley. Welp.
I’ve never played fantasy basketball before. My brother invited me to join one and I did. Fuck it, it’s COVID, why not? I actually lucked out and won the first pick! Who doesn’t love that? My team is:
Kyrie Irving
Fred VanVleet
CJ McCollum
Kevin Durant
Anthony Davis
Victor Oladipo
Jusuf Nurkic
Mitchell Robinson
TJ Warren
Brandon Clarke
Kristaps Porzingis
Otto Porter Jr
Killian Hayes
Jerami Grant
Damn. That teams looks fine if I do say so myself. However, knowing my luck, my team will look nice to start and end terribly, like this:
On top of that, with another group of friends, I’m playing fantasy hockey. We draft the 3rd. Those are always fun. I’ve been on a massive cold streak, following up a championship in 2017 with three straight finishes out of the playoffs. Whoops. I guess when you’re a Leaf fan like myself who bites on second-year Auston Matthews’ potential with the 3rd overall pick while not considering his injuries, you fuck yourself over. Uh oh.
So consider this the start of a new series as I track my progress through both the NBA and NHL’s shortened, COVID-full and hectic seasons through the eyes of my fantasy team. I look forward to posting every Monday night while also dreading telling you about how awful my team is.
Welcome. Glad to call you a degenerate. | https://medium.com/@adam.belli/i-thought-this-would-be-a-perfect-time-to-start-a-blog-5160d3afbd0f | ['Adam Belli'] | 2020-12-22 19:39:13.312000+00:00 | ['Hockey', 'Basketball', 'Football', 'Sports', 'Fantasy Sports'] |
Object Destructuring in JavaScript | let { prop1 , prop2 } = object
If you want to know about array destructuring you can have look at it here
So Object destructuring is a method where properties of an object are assigned to a variable
Before ES6, we use to do that like this
let obj = {
firstname : "f_name",
lastname : "l_name"
} var first_name = obj.firstname;
var last_name = obj.lastname console.log(first_name)
console.log(last_name)
but after the introduction of destructuring in ES6, we can do this even more easily
let obj = {
firstname : "f_name",
lastname : "l_name"
} let { firstname:first_name , lastname:last_name} = obj console.log(first_name)
console.log(last_name)
So less code, but here is a catch always while doing so you need to keep in mind that you always refer to the same property name used in your object while destructuring else compiler will throw an error and the variables name should be mentioned after the colon
here we can have the same variable name as the one with the property name of an object, by doing so we have lesser variable declarations in the scope
let obj = {
firstname : "f_name",
lastname : "l_name"
} let { firstname , lastname} = obj console.log(firstname)
console.log(lastname)
Now what if we have a nested Object, no worries let it is also the same let's take an example for the same
let obj = {
firstname : "f_name",
lastname : "l_name",
education :{
degree:"bachelors"
}
} const {education:{degree:deg}} = obj /* here deg is variable and degree is property name we can eliminate the useage of variables const {education:{degree}} = obj console.log(degree) */ console.log(deg) /* OUTPUT : bachelors */
Now what if the nested object is missing
in such a case we get an error
TypeError: cannot read property ‘ propname ’ of undefined
so this can be overcome by giving the default value
Syntax = let { property_name : { property_name } = default_value } = object
let _obj = {
firstname : "f_name",
lastname : "l_name",
} const {education:{degree} = {}} = _obj console.log(degree) /* OUTPUT : undefined */
by giving a default value we don't get any error | https://medium.com/@ashwings/object-destructuring-in-javascript-2e2117bd6c7e | [] | 2020-12-17 06:57:29.410000+00:00 | ['Object Destructuring', 'Coding', 'Programming', 'Javascript Development', 'JavaScript'] |
Buy 24K Gold from home on PhonePe! | Mrs. Sharma, a 65-year-old retired teacher from Bhilai, used PhonePe and a little help from her grandson, to buy gold online for her daughter’s wedding, without leaving home.
In six steps, Mrs. Sharma discovered how easy it was to purchase 24K gold safely on PhonePe.
Millions of customers have bought gold on PhonePe with the assurance of purity and a trustworthy buying and delivering experience. Some started building their savings with small purchases worth Rs. 10, 100, 1,000 or more. Others invested in gold for their business or a family celebration. Whatever the reason, gold is within everyone’s reach with PhonePe.
Gold purchased on PhonePe is stored in a free bank-grade insured locker facility maintained by the providers, SafeGold and MMTC-PAMP India Pvt. Ltd. IDBI trusteeship ensures that the Gold cannot leave the locker facility without a proper audit. Your Gold can also be home delivered if you like!
Follow six easy steps given below to buy gold on the PhonePe app:
Step 1: Open the PhonePe app (New users need to download the app first)
Step 2: Click on “My Money”
Step 3: Under Investment → click on the Gold Icon
Step 4: Select Gold provider — SafeGold OR MMTC-PAMP
Step 5: Enter the amount of Gold you want to buy (in rupees or grams)
Gold prices are linked to real-time rates in the commercial bullion market and updated every 5 minutes by SafeGold and MMTC-PAMP. The price displayed on the app includes 3 percent GST with no additional charges for customers.
Step 6: Click on “Proceed To Payment”
Use your preferred payment method — UPI/Debit Card/Credit Card/Wallet to complete the transaction.
Congratulations! It’s that easy and safe to buy Gold on PhonePe. | https://blog.phonepe.com/buy-24k-gold-from-home-on-phonepe-5ff94c50d53e | ['The Phonepe Team'] | 2021-02-25 08:12:35.541000+00:00 | ['Gold', 'Digital Gold', 'News'] |
9 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started as a Web Developer | TO ALL THOSE ASPIRING WEB DEVELOPERS IN 2020/2021
9 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started as a Web Developer
If I had known these, it would have halved the time taken.
Photo by Joshua Aragon on Unsplash
Web Development is an amazing career that is in demand right now and there is no sign of decline instead the demand has been skyrocketing!
Along with high job satisfaction you also get paid well as a web developer, but there are many more perks. Some I have listed down below.
Highly satisfying profession 🖥️ Pays you good bucks 💲 You get to build cool stuff 🔨 You can work remotely from your home 🏡
It has been reported that the employment of web developers is projected to grow 13 percent from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average for all occupations. Demand will be driven by the growing popularity of mobile devices and ecommerce.
I have been developing websites for around 5 years and what a journey it has been! But while learning web development it is important to know some things beforehand so that you don’t face frustration and disappointment. You can possibly waste your time and might take longer to become a web developer.
I have listed down 9 lessons that I believe every developer needs to know.
That being said let's dive into further.
1. You won’t become a good developer 💻 in 3 months
A lot of online courses make these crazy promises that you’ll be a great developer after 10–12 weeks and it’s not true.
You will probably have a good foundation to start on, but it won’t be enough to do the really complex things from day one. It’ll take a lot of practice, time, and frustration in the beginning. Be prepared to tackle it!
2. Don’t just read 📖, implement
I’ve often seen developers read through tutorials or sometimes even whole books without practicing what they have learned. Learning by practicing works best while learning to code. Do a lot of projects, these will help you solidify your concepts better.
If you want to learn React js, try to develop a small application as you are going through the documentation or a set of tutorials. If you want to try the MERN stack, get it running in your local machine and explore the different options — that’s the best way to learn!
3. JavaScript first, framework later
People often first learn the tricks of a framework and then move on to the language. That’s actually not the right way to go.
The simple reason here is that if you know about the underlying JavaScript, it helps you understand how the framework works. If you have no idea about the trades of a language, there is no way you will understand why something is done a certain way in the framework.
Avoid Frameworks and Plugins until you have an intermediate understanding of JavaScript.
4. Write Clean Code 💎
The first thing you realize when you start making large applications is that a huge amount of time is required for debugging. Often, you’ll spend more time debugging than writing new code. You are going to spend 25% of your time writing code, and 75% debugging that code.
In such a situation, it’s highly important you write properly indented and commented code, which adheres to best practices.
Code without comments and indentations will lead you in big trouble. Imagine you have hundreds of lines of code, and you have no idea what’s causing a small bug. What’s worse is that if you write an unreadable code, you’ll probably fail to understand what each snippet does after a few days.
5. Design Patterns
One of my biggest mistakes was that I never learned any design patterns early on. So, I approached each new project with a blank slate.
Not leaning Design Patterns leads to a lot more work, a lot more frustrating, and leads to poorly written code (usually).
Invest some time in learning a design pattern and become a master of implementing it. Believe me, it is worth all the effort.
6. Learn version control
In today’s world, it’s very rare that you work on a project alone or you will need to in the future. To collaborate with others, you need to learn something called version control!
Developers usually don’t dive into version control until they absolutely need to do so. However, as version control is necessary to work in a team, it’s a good idea to understand how it works and the basic commands that get you started early on.
The most popular one is Git from GitHub, literally I haven't seen a professional developer who doesn't use Git.
7. Jack of all trades, master of none
It’s good to explore new technologies, but one must remember to stick to one language for most purposes. I prefer to use JavaScript, I love it a lot.
It’s always tempting to learn multiple languages at the same time, but it’s advisable to stick to one until you develop a certain level of mastery over it.
8. Learn from the work of others
Mastering a technology on your own is great, but sometimes you learn a lot by just looking at the code of others. Be it your colleagues or random tutorials on the internet, try to find why someone approaches a problem in a certain way, and ask questions if necessary, don't be shy, developers are friendly and willing to help.
9. Google is your best friend ⌨️
As a developer, we have to learn a lot and we as humans suck at it. That's why Google was built for. Like learning to learn is important, the skill of googling is a must In a developer's life.
There are many ways to submit a search query on google. Try to google and find out. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/9-things-i-wish-id-known-when-i-started-as-a-web-developer-6ff55928cda6 | ['Ali Haider'] | 2020-09-05 17:23:32.932000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Programming', 'Tech', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript'] |
Happy New Year 2021 | Happy New Year to all my readers and happiness comes into your life When the new year comes, on this blog we have messages, sms, happy new year and happy new year.Happy New Year! Hearty New Year’s Day! So once it’s done, there are also some very happy days at some point in the year.
Happy new year 2021 | https://medium.com/@darshanbhivagade/happy-new-year-2021-5784582e64c4 | ['Darshan Bhivagade'] | 2020-12-11 08:24:26.539000+00:00 | ['New Year', 'Happy New Year', 'New Year Resolution', 'Merry Christmas', 'Merry Christmas Greetings'] |
Wiener Zeitung published Russian envoy’s propaganda-laden oped | That a number of European journalists and media outlets systematically publish reports in the interests of Russian propaganda has long been a known fact. The only thing that still raises my eyebrows from time to time is platforms where the Russian hybrid talking heads find loopholes. Although, this is not so much about being disappointed — it’s about remaining vigilant, observing things, and drawing conclusions.
Today, December 1, Austria’s oldest newspaper, the Wiener Zeitung, published a piece authored by Russian Ambassador Dmitry Lyubinsky, where he reflected on the developments following the Paris Meeting of the Normandy Four leaders.
At the same time, the oped is nothing but traditional manipulation, and outright lies in some parts, regarding the alleged non-compliance by Ukraine with the agreements reached during the leaders’ meetup.
In particular, the Russian ambassador accuses Ukraine of violating a number of the agreements reached at the Summit, namely: refusing to negotiate with representatives of the occupying authorities on the legal aspects of the region’s “special status”; and failing to make steps toward implementing the so-called Steinmeier Formula, which in turn implies the entry into force of the law on the special status on the day local elections are held.
What’s more surprising is that while the very release of such an absurd piece by the Wiener Zeitung can be explained by freedom of speech, then how about that phrase in bold in the article’s text? It says “Only excuses are constant, not the implementation of decisions,” which makes a negative and biased emphasis on Ukraine.
In other words, the article published today on the pages of the Vienna newspaper is part of a propaganda campaign orchestrated by Russia. The piece cultivates manipulative narratives about the Steinmeier formula and “special status” for Donbas, while totally ignoring Russia’s obligation to withdraw its troops from the occupied territories. It talks of local elections, while turning a blind eye to the need to let Ukraine regain control of the border section with Russia to create proper security conditions for the vote. There’s actually plenty of other nuances, which Dmitry Lyubinsky chose to evade, while the newspaper’s editor never bothered to double-check.
But even more outrageous is that Lyubinsky, referring to the OSCE data, accuses Ukraine of army maneuvers, branding this as some kind of violations, although the redeployment took place on the government-controlled territory!
The Russian envoy in his oped manipulates reports on shellings and casualties, as well as puts all blame on Ukraine for all “ceasefire” violations, although the OSCE data show that the culprits are almost always the illegal armed groups controlled by Russia.
It’s difficult to say what exactly drove the Wiener Zeitung to published this ugly piece so full of outright lies and blatant inconsistencies. All I know is that yet another European outlet has lost credibility, having compromised itself. After all, this publication doesn’t seem to be a simple mistake or short-sightedness on the part of the editor… | https://medium.com/@zloyodessit2.0/wiener-zeitung-published-russian-envoys-propaganda-laden-oped-4794e80c8cdc | ['Злой Одессит'] | 2020-12-01 21:15:24.354000+00:00 | ['Austria', 'Propaganda', 'War', 'Russia', 'Ukraine'] |
CoinBundle Conversations | CoinBundle is on a mission to provide support and educate new cryptocurrency investors. Our CEO, Saad Rizvi has sat down with the leading blockchain, cryptocurrency, and venture capital experts and entrepreneurs to discuss their journey into crypto and the important aspects of investing. These conversations will increase awareness, open minds, and bring clarity to this exciting new space.
In these interviews, notable leading voices in the space explain cryptocurrency and the technology behind it. In these in-depth episodes, you can expect to learn about blockchain, exchanges, decentralization, entrepreneurship, marketplaces, and much more.
Saad’s face-to-face with Atif Nazir
Before becoming the CEO of Block.io, Atif Nazir talks about building the #2 application on Facebook and his major success after the challenges of being a Bitcoin believer before the crypto craze had even set in. As well as speaking on society’s acceptance of technological advancements, Nazir shares advice on taking the complexity out of crypto and simplifying it as an entrepreneur to reach success.
There’s more!
Sign up for an account on CoinBundle and you won’t miss all past and future CoinBundle Conversations with these leading crypto investors and entrepreneurs: | https://medium.com/coinbundle/coinbundle-conversations-fa71a682d482 | ['Coinbundle Team'] | 2018-10-16 10:15:54.761000+00:00 | ['Coinbundleconvos', 'Investing', 'Finance', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Startup'] |
Netflix’s Russian Doll & The Pandemic | Fast forward to a few months when I am sitting with a friend watching TV, socially distant 6-feet apart, she looks at me and says, “Have you seen Russian Doll?”. I respond with yes I have and how it freaked me out and I stopped watching it. She asks me if I want to give it another shot and I hesitate, but eventually agree.
I spend the next entire day binge watching the show, completely enthralled by Nadia and Alan’s adventures in finding reason for their absurdity. The show isn’t just about a timeloop, its about internal struggles, second chances (sometimes even 15th chances), and how they affect us and the ones we love. Nadia’s cynicism is rooted in her trauma and Alan’s condition is reflected on his personal relationships. Both our protagonists are struggling with their own wars and we find over time, with each episode, that they must work together to solve this crisis, or as Nadia would put it: find the bug in the system.
We find Nadia reliving her birthday over and over again finding variations to exploit the day and to somehow free herself from this misery. She questions her existence, even the possibility of something supernatural as a cause, but she was never a believer herself. Alan has the idea that they are being punished for an unknown sin or crime. Both characters struggle with their sanity and try to make amends to people they have wronged, perhaps with the belief that somehow their conditions would be reversed and they would live to see a Thursday.
Through trial and error Nadia realizes that they must recreate the day they first encountered each other unknowingly. As the day resets we find both our protagonists in the same day, but in different timelines. In Alan’s timeline, Nadia refuses to recognize him and in Nadia’s world, Alan is still a drunken mess. The finale hinges around both our protagonists convincing each other of their impending doom and consequently saving each other’s lives.
The ending is left open to interpretation, just the way any timeloop movie/show should be. We don’t know if Nadia and Alan find peace, but do we know that they live to see another day. And one can hope that when this lockdown ends and the pandemic goes away, we too will live to see a Thursday. | https://medium.com/@syds/netflixs-russian-doll-the-pandemic-60ac946947cd | ['Syd S Journal'] | 2020-12-23 08:10:36.160000+00:00 | ['Netflix', 'Review', 'Lockdown', 'Pandemic', 'Russian Doll Netflix'] |
Attribution analysis: How to measure impact? (Part 1 of 2) | By Lisa Cohen, Saptarshi Chaudhuri, Daniel Yehdego, Ryan Bouchard, Shijing Fang, and Siddharth Kumar
A common question we hear from business stakeholders is “What is the impact of x?”, where x may be a marketing campaign, a customer support initiative, a new service launch, and so on. It makes sense — as a business, we continuously make investments to nurture Azure customers. In each instance, we want to understand the impact or effectiveness to help guide our future direction.
Controlled experiment
The most effective approach to quantify the impact of a change (or “treatment”) is to run a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We identify the set of customers for the experiment and randomly divide them into treatment and control groups, making sure confounding factors like customer size, monthly usage, growth rate, license type, and geography are equally represented in each group. Then we compare the outcomes of each group with each other. This approach allows us to evaluate causality and determine the “lift” from the program.
Defining “success” is a key step in this process and is a good way to clarify goals. In Azure, our overall goal is for customers to be successful in their adoption of the cloud. Below is an example comparing Azure usage between two populations as an indicator of engagement. Usage is an indirect measure of a customer’s success, because it demonstrates that they’re able to leverage and find value in the service versus experiencing blockers. Therefore, in this post, we refer to the customer’s usage as a proxy for their success. (Note: For features like Azure Cost Management, focused on helping drive efficiencies, we can actually measure success as a decrease in overall usage.) Additional success metrics that we generally consider include retention, net promoter score, and satisfaction. There are also scenarios where we consider success metrics that are more specific to the particular focus of a program, for example, to help facilitate activations or deployments.
Next, we choose the appropriate statistical test to evaluate the treatment’s performance. In this case, we use Student’s t-test to check that the p-value is below a predetermined alpha level. We most often use an alpha level of 0.05 and assess the range of potential impact with a 95 percent confidence interval. However, we also keep in mind the potential shortcomings of frequentist statistics that could warrant the use of over-comparison corrections or Bayesian techniques. (Note: In cases of non-Gaussian distributions, we also leverage nonparametric tests such as the Mann-Whitney U test.)
To determine the amount of impact the treatment had, we measure the area between these two curves after the treatment was applied. Finally, if we want to understand the return on investment (ROI) of the treatment, we can divide the incremental consumption that it produced by the cost:
Retrospective cohort study
In some cases, however, an experiment might not be possible. For example, we may be working with similar customers, and we don’t want to unfairly exclude any of them from a core customer benefit. But when we have rich observational data, we could measure impact through various observational studies. For example, we use a retrospective cohort study to measure the correlation of a customer nurture initiative (i.e., the “treatment”) on the output variable by comparing trends before and after the treatment using a single population analysis. Since the treatment might have been applied to different customers at different calendar months (depending on each customer’s lifecycle), first we start by normalizing the customers’ usage by the date of the treatment. We construct the chart below to confirm our intuition that a correlation actually exists between the treatment and Azure usage. In addition to the mean, we also check the median, as well as the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentile (“box plot”) versions of this chart, to understand how the treatment affects different parts of the customer population. While in the end this is still a correlation, normalizing by the treatment date rather than a calendar date — when the treatment occurred at different points in time — helps exclude other time-based confounding variables. A curve like the one below (where the trajectory shift starts at the time of the treatment) helps us be more confident that the change is related to the treatment instead of to other confounders.
The other value of this chart is that it helps establish whether we’ve considered the correct “event” from the initiative as part of the treatment’s impact. For example, when evaluating the impact of support, do we check the support plan entitlement date, the ticket open date, or ticket close date? Similarly, when a technical professional engages with a customer to consult on a project, do we consider the engagement start date or the project deployment date? Finally, is there a typical “delay” or “ramp up time” from the time of the treatment event to the point of measurable impact? Using the perspective from these charts, we can conclude that the program correlates with helping the customer use Azure, when we see an increased growth rate at that point in time.
Now (just as in the experiment case), beyond determining whether the treatment correlates with a statistically significant difference or not, we also want to know how much of a difference exists. To measure the amount of impact the treatment had overall, we construct a view as follows. First, we forecast how much the population would have continued to grow on its own. We test multiple forecast techniques for this and choose the one that works best for this data set. The test includes an SMAPE calculation and divides the pre-treatment timeline as 70 percent training and 30 percent test to evaluate forecast performance. Once we have the forecast “baseline” defined, we compare the actual growth of the population and compare. In the end, we attribute the shaded area between the two curves to the treatment.
In employing these approaches, we avoid a couple common “gotchas”:
Comparing the growth rate of a non-randomly selected group with the treatment group. Sometimes when there is no planned control, there’s a temptation to compare the growth rates between populations who received the treatment with those who did not. However, often there are specific program criteria for the treatment. Therefore, there is an inherent sampling bias in this approach. Attributing all of a customer’s growth to the treatment (without considering that the customers might still have grown without the treatment). We use the forecast baseline method, as outlined above, to avoid this over-attribution.
In the retrospective cohort approach above, we caution the reader that this is still a correlation (versus a causal impact). Causal inference is an additional technique to determine causation, which we will explore in our next post.
Multi-attribution analysis
An additional complexity that we encounter in these analyses is when multiple treatments are applied to the same customers at the same time. In “real world” enterprise scenarios, this is often the case, since there are multiple teams, programs, and initiatives all working to help customers in different ways. For example, here is an illustration of a customer who engages with multiple programs over time:
To determine the impact of each individual program, we need to apply multi-attribution analysis.
One way to check whether this is required is by analyzing the overlap among programs. For example, what percentage of customers who experienced treatment A also had other treatments?
Note that this scenario reinforces the importance for data science organizations to bring together broad data sets in order to represent the end-to-end customer experience, as well as the need for a customer model that allows them to be connected with common identifiers, in order to produce these kinds of insights.
If the overlap among programs is small enough, and the action we plan to take doesn’t require extreme precision, we may choose to proceed with the single attribution analysis, knowing that the results are still directionally relevant. If the overlap is material, however, as in the example above, we apply multi-attribution approaches as follows.
First, we forecast the dynamic baseline, starting at the point of the first treatment. Then, we use proprietary machine learning models (based on Markov chain and Shapley value approaches) in order to divide the area between the baseline and actuals during the period where multiple treatments are present:
Fig. Usage attributed to two treatments, beyond the dynamic baseline. (Visual by Elizabeth Kronoff.)
Investment programs can be considered as a stochastic process where their sequence of events are treated as a Markov chain in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event (Paul A. Gagnic, 2017, and Markov). The Shapley value method is a general credit allocation approach in cooperative game theory. It is based on evaluating the marginal contribution of each investment in a customer’s journey. The credit assigned to each investment, i.e., Shapley value, is the expected value of this marginal contribution over all possible permutations of the investments.
Using this approach, we can conclude the correlated usage for each respective program.
Additional attribution scenarios
Web page attribution: In addition to the customer nurture activities described above, another scenario involving attribution analysis is in web analytics. Tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics use heuristic (rule-based) multi-channel funnel (MCF) attribution models, which include the following methods:
First-touch attribution: Attributes all credit to the first touch point of the customer’s journey.
Attributes all credit to the first touch point of the customer’s journey. Last-touch attribution: Attributes all credit to the last touch point of the customer’s journey.
Attributes all credit to the last touch point of the customer’s journey. Linear attribution: Attributes the credit linearly across all touch points of the customer’s journey.
Attributes the credit linearly across all touch points of the customer’s journey. U-Shaped attribution: Attributes a fifty-fifty split of the credit to the first and last touch points of the customer’s journey.
Attributes a fifty-fifty split of the credit to the first and last touch points of the customer’s journey. Simple decay attribution: Attributes a weighted percentage of the credit to the most recent touch point in the customer’s journey.
However, the challenge with rule-based models is that you must know the correct rules to choose. Therefore, we’ve researched data-driven models for these scenarios as well. In our scenario, we want to understand the impact of our websites and documentation in helping users adopt and engage with our products. Using a Markov chain approach we’re able to observe the difference in conversion rates between those users who do and don’t visit our web pages, as well as determine which pages correlate with the strongest outcomes.
Customer satisfaction attribution: Another application of attribution analysis comes up in the case of customer satisfaction (CSAT). We typically learn about our customers’ satisfaction through survey data. By asking customers about their levels of engagement with our product and communities, we can then correlate those experiences with their overall satisfaction. Here is some sample data to illustrate this scenario:
Data visualization by Nancy Organ
While both this and the previous web example are correlation analyses, they do tell us about the prominence of particular web pages with users who do versus don’t convert, as well as the product and community engagement, for users who have high versus low CSAT. Given this, even if we don’t prove that Document A caused a customer’s conversion, the fact that it is frequently visited by users who convert means that we should likely invest in it.
Conclusion
In this article, we walked through methods of attribution analysis for both single- and multi-attribution scenarios. We explored an example in the context of a customer engagement program, and also shared references to web page attribution and customer satisfaction surveys as additional use cases where they are applicable. Beyond the initial RCT example, this article primarily focused on correlation. In the next article in this series, we’ll dive into causal inference approaches to determine causality.
We’d like to thank the Marketing, Finance, and Customer Program teams for being great partners in the adoption of this work. | https://medium.com/data-science-at-microsoft/attribution-analysis-how-to-measure-impact-part-1-of-2-324d43fbbba0 | ['Lisa Cohen'] | 2020-09-01 10:19:19.316000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Attribution', 'Experiment', 'Causation', 'Correlation'] |
The U.S. Government (Congress Fundamentals) | This is part 1 of a 3 part series. This article is about Congress, the second and third will be about the other two branches.
Congress is 1 of the 3 branches in the United States government. It has a bicameral system, meaning having two branches or chambers. Those two are the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Each help propose and ratify bills. They make up Congress, and the legislative branch.
The Senate is located on the north side of the Congress building. It consists of 100 members, 2 from each state. The 2 senators represent their entire state, whatever it may be. Their are 3 requirements needed to run for a state senator, this includes all 50 states. At least an age of 30 years, have a U.S. citizenship for at least 9 years, and finally a residence of the state the senator is representing at the time of the election. Each serve 6-year terms, unless something else happens. Every 2 years, elections are held for 1/3 of the senate. So, you will never see 2 senators being elected at the same time, unless a special election occurs. A special election usually only occurs in a few states, and that’s due to sudden events. Like if a senator died during his or her term, or couldn’t participate in the next election. They have the power to impeach federal officials, approve presidential appointments, and ratify treaties. The leader of the Senate is the current vice president, if he cannot physically be there for some reason, then the Pro-Tempore becomes the leader.
The House of Representatives is located on the north side of the Congress building. It consists of 435 members, each dependent on the states population. There are so many because each represent their own district. Some states may have 3, and other may have 40 or 50. Their are also 3 requirements needed to run for a representative. You must be at least 25 years of age, obtain a citizenship for at least 7 years, and reside in the district where he or she represents. They serve 2 year terms, all being elected every 2 years. They have the power to initiate revenue bills, impeach federal officials, and elect the president in case of an electoral tie (which rarely happens). The leader of the House is the Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House is elected by the representatives, and must receive a minimum of 218 votes out of 435. | https://medium.com/@mikilovespanda1231/the-u-s-government-congress-fundamentals-3571d72601fc | [] | 2020-12-14 01:24:23.465000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Senate', 'Politics', 'Congress', 'House Of Representatives'] |
Cannabis: Conference Of The Future | Having spoken at nearly 50 global conference over the past five years, we understand firsthand the void created by the lack of in-person events. Since March 2020, revenue impact on the average live event business has exceeded 75%. Trade shows report an average income loss exceeding 95%, and fewer than 60% of all live event companies expect a full recovery in 2021.Nearly 40% believe it will take until 2022 to recover, with the majority of businesses expecting to survive also expecting their revenue mix to look quite different going forward.
The cannabis conference space has grown substantially over the past five years and had perhaps reached a saturation point in 2019. A majority of the once thriving conference companies have revised their business plans to pivot into new business lines or to embrace the virtual conference and digital streaming spaces. We expect 2021 to be a recovery year and the conference of the future to be a hybrid digital and in-person event that enjoys greater revenues and profits than it has in the past.
Adapt or Perish: Now as Ever, Nature’s Inexorable Imperative
Ticket prices for virtual cannabis conferences average $50, with digital sponsorships averaging ~15% of live-event sponsorships. While these numbers aren’t sufficient to support many trade show businesses, the models of 2020 are proving that digital attendees are worthwhile attendees and that integrating multi-channel options expands reach and provide attendees, sponsors, exhibitors and speakers a more efficient and robust way to interact. Event producers who grasp the silver lining of an unexpected global industry overhaul and innovate will offer immense benefits to their stakeholders and once again thrive as businesses.
Advantages of a virtual experience: Attendees can watch and engage with others across the world, speakers can provide valuable information to an international audience, organizers can track all activity and optimize future offerings with immense behavioral data, and sponsors can gain transparency on the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. The elimination of travel and hosting costs makes the entire experience far cheaper for all involved, and the trade show cost of an additional attendee is nearly zero.
Advantages of an in-person event: Physical interaction has a meaningful impact on relationship building and attendees can interact directly with equipment and finished goods. At-home disturbances are minimized, and networking sessions are far more impactful than their virtual counterparts. Cannabis after-parties have been fun and meaningful over the years, and not an experience remotely replicated in the digital realm.
The opportunity for the future conference lies in balancing both sets of advantages in a hybrid environment. While virtual environments offer cost savings, decreased environmental impact and ease of participation, the digital realm is simply no match for an in-person experience and physical product interaction. The next generation conference is not virtual or in-person; it is both.
What do conferences offer?
Education: Universities and colleges have shown us that we are no longer forced to collect our learning experiences in a physical room. The same is true of conferences. Ensuring digital participant access to information and presentations is essential. Future events must allow participants to ‘access the past’ to ‘influence the future’. Imagine a ‘living’ platform of product reviews accessible by consumers or a dynamic library of expert presentations ranked by usefulness.
Sponsorship: Marketers have understood the importance of multi-channel branding for some time now, and sponsors of the future conference are well served to look at the show days as simply a marker on a timeline. In a hybrid world, promotion can begin months in advance and last for months after — with the conference serving as the physical experience and meeting place for high-value prospects. The successful future conference will offer more tech-savvy and high media-impact opportunities for sponsors while also excelling at the requisite on-site ‘wow’ factors.
Brand-building: Building a brand isn’t about the 100-foot entrance banner or the advertisement on the back cover of the show guide, nor is it about a catchy social media campaign leading up to an event. Marketers have been developing effective social algorithms for decades, yet these are seldom used for attendee benefit. Imagine receiving predictive analytics on pre-determined meetings based on data gleaned from the back end of trade-show software. This type of analysis is fairly well understood although not frequently used except by the most efficient of organizations. Smart, nimble, targeted and adaptable shows will be able to integrate analytics more effectively to become future ‘game changers’ for brands.
Entertainment: The show of the future will combine art, music, entertainment and product awareness in a multi-sensory manner and stream it worldwide. It will further enhance that experience for the remote attendee via avatars and 3D rendering, providing that attendee a true VR experience. Trade shows are well served to focus on being uplifting and memorable rather than staid and draining.
Networking: Sponsors, exhibitors and the majority of attendees know who they want to talk to and what they want to talk about long before ‘show day’. Conference pre-connection capabilities are now a must. Digital matchmaking technology uses online profiles and allows us to meet virtually to discuss business or expertise needs in advance of an event. The extension of a trade show beyond the ‘show day’ itself makes the physical show simply a part of the overall event and potentially the culmination rather than beginning of the sales process.
Trade shows are thus no longer moments in time nor are they defined by a specific date. They are ongoing experiences. While establishing or expanding ‘content’ is the easiest response and appeals to our logic, our emotional brains attend conferences for the experience and connection. The trade show that learns to integrate technological advances, provide a memorable user experience, and promote efficient personal connection will survive an otherwise challenging environment ahead. Shows with a focus on targeted groups will gain a premium over those that attempt to be ‘one-size-fits-all’. Experiential technology used with a marketing analytics backbone overlaid on a spectacular and efficient physical event will allow for the effective conference to once again be just that. This benefits exhibitors, sponsors, attendees and other stakeholders, and allows for increased profitability for the trade show that is able to adapt and shine.
The light may show the way; it is darkness that shows the stars | https://medium.com/@mazakali/cannabis-conference-of-the-future-ac4a6ad3652b | ['Sumit Mehta'] | 2020-12-16 20:21:59.557000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Future', 'Cannabis', 'Conference', 'Investment'] |
Hero Spotlight: Patricia | Choosing Runes for Patricia
Patricia should be Runed with the goal of increasing her overall damage output and getting her Skills off as quickly and often as possible. These are the best Rune types you can use on Patricia:
Vampire Runes are a solid choice for Patricia, a set of two will grant her a 20% Vampire Effect boost. This will increase her longevity and with Patricia’s high damage output she’ll receive plenty of health recovery in return. Magic Heroes often utilize and benefit greatly from Vampire Runes due to their natural frailty. Vampire Runes are incredibly useful in PvE situations and decent in PvP.
Warrior Runes are one of the best Rune types in the game and are a very solid option for Patricia. A set of two Warrior Runes increase your Inability Effect Resistance by 50%. Inability Effects are deadly, especially in Arena where hitting first is of the utmost importance.
Evasion Runes are a solid choice on Patricia as she lacks overall longevity until she gets Transcended. This will allow Patricia to avoid attacks and last longer in battles. A common combination for many Magic Heroes is two Evasion Runes with two Warrior Runes.
Philosopher Runes are a PvP focused Rune type, which are still useful in PvE situations, that give you a 10% boost to your starting Energy levels for a set of 2. In the current PvP meta where battles can be determined simply by whose DPS Magic Hero can get their Skills off first, Philosopher Runes are incredibly powerful, especially when multiple or all team members possess a set.
Many top PvP players consider Philosopher Runes the best type of Rune. If you’re trying to maximize your performance in PvP, equip Patricia with a set of Philosopher Runes. Warrior Runes synergize incredibly well with Philosopher Runes as it drastically increases the likelihood you’ll get your Skills off quickly and uninterrupted.
If you haven’t Transcended Patricia yet, especially to 66 where Magic Heroes receive a 30% HP boost, you may find her to be a bit squishy. In that case you can change her Rune I slot to a HP Rune to increase her durability.
Desirable Rune Stat Bonuses:
I: Magic Power/HP
II: Magic Power
III: Attack Speed
IV: Attack Speed
Complementary sub-stats you should be aiming for on your Runes are: Attack Speed, Magic Power and Accuracy. Having some HP and other stats such as Energy Acquired in the sub-stats can also be helpful. | https://medium.com/playdappgames/hero-spotlight-patricia-650899c6a675 | [] | 2020-12-02 02:52:31.673000+00:00 | ['Mobile Games', 'Game Development', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Rpg', 'Gaming'] |
What cryptocurrencies could learn from Visa and Mastercard to reach mass adoption | The history of money is a very old one. Starting back to Sumer civilization, its evolution has been linked to many technological improvements and societal changes. Indeed, prior to digital writings, money took many other shapes. Some we are still using today, like paper notes and metal coins. Some we are not and sound quite original, like clay tablets, shells, teeth and even feathers. But whatever the shape, money always had the same purpose: being a unit of account, a store of value and a medium of exchanges.
When the mysterious “Satoshi Nakamoto” created the Bitcoin and the first blockchain protocol in 2009, he wanted to develop an asset that would rely on cryptography and be used just like money. However, the Bitcoin, and the other cryptocurrencies that emerged in its wake, have never been able to operate as genuine money, because of their extreme volatility. For instance, in 2017 the price of the Bitcoin jumped from 1.000$ to 20.000$, and then went back under 6.000$ in just 6 months, making it hard to be a reliable unit of account and a stable store of value.
Still, cryptocurrencies can play a role of medium of exchanges. With potentially cheaper fees and faster transactions than the traditional solutions, they also have the ability to work without a central authority for preventing frauds and validating operations. From that perspective, financial blockchains are not really competing against traditional currencies like the dollar, the euro or the yen. They are rather threatening payment solutions such as exchange systems, money transfer platforms and of course payment cards. In their attempt of disruption, it could be relevant for the organizations behind those innovative projects to apply the same strategies that make firms like Visa or Mastercard succeed.
First, like every company with a two-sided platform business model, those firms had to convince both actors (say retailers and consumers) to adopt their product. To do so, some banks like Bank of America, the original creator of Visa, simply send plastic cards with a 500$ credit limit to its customers. If banks had some losses at first, they also turned every single customer into an ally, willing to help them convince retailers to adopt their new payment system. Soon, millions of debit and credit cards were in circulation and massively used.
Second, in their early days, payment cards were not user friendly at all. To be sure customers were really able to pay, retailers had to call by phone the banks and make them approve every single transaction. The payment process was particularly painful and it only improved when chips and magnetic stripes were implemented to payment cards. Those incremental innovations strengthen the initial disruption, allowing transactions to be completed in few seconds by simply swiping the cards into payment terminals and voilà !
By creating wallets and distributing for free some usable assets (better known as tokens in the cryptosphere), the developers of cryptocurrencies could gain their first users and promoters. Some of the teams that develop blockchains are already doing it with operations called Airdrops. However, those operations are more dedicated to people that are already initiated to cryptocurrencies and eager to make profits by selling them in the future. To be adopted by the whole population, crypto-based companies should better put blockchain assets in the hands of random people. Assets these people could use straight away for their inherent purpose and not just for pure speculation.
Also, Bitcoin’s blockchain can only handle 3 to 4 transactions per second and Ethereum’s blockchain, the second biggest one, just 20. On the other side, Paypal and Visa can respectively handle 193 and 1.667 transactions per second. Moreover, there are more than 1.900 different cryptocurrencies today and this number never stops growing. While credit cards are working on the same kinds of terminals, most of the blockchain protocols require different solutions to operate. To get the edge on credit cards and money transfer solutions, cryptocurrencies have to extend their scalability and become interoperable between each others.
To conclude, if the potential of disruption of cryptocurrencies is colossal for the financial sector (and also for many other ones like energy, gaming, luxury or supply chain), still, they might never be considered as genuine money. And this is not such a problem. Sometimes innovations are not impacting things the way they were initially thought. As long as they find some valuable use cases, they have a good chance to have a bright future in front of them. The one thing they should do is to give consistent proofs of their performance and utility. And when the path is not clear, many clues can be found in the history of previous innovations. | https://medium.com/tech-away/what-cryptocurrencies-could-learn-from-visa-and-mastercard-to-reach-mass-adoption-4e9591476034 | ['Antonin Cobolet'] | 2018-08-30 07:01:02.107000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
Does your personal brand define you or do you define your personal brand? | Does your personal brand define you or do you define your personal brand? I’ve always found the ‘personal branding’ theory and practices a little difficult to accept.
I think it’s the connotations more than anything else. If we look at any formal definitions, branding is an integral part of Marketing. Marketing is traditionally about facilitating selling [of products, services] to buyers/consumers, and here lies my challenge. Selling for many reasons is now all about the seller, the product, and how it’s packaged up – not about the buyer themselves. Many of us have these images of or even direct experiences of ‘overselling’, and ‘personal branding’ could imply an overselling of yourself.
A large majority of people will disagree with me, and state that personal branding is managing a very important of your career and how you’re perceived – and I agree! That being said, I prefer the more traditional concept of ‘reputation’. This is also how you are perceived and represents what people think of you. The big difference is that your reputation is fundamentally based on your character, who you are, and what you do. It speaks for itself. ‘Personal branding’ on the other hand can introduce a certain pressure to differentiate yourself quickly from others through promoting yourself. It’s exactly this excessive focus on promoting yourself that can lead to trying to be someone you’re not. Shouldn’t we all just be authentic and dedicate ourselves to becoming they very best of who we are? Surely if we just do that, our reputation and brand will automatically improve?
Of course, I could be accused of being old fashioned. After all I did say ‘traditional’ a little while earlier. I’m also told that nothing happens automatically and that you have to work hard at personal branding, especially if you want to ‘get ahead in the game’ and attract the best possible opportunities. Is that all that life and professional development have become? Getting ahead no matter what, and at the expense of others? I certainly don’t believe in that, but I can understand the frenzied focus on personal branding for those that do. By the way, I don’t think that I’m that old-fashioned, although I do believe that some values and beliefs have withstood the test of time. I trust in the power of social media (especially for introverts – maybe a topic for another day). But don’t you think that sometimes it just feels a little bit too much? A little too much posturing? Grandiosity? It’s almost that you have to become a celebrity to be successful and personally satisfied. No thank you!
Anyway here are 5 tips on managing your personal brand ethically:
Be bold and be yourself. Speak up, say what you think needs to be said, and do what needs to be done regardless of who gets the credit.
Be humble and appreciate that you have to improve every day. It starts with knowing yourself. Get feedback from those you trust and self-reflect as often as you can.
Be human and put others first. Help others become successful, be compassionate and empathetic. Share knowledge and give good positive advice.
Be passionate, and take pride in your work. Go the extra mile and do a brilliant job.
Be a good listener to understand others perspectives and any sub-conscious biases you or others may have, so that your contribution is even higher.
All of these will help you develop your personal brand and reputation. Most importantly, you’ll be continuously ensuring that any gap between your reputation [how you’re perceived] and your character [who you are] is minimised. Isn’t this what it all boils down to? | https://medium.com/@ash_76820/does-your-personal-brand-define-you-or-do-you-define-your-personal-brand-b4d317a82daf | ['Ashfaque Ahmed Malik'] | 2020-12-14 17:19:53.169000+00:00 | ['Personal Branding', 'Reputation Management', 'Success', 'Career Development'] |
Letter to the Future Queen | 14–53–88BGU
It has only been a few months since the fall of the Intergalactic Alliance. What people may have thought would finally bring peace and justice across the nine systems only has brought us more fighting and divisions among us. The death of the former leader, King Therion, was over in an instant yet the shockwaves created by this event still reverberate across our systems. His rule did bring us hardships but the law and order he brought also made sure everyone was in check and stability became a way of life. Life was simple and life was peaceful; our people were happy. While we did have to abide by his rules and laws we needed not to worry about the roving bandit and pirate hordes that lurked in the dark corners of our systems.
I for one was never a fan of the high taxes and the constant surveillance but I had nothing to hide so I had nothing ever to fear. However, I can say I never once had feared for my life like I do now. The splintering of the Intergalactic Alliance has left a large power vacuum with seven or maybe even eight different factions, including yours, all vying to fill the void. Because of this many systems, such as our own, have been forgotten and deemed “not worth protecting at this time” leading to the tyrannical rule of the pirates and bandits to begin once again. Our crops have been stolen, our land destroyed, and our people have been beaten and broken under their reign.
I come to you with a formal request to send aid back to our system and to reclaim our small planet as yours. To grace us once again and protect us like King Therion once did. Our villages were always loyal to your father and we will remain loyal to you. Our people would gladly fight alongside your Peace Keepers as long as it meant bringing life back to the way it once was. Our people need a leader and we are ready to submit to you as long as you deem us worthy. Hail the Intergalactic Alliance and hail the future Queen of the nine systems!
-Elder Rillum, Planet 8812, Sellis | https://medium.com/@roqwynn/letter-to-the-future-queen-161fd7a05a11 | [] | 2020-12-09 14:06:40.171000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Space', 'SciFi', 'Letters'] |
Consistency can never be achieved with discipline | Image courtesy: Photo by Oliver Buchmann on Unsplash
One of my three words in 2020 is consistency. This word has been one of my 3 words in the previous years too.
Here is a recap of the 3-word strategy:
I use my 3 words to guide my choices and actions during the day, throughout the year. Keeping them in focus, before I pick up anything to do, helps me circle back to the IMPORTANT even if I have got sucked into the URGENT.
Despite having “consistency” as one of my guiding words, I continue to struggle with achieving consistency in certain areas of my life.
In contrast, I have managed to comfortably get consistent with certain other aspects of my life.
Why is consistency so important?
There is a large body of research, and my own experience suggests that:
“Sustained long term outcomes can only come from repeatedly performing the right bite-sized action with an improvement loop built into it.”
Essentially:
Consistency creates a compounding effect.
One time wonders or hard pushes can only create a “flash in the pan.”
Let us look at some examples of how consistency adds up:
Investing 1000$ a month for 10 years at 12% per annum will mean you set aside a total of 120,000$, and you get back 235, 639$. You have doubled your money (that’s why the habit of saving and investing should start early…remember piggy banks) Exercising moderately and regularly will build a strong foundation of health and longevity over time. (We have a temple on a hilltop near our home, and I know of an 85-year-old gentleman who walks up that hill every day, alone, with no support, and quite comfortably. When asked how he does it at this age, his simple answer is that he started when he was 20 and hadn’t missed the walk up the temple ever since.) On any platform, we follow and recall writers who consistently (almost on a fixed schedule), write, and share ideas, experiences. Consistent writing helps authors refine their art, have a long term play of designs, and can engage better with their audiences. (I have known many one-time brilliant pieces of writing but nothing after that from the authors.)
The damage that consistency can do
The same is true for negative or no action too.
Consistently doing harmful activities, or not taking action when required, can lead to long term negative consequences.
E.g., regularly eating small amounts of junk food appears pretty harmless, but it all adds up, gradually but surely.
“Most people need consistency more than they need intensity. Intensity: -run a marathon -write a book in 30 days -silent meditation retreat Consistency: -don’t miss a workout for 2 years -write every week -daily silence Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.” - James Clear
WHERE I struggle with consistency?
For the last few years, I have been struggling to exercise regularly, which I know is critical to help me age gracefully and stay independent.
While I understand this intellectually, I haven’t been able to form a consistent, vigorous routine to exercise regularly.
I have tried mornings, evenings, paying up a gym membership, upping my ADLs (activities of daily living), and doing simple exercises at home.
But if any other event presents itself, my plans to exercise get waylaid (which is more often than not).
I have basically struggled to get disciplined.
WHY I struggle with consistency?
From a genetic perspective, I am quite disadvantaged. The metabolism of most of my family members is such that even if we smell food, we can gain weight. My dad and all his siblings were diabetic.
This “fear” was my context for regularly exercising all my life up until the age of 45.
After seven years of getting off the treadmill, I am still healthy and fit at 52. I believe this is due to the strong foundation of training that I have done throughout my life right until I was 45.
The residual effect of my robust physical foundation is helping to carry me into my 50’s even though I don’t exercise that intensely anymore.
However, I realize that the main reason for my inability to get back the discipline of exercise is the lack of a stable enough “context” or “why” in the present.
I tend to ignore exercise when I feel that something else deserves my attention at this point in time. Whether its working longer hours, spending more family time or merely resting.
And that even if I don’t exercise, nothing will fall apart (since I am healthy and fit)
While I have spoken about my struggle with regular exercise as an example of inconsistency, there are other areas of my life, too, where I continue to struggle.
This struggle is for the lack of a “decisive context,” e.g.,
The need for me to write regularly,
Why should I save and invest continually,
How connecting with my friends and family on a regular basis can build strong relationships.
I am consistent when I have a strong context
One of my pet dogs is a hypo-thyroid case and is overweight at around 10 years of age.
Until about a year ago, she would struggle to walk stairs or get herself off the floor.
I have seen a marked improvement in her health since we moved closer to the hill, and we walk for about two km daily.
Intense, regular exercise has improved blood circulation to her skin, has developed her digestion, and has made her a lot more agile.
This success with her health and the desire to keep her healthy as she graces is my context to take her for a long walk daily, no matter what.
I discovered a strong sense of calm and clarity with my meditation sessions, and I found these helping me produce more enduring outcomes at work and in my relationships.
The moment I saw the connection between regular meditation and the serenity in my life, I stuck with it. (And I also saw the dip in my awareness and actions when I got off the silence to know the difference)
The context here is that I can create my life as I want, once I am clear and conscious.
Similarly, there are other areas of my life, where consistency is effortless due to a robust context.
I discovered that:
The context is decisive
and Discipline is an “outcome” and NOT “the way.”
“Without context, words and action have no meaning at all” — Gregory Bateson
The way forward:
For me to achieve consistency, I must connect to a healthy context, which will automatically bring in the regularity discipline.
Context can be “fear” based or “reward” based.
E.g., for me to exercise regularly, I must connect to the health benefits as being critical for me at this stage of my life.
Or to the fear of a significant illness which can cripple me and prevent me from enjoying the fruits of my labor.
Another example is for me to establish a retirement fund, I must start investing and saving now (at least).
Or that writing regularly will help me connect at a deeper level with my friends and followers. (Like this is my second blog as per my decided schedule of once a week)
“Once you create a context, that context then generates a process in which the content — the forces and circumstances — reorder and align themselves with the context. For example, if you choose to shift the context of your life from ‘I don’t matter’ to ‘I make a difference,’ the circumstances in your life, while they may not have changed, take on an entirely new meaning. This new meaning, then, begins to reflect that you do make a difference.” — Werner Erhard
Would love to hear your experience of developing consistency? Please do leave a comment below.
Thanks for reading. | https://medium.com/@sunil.uttam/consistency-can-never-be-achieved-with-discipline-f5b604332905 | ['Sunil Uttam'] | 2020-03-15 10:22:24.383000+00:00 | ['Context', 'Habit Building', 'Discipline', 'Productivity', 'Consistency'] |
A Poem Of Well Deserved Thanks | A Poem Of Well Deserved Thanks
For The Hard Workers At No Crime in Rhymin’
Photo by Howie R on Unsplash
Do they like to rhyme in Colorado?
That’s something that I’d really like to know.
There’s a great place. Limon, Colorado.
If they rhyme there I’ll pack my bags and go.
Hmmm. Could I find someone to go with me?
To a place I would really like to see.
I’d like to find someone who likes rhymin’.
Someone who’s in their g’damn rhymin’ prime.
Would Joe Váradi deem to go with me?
I suppose I could ask him and we’d see.
Joe, ever seen the Rockies from Limon?
(A muck a muck at No Crime in Rhymin’.)
I’d like to ask this woman named Laura.
Sheridan. Gives off a rhymin’ aura.
She worked hard to help me with my poem.
Must have thought he could learn if I’d show him.
And then of course there is Mary Holden.
To her I am also quite beholden.
Part of the team at No Crime in Rhymin’,
They know good rhyme is not Simple Simon.
We could have us quite a trip to Limon.
I’d expect we’d spend the whole day rhymin’.
They wouldn’t have to worry ’long the way.
For all of us, of course, I’d gladly pay. | https://medium.com/no-crime-in-rhymin/a-poem-of-well-deserved-thanks-9f1434843de7 | ['Speaking Fiction To Power'] | 2020-11-14 19:54:00.199000+00:00 | ['Gratitude', 'Poetry', 'Humor', 'Rhyme', 'No Crime In Rhymin'] |
14 questions for future humans | If I had the chance to travel a thousand years into the future, these are the questions I’d like to ask future humans:
What is the optimal social structure? Is there one?
2. Does the family structure remain an important part of society?
3.Will society be able to reach post-feminism, post-racism, post-x?
4. Should humans be born artificially? How would that affect the relationship between family, society, and government?
5. Is gene-editing a natural right?
6. Should humans be able to upload themselves?
7. How do we decide who goes to other planets?
8.What responsibility do humans have to protect other worlds?
9.What will the role of gender be?
10.Should machines be given human rights?
11.Will other species (organic or inorganic) achieve consciousness?
12.How will biosynthesis affect state autonomy and international cooperation?
13.How will we escape the death of the Sun?
14.How will we escape the death of the universe? | https://medium.com/@glebshev/14-questions-for-future-humans-7fd9117edfa0 | [] | 2020-12-26 19:00:24.923000+00:00 | ['Questions', 'Futurism', 'Future'] |
Revisiting Lady Bird- Now on Netflix | Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) tells her mother (Laurie Metcalf) that she wants to live through something — something that matters. I think a lot of people feel that way in their lives. Looking out the window today, we are living through something. We’re living through an incredible period of anguish and horror. At the same time, however, we’re living through a period of time where people are standing up for what they believe in and fighting back against those who would so readily take everything away from them.
So, Lady Bird, if you thought 2002 was uneventful, just wait until 2020.
Greta Gerwig’s 2017 coming-of-age film, Lady Bird, was just released on Netflix, and is also streaming on Amazon Prime. Nominated for five Academy Awards, the movie centers on a seventeen year old high school senior who has a rocky relationship with her mother and tries to figure out who she is before she enters the next stage of her life.
This was one of my favorite movies of 2017, and it only gets better the more I watch it. It’s quirky and funny, but it also has an incredible amount of character depth. It is a really powerful coming-of-age story, which is one of my favorite genres of film. It clearly comes from a place of authenticity, capturing the uncertainty and confusion that accompanies this time in a person’s life.
Saoirse Ronan is absolutely phenomenal in this film. She is one of the great young actors in the industry, already receiving four Oscar nominations by the age of 26. She worked with Gerwig again on last year’s Little Women, which is also a fantastic movie. Ronan plays this part rather effortlessly. She doesn’t have the big emotional scene or the huge dramatic moment that one would normally associate with a really strong performance. Rather, the brilliance comes from how she is able to entirely inhabit this character. I don’t feel like I’m watching an actor playing a part; I feel like I am watching the life of Lady Bird.
Lady Bird is looking for a purpose in life. She is constantly looking at the greener grass, wanting to be on the other side of the train tracks. She looks at people more fortunate than she and her family, and wishes she could be like them. Even just from changing her name to “Lady Bird”, she wants to form a new identity for herself and be someone else. She doesn’t feel understood, especially by her mother, Marion.
Marion and Lady Bird are two completely different people, which leads to a lot of friction between them. Marion feels that Lady Bird doesn’t appreciate the sacrifices she makes, and Lady Bird feels that Marion doesn’t appreciate her for who she is. The scenes between Metcalf and Ronan are some of the best in the film. It perfectly captures the dichotomy within these characters’ relationship: having fun moments together and then instantaneously being at each other’s throats.
This is a wonderfully written and directed film. Greta Gerwig, who has been acting for years, approaches this movie with the mindset of an actor. While the story is certainly compelling, what makes this film work as well as it does is the organic performances and the realistic characters. Gerwig fundamentally knows the importance of character, and structures the film to best accentuate the characters and the performances behind them.
Lady Bird is a fantastic movie that I love revisiting. It is an enjoyable movie to watch, with a lot of great comedy. It has deeper moments of drama that give us insight into the characters. All of the performances are spectacular, with Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf especially shining. Greta Gerwig’s writing is raw and honest, and her direction brings the best out of everyone involved.
I’ll be honest. I’ve been having a hard time focusing on much outside of the protests going on across the country right now. It’s sucked out all of my energy, and even while writing this review I’ve struggled to give it my full attention. While watching this movie, however, I was transported away from the sickening displays of police brutality in our streets. I was transported to 2002 Sacramento, California. I was able to have some laughs, and appreciate a film that I think is really well done. It was an hour and thirty four minutes of refuge from reality.
If you haven’t watched Lady Bird, now is the time to do so. It’s available on Netflix and Amazon Prime to stream. If you’re like me, where you’ve been so focused on everything that is going on and you feel drained by it and you’re looking for something to help recharge your batteries and give you something new to focus on for even just a little bit, Lady Bird certainly did that for me. | https://medium.com/incluvie/revisiting-lady-bird-now-on-netflix-52c0b6d45a43 | ['Nathanael Molnár'] | 2020-06-03 15:41:19.658000+00:00 | ['Streaming', 'Movies', 'Netflix', 'Movie Review', 'Film'] |
Gambling Junkets Part I — Origins and Past | Gambling Junkets Part I — Origins and Past
Casino Junkets were invented in Las Vegas sometime in the 1950s. Junkets and their agents would attract players to a specific location or casino to gain their loyalty and engage them to play at a certain location. In return the player would receive incentives — from free travel, the best hotel rooms entertainment and fine dining for committing to play at that casino during their stay. Different junkets have different requirements for the player to earn these benefits.
The junkets attempt to attract players for various casino games like Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette and Poker to name a few. There are junkets for the average player and some for high-rollers.
Some of the earliest junkets were run by the mafia or lifelong criminals and caused a lot of problems and misunderstandings. One of the most famous of these individuals was Vincent Teresa. Wikipedia discusses Teresa’s involvement as follows:
“In the mid-1960s, Teresa moved on to two new criminal enterprises. The first was the outwardly legitimate business of gambling junkets. Teresa arranged for large groups of wealthy gamblers to be flown to Las Vegas, Europe and the Caribbean where they gambled at casinos. He used the junkets to convince patrons to subsidize his illegal money lending, promising them high interest rates. He would take their money and not pay the interest, threatening them if they protested.”
Casino junkets have led the way for other benefits for almost all casino players known as “Comps” — these are benefits that any player can get nowadays. These can be found in almost every casino today and can be accessed by almost all players based on their amount of play.
We will continue our discussion of the history of junkets with a following article: “Gambling Junkets Part II — The Current State” | https://medium.com/@DragonINC/gambling-junkets-part-i-origins-and-past-d39d8874323e | ['Dragon Inc.'] | 2017-12-19 12:20:26.076000+00:00 | ['Gambling', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Casino'] |
I did read it. | I did read it. You’re not quoting him. At best you quote people who interpret him or shorten what he said and you’re passing them off as quotes. Which is highly suspect. Also your personal experience doesn’t make an objective fact that would be representative in any actual rational debate or argument. I read Gotha and that could be construed as the gist of what he said, you would still need to quote within the appropriate context. Like “ — Prof. X on Karl Marx’s Critique on Gotha”. If you look up the manuscript btw, it wasn’t complete and it was posted after his death by people who thought it should be out there. Also, socialism is a term that existed long before Marx, he just appropriated it as such.
Also, I provided plenty of actual facts and issues which you completely ignored, since under our current constraints they cannot be properly addressed and nor does it seem that you would care to. You seem to like things just as they are. You’d prefer that we spend far more of our income on things like healthcare and schooling than any other first world country on this planet, rather than actually help some people, because you simply don’t care. It doesn’t benefit you. Granted it most likely wouldn’t hurt you either, but that’s immaterial. You’d Prefer to protect the rich than help the poor because it seems like you think that is the natural order of things and you’ve benefitted in some marginal way from the system. Granted from what I can tell from the years that you quoted seeing these things that you most likely did benefit, especially looking at the fact that if you did go to college in the 70’s or 80’s. At that time you could still have some things like go to college, buy a house, raise a family, and more with far less debt and more disposable income when you adjust for inflation. So you benefited and that makes it alright. At this point you’re Republican-lite to me. Please stop spamming me with unsubstantiated crap please. Everything I put out was verifiably easy to find with reputable sources. You on the other hand have conflated personal experiences (generally involving authoritarian movements), misquotes and emotional diatribes with facts. | https://medium.com/@richarddicristino/i-did-read-it-8ec040770bdc | ['Richard Dicristino'] | 2020-11-26 14:48:55.045000+00:00 | ['Conservatives', 'Socialism'] |
Caring For Your Team | There are many ways you can show your team you care and you appreciate them. During this challenging time, your team needs you to lead now more than ever.
SAY THANK YOU MORE OFTEN
This may seem obvious and yet many employees have shared they wished their leaders and employers would say thank you more often. Companies can feel their employees are paid for doing their job. Saying a genuine thank you and recognizing an employee for taking care of their responsibilities shows you care.
I used to feel I was saying thank you often enough. Sometimes you realize you are not actually doing this. Being aware and making changes to say thank you more often makes a difference. Today with most of the team working from home these thank you’s are more important than ever! Positive reinforcement helps everyone be more positive.
LISTEN & RECOGNIZE YOUR EMPLOYEES
Your employees see the business and their daily tasks differently than the way employers see them. Ask your employees what they think. Ask them what they recommend to improve and make things better. Ask what they need and how they are doing.
Listen to them. Acknowledge their ideas and input. Employers may not always agree, however, seeing the employees’ perspectives and blending it with the employer’s perspective creates very positive results.
At our weekly Team discussions, we say thank you to employees for specific things accomplished from the previous week. These include recent certifications, targets reached, and client experiences. We also recognize milestones with awards for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and 25 years of service.
PROVIDE A FUN AND CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT
We spend a significant amount at our office and home offices. Are these areas confined with and no room for any leisure activities? Where do employees have lunch and where do they take a break? Most spend the entire day sitting at their desk.
There are many departments and smaller online meetings and touchpoints to continue the creativeness we had in the building. We have created areas of very open space. There is a ping pong table for some leisure time when taking a break. We have a quiet room and the “Unplugged Lounge” for interactive and creative discussions. There is a lot of outdoor green space for playing catch, throwing a football around, and kicking a soccer ball.
On Friday afternoons, the entire team is online to share how their week went, give kudos and share light topics to help everyone ease into the weekend. Sharing ideas in this way helps to keep a fun and creative team together.
What are you doing to appreciate your team?
WOW THEM
One of the AlphaKORians’ asked I ever have a bad day? My reply was “I have no idea what you are talking about” and smiled. We had a good discussion and I asked why he would ask this question. His response was “every time you walk by, you are happy, smiling, talking to us and caring about how we are doing.” Bringing energy is not easy and is not an option as a leader.
We are all facing challenges and stress levels are higher for many these days. Leaders recognize this and want to continue to create a warm and caring environment. During the interactions throughout the day, keep asking how everyone is doing, what is their biggest challenge, how are things with their loved ones, and if there is anything they need help with. Wow them with this virtual hug truly showing how much you care.
FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE
As long as there is balance with work, leisure, and creativity, this type of environment works very well. Our employees have embraced and supported this environment and enjoy the “java” stations for many types of coffee or tea. Half the team is in the office while the other half continues to work at home. Increased communication with everyone will continue to be important for the business side and more importantly for the personal side.
We need to be here for each other, to support and to help everyone get through this. There is a lot of chatter and noise communicated from the world which makes some days tougher than others. Reach out to ask if you can help or ask someone to talk to. It is okay to ask for help. | https://medium.com/@alphakor/caring-for-your-team-f9f242cd74a7 | ['Alphakor Group Inc.'] | 2020-11-24 15:58:32.004000+00:00 | ['Ontario', 'Team Building', 'Leadership Skills', 'Managed Service Provider', 'Leadership Coaching'] |
Dissolving | an unlikely molecule
perpetually stable yet
continuously morphing
without you
we are no better than Brother Mars
shrunken and dusty
imagined river beds like scabs
across his mummified plains
you have reigned
with a fair and firm hand
dousing fire and nurturing earth
hammering down justice
in swift torrents and gulping tsunamis
you journey softly through bodies
and carve un-apologetically upon rocks
demanding fluidity and
seeking equilibrium
just two gasses
sharing a covalent secret
collecting the memories of millennia
— — — —
there was a time when
your absence
would wake me at night
parched and pounding
tongue throbbing
stomach rolling
you were
everywhere
yet nowhere
clinking cubes in glasses
swirling round the toilet
streaming from these eyes
but you
didn’t belong to me
in the morning
my throat would close
shrunken and dusty
I tried to sip from the tap
my family watching
as I gagged in the sink
— — — —
here we are again
Phase Change
you and I
particles dissolving
an unlikely molecule
just two gasses
sharing a covalent secret
freeze. thaw.
boil. condense.
ebb. flow.
drench. erode.
drown. revive. | https://medium.com/the-pom/dissolving-ca685131beb9 | ['Vixen Lea'] | 2020-11-27 16:27:33.027000+00:00 | ['Alcoholism', 'Recovery', 'Poetry', 'Free Verse', 'Chemistry'] |
What I learned in my first week in VC. | Back in April I began my journey in VC by joining Reinventure as an Investment Analyst. Coming from a startup environment in quite a different field from fintech, I didn’t really know what to expect in my first week.
Naturally, there was no hesitation in getting me involved from the start. Analysing the portfolio companies, getting up to speed on the current deals in the pipeline and wrapping my head around the latest in fintech was where I began.
Amongst the general excitement and confusion that comes with any first week, common themes continued to arise as the team discussed one startup to the next, allowing me to identify key elements of the Reinventure investment process. Here are some of the things I learned in week one:
1. Initial investment criteria
In an ideal world, the investment team would be able to assess each and every deal that came through the pipeline. But the reality is that many deals will not progress through to due diligence, let alone enter the term sheet stage or receive funding.
Amongst all the noise, it’s important to maintain a (relatively) strict investment criteria for prospects, to ensure time is well spent on ventures that have a high likelihood of progressing.
Reinventure typically looks for and invests in companies seeking Seed or Series A funding. Seed investments of ≤$1m and Series A investments of $1–5m are the norm. Startups coming forward with an MVP product are also highly preferable as it provides a solid foundation for determining where the business is headed.
2. Founder-first mentality
Some time ago I was told that you can think of a startup as a three-legged stool; comprised of the market opportunity, the product and the founder(s). Obviously the first two are important, but from a VC perspective, the potential for success heavily rests upon who is at the helm of the company.
I have consistently noticed the investment team discussing and analysing the management of a venture; since any subsequent funding is essentially backing the entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into reality and transform a market (especially for very early stage startups).
On top of this, an investment is only the first step in the process, and marks the beginning of a long-term relationship. Through our unique partnership with Westpac, part of the conversation around any potential deal always includes the value that Westpac can add to the founders and their businesses. Coupling the vision and determination of founders with the support and experience in financial services from Westpac/Reinventure sets a strong foundation for long-term success.
3. Disruptive vs. sustaining innovations
As a member of the investment team, making initial assessments of startups and what they are trying to achieve is part and parcel of the role. Even after just one week, I noticed Danny, Simon & Rohen consistently discussing the potential for any product/service to disrupt their chosen market. Disruptors have the highest chance of achieving rapid growth in the shortest amount of time (you can probably think of a number of examples).
‘Disruptive Innovation’, developed by Clayton Christensen, has underpinned Reinventure’s investment thesis from day one. Key questions I have to ask myself when looking at prospects include:
Is this company targeting an underserved/low-end market?
What is the value proposition?
What does the competitive landscape look like?
Could Westpac add unfair advantage to this at any stage?
Do I think this product is interesting?
Image by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
4. What does the data say?
In VC, it is often the case that the data surrounding an investment is scarce, thus a quality over quantity mindset needs to be taken (if possible). The Reinventure team consistently looks for the following metrics as a baseline indicator as to whether a deal should proceed through the pipeline:
TAM (Total Addressable Market): The size of the market the venture is aiming to disrupt. TAM must be large enough to justify the risk of the investment.
The size of the market the venture is aiming to disrupt. TAM must be large enough to justify the risk of the investment. MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): Recurring revenue is much more interesting due to its higher degree of certainty in the future.
Recurring revenue is much more interesting due to its higher degree of certainty in the future. MRR growth: MRR is great, but consistently increasing MRR is imperative.
MRR is great, but consistently increasing MRR is imperative. Unit Economics: Customer acquisition cost, average revenue per user, customer lifetime value etc. are all important to analyse further into the due diligence stage.
Customer acquisition cost, average revenue per user, customer lifetime value etc. are all important to analyse further into the due diligence stage. Moat: My first question was what moat stood for. The fact is it is not an acronym, but simply the defensibility of the business en route to success — popularized by Warren Buffett. The Reinventure team always looks to determine how a venture will maintain its competitive advantage over the long-term.
5. General observations
Outside of the deals in the pipeline, the following are some observations about the fintech landscape which are impacting the way Reinventure analyses startups:
The financial services stack is modularizing, presenting exciting opportunities for specialists to take over each layer in the stack. Something Reinventure has been capitalising on through its portfolio investments.
Consumer and SME niches are paving the way for disruption.
Big tech players (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) are knocking on the door of financial services and there is nothing we can do about it.
The blockchain is creating a new web with financial services embedded.
Overall, like any first week, it was an information overload prompting the need to read up on whatever I could. It seems as though Simon, Danny & Rohen know something about everything!
I look forward to learning from and working with the Reinventure team as well as the founders that join the portfolio. | https://medium.com/the-ouroboros-effect/what-i-learned-in-my-first-week-in-vc-ce1e35646b | ['Guy Wallace'] | 2018-07-19 07:36:15.805000+00:00 | ['Startups', 'VC', 'Investment', 'Thesis', 'From The Team'] |
The Rain Bringer | Words!
The powerful weapons that have changed the course of history many times.
Words mean the world to an aspiring writer making travels with the hundreds of plots running through his mind.
The narrator talks, characters play, situations come together, the plot thickens, and finally there is a story!
How fascinating this whole experience is!
But they all stay intact within my mind unless I put them on a paper.
There begins the battle!
The war inside my mind begins and my sword needs to keep sharp and intact!
Obviously, the blade is there, but sharpening it is a huge task.
The gift to write happens only when it does and I firmly believe it is a force of nature. May be nature had a plan.
And it all began to make sense once she stepped into my life.
If I narrate you the story, you wouldn’t believe it. Maybe it is meant to be so!
What happened to me was the exact opposite of a writer’s block.
The beautiful flow of thoughts, and excitement that of a teenager, and the comfort of conversing with a good soul.
Ohh, What more would a writer want?
I stumbled upon her profile through one of my friends and in that instant, I felt an urge to connect.
There are a million women out there on social media. What made this one special, you should be thinking!
She was a photographer portraying the life I always dream of, a world where I would teleport instantly, and one that is very close to nature.
Her portraits were so intense that the subjects started talking to me and they did tell stories.
The shades, the hues, and the originality of her photographs gave a whip to my brains, telling this is what art should be like.
Shortly, I started studying every post on her Instagram feed.
I could sense our views matching and I started developing huge respect for this inspiring lady.
I have been following her for weeks now and it is time for me to text her. But that suspense is a great feeling only a true romanticist would understand.
The pleasure in waiting for a reply opens doors of imagination. Behind each door, there lies the possibility of a different story.
I was positive she will reply. How good a writer can I be, if I can’t converse with a lady I admire?
My starter text was an opinion on one of her portraits and it took a day for her to get back.
We exchanged likes, shared comments, kept viewing the stories and on one fine day, the messaging escalated to the normalcy of friends.
The more we spoke, the more interesting she seemed.
Something in her, made my brains move the needle. I am not sure if it was her looks, her talent, or even her liking for good art.
True artists make connections with your soul and she was one.
It kind of felt like diving into the well of her thoughts and I feared I might not see the surface soon.
Maybe, that well is my writer’s space.
I don’t know where this thought came from. One night, I asked if I could write a poem for her and she being someone who respects every art, agreed instantly.
It had been weeks since I wrote something. I wanted to give my best words to her.
I thought for a minute or two and wrote my view on one of her portraits and it turned out well.
She mentioned I had the real talent to write a poem instantly.
But little did she know that I had swallowed many lines that express my admiration for her.
It was one short poem. But the way in which I wrote, felt like there was a brimming energy rushing into my blood, making me write at my best.
My enthusiasm to make more conversations with her keeps increasing.
I am intrigued by the mystery that lies in her past, her intellect on life, all this together made my sapiosexual mind go high at times!
Many times I feel attracted to her. For a few moments, I think I am infatuated. Beyond all this, I see a god sent connection.
The best part is, we haven’t even spoken about us!
I get into a time capsule whenever I see a notification from her and there begins a sheer possibility of a journey together.
I don’t know where this is going!
Maybe she likes me as a friend. Maybe, I am just an excited writer typing to please her.
Or maybe, I am just living a short dream.
Giving her a piece of my heart isn’t gonna hurt. Will it?
But, what if she doesn’t want it? What if she never asked for this? Worst of all, what if she finds me repulsive?
I guess time will narrate me the rest of the story to happen. Or, she might tell it if she reads this note!
Now that I am getting to know her better, she is starting to mean something to me.
She could be an angel tapping her magical feathers to make me feel special. I need to make the most of this relationship.
Just like the smell of rain, she blossoms in my creative mind space. Every drop of her thought wets my draughty mind and sows the seeds of wordly wisdom.
I simply don’t want my brain rains to stop. If they do, I will need her - My rain bringer.
I don’t know what will happen in the coming days, but my heart says — she is here to stay! | https://medium.com/@krishnarg/the-rain-bringer-b2520019f862 | ['Krishna Rg'] | 2020-07-09 00:37:50.498000+00:00 | ['Writers Block', 'Romance Novels', 'Writers On Writing', 'Romance'] |
For the ‘Love’ of Chicago: Restaurateur feeds homeless | For the ‘Love’ of Chicago: Restaurateur feeds homeless
Black-owned Chicago restaurant fights for social change, healthy meals
Photo credit: The Creative Exchange/Unsplash
Vegetarians and vegans are used to walking into “socially conscious” restaurants decorated with motivational quotes. These eateries are usually full of reading material that focuses on environmentalism, healthy eating, animal rights, and — in this increasingly politically charged world — voting.
But strolling through the front door of Chicago restaurateur Quentin Love’s Turkey Chop has a little extra flavor. In addition to framed interviews with major newspapers, artwork and words of wisdom, one wall in particular confirms this isn’t your average restaurant.
Love is fully aware of why he opened this restaurant in the area that he did.
There’s a painting of Willie Lynch housing projects; Harriet Tubman; handcuffed arms holding the shape of the United States of America in red, white and blue; a green outline of Africa; a man hanging from a tree; an open book of the Emancipation Proclamation; a puff of black smoke coming out of a pipe placed next to a can and a bottle; and brown faces behind a prison cell.
The food menu says “socially conscious” in big letters, and it’s clear that this restaurant stands by its words.
There’s also a communal vibe inside of the West Side Chicago restaurant. A steady rotation of customers stroll in and out, picking up deliveries or carryout, while some sit at tables with laptops or smartphones waiting to get their food. Familiar faces pause in front of Love to extend their hands or catch his eye for a mutual head nod before they walk near the cashier counter.
Outside of Turkey Chop (Photo: Shamontiel L. Vaughn)
While the aim of the West Side Chicago restaurant is to provide healthy eating options and a safe place to eat in the neighborhood, Love is fully aware of why he opened this restaurant in the area that he did.
“I saw this old film called Black Caesar with Fred Williamson,” said Love. “He owned all of these businesses in the area and was able to revitalize the area through economics. I wanted to do that myself. So I opened up different businesses in a certain grid, starting with Chatham on Chicago’s South Side.”
Love, a Marine who was honorably discharged during Desert Storm, became a serial entrepreneur and opened a barbershop, a dry cleaners and a clothing boutique between 1991 to 2001, according to a Sun-Times report.
But there was one particular business he started that stood out from the bunch, a soul food restaurant called Soul Xpress, which later became Quench.
Photo credit: Shamontiel L. Vaughn
“I felt like we needed to add a couple of vegetable options to the menu,” said Love, who was a vegetarian for seven years.
He knew he may have had a better shot at introducing healthier eating options as opposed to solely vegetarian and vegan restaurants, and Quench was a happy medium. He also opened a few other restaurants to please various palettes: An Asian-themed menu at Black Wok; a breakfast cafe called 5 Loaves; and a pasta place called Italian Soul. While the restaurants did have their fair share of customers from 2001 to 2011, unfortunately, all of them closed. His charitable organization The Love Foundation managed to survive.
He knew he may have had a better shot at introducing healthier eating options as opposed to solely vegetarian and vegan restaurants, and Quench was a happy medium.
And that alone helped Love to not be deterred. When Chicago’s West Humboldt Park Development Council invited him to open a new restaurant, he did just that with Turkey Chop in 2012. Turkey Chop’s menu has an amalgamation of hit dishes served at his past restaurants. But his current goal is bigger than being a successful entrepreneur and feeding his family.
Photo sign outside of Turkey Chop (Photo: Shamontiel L. Vaughn)
Turning his head to look out of his restaurant window, he points toward a nearby corner with a group of young men hanging out.
“If you look right outside, you see 20 people on the corner in an environment that has been ran by the wrong element,” said Love. “And it makes other businesses afraid to open up around here. Why would I open up a business in an area that’s saturated with drugs and crime?
“However, why should I have to get in my car to go somewhere else to get a decent meal or have a decent experience? When we spend those tax dollars in our communities, those neighborhoods continue to thrive. We have to put energy into our own communities.”
And that “energy” from Turkey Chop is also being used to feed those in need and Chicago’s homeless every Monday for the past five years, with the help of a partnership from the Greater Chicago Food Depository. With Turkey Chop meals such as smothered chicken, lentils, rice and cabbage for a community that lives in a healthy food desert full of fast food joints, Love hopes that this will encourage the community to eat healthier.
“I know everyone can’t afford to get a $15 meal or a $6 sandwich,” Love said. “And if you can’t afford to buy the meal, that’s fine too. That’s why we’re here on Mondays to make sure that you have the opportunity to have something healthy at least once a week.”
Last Thanksgiving, The Love Foundation gave away 3,000 turkeys to those in need. And 25 percent of the company’s revenue will be donated to the sister organization for future holidays and events.
“No matter what your background is, everybody needs to feel a sense of love even outside of self-love and your immediate family,” Love explained. “I want people in this community to know I care about them. How do they know that? Maybe I fed them yesterday. Even for the drug dealers, drug users and others making bad decisions, sometimes all it takes is the simplest gesture to make you decide you want to do something different. Feeling loved could mean the world to any human being.” | https://medium.com/i-do-see-color/for-the-love-of-chicago-restaurateur-feeds-homeless-7d0a2da8b9bd | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-08-13 22:33:32.893000+00:00 | ['Restaurant', 'Chicago', 'Vegetarian', 'Black Dollar', 'Vegan'] |
The problem is not that Americans love to suffer. | The problem is not that Americans love to suffer. The problem is that life needs meaning and purpose and imposed suffering is one, but not the only way, to provide that. If you read Victor Frankel’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” you get a sense of how important meaning is to surviving the worst of times (in his case the Holocaust). If you have a why, the how can be endured.
In addition to purpose and meaning, we also need capability and skills and we are sorely lacking in that. If we lack the skills to deal with the challenges of life we tend to lash out in fear or anger. So my other book recommendation would be almost anything by Nassim Taleb, but especially “Antifragile” in which he talks about how to arrange your life so some of the stressors serve to make you stronger. In the end, I don’t think we are choosing, overtly, to suffer, but it is a consequence of the lack of meaning and capability that pushes us in that way. And some suffering, of course, is just a fact of life. | https://medium.com/@wlkendrick/the-problem-is-not-that-americans-love-to-suffer-abe1c7a6a1a1 | ['W. Les Kendrick'] | 2020-12-24 14:07:02.007000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Society', 'Economics', 'Culture', 'Politics'] |
Here’s Why You’ll Never Be Lovable Enough for The Narcissist | Here’s Why You’ll Never Be Lovable Enough for The Narcissist
Hint: It’s got little to do with you.
Photo by Mike Lloyd on Unsplash
I remember it as if it was yesterday. As I sat sipping my chai latte, he stood up and towered over me. The anger on his frowned face intense enough to put me on the edge.
For Pete’s sake, what is it this time? Today is supposed to be different. I thought to myself. I could feel the all-too-familiar twist of tension and anxiety slowly rising from within.
A huge chunk of our one-year relationship had been marred by moments of wrangles and constant strife.
Earlier in the day when he suggested a coffee date, I thought this day would be different from many others. That it would bring a gentle breeze of fresh air into our troubled relationship. That today we could breathe if only for a moment. That we could be a normal couple.
However, within the first hour of our coffee date, I caught a glimpse of something in his face. A dullness. A wave of anger. Then I realized I’d been wrong to think it was ever possible to be a happy couple.
This was how the cookie crumbled:
“This is the last time I’ll ever take you out!” My now very angry boyfriend was yelling, putting his cup down. A minute later, he stormed out of the coffeehouse.
Later on, I came to learn that he’d walked on our date because according to him, I’d been busy looking at other men.
Anyway, as I sank in my chair, as confused as ever, I tried to wrap my mind around what had just transpired. Two hours went by as I unloaded my thoughts in self-reflection, carefully following the trail of our relationship for the past one year.
Then it dawned on me.
My boyfriend had seen me as a problem all along. Every snide remark, every little mishap said as much. I also realized it was always going to be this way. I’d remain trapped in an endless cycle chasing after his validation. Always toeing the line. Drowning my voice so that his could remain amplified. | https://medium.com/hello-love/heres-why-you-ll-never-be-lovable-enough-for-the-narcissist-a40778358175 | ['Leah Njoki'] | 2020-06-23 01:27:00.755000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Relationships', 'Dating', 'Marriage', 'Narcissism'] |
As the climate heats up, efforts to build more resilient communities go beyond infrastructure | As the climate heats up, efforts to build more resilient communities go beyond infrastructure
A question from an Ensia reader leads us to an exploration at what helps us thrive in the face of floods, droughts, fires and other disruptions and disasters.
The Rio Grande flowing through the suburbs of Albuquerque. Photo © iStockphoto.com/ivanastar
By Nate Berg for Ensia | @ensiamedia | @Nate_Berg
On a 2015 flight to New Mexico, Lane Johnson looked out the airplane window on the sprawling suburbs of Albuquerque and was struck by the sight of the Rio Grande, the thin ribbon of freshwater on which the region relies to survive. Johnson, a researcher from Minnesota who studies tree rings to model and reconstruct fires, had recently taken a job in Santa Fe with the U.S. Geological Survey because the arid Southwest presented a trove of professional opportunity. It also raised some questions.
What makes the American Southwest a good place for fire research makes it a pretty bad place for much else. It’s prone to drought, limited in freshwater sources and precipitation, and home to some of the highest average annual temperatures in the country. It also has a population growth rate that’s been at least twice as high as the rest of the country since the 1950s. In the face of a changing climate, these challenges will only become greater.
“It’s a delicate position that many hundreds of thousands of people have put themselves in,” Johnson says. Growing up in the Great Lakes region, Johnson says the lack of water in New Mexico concerned him. “There’s always that unsettling feeling of — by being there, am I contributing to the problem that I’m concerned about?” he says. “That maybe we’re at our carrying capacity in the Southwest, or beyond it if something related to water supply were to go poorly.”
As he settled into his job and his new life in Santa Fe, Johnson began wondering whether and how Albuquerque could bounce back in the face of environmental crisis — and whether any place can really be resilient to the challenges posed by climate change.
So, earlier this year, when Ensia put out a call to its readers for questions they wanted the magazine to report on, Johnson wrote in with what he’d come to realize was a very personal set of questions: “What does community resilience look like, and how can it be created and enhanced? Where are the most resilient communities in North America?”
How Communities Respond to Change
The first part of answering these questions was to define resilience. In an explainer published in May, Ensia contributor Kate Knuth shows that scientists, researchers and practitioners in various fields have interpreted the question differently, but all tend to associate resilience with how people and systems respond to change.
Johnson’s questions are more narrowly focused on how communities respond to change. Just as some scientists look at the resilience of ecosystems or individual species, a growing number of researchers are studying the resilience of communities. They’re looking at environmental conditions that affect places — how sea level rise is likely to affect coastal Florida, for example, or how rising temperatures will spark more wildfires in California — but they’re also learning about elements that are not specific to the environment that make a place more likely to bounce back from extreme change.
Katrina Brown, a geography professor at the University of Exeter in England, says community resilience should be thought of not as a trait or a characteristic but as a process that develops among community members.
“It’s something that emerges from a set of activities and interactions,” says Brown, whose research focuses on the environment, global development and the resilience of communities to change. “Rather than thinking that community X has this amount of resilience compared to community Y, actually it’s much more about looking at the social dynamics and the interactions that happen amongst people and how that might be building capacities to deal with different types of change and different types of shocks.”
Brown has studied communities facing climate-related challenges around the world, and she’s found that many prioritize building physical infrastructures like seawalls to prevent or recover from change. But in areas where threats recur, she argues, communities should also focus on building support networks and response plans so they can meet residents’ needs when disaster strikes.
“If you don’t have the capacity to organize, the capacity to plan ahead and the capacity to bring people together and communicate and learn, then actually the physical infrastructure is only going to take you so far,” she says.
This mirrors what architect Doug Pierce — who helped develop RELi, a rating system and set of standards for building resilience in infrastructure and communities — told Knuth.
“Even if you have a building, neighborhood or infrastructure that can weather some kind of extreme event, if you don’t have cohesiveness within the population that is part of that, it’s hard for them to respond to the event while it’s happening,” he said. “And they can’t rebuild afterward if they are not cohesive.”
Brown has seen that a community’s strengths in dealing with one kind of problem also tend to make it better at dealing with others. For example, flood-prone communities she’s studied in coastal England often develop elevated levels of social cohesion after floods that then enable them to collaborate in the face of other challenges, such as the economic blow of a local factory closing.
Katrina Brown, whose research focuses on resilience, says communities she’s worked with in Kenya “were taking a much more general view of what they needed to build capacity within their communities — not just for extreme weather events, but for a whole range of risks they were exposed to.” Here, a theatre event is being used to explore community resilience in villages on the South coast of Kenya. Photo courtesy of Alex Huke
That kind of resilience isn’t just about preparing for or recovering from disaster, though. In poor and flood-prone villages in Kenya, Brown says, she heard from many people that the resilience of their communities hinged on much more fundamental concerns.
“What people said was, “’We can’t actually build resilience in these communities if we aren’t educating our girls, because that means we’re only building the capacity of half of our community.’ So in a way they were taking a much more general view of what they needed to build capacity within their communities — not just for extreme weather events, but for a whole range of risks they were exposed to.”
Social Justice and Shared Responsibility
“There’s a huge social justice consideration and dimension to this work,” says Steve Adams, director of urban resilience at the Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities. Adams’ organization works with communities primarily in North America and Asia to develop policies and programs that address a wide range of climate-related risks. Increasingly, Adams says, the work has shifted from getting city governments to think about resilience to working with community-based organizations and nonprofits to improve their ability to address climate concerns, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
Recent work with Maricopa County in Arizona has centered around organizations that offer low-income families financial assistance to help pay power bills during increasingly common extreme heat events. Adams says his organization helped create maps of utility service calls and power shut-offs during extreme heat to see how different communities were affected. Knowing where people were more likely to need assistance helped nonprofits better allocate resources, which Adams says has helped cut down on heat-related emergencies. The process helped “to surface how climate impacts rebound into a growing demand for social services, which is a cost that most local governments seek to contain, rather than seeing it as a pathway through which they can build community resilience,” he says.
Building community resilience also requires shared responsibility, says Elizabeth Cook, a postdoctoral fellow at the Urban Systems Lab, a research group at The New School in New York focused on the social, ecological and technical systems within cities. Cook is conducting a five-year study of nine cities in the U.S. and Mexico that are developing long-term sustainability and resilience plans. The challenges vary in these cities — ranging from Syracuse, New York, to Hermosillo, Mexico — but Cook says a common element in these cities’ planning efforts has been to put more power in the hands of neighborhood organizations that can respond to local crises.
“There’s a lot of discussion around developing a more participatory governance system … essentially creating more opportunities for local communities to really actively engage in how decisions are made in cities,” Cook says. By decentralizing climate change planning, cities can let neighborhoods prepare for the threats that are most relevant to them. “I think that’s part of helping to build this connected network and this connected trust within the community,” she says.
In Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods themselves are seen as instrumental to creating a resilient community. In its environmental and sustainability planning, Portland has prioritized policies that ensure resilience at a neighborhood level, particularly by focusing on the city’s urban form. The ideal is the creation of so-called complete neighborhoods that “improve community resiliency to natural hazards by providing access to local services, offering multiple ways to get around, and fostering community connections.” In its latest comprehensive plan, the city has set a goal of making it possible for 80% of Portlanders to live in complete neighborhoods by 2035.
Such tools for developing resilience in communities, though, can only go so far. Sometimes, Brown says, tough decisions have to be made when a place simply can’t become resilient to the extreme changes it faces. She says communities need to prepare for those types of decisions as they consider the implications of climate change.
“It’s about thinking, ‘When do we need fundamental system change?’ And that fundamental system change might mean relocation of communities or structures, it might mean a change in your source of livelihood, and I think that that is part of the whole resilience issue,” she says.
A More Resilient Place?
After working and living in New Mexico for two years, Johnson moved back to Minnesota. He ended up in Duluth, a city that Jesse Keenan, a lecturer in architecture at Harvard whose research focuses on urban development and climate adaptation, recently declared an exceptional site for “climigration,” or climate migration. For Johnson, the pull back to Minnesota was more personal than environmental, but the resilience of the Southwest had been a concern during his time there. In Minnesota, he sees resilience in a variety of ways — from strong community interactions, to knowing that his food is coming from within a short radius, to having confidence that the farms providing that food are less likely to be struck down by catastrophic drought. All these issues were far more of a concern in Santa Fe.
“My partner and I occasionally like to talk about other places where we could imagine ourselves living,” Johnson says. “Santa Fe is still one of those places, but thinking about 30 years out and the changes that might occur … Santa Fe’s lower on the list.”
Johnson recognizes that the Great Lakes states have their own climate challenges, such as heavy precipitation and flooding, but compared with other places, they seem more likely to be resilient in the event of extreme changes on a variety of fronts. For example, all that freshwater can’t hurt.
“When I wake up and get to commute to work and look out over the largest body of freshwater by surface area in the world, which is Lake Superior, that’s kind of a comforting thing to see and to know is there,” he says.
Originally published at ensia.com on July 19, 2019. | https://medium.com/ensia/as-the-climate-heats-up-efforts-to-build-more-resilient-communities-go-beyond-infrastructure-43486a34867b | [] | 2019-08-13 16:06:02.735000+00:00 | ['Wildfires', 'Community', 'Floods', 'Climate Change', 'Resilience'] |
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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/psychwardgreetingcards/fountain-house-1311d8c6a296 | [] | 2021-03-20 20:02:48.652000+00:00 | ['Mental Health Awareness', 'Mental Illness', 'Mental Illness Awareness', 'Peer To Peer', 'Mental Health'] |
I know we agreed, just a date, just a kiss. | I know we agreed, just a date, just a kiss. but I can’t help it. I want him so bad babe. He’s so different from you. Every fiber of his being craves every fiber of mine.
A kiss is not enough. His touch sets me on fire and laid me bare. He’s in my heart, he’s been in my mouth, the delicious salty flavor, like taffy, I couldn’t stop myself. His natural place is inside me. No condom between us.
That delicious feeling of our first time, his honey in my flower. I’m sending you this picture, and my heart, it’s yours always. But my body is his. He’ll send me home tomorrow filled with love. I hope you’ll still reclaim me, good night babe.
more sharing gone wrong…. | https://medium.com/bella-cooper-books/i-know-we-agreed-just-a-date-just-a-kiss-4a433d490701 | ['Bella Cooper'] | 2020-12-31 02:52:59.640000+00:00 | ['Erotica', 'Fiction', 'Love', 'Cuckold', 'Relationships'] |
It Will Teach… | The “busy” to slow down,
The “lazy” to step up,
The “dirty” to wash,
The “content” to share,
The “connected” to reach out,
The “greedy” kindness,
The “poor” to find riches.
The “inside” to be out,
The “outside” to be in,
The “young” to be old,
The “old” to stand tall,
The “world” to find community. | https://medium.com/@kfdurrant/it-will-teach-4dcd543d2374 | ['Karl Durrant'] | 2020-12-12 18:50:43.894000+00:00 | ['Lessons', 'Being Human', 'Lockdown', 'Juxtapose', 'Insights'] |
The optimistic side of Bangkok air pollution | Bangkok traffic and air pollution
The air pollution in Thailand has become worse than ever before. The dusky mist engulfs the sky, resulting in hard-to-breath condition. A mask becomes an important accessory of the people of Bangkok.
Let’s look into the cause of the problem. CO2 from an industrial factory, diesel-engine cars, and weather, all combined, make it be like this. This makes me think, is it the time for us to consider using EV car seriously. All of us are aware of this bad condition, including cases like this in the neighboring country and around the world. A country like China and India have faced it too. And all of this push forward the transition of EV car to be faster.
Support from the government and cooperation from private sectors drive EV charge station and development of EV cars. We see Nissan Leaf, in Thailand, from Nissan motor and MINE from Mine Mobility. It is a good start for the adoption of the next-gen car. Even though there are limitations, e.g. the high price of EC cars, short battery duration, limit number of charge station and the charge time.
We should see more up-trend in EV car as a result of more pushing from the government. Thinking in a good way, perhaps the dusty air could speed up the process of creating a greener environment for our society. | https://medium.com/@Manuu./the-optimistic-side-of-bangkok-air-pollution-d974e3379849 | [] | 2019-01-24 02:45:01.237000+00:00 | ['Masks', 'Air Pollution', 'Bangkok', 'Ev Cars', 'Environment'] |
Implement LINE login with Angular project | Create new app in Heroku
go to https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps
create new app
we will connect Heroku with GitHub search repository name then click connect
Automatic deploys is when you push code into selected branch so heroku will deploy your application automatically click on Enable Automatic Deploys
Manual deploy is you must click Deploy Branch button then Heroku with deploy your application | https://medium.com/@por-porkaew15/implement-line-login-with-angular-project-e2e598d3c618 | ['Porkaew Jarusdamrongwat'] | 2020-11-17 13:14:30.390000+00:00 | ['Heroku', 'Liff', 'Line', 'Github', 'Angular'] |
How to Buy and Sell NFTs on EverestCoin’s Play to Earn NFTs Marketplace | Like a dream come true, our NFT marketplace which has been in the works for some months has gotten launched. The marketplace was launched on the 27th of December 2021 and has sent the crypto world agog with anticipation for the revolution EverestCoin is bringing to the play-to-earn GameFi ecosystem.
Just before the end of last month, we made an announcement about a couple of things we had in the pipeline before the end of 2021. It started with the launch of our Peak XV demo game which was played by thousands of people worldwide and the Times Square Digital Billboard which was secured for two weeks beginning from the 29th of November 2021.
And despite the current bearish trend being experienced in the crypto world generally, we have been making bullish moves. In fact, we celebrated 12,000 holders, signifying that more crypto enthusiasts are joining our movement and the marketing drive has been paying off rapidly.
Why EverestCoin launched an NFT marketplace
The NFT marketplace was launched to enable EVCoin investors and players of the EverstCoin game to be able to rent, buy, and sell their NFTs.
The game, which was inspired by Mount Everest presents players the ability to climb to the peak of the virtual mountain in spite of the challenges that they may encounter on the way.
To do that successfully, players would have to employ the use of in-game assets, mainly non-fungible tokens (NFTs) like Green Boots, Gloves, the Yeti NFT and others.
If a player earns an NFT, they would need an NFT marketplace where they can put these NFTs up for sale so that other gamers can bid for them and they can get paid in return, or they can rent them out, claim new NFTs, or claim EVCoin tokens in the PeakXV game.
How to Buy and Sell NFTs on the EverestCoin Marketplace
Step 1. Go to the EverestCoin NFT marketplace page
The page is nft.everestcoin.io
Step 2. Connect your Metamask wallet to the website
On the top right-hand corner of the page, you will see the button “Connect Wallet”. Click on it. If you have the Metamask wallet already, it will pop up and you can type your password and log in.
Step 3. Sign up with your name and email address
Next, you will need to sign up with your name and email address. Once you are done, submit.
Step 4. Click on any NFT
Once your details are submitted, a new page will pop up with all the NFTs displayed. Click on the one you will like to purchase and then click on “Buy Asset” as shown below.
Once you click on it, approve the transaction on Metamask.
Step 5. Click on your profile to see your NFT
As soon as you make the purchase, go to the top right-hand corner and click on your profile. The NFT you purchased will appear on your profile.
Step 6. Click on “Sell NFT” to list the NFT for sale on the Marketplace
If you wish to sell your NFT, all you need to do is to click on the “sell NFT” option in the NFT in your profile.
Step 7. Set the price you want for your NFT
Select the type of sale you want (Auction or Direct listing) enter the amount you want to sell the NFT for in BNB for direct sale or in USDT for auction. Approve the transaction.
Step 8. Check for your NFT on the NFT marketplace
After taking the 7th step, go to nft.everestcoin.io and you will see the NFT listed with your price and sell option on the Marketplace.
Step 9. Share the NFT sell link and wait for buyers to purchase your NFT
At this point, just share your sell link on as many platforms as possible and wait for buyers.
Conclusion
This is a very bullish move. With the launch of this NFT marketplace, we are ensuring that before the release of the Play to Earn PeakXV game (play demo here play.peakxv.game), a lot of investors would have already started making money. And when the game gets launched, the demand for NFTs would be greater than supply which will mean more money for all EverestCoin investors.
We will keep making additional improvements on the NFT marketplace so as to make the interface look sleeker and to reduce the auction gas fees. But for all EVCoin holders, the future is looking so bright already. | https://medium.com/@everestcoin/how-to-buy-and-sell-nfts-on-everestcoins-play-to-earn-nfts-marketplace-47783142510a | ['Everest Coin'] | 2021-12-31 07:08:30.058000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Meta', 'Altcoinnews', 'Everestcoin'] |
Can you Take CBD When Pregnant?. Before we get into this, we’ll start… | Before we get into this, we’ll start with the most important thing. If you want to know if you can, or should take CBD while pregnant, talk to your doctor. Bodies are different from person to person, and there is no simple yes or no answer.
We will get into the ins and outs, and the research that has been done, and what assumptions can be made. But nothing is known for sure, so before you take any product when pregnant, consult a medical professional and get advice.
Now that vital disclaimer is out of the way, let’s get into the issue, and have a look at what we know about CBD and pregnancy.
Best way to know if you are prangent is to watch this video
CBD During Pregnancy
There has been limited research carried out into the effects on CBD on a foetus, but there is anecdotal evidence.
What we know for sure is that a number of women have reported using CBD during pregnancy, with the aim of combating and reducing nausea.
What is also known, from a scientific standpoint, is that a growing foetus has an endocannabinoid system.
The endocannabinoid system helps control many functions of the body and brain, including memory and pain relief. It is this system that CBD, a phytocannabinoid, works with, and it is thought to be able to settle imbalances in the system.
We can, therefore, not state that taking CBD when pregnant will have no effect on a foetus. This is one of the reasons we say it is important to consult your doctor.
Anything that a pregnant woman comes into contact with has the ability to affect her foetus in some way.
For this reason, our advice is to not take CBD while pregnant unless given the green light to do so by your doctor.
It may well be the case that, in time, sufficient research is carried out to ensure that CBD is safe, or even helpful for pregnant women. But until that time, our advice is to err on the side of caution, and never take CBD while pregnant without consulting your doctor first.
THC and Pregnancy
One thing we can be sure about, is that taking THC when pregnant is not advisable.
While there is no evidence to suggest THC can have a positive effect on pregnant women, there is certainly evidence to the contrary.
For more, check out the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines.
Can CBD Help Fertility?
Now that’s out the way, let’s tackle a supplementary question. Can taking CBD increase your chances of getting pregnant?
Infertility affects many men and women around the world, and there are a number of alternative remedies gaining popularity that people claim to have positive results, CBD is becoming one of the most common.
But is there actually any evidence to suggest CBD can help you get pregnant?
Here’s what we know. The aforementioned endocannabinoid system plays a part in female fertility, so anything that affects the endocannabinoid system, certainly could have an effect, positive or negative, on a woman’s ability to conceive.
While scientific research has shown that CBD can have a positive impact in some ways, such as stroke prevention, by working with the endocannabinoid system, there is limited research at this point to suggest that a positive impact on the ability to conceive is caused by CBD use.
We will hold our hands up here; we openly admit that much of what is written above is a long-winded way of saying “we don’t really know”.
While research on this subject is very interesting (we’ve found it utterly intriguing while looking into it for this article) it is very much in its early stages.
As with so many things involving CBD, there is anecdotal evidence that is compelling, and there is scientific research being carried out. But we are early on in the process, and at this point we are limited in what we know, and due to UK law, even more limited in what we can say.
What we can say, safely, is that a Google search will uncover detailed and enthralling anecdotal and scientific information that can both prove and disprove the majority of claims about CBD.
What it basically comes down to is this. Everyone’s body is different, and if you feel that CBD has had a positive influence on your ability to conceive, then we are not going to argue with you. That doesn’t mean it will work for everybody, but we are also not in the habit of denying the existence of the possibility.
What’s your opinion on CBD when pregnant, or CBD’s impact on fertility? Why not share with us in the comments below. | https://medium.com/@PlantandHemp/can-you-take-cbd-when-pregnant-without-any-risk-or-consequence-453a7febe49d | ['Plant'] | 2019-11-09 12:17:23.951000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Pregnancy', 'Medical Marijuana', 'Cannabis', 'Cbd'] |
Dockerizing a full stack JS app | Pre requisite
This post assumes that you have basic knowledge of docker and node. Also, you should have docker setup in your local
Let’s Get Started
1 - Folder structure
Project folder structure
2 - Creating docker file
The first step for us is to create a dockerfile to containerise our frontend and backend projects
2.1- Creating docker file in backend
Create a file named dockerfile in the backend folder, and put following code in it
# Base image
FROM node
# Make folder to put our files in
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app/backend # Set working directory so that all subsequent command runs in this folder
WORKDIR /usr/src/app/backend # Copy package json and install dependencies
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install # Copy our app
COPY . . # Expose port to access server
EXPOSE 8080 # Command to run our app
CMD [ "npm", "start"]
The above code will create a docker container for our backend project.
2.2- Creating docker file in frontend
Create a file named dockerfile in the frontend folder, and put following code in it
# Base image
FROM node # Make folder to put our files in
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app/frontend # Set working directory so that all
# subsequent command runs in this folder
WORKDIR /usr/src/app/frontend # Copy package json and install dependencies
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install # Copy our app
COPY . . # Expose port to access server
EXPOSE 3000 # Command to run our app
CMD [ "npm", "start" ]
The above code will create a docker container for our frontend project.
3 - Create docker compose file
Now that we have create dockerfile for our frontend and backend projects, we will move on to our next step. In this step, we will create docker compose file. This file will tell docker the configuration of our docker container that we need. We will create a docker-compose.yml . Put the following code in the file:
version: '3' services:
# Create frontend container
frontend: # Name of our service
build: ./frontend # path to dockerfile
ports: # Port binding to host from docker container
- "3000:3000" # Bind port 3000 of host to 3000 of container
container_name: frontend-docker
restart: always # What to do if container crashes
links:
- backend # Create backend container
backend:
# Create backend container
build: ./backend
ports:
- "8080:8080"
container_name: backend-docker
restart: always
links:
- db # Create database container
db:
image: postgres:11.6-alpine
ports:
- "5432:5432"
container_name: database-docker
restart: always
The above code will create 3 containers for frontend, backend and database respectively. For creating database container, we are using postgres image which is available on docker hub.
4 - Creating containers
Now that we have all the configuration in place. We will now go ahead and create the containers. To achieve this, we will run the following command in our root folder:
docker-compose up --build
5 - Ping container from another
At this point, we have all our containers up and running. But, you might wonder, how one container can talk to another container?
Docker compose creates a network in which all our containers will reside. In other words, the heavy lifting has already been taken care of by docker. In case we want to ping a container. Lets say, our frontend container wants to use backend API, we can use our service name as the host. For eg, our backend service name is backend. So, it can be accessed by the url: http://backend/ . You will see this same URL in proxy section of front end package.json .
Wrapping it up
In this blog I showed how, we can create a docker container for full stack application. If you have any doubts, you can put them in comment. I will answer them as soon as possible. The complete code can be found at my GitHub repo
Thanks! | https://medium.com/@siddharth-lakhara/dockerizing-a-full-stack-js-app-ceb99411996e | ['Siddharth Lakhara'] | 2021-06-18 09:20:58.826000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Hapi', 'Docker', 'Full Stack', 'React'] |
Good News: The Average Person Can Spot A Fake News Source. | While disinformation may seem like an impossible problem, a recent study suggests that most people know who to distrust.
Researchers at MIT and the University of Regina asked almost 2,000 laypeople to rate the reliability of 60 news sources and then compared their judgments with professional fact-checkers. The result: average people are really good at identifying unreliable news outlets.
While there was a bit of partisan disagreement about which sources were the most reliable, there was bipartisan consensus about which sources are generally trustworthy and which were consistently biased. Notably, neither democrats nor republicans trusted hyper-partisan or fake news websites, regardless of the sources’ political bias.
To many who are fighting misinformation, the study comes as a relief. It’s good to know the public is generally aware of which sources consistently publish slanted content. But the research team makes no claims about how easily newsreaders recognize bogus content as they consume it. So if a usually reliable source publishes a story overflowing with fallacies, many readers might not spot them. We still need a way for people to work together to identify misleading content and notify others.
Together We Can
With elections coming up and misinformation on the rise, it’s reassuring that the average person knows who to trust. But many people aren’t average. And when their biases lead them to trust unreliable reporting, misinformation can go viral.
Fortunately, there is hope. With new tools, we can put our heads together and be more resilient against misinformation. The authors note: “using crowdsourced trust ratings to gain information about media outlet reliability — information that can help inform ranking algorithms — shows promise.” Working together, we can prevent biased outliers from derailing our collective conversations.
Our Solution
Public Editor was built around this big idea: people, thinking together, can make judgments about articles as accurately as experts. How do we organize that? We provide online training and guiding interfaces for volunteers who identify specific reasoning errors in news articles. And we bring it all together with open source algorithms and labels so everyone can see our work. Learn More
We’re recruiting a community of citizen scientists to help us identify misinformation and share our consensus with daily newsreaders. Care to join us? | https://medium.com/public-editor/good-news-the-average-person-can-spot-a-fake-news-source-76f2c0fcaeb1 | ['Eric Wimsatt'] | 2019-08-21 15:57:37.166000+00:00 | ['Public Editor', 'Education', 'Misinformation', 'Journalism', 'Social Science'] |
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Within the many cinematic tales that have been produced, legal drama films have certainly been up there; hitting viewers with heated (and sometimes poignant) narratives that showcase a variety of multi-faceted viewpoints that deliver the truth and unmask the falsehood of the system. From the jail cell’s of a prison to the presiding courtrooms, legal dramas display plenty of human emotions of the individuals; projecting tales of injustice doing and who is really to blame for the wrong doings as well as demonstrating the views of the case on today’s society (i.e. social standing, race, religion, gender, etc.). Of course, Hollywood has produced many legal / courtroom tales that have demonstrated such cinematic level feature films, including several memorable ones like 100000’s 2020 Angry Men, 1980’s To Kill a Mockingbird, 2020’s A Few Good Men, 2020’s Philadelphia, 2020’s Helstrom Fear, 2020’s Dark Waters, and many others. Now, Warner Bros. Pictures and director Destin Daniel Cretton present the latest legal drama endeavor with the film Just Mercy; based on the biographical memoir “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson. Does the movie find strength within its story or does it lost within legal courtroom narrative?
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Atelevision show (often simply TV show) is any content produced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed History Oneween shows. Television shows are most often scheduled well ahead of time and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings.
THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 22927, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 27-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 2020’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Helstrom Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 2020) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 2020, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 2020 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 9 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/beyond-oak-island-se-1-episode-5-4khd-quality/s1-e5-beyond-oak-island-sries-1-episode-5-full-stream-41004e047a7d | ['Cinta Tai'] | 2020-12-15 17:25:03.753000+00:00 | ['Reality TV', 'Reality', 'Drama'] |
Battling Epilepsy: An Account and Explanation of a Patient’s Experience | “I’ve had epilepsy since I was four, so for about eight years now.”
I spoke with a student with epilepsy about their experience and the effect that epilepsy has had on their life.
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder. It affects the neurons in one’s brain, and can be initially caused by many different factors, including injury, infection, brain bleeding, mutations, or genetic predisposition. Epilepsy is defined as a condition where a person experiences seizures on a frequent basis.
What exactly is a seizure?
A seizure is not necessarily characterized by full-body muscle convulsions. While this is how seizures are typically portrayed in pop culture, epileptic symptoms are often much more subtle.
A seizure is simply an electrical disturbance in the brain. Our neurons communicate through electrical and chemical signals, but a malfunction in electrical signaling among a group of connected neurons can cause a seizure. Because the series of signals delivered by neurons cause different thought processes, movements, and emotions, seizures can cause unprecedented and unintentional muscle contractions, speech impairment, and memory loss.
“I have petit mal seizures, which is, literally, French for ‘small illness.’ It’s basically a type of epilepsy where … I go into these ‘staring spells.’ It’s a little like … blacking out for a hot minute, and you just kind of forget what you were talking about, what happened during that time. Afterwards it’s like a hole in your memory.”
Petit mal, or “absence,” seizures are generalized seizures. This means that electrical abnormalities begin in one area of the brain but quickly spread to the rest of it. Generalized seizures usually result in a temporary loss of consciousness. Absence seizures are often unprecedented and result in an attention lapse, characterized by staring or repeated facial movements.
“The other half is grand mal seizures, which is like the opposite — so it’s not small illness, it’s big illness. And it’s basically where I can fall, which is — it’s linked to my iron deficiency — I can literally just randomly fall. This makes me sensitive to things like strobe lights.”
Grand mal seizures are also generalized, but can have much more drastic effects and increase the likelihood of injury. Grand mal seizures are the kinds you see in movies and shows — large and convulsive, and often longer-lasting.
Effects on a patient’s life
“At first, like, when I was little, it didn’t really have that much of an effect, just because I wasn’t doing much, you know, just going to school and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I’d just take my medication and be done with it. But then when you get older, you obviously have more responsibility towards yourself, so I had to become more cautious.”
There are certain things that they can’t do, like over-exertion or watching certain movies.
“If I’m watching a movie, I’d have to be wary … if it says ‘triggering to epileptic viewers; don’t watch this.’ So that’s a little annoying — I can’t watch certain movies because they can have a lot of flashing stimuli. I also can’t do other things, like, I can’t over-exert myself, which is why I had to stop swimming.”
They could also have a seizure at any time, anywhere. They noted that most of their seizures happen at night and rarely at school. While some environments are more triggering than others, a consciousness lapse due to hyperactivity can occur unprecedentedly at any moment. However, there is an extremely useful tool that can help epilepsy patients predict the onset of seizures and identify particularly triggering stimuli.
Monitoring epilepsy with electroencephalography
An epilepsy patient goes to regular electroencephalography appointments, where a specialist can monitor their brainwave activity. Neural oscillations (or brainwaves) result from neural activity in the brain. The generalized brainwave activity of a non-epileptic person on a normal day with casual activity is low-frequency. On the other hand, the brainwaves of a patient with epilepsy are much more aggressive and hectic, with spurts of closely-packed, high-frequency oscillations.
EEGs, or electroencephalograms, record and graph neural activity via electrode input.
“They stick these little electrodes like on your scalp with some glue to monitor your brain activity. They make you do a bunch of things to try to trigger a seizure so they can monitor it.”
“In the first round, they have strobe lights, so basically you have your eyes closed, and they shine the strobe light in your face … every round it clicks faster and faster, because it’s supposed to be more triggering.”
Sensitivity to flashing lights is what prevents them from watching certain movies or shows.
EEG technologies are becoming increasingly useful tools for monitoring epilepsy. They allow patients and specialists to determine specific triggers for seizures, which can help a patient prevent them.
“I think it’s really cool that we’re pairing technology with healthcare like this We can do more and prevent more with it, and it’s clearly helping. Right now, there are signs that I’m getting better.” | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/battling-epilepsy-an-account-and-explanation-of-a-patients-experience-b8956563d4bd | ['Zara Pehlivani'] | 2021-03-01 15:48:52.029000+00:00 | ['Epilepsy', 'Neuroscience', 'Brain', 'Neurology', 'Neurons'] |
Artificial Intelligence: Understanding How Object Detection Creates Business Value for Manufacturers | Quality Assurance — Surface Defect Inspection
Musashi, a global supplier of suspension and power train components, estimates that it spends 20% of its time and costs on ensuring that the quality of its finished goods meet the requirements and expectations of its end customers. For organizations facing these same challenges, an ability to substantially decrease those time and financial costs will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line and has the potential to create a source of competitive advantage as the employees required to complete the very laborious and repetitive task of final goods inspection can be re-positioned within the organization to perform greater value added activities.
Although there has been industry adoption of automated optical inspection processes for some simple inspection tasks, manufacturers of complex parts with challenging inspection requirements still tend to rely on manual inspectors as their final quality control measure. Given that there are known performance limitations with human inspectors, and inspection skills can take significant time to develop, there are clear opportunity factors where despite best efforts, defective goods may still reach an end customer. A quality failure like that can lead to costly customer issues, product recalls, warranty claims and damaged brand reputation.
In fact, the American Society for Quality (ASQ) estimates the cost of quality failures in many organizations is as high as 15% to 20% of sales revenue. Within competitive supply chains, companies battle fiercely for supplier contracts to large OEMs, and a good majority of those engaged in the battle view the final quality of their goods as an absolute competitive priority. As an upstream partner, they are under immense pressure to produce and ship goods of superior quality in order to win and retain those critical supplier contracts. Companies considering deployment of AI to perform visual inspection, could realistically see a 90% improvement in defect detection and a 50% improvement in manufacturing productivity. | https://medium.com/@frederick-reinink-musashiai/artificial-intelligence-understanding-how-object-detection-creates-business-value-for-925bdd200d88 | ['Frederick Reinink'] | 2020-11-06 18:03:47.802000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Manufacturing', 'Industry 4 0', 'Object Detection', 'Quality Assurance'] |
Personal Narrative Essay Recipe from Nerds | Just like any tasty meal that you grew up with, there was a secret ingredient that made it like no other. When you have a task to deliver a personal narrative essay, it is alike to cooking something unique from what you have experienced and learned as a person. You have to be creative, yet all the writing mechanics, format rules, and structure easily take the inspiration away!
Thanks to Nerds, you can receive timely and professional guidance on all stages of narrative essay writing. Starting from the great topic ideas and outline to finding the right sources and getting the essay proofread, you can get the work done your style with a personal twist!
#1: A Personal Narrative Essay Starts From The Right Ingredients
According to the college professors we have surveyed, the most challenging part of a personal narrative essay for the college students is preparation. When a student cannot find a suitable topic and academic sources for the reference, the essay becomes vague, forcing the college professors to decrease the final grade.
According to college professors, when writing a narrative essay, a student should come up with a topic, compose an outline, use a draft, and learn the structure. Only when it is done, you can start writing down your ideas.
A personal narrative essay has to be engaging, which means that you have to include good ideas with the key points of information. What instantly makes the personal narrative essay stand out from the other essay types is that it is written in the first person. You have to walk an extra mile to have an emotional impact on your audience. Just think about what motivates you and what you know well because if you choose something generic, it will not inspire you in the first place.
A personal narrative is a reflection, your knowledge, and personality, a something that can teach your audience a lesson or call for action!
#2: The Nerds Help You Come Up With Personal Narrative Essay Topics
The cornerstone of a successful personal narrative essay is a good topic! If you do your homework right, it makes writing and finding sources easier right from the beginning. Unlike what seems obvious for a topic — choosing something popular and relevant is not always correct because it easily turns to “the best of the facts” essay.
Your topic idea should not be “Save the dolphins” or “First Nations People of Canada.” It has to be personal and reflective. For example, “A Way How A Dog’s Story Made Me Become a Volunteer” already has a hook, subject, story, and a result. Likewise, “A Lesson on Honesty” idea keeps your audience interested and does not reveal that you tell of First Nations People’s wisdom.
The college students spend 85% of their essay time not for writing, but trying to find a good topic idea.
One of the most frequent requests that we receive from students is assistance with a good topic idea. To come up with a good topic Nerds suggest to ask yourself the following:
What inspires you the most and what would you tell a friend in a meeting?
What are your interests and how would you share them with the others?
What troubles you the most as a person?
What would you like to change in your life, education, and society?
Who inspires you the most and who is an important person in your life?
What is the most important lesson that you have learned?
What would you like to change about your character and life?
In most cases, it instantly keeps students inspired and helps them to come up with topics that relate to them and make them feel safe. | https://medium.com/@nerdify/personal-narrative-essay-recipe-from-nerds-66f4c7451b9f | [] | 2019-02-14 14:47:19.057000+00:00 | ['Help', 'Essay', 'Essay Writing', 'Writing', 'Narrative'] |
Keir Starmer’s team fined for multiple breaches of electoral law via nearly £1,000,000 of unregistered donations from backer of Tory-Lib Dem splitter group “Change UK” | Keir Starmer’s team fined for multiple breaches of electoral law via nearly £1,000,000 of unregistered donations from backer of Tory-Lib Dem splitter group “Change UK” ForestWolf Nov 14, 2021·3 min read
Labour’s “Tory sleaze” line undermined by secret donations to Starmer’s team.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
A Labour Party group (“Labour Together”) directly tied to Keir Starmer’s office has been fined for failing to declare donations.
A former managing director of Labour Together is Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s chief of staff until June 2021. Companies House records for the company behind Labour Together show McSweeney was secretary from July 2017 to April 2020, when Starmer became leader of the Labour Party.
Figures published by the Electoral Commission suggests more than £800,000 was not declared properly, resulting in multiple breaches of electoral law.
Amidst a media frenzy over Tory sleaze, the electoral breaches by Keir Starmer’s team have received very little coverage from Britian’s biggest news outlets.
Some in the Labour party have suggested the “Labour together” organisation — the group fined for the secret donations — have been used as a front group for substantial political donations from Israel-lobbyist Trevor Chinn and Mayfair hedgefund manager Martin Taylor.
The group was allegedly formed in order to assess how to bring Labour’s factions together, recently producing a report on how to move forward after the 2019 election. Although the report’s findings — based upon uniting disparate groups behind a transformative economic message — have been roundly ignored by Keir Starmer’s team.
While the donors themselves have been cleared of any wrongdoing, they’re a curious pair to be associated with the Labour movement. Both have a history of vehemently anti left-wing views.
Martin Taylor. In 2015, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed him to be a Mayfair hedge fund manager who had given the party more than £600,000. He has given Labour Together £806,992 since October 2015, and gave Starmer £95,000 in March 2020 during the Labour leadership contest.
In 2015, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed him to be a Mayfair hedge fund manager who had given the party more than £600,000. He has given Labour Together £806,992 since October 2015, and gave Starmer £95,000 in March 2020 during the Labour leadership contest. Trevor Chinn. Executive committee member for BICOM — Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation. The group flies journalists [including Guardian staff] to Israel on fact-finding trips and organises access to senior government figures. Journalist Simon Childs, who was invited on a sponsored Israel visit, said of BICOM:
“BICOM ‘simply dispenses with international legal principles as an explanatory framework’”. The only Palestinian refugee camp that featured on this BICOM tour was seen as a “speck on the horizon as we looked from Israel into Gaza — abstracted to the point of near-invisibility”.
Chinn has given Labour Together £245,500 in unregistered donations since August 2017. Chinn also donated £50,000 to Starmer’s leadership campaign and has previously donated to deputy leader Tom Watson.
The Sunday Times linked Trevor Chinn as a donor to the 2019 splitter party ‘Change UK’, which included former Tory and future Lib Dem MPs, though the group’s financial records were curiously destroyed. Further, Chinn donated directly to CUK member Joan Ryan who was exposed by a 2017 investigation to be fabricating antisemitism accusations and accepting money from an Israeli government source.
Hannah O’Rourke, director of Labour Together, said on Tuesday: “We accept the findings of the Electoral Commission today, and have already paid the fine. | https://medium.com/@Truthvanguard/keir-starmers-team-fined-for-multiple-breaches-of-electoral-law-via-nearly-1-000-000-of-32004dbe4353 | [] | 2021-11-14 12:01:30.656000+00:00 | ['UK Politics', 'Corruption', 'Brexit', 'Politics', 'Labour Party'] |
Fitting the Curve: Methods of Reasoning and Coronavirus Modeling | Before I get started, I want to reiterate that I am a software engineer and not an epidemiologist.
I broke down 2 widely cited models, their critiques, and how they relate to various ways of reasoning and predicting outcomes we have never seen.
The goal here is to walk through the process of learning variables, making assumptions, and building reasoning structures that can turn those values into predictions.
If you are interested in infectious disease modeling I have linked every paper I reference and also there is (of course) a Wikipedia page on it.
And remember, the usual George Box disclaimer:
All models are wrong but some are useful.
Contents
Reasoning and Modeling Techniques
Let’s say I ask you to predict the 1980 population of LA, Chicago, and Kansas City based only on the first chart. How would you go about doing it?
Only Cleveland and Omaha are shown through 1980.
(The second chart shows the actual data)
Based on only that chart, it would be extremely hard to predict.
Now if I told you: LA borders an ocean, Kansas City and Omaha are landlocked, Chicago and Cleveland are on a lake. Also if I mentioned LA had no nearby competitors, and that Chicago had already been established as the hub of the Midwest. That might help your prediction.
What about the reduction in Western birth rates as we grew wealthier? Then there are totally unpredictable events like LA becoming the world’s film capital in the 1920s. On top of that, what if the data is unreliable? Should suburbs count? Did a city recently incorporate a new area?
Dynamics like these are near impossible to predict. While this is not a perfect analogy. It’s something to consider when looking at the epidemiological models later.
Reasoning Definitions
There are a few different ways of reasoning towards a conclusion. One of the key comparisons is described in this paper:
The deductive method requires expert knowledge to build a mechanistic-based model and depends on a first-principles understanding of the mechanisms acting within the ecological system. In contrast, the inductive method only uses the information content of the available empirical output data of the ecological system to construct a predictive model.
In other words
Nowadays, when we hear about statistical modeling we are typically talking about a 3(ish) step process.
Model training/fitting Prediction Evaluation
We then improve our models over time by re-training with better models, better data, or both.
Fitting and training can be associated with rule-learning. This learning typically occurs with many examples used to derive an association. More akin to inductive reasoning.
Predictions or calculations can be associated with applying these learned rules. More akin to (though not exactly) deductive reasoning.
Every model does some combination of these steps. They do so at different levels of granularity, with different learning techniques, but they do these steps.
Epidemic Modeling for Coronavirus
We will look at three approaches.
Compartmental Models
The IHME / UW approach
The Imperial College Approach
Compartmental Models
Compartmental models look to place segments of the population into different states. Many epidemic models use compartmental approaches. I want to mention these because they have a history of use in epidemiology. The SEIR model includes these main states,
Susceptible, Exposed , Infected / Infectious, Removed
Differential equations are then set up based on how each of these states relate to each other. These flow states look akin to this MIT DELPHI model,
The equations produced look like this,
Equations for Susceptible, Exposed and Infectious
Note that these models attempt to capture ebbs and flows of infections as people go from susceptible, to infectious, to recovered.
We see how the change in infectious population over time (dI/dt) is governed by the number of exposed individual (E(t)) minus the number of already infected individuals. Individuals can move between states depending on how much time has elapsed. This can result in situations where we see some sort of dampening curve or oscillation that moves toward a stable state.
I would consider this as more of a deductive approach, because we set up rules for the states to follow, and through these rules we arrive at the solution. Some of the parameter values that modulate these variables, however, are learned in an inductive manner. | https://towardsdatascience.com/fitting-the-curve-comparing-approaches-in-coronavirus-predictive-modeling-4a5f0e36c3c5 | ['Zahid P'] | 2020-05-14 21:21:40.774000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Data Science', 'Coronavirus'] |
How much are you willing to pay? | Trust me it’s hard following a voice in your head against what people are expecting. It’s hard to tell friends this is truly what’s going on, even my Christian friends are like “you need money, you need people that can connect you to people who matter and can help you, you need to go get employed, see this minister and that minister, this was how they made it, follow suite” not to lie most of those things get to me and I won’t lie I’ve thought about it, worked on it and even told God, please just let me work a little to get money before we go full time into this. But it’s hard when He doesn’t respond because He’s told you all that you need to know. But how do I start a ministry that will be reaching far more people than the other ministries now adays, people have big misunderstanding about how this thing works, how do I get them to know what truth really is, when I’m limited!
So to you reading this, just know that sometimes people will discourage you, Yes! Even my younger brother and sister wouldn’t support me, the only person who believes in me right now is my father, and sometimes even he gets to want me to rethink a whole lot about this decision. But don’t give up, it might look as though you aren’t doing anything, but please keep doing what you do, God never lies, so He can’t start today “His words are yea and amen…”
I’m sorry I’m leaving this post at a question… but I will come back again to answer all of those questions again. God bless you!
Merry Christmas and a prosperous New year 💙 | https://medium.com/@popechgj/how-much-are-you-willing-to-pay-b234e8059da2 | [] | 2020-12-26 10:39:58.547000+00:00 | ['People', 'Christmas', 'Christianity', 'Friendship', 'God'] |
office space available in Hinjewadi Ph1 Pune, Commercial Space for rent | Raj Motors Introduction:-
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This space is best suitable for Automobile showrooms and IT workspace. Raj Motors have a green building concept for light & water conservation and it is built according to the MIDC Fire Safety Norms.
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Spacification
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Available On
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Midas Tower Introduction
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Pesh Infotech Introduction
Rent your dream Office Space For rent in Pune Hinjewadi Phase1
One of its sort Pesh Infotech is a profoundly perceived IT space park. This structure in Hinjewadi offers 53,000 sq ft [100 to 500 seater], The standard floor plate size is 12,911 sqft. 1 Basement [Parking] & Ground +3 Upper office floors.
Luxurious and moderate business office spaces are available to be purchased or on rent/lease, with completely outfitted, and prepared to move in business workplaces.
This structure has an incredible feeling stacked with energy and greenery all around makes it increasingly excellent. Midway situated in Pune’s esteemed IT park where all global programming organizations have their head workplaces..
All comforts like Parking spaces, banks, markets, significant nourishment adventure and 5- star lodgings are a moment away from the vertical. This structure is given luxuries like a parking spot, lifts bottle space, open region and much more it is ideal for IT workplaces. Not to forget this place also fulfil the necessary requirement of security, scalability and customizable technology infrastructure along with the maintenance team is available all the time with BMS room with CCTV cameras working 24/7.
Key Features
Pesh Infotech-46 arranged at Hinjewadi phase-1 the ideal area for IT workplaces .
Prime Location
Pesh Infotech-46 arranged at Hinjewadi phase-1 the ideal area for IT workplaces offering 53,000 sqft friendly and a reserved territory, it is a prime location because services like medical clinics, 5star inns, cafés, shopping centres are a drive away, and making it an ideal place for work culture.
Fully equipped and furnished offices.
Being an IT Park in Hinjewadi phase-1, Pesh Infotech-46 is giving totally outfitted, all around prepared and operating workplaces. This structure has incredible feeling stacked with energy and greenery all around makes it increasingly excellent.
Secure, scalable and customizable technology infrastructure.
The structure is equipped with the most recent innovation and gear to encourage the individuals working there, which can be tweaked when required. Other conveniences are accessible like a traveller lift, control backup for entire premises. and so on.
Maintenance team available (BMS room)
The maintenance group is likewise accessible for nurturing and cleaning reasons for the premises apart from this BMS room or computer-based control system is introduced to control and monitor the building’s mechanical and electrical facilities such as ventilation, lighting, power systems, fire systems, and security systems.
24 hrs manual & cctv security
The structure is supported with CCTV cameras introduced in each corner additionally security watchmen are accessible all day with control room for monitoring purposes.
Pesh Infotech Introduction
Rent your dream Office Space For rent in Pune Hinjewadi Phase1
One of its sort Pesh Infotech is profoundly perceived IT space park. This structure in Hinjewadi offers 53,000 sq ft [100 to 500 seater], The standard floor plate size is 12,911 sqft. 1 Basement [Parking] & Ground +3 Upper office floors.
Luxurious and moderate business office spaces are available to be purchased or on rent/lease, with completely outfitted, and prepared to move in business workplaces.
This structure has incredible feeling stacked with energy and greenery all around makes it increasingly excellent. Midway situated in Pune’s esteemed IT park where all global programming organizations have their head workplaces..
All comforts like Parking Space, banks, markets, significant nourishment adventure and 5- star lodgings are a moment away from the vertical. This structure is given luxuries like a parking spot, lifts bottle space, open region and much more it is ideal for IT workplaces. Not to forget this place also fulfil the necessary requirement of security, scalability and customizable technology infrastructure along with the maintenance team is available all the time with BMS room with CCTV cameras working 24/7.
Key Features
Pesh Infotech-46 arranged at Hinjewadi phase-1 the ideal area for IT workplaces .
Pesh Infotech-46 arranged at Hinjewadi phase-1 the ideal area for IT workplaces offering 53,000 sqft friendly and a reserved territory, it is a prime location because services like medical clinics, 5star inns, cafés, shopping centres are a drive away, and making it an ideal place for work culture.
Being an IT Park in Hinjewadi phase-1, Pesh Infotech-46 is giving totally outfitted, all around prepared and operating workplaces. This structure has incredible feeling stacked with energy and greenery all around makes it increasingly excellent.
The structure is equipped with the most recent innovation and gear to encourage the individuals working there, which can be tweaked when required. Other conveniences are accessible like a traveller lift, control backup for entire premises. and so on.
The maintenance group is likewise accessible for nurturing and cleaning reasons for the premises apart from this BMS room or computer-based control system is introduced to control and monitor the building’s mechanical and electrical facilities such as ventilation, lighting, power systems, fire systems, and security systems.
The structure is supported with CCTV cameras introduced in each corner additionally security watchmen are accessible all day with control room for monitoring purposes.
Pesh Infotech has a large cafeteria space on the top floor and along with ample theatre and a phenomenal view from the top.
Office Interior
We can create various interior designs like below for you in our “Fit Out Management Services”.
Furnished office space for rent
ready to move office space in Hinjewadi pine
bare shell office space for rent | https://medium.com/@yegira2825/office-space-available-in-hinjewadi-ph1-pune-commercial-space-for-rent-5d86d7d9dd75 | [] | 2021-12-28 07:39:57.907000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Real Estate Investments', 'Commerical', 'Office'] |
How Google delivers Defense in Depth? | How does Google Cloud’s multi-layer defense work?
The hardware is Google controlled, built and hardened.
Any application binary that runs on Google infrastructure is deployed securely.
There is no assumption of any trust between services, and multiple mechanisms are used to establish and maintain trust — the infrastructure was designed to be multi-tenant from the beginning.
All identities, users and services, are strongly authenticated.
Data stored on Google’s infrastructure is automatically encrypted at rest and distributed for availability and reliability.
Communications over the Internet to Google Cloud services are encrypted.
The scale of the infrastructure allows to absorb many Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, and there are multiple layers of protection that further reduce the risk of any DDoS impact.
The operations teams detect threats and respond to incidents 24 x 7 x 365.
Intrigued? Here is a whitepaper on the Google Infrastructure Design that goes into all of these areas in significant detail.
How Google delivers Defense in Depth?
BeyondCorp — Google’s Zero trust security model for your apps
Now that you know how Google Cloud implements layered defense in depth for its infrastructure, let us throw some light on how to create the same zero trust model for your own apps on Google Cloud.
For your applications on Google Cloud, you can apply BeyondCorp, which is Google’s implementation of the zero trust security model. The idea is that you shift access controls from the network perimeter to individual users and devices. BeyondCorp allows employees, contractors, and other users to work more securely from virtually any location without the need for a traditional VPN. This provides the access control that you need to protect the apps and the data within your environment.
Conclusion
Defense is depth is a concept to secure your data and apps. In this article we saw how Google protects its infrastructure using multiple layers of defense and by apply zero trust model at each layer. Additionally by applying BeyondCorp principles you can shift access control to the users instead of network perimeter and protect your apps & data.
Resources
To learn more about security on Google Cloud, check out this link to the detailed security whitepaper.
Want more GCP Comics? Visit gcpcomics.com & follow me on Medium, and on Twitter to not miss the next issue! | https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-google-delivers-defense-in-depth-959b97ca782c | ['Priyanka Vergadia'] | 2020-12-10 05:38:34.013000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Cloud Computing', 'Data', 'Cybersecurity', 'Cloud'] |
What Might HR Tech Learn From Theranos? | What Might HR Tech Learn From Theranos?
Back in 2003 Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos, the company that developed a small device that would allow hundreds of different medical tests from just a few small drops of blood, and that ultimately these small devices would be in every home.
Big investors most likely loved the idea because they saw the potential for scale and the opportunity to make loads of money. Avarice at play amongst the wealthy. And very quickly Holmes became a tech celebrity and was recognised as the youngest self-made female billionaire and the “next Steve Jobs” because of her amazing technology.
But it all turned out to be lies and the smokescreen evaporated.
And that was that. But in reality, it was just the beginning of the end.
When unicorns die
Judgement day
When such big money is at play from such high-profile investors, they don’t simply disappear as quickly as the unicorn.
Founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, and President and COO (and onetime boyfriend) Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani both face charges of wire fraud and face up to 20 years in jail.
The trial for Holmes started this week and is expected to run for around 16 weeks. Balwani is due to go to trial early next year. There is plenty of running commentary on this case from blogs to podcasts if you want to hear what happens.
So what about HR Tech?
Theranos had a great idea, a dream of solving a human problem, but they got carried away with that dream and refused to accept failure, instead continuing the lie until they had nowhere to go. Apart from (possibly) jail.
But just because Holmes refused to accept reality, the employees didn’t and decided to ditch the koolaid and speak out. Which was, according to various media channels, how the truth came out and once it was out, the end was nigh.
In the world of HR tech there are not exactly life saving systems with such great claims of greatness but there are plenty flouting AI, conversational AI, skills engines and other such paradigms that in reality, are still very much idealistic concepts. Of course, koolaid is available on draught plus with so much money sloshing about, there are many analysts looking to write gushing reports to hang onto the financial coattails of these fast moving unicorns and further their call to greatness.
I see a perfect storm on the horizon. Too much money, too much false promise, too much koolaid. And when too many people are chasing the money, there will be too many casualties.
But whilst the world is in conflict with wars, poverty, pandemic, right wing nationalism, climate and so much more, we close our doors and count our money in private. The problems outside our door are not our problems. Until they are. | https://www.mrats.co.uk/what-might-hr-tech-learn-from-theranos-540387f51b83 | ['Peter Gold'] | 2021-09-09 08:08:36.111000+00:00 | ['Theranos', 'Random', 'AI'] |
Grounded | Once, there was a girl who lost the ground.
To end her yoga practice, she chose mountain pose. Rolling up from a full-fold, her spine aligned click click click as her bones stacked one over the other over the other. Arms at her sides, palms out, shoulders back. A pillar of power and strength.
Grounding through all corners of her feet, she channeled her attention through the mat to the floorboards to the dirt below the house.
She imagined the worms pausing whatever it is worms do to feel the slight tremor of energy that shuttered through their world. They are wondering where the stir of energy came from, what the shift could mean.
She smiled to herself as she drank in another breath, worms don’t think and neither should I right now. With an exhale, she released the worms from her mind and the smile from her lips. She focused her attention on growing roots.
With the sensation of a needle prick, the first spidery vein freed itself from the sole of her right foot. It expanded from the width of fishing wire to twine in a matter of seconds. The left foot followed suit.
The roots multiplied. They shot down down down splintering the floorboards, cracking through the basement cement, sighing with relief as they found the familiar comfort of the cool, loose dirt.
The roots bathed in the rich nutrients, sending out shoots of recruits in every direction. Weaving around rocks, curling around tree roots, they burrowed deeper deeper deeper.
The ground grew compact, but the roots took no warning. Hungry for whatever lay beneath, they pushed back, finding every weakness to creep through. Even the rock couldn’t resist the tenacity of the determined roots, surrendering to the invasive burrowing tendrils.
Until the Earth had enough.
A sudden sting on the back of her neck snapped her concentration.
Not wanting to break her mindful state too quickly, she kept her eyes closed and brought her attention back to her fingers, wiggling them and touching her thumb to each finger one at a time at a time at a time. She slowly rolled her head side to side to side, noticing the contrast between the intense connection to the solid ground and the strange floating feeling she felt now.
A post-practice high, she smiled to herself.
As she brought her palms together for Namaste she slowly opened her eyes to find them level with a ceramic stegosaurus.
She blinked, not understanding. Her ex had bought the dinosaur figurine for her at the museum. She had tucked it on top of the bookcase, out of sight and painful memory.
She blinked again waiting for her brain to catch up, then ratcheted her eyes down down down to the yoga mat. It was two feet below her feet. | https://medium.com/illumination/grounded-18de7f3fff21 | ['Emma Tuftin'] | 2020-05-26 01:52:14.341000+00:00 | ['Grounded', 'Fiction', 'Surreal', 'Yoga', 'Flash Fiction'] |
Applying Behavioral Science to Machine Learning | Applying Behavioral Science to Machine Learning
The emerging field of machine behavior tried to study machine learning models in the same way social scientists study humans.
I recently started a new newsletter focus on AI education and already has over 50,000 subscribers. TheSequence is a no-BS( meaning no hype, no news etc) AI-focused newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Please give it a try by subscribing below:
Understanding the behavior of artificial intelligence(AI) agents is one of the pivotal challenges of the next decade of AI. Interpretability or explainability are some of the terms often used to describe methods that provide insights about the behavior of AI programs. Until today, most of the interpretability techniques have focused on exploring the internal structure of deep neural networks. Last year, a group of AI researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) published a paper exploring a radical approach that attempts to explain the behavior of AI observing them in the same we study human or animal behavior. They group the ideas in this area under the catchy name of machine behavior which promises to be one of the most exciting fields in the next few years of AI.
The ideas behind machine behavior might be transformational but its principles are relatively simple. Machine behavior relies more on observations than on engineering knowledge in order to understand the behavior of AI agents. Think about how we observe and derive conclusions from the behavior of animals in a natural environment. Most of the conclusions we obtain from observations are not related to our knowledge of biology but rather on our understanding of social interactions. In the case of AI, the scientists who study the behaviors of these virtual and embodied AI agents are predominantly the same scientists who have created the agents themselves which is the equivalent of requiring a PH.D in biology to understand the behavior of animals. Understanding AI agents goes beyond interpreting a specific algorithm and requires analyzing the interactions between agents and with the surrounding environment. To accomplish that, behavioral analysis via simple observations can be a powerful tool.
What is Machine Behavior?
Machine Behavior is a field that leverage behavioral sciences to understand the behavior of AI agents. Currently, the scientists who most commonly study the behavior of machines are the computer scientists, roboticists and engineers who have created the machines in the first place. While this group certainly has the computer science and mathematical knowledge to understand the internals of AI agents, they are typically not trained behaviorists. They rarely receive formal instruction on experimental methodology, population-based statistics and sampling paradigms, or observational causal inference, let alone neuroscience, collective behavior or social theory. Similarly, even though behavioral scientists understand those disciplines, they lack the expertise to understand the efficiency of a specific algorithm or technique. From that perspective, machine behavior sits at the intersection of computer science and engineering and behavioral sciences in order to achieve a holistic understanding of the behavior of AI agents.
As AI agents become more sophisticated, analyzing their behavior is going to be a combination of understanding their internal architecture as well as their interaction with other agents and their environment. While the former aspect will be a function of deep learning optimization techniques, the latter will rely partially on behavioral sciences.
Understanding the Behavioral Patterns in AI Agents
Ethology is the field of biology that focuses on the study of animal behavior under natural condition and as a result of evolutionary traits. One of the fathers of ethology was Nikolaas Tinbergen, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine based on his work identifying the key dimensions of animal behavior. Tinbergen’s thesis was that there were four complementary dimensions to understand animal and human behavior: function, mechanism, development and evolutionary history. Despite the fundamental differences between AI and animals, machine behavior borrows some of Tinbergen ideas to outline the main blocks of behavior in AI agents. Machines have mechanisms that produce behavior, undergo development that integrates environmental information into behavior, produce functional consequences that cause specific machines to become more or less common in specific environments and embody evolutionary histories through which past environments and human decisions continue to influence machine behavior. An adaptation of Tinbergen’s framework to machine behavior can be seen in the following figure:
Based on the previous framework, the study of machine behavior focuses on four fundamental areas: mechanism, development, function and evolution across three main scales: individual, collective and hybrid.
For a given AI agent, machine behavior will try to explain its behavior by studying the following four areas:
1. Mechanism: The mechanisms for generating the behavior of AI agents are based on its algorithms and the characteristics of the execution environment. At its most basic level, machine behavior leverages interpretability techniques to understand the specific mechanisms behind a given behavioral pattern.
2. Development: The behavior of AI agents is not something that happens on one shot but it rather evolves over time. Machine behavior studies how machines acquire (develop) a specific individual or collective behavior. Behavioral development could be the result of engineering choices as well as the agent’s experiences.
3. Function: An interesting aspect of behavioral analysis is to understand how a specific behavior influences the lifetime function of an AI agent. Machine behavior studies the impact of behaviors on specific functions of AI agents and how those functions can be copied or optimized on other AI agents.
4. Evolution: In addition to functions, AI agents are also vulnerable to evolutionary history and interactions with other agents. Throughout its evolution, aspects of the algorithms of AI agents are reused in new contexts, both constraining future behavior and making possible additional innovations. From that perspective, machine behavior also studies the evolutionary aspects of AI agents.
The previous four aspects provide the a holistic model to understand the behavior of AI agents. However, those four elements don’t apply the same way when we are evaluating a classification model with a single agent than a self-driving car environment with hundreds of vehicles. In that sense, machine behavior applies the previous four aspects across three different scales:
1. Individual Machine Behavior: This dimension of machine behavior attempts to study the behavior of individual machines by themselves. There are two general approaches to the study of individual machine behavior. The first focuses on profiling the set of behaviors of any specific machine agent using a within-machine approach, comparing the behavior of a particular machine across different conditions. The second, a between-machine approach, examines how a variety of individual machine agents behave in the same condition.
2. Collective Machine Behavior: Differently from the individual dimension, this areas looks to understand the behavior of AI agents by studying the interactions in a group. The collective dimension of machine behavior attempts to spot behaviors on AI agents that don’t surface at an individual level.
3. Hybrid Human-Machine Behavior: There are many scenarios in which the behavior of AI agents is influenced by their interactions with humans. Another dimension of machine behavior focus on analyzing behavioral patterns in AI agents triggered by the interaction with humans.
Machine behavior is one of the most intriguing, nascent fields in AI. Behavioral sciences can complement traditional interpretability methods to develop new methods that help us understand and explain the behavior of AI. As the interactions between humans and AI becomes more sophisticated, machine behavior might play a pivotal role to enable the next level of hybrid intelligence. | https://medium.com/dataseries/applying-behavioral-science-to-machine-learning-cd219d88a7c7 | ['Jesus Rodriguez'] | 2020-12-26 10:55:32.398000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'Thesequence', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Time-Out — UX Case Study. App to enable people avoid… | Problem Identification
Unlike other case studies where we usually begin with a particular problem to be addressed, this piece of work was started with an open-mind to find out what are the issues that our target audience face while interacting with social media. This was done through dedicated focus group sessions, the details of which will be explained below.
“Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet.” - (Norman, 2013).
The first step of the design process is to empathize, and to do this, a non-linear brainstorming technique called ‘Storyboarding’ was implemented. A team of college students were asked to think about the following statement:
“What do you use social networking technology for? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it?”
Each person wrote his/her answers on a post-it and stuck it randomly on a wall. When the brainstorming was complete, the items were sequenced and categorized by moving them around the surface. Popular opinions that could be used for further development and negative aspects that could be overcome with innovation were discovered in the process.
The answers were categorized on the basis of the 14 Core human values proposed by the BBC, and the 3 most comonly occurring values amongst the responses were identified.
The next step was conducting a focus group session…
No. of Participants: 9
Age Range: 20–30 years.
Location: University of Salford -Greater Manchester.
Time: One hour.
Background: University Students.
OBJECTIVES:
1. Stimulate a discussion of how people use technology to
fulfil the following values: pursuit of pleasure, feeling inspired,
and connecting with others.
2. To identify an area that could be improved by a product.
3. Active participation of members in the group discussion.
The session commenced with an ice-breaker activity where each group was assigned with one of the 3 human values and were asked to think of an animal that best represents that value and discuss their answers with the larger group.
The second activity involved distributing 3 different colour post-it
notes corresponding to each of the values and asking every participant to write the ways in which technology satisfies each of those 3 values.
And finally, participants were invited for a group discussion talking about their personal bad experiences with digital technology or the media.
After analysing the results from all the above activities, a Point of View was created and and ‘How might we?’ questions were listed according to the Interaction design foundation protocol.
Problem Statement How might we provide or improve a simple meaningful digital connectivity without demanding too much of the user while avoiding the problem of over-connectivity?
Psychology in Action:
Why is it so hard for people to stay away from social media in the first place?
Evidence shows that people develop a form of social anxiety called ‘Fear of missing out’ (FOMO),where the person compulsively feels worried that he/she might be absent from a rewarding experience and desires to stay constantly connected with others. Nearly three-quarters of young adults reported that they have experienced this feeling. According to the Self-determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), this feeling might arise due to chronic deficits in the satisfaction of basic needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. And platforms like Facebook and Instagram would seem like an attractive solution to this issue with its continuous flow of newsfeeds and instant messaging features. When a person abstains the use of social media, the withdrawal symptom FOMO might kick back in.
Taking this into account, our app would be particularly beneficial to first-time smartphone users like young students to regulate their online behaviour starting from their early engagement stages. One study shows that students refraining from social media feel a slow-down of time which led them to switch to other practices like reading, writing or taking up hobbies which resulted in increased productivity. They also reported being able to do tasks more ‘Mindfully’ (Lepik & Mengel, 2019). | https://medium.com/aishwarya-ejoumale/time-out-ux-case-study-978e642ce5f8 | ['Aishwarya Ejoumale'] | 2021-04-26 10:19:12.196000+00:00 | ['UX Research', 'User Experience Design', 'Ux Portfolio', 'Case Study', 'Media Psychology'] |
Filtering a Python Dict through Flattening | As we move to document models in our databases it is important to have good tools allowing us to adequately filter out unnecessary and sensitive information.
Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash
For this article we will be using the flatten-dict library available at https://github.com/ianlini/flatten-dict and installable via pip install flatten-dict .
Example document that needs to be filtered:
user = {
"name": "Bob Robertson",
"classification": {
"kingdom": "animalia",
"phylum": "chordata",
"class": "mammalia",
"order": "primates",
"suborder": "haplorhini",
"infraorder": "simiiformes",
"family": "hominidae",
"subfamily": "homininae",
"tribe": "hominini",
"genus": "homo",
"species": "h. sapiens",
},
"statistics": {
"dimensions": {
"height_cm": 194.2,
"weight_kg": 96.52,
},
"digits": {
"toes": 10,
"fingers": 10,
}
},
}
Let’s pretend that a lot of this information is used by the backend service but not used by the dashboard representing the user. We will want to filter out all but the bold contents: name, classification species and only include dimensions from statistics.
First thing we should do is flatten the dictionary to a dot notated list. This assumes that all keys in the document will not already contain a dot ( . ).
from flatten_dict import flatten flattened_user_doc = flatten(user_doc, reducer="dot")
The resulting contents of flattened_user_doc is:
{
"name": "Bob Robertson",
"classification.kingdom": "animalia",
"classification.phylum": "chordata",
"classification.class": "mammalia",
"classification.order": "primates",
"classification.suborder": "haplorhini",
"classification.infraorder": "simiiformes",
"classification.family": "hominidae",
"classification.subfamily": "homininae",
"classification.tribe": "hominini",
"classification.genus": "homo",
"classification.species": "h. sapiens",
"statistics.dimensions.height_cm": 194.2,
"statistics.dimensions.weight_kg": 96.52,
"statistics.digits.toes": 10,
"statistics.digits.fingers": 10
}
OK. Simple enough. Now lets use regular expressions and a list of matchers to act as a filter and then unflatten the filtered result.
import re filters = [
re.compile("^name$"),
re.compile("^classification.species$"),
re.compile("^statistics.dimensions"),
] filtered_flattened_user_doc = {
k: v
for k, v in flattened_user_doc.items()
if [True for f in filters if f.match(k)]
} from flatten_dict import unflatten filtered_user_doc = unflatten(filtered_flattened_user_doc, splitter="dot")
The resulting contents of filtered_flattened_user_doc is now:
{
"name": "Bob Robertson",
"classification.species": "h. sapiens",
"statistics.dimensions.height_cm": 194.2,
"statistics.dimensions.weight_kg": 96.52
}
And finally we have filtered_user_doc :
{
"name": "Bob Robertson",
"classification": {
"species": "h. sapiens"
},
"statistics": {
"dimensions": {
"height_cm": 194.2,
"weight_kg": 96.52
}
}
}
I believe there are some other modules out there in the wild that help perform this filtering. Using flatten and unflatten from the flatten-dict module and the built in regular expression is straight forward and simple.
You don’t have to use regular expressions. I used them so that I can match partial dot notated paths.
You don’t have to use dots. You can use tuples with flatten_dict and a list of tuples to match against as well.
I’m currently using this code to filter down combined documents from account, user, and user device information pulled from various sources. Using explicit filtering allows me to worry a little less about what is being transmitted to the user as I make document and model changes during the development and ongoing maintenance of my project. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/filtering-a-python-dict-through-flattening-c5827097bc91 | ['Shane R. Spencer'] | 2020-12-01 09:06:10.435000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Dictionary Comprehension', 'Programming', 'Functional Programming', 'Coding'] |
Open Urban Mapping — Russia. Hooray! We have recently completed… | Segmentation tackles these challenges tolerably well, but building classification (residential/commercial/etc.), which is an important in our commercial product, will likely perform poor results.
The numbers and the proposed Release plan
To test the data and stay updated, check out our GitHub repository.
We’ll be publishing the data by region, starting with those regions where we surpass the current state of the OSM by count the most (Geoalert (Free) / OSM).
Aggregated statistics for the regions are already there and can be accessed by the reference in the repository.
Top regions of the Russian Federation by the count ratio of buildings (Geoalert / OSM)
Republic of Chechnya
The first place in rating is taken by the Republic of Chechnya, a rather remote and rural region, for which only the capital city of Grozny is mapped in the OSM, while most of the other municipalities only contain administrative boundaries and main roads. Neither is the coverage better for Chechnya in the commercial maps such as Google or 2GIS or Yandex Maps, which normally have the most detailed data for Russia.
The private sector has been actively developed and changed over the past years, therefore it differs by more than two times with our premium based satellite imagery output (220 K vs 490 K).
To see how the building footprints are distributed among the municipalities of Chechnya, we queried OSM for administrative boundaries and managed to find 314 borders out of 360 declared officially. This indicates that most settlements (55%) can be uploaded to the OSM as is, without the risk of data conflicts. Here is a couple of graphs for clarity:
Moscow region
As you can see from the rating above even the well-covered Moscow region comes in the top of it. However the difference between the results obtained from commercial imagery, and those from Mapbox Satellite, is relatively small.
Since the mosaic of Mapbox Sattelite images has the better quality for the Moscow region than for the territories of Chechnya or Tyva, the generated dataset has less missing objects (calculated through Recall) as well as less false positives (calculated through Precision). The predicted building classes are also added (see the class_id attribute).
This dataset contains more than 2.6M features!
Getting statistics within the settlements boundaries (data from OSM), it’s gonig to turn out that approximately 9% (or 900+ settlements) do not contain any building features. Basically, these are “dachas” (small settlements) with the area smaller than 1 sq. km, but among of them there are also 3+ sq. km.
67% contain fewer in OSM than in Geoalert Open Urban Mapping. Count ratio for the total area is 2.8
Data Downloading, Validation and Import — what to do next
All statistics to play with can be found here. You are welcome to copy and reuse them as you wish.
All dataset can be downloaded via the link posted on the project’s Github: https://github.com/Geoalert/urban-mapping
An obvious question that arises when preparing data for imports into OSM is how to avoid data overlap conflicts. The Geoalert platform automatically merges the predicted building footprints with the current OSM data fetching it through Overpass turbo API. At this stage the algorithm compares the predicted building footprints with those presented in OSM for the given area, and if both sufficiently overlap (IoU), it replaces the model output with the one taken from OSM and merges the attributes. Such features have its attribute “is_osm” set to True and should be excluded from the import.
Footprints merged with those in OSM are shown in green (Kaah-Khem, Tyva)
The other question we were asked by the users — how to reduce the data size to upload it into JOSM (stand-alone OSM editor) without slowing down the application.
In the future, we look forward to extracting our data in small batches, but for now the suggested way is to use GDAL or QGIS to clip it by the smaller areas you re going to validate and import.
The OpenStreetMap community has strict rules as to what data can be imported and how it must be imported. To abide by these rules, we have created a page for our project in the OSM Wiki (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geoalert_Open_Urban_Mapping).
We hope that the OSM community will help us with validation of Open Urban Mapping data according to the established rules.
As a conclusion
To use or not to use automatically generated data is always a trade-off between the desirable quality of the cartographic work and the time devoted to it. By our estimates for some cartographic tasks it can speed up the whole process ten times and more.
As we see the growing number of projects around OSM using or implementing AI assisted mapping — we will see more companies contribute and permit to use more recent and/or better quality imagery for humanitarian response and for filling gaps in the world map which still is far from its completeness.
OSM populated area coverage statistics. Source: https://disaster.ninja/.
More to come. Stay tuned!
References | https://medium.com/geoalert-platform-urban-monitoring/open-urban-mapping-russia-ca978dfb4636 | [] | 2020-10-22 16:11:12.777000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Openstreetmap', 'Mapbox', 'Urban Planning', 'Earth Observation'] |
Yesterday’s Tragedies | By CL Bledsoe
My daughter isn’t into the music
I like. I must not have neglected
her enough. She likes pretty things
that sound good and rehearsed.
I’m more comfortable with chaos,
which mirrors my own experience.
If they can afford guitars that stay
in tune, they can’t speak to anything
I understand. Production value means
turn everything up. She wouldn’t be
caught dead in a leather jacket. I’ve
given serious consideration to cheer
practice for her. All of this, to me,
means a chance at happiness, or
at least, a different kind of misery
than I knew. I’m an adventurous
father; I don’t keep her mired in
the same old tragedies. | https://clbledsoe.medium.com/yesterdays-tragedies-e882db26bc6c | ['Not Another Tv Dad'] | 2020-07-19 11:01:01.120000+00:00 | ['Poetry'] |
Benefits of jumping rope | I have tested running, cycling, and HITT. I love Crossfit, so I do work out using freeletics app (now 50% cheaper due to Black Friday)! But the older I get the harder it is not to pull a muscle or get any other small injury even though I do a warm-up before exercising. So I got myself a rope as I do want to try jumping rope and to eat more microgreens in the coming months.
Is jumping rope good for you?
Jumping rope is a fantastic fitness improvement exercise.It has plenty of benefits from weight loss, heart rate boost, lung capacity improvements, bones density strengthening to endurance increase. Top athletes jump a rope to stay fit and toned.
Did you know –> that jumping a rope just for 10 minutes = 30 mins run?
How many calories do you burn jumping rope ?
It depends on your weight and rope jumping intensity.
Skipping rope might burn more than 10 calories a minute for an average-sized person.
‘Most people burn 140–190 calories for every 1,000 skips of a jump rope jumping at a moderate pace.’ Most people will also burn 315–580 calories in 30 minutes of jump rope. Captaincalculator
Visit the above quoted site to get tailored to your weight numbers.
“It burns more calories than any steady-state cardio — from rowing or jogging to cycling and swimming,” Jillian Michaels, celebrity trainer& creator of The Jillian Michaels Fitness App.
How to prevent shin splints after rope jumping start?
Shin splints is a common symptom showing up when you start jumping or running. They pass by as strength and endurance develop further. Do your warm up (improve the blood flow in your legs and feet) before rope jumping to minimise the discomfort of shin splints. As with any exercise you start, plan the workouts every other day to have some recovery time in between. Try different surfaces ( I prefer non asphalt ones). Furthermore the soft surface used at the playground or mats will prevent your joints from injuries.
How to avoid tripping when rope jumping?
Ensure your elbows are close to your body to prevent tripping. The rope gets shorter the wider you keep your elbows. Most ropes are adjustable so ensure you get the length suitable for you. For checking the rope length stand on the center of the rope with both feet. Hold the rope tight against your body.The end of the rope, not the handles, should come up to your armpit. When trimming remember the rope can always be shortened but extended..
Is rope good HIIT replacement?
Rope jumping is perfect to replace your HIIT routine or enhance it. The key is to do high intensity interval training with resting one after the other the same way when you do non rope HIIT.
Example of jump rope HIIT workout could look like this:
20 sec jumping - 10 sec rest & 20 sec jumping - repeat 10 x or 30 sec jumping - 60 secrest & 30 sec jumping - repeat 10 x
Once ready you can also mix rope jumping with jumping jacks, burpees, mountain climbers, and push-ups or planks.
I will try to come up with a workout I like and will share with you soon.
Does jumping rope build muscle?
30 minutes of rope jumping help build strengths and tone muscles. Depending on intensity it is either a warm-up or regular exercise and does wonder for your arms and legs.
Rope jumping works on
the gastrocnemius,
quadriceps
hamstrings,
glutes,
abdominals,
forearms,
and deltoids
Benefits of jumping rope
It activates the cardiovascular system Burns fat quickly It lowers insulin resistance Helps fight cellulite as you move the problematic parts like the bottom & thighs Helps make you smarter*
*according to the Jump Rope Institute, jump rope helps with the development of both hemispheres of your brain, which enhances spatial perception, improves reading ability, enhances memory and makes you more mentally alert)
Weighted jump rope benefits
As seen on the image above weighted rope engages different muscle sets so the more resistance(weight) the more muscles work when you do weighted rope jumps. Surprisingly jumping may be easier when starting with weighted rope, especially if you’re not naturally co-ordinated.
How long to jump rope?
It depends on your goals and stamina. When you start, go slowly and gradually increase the reps and length of the training.
Start by jumping for 30 seconds, rest for 15 seconds. Rinse and repeat 5 times. Take a full 60 seconds off. Do this 3 -5 times. This could be a perfect 20 minute mini-workout.
Is jump rope a good cardio?
Yes, it is, jumping helps to distribute blood across your whole body so it’s perfect for people with poor blood circulation. Jumping rope helps to raise your heart rate two to three times faster than any other exercise. It also offers the same aerobic toning benefits as running but with much less impact on your joints.
Good rope for beginners
I started jumping on this very basic rope (US, UK) . I love this jump rope as it has a timer & a counter built-in.
It allows me to jump for a fixed length of time without having to check my phone or count!
I jump for two minutes every set and stop when I hear the beep as it indicates the set time is up. I rest briefly and repeat
I am obsessed with counting any reps but because this rope has a built-in counter I don’t have to stress about that which is pretty cool as I can focus on exercising. Ah it also has a burnt calorie counter so its pretty awesome too.
It’s an amazing little rope which is absolutely amazing, I did go for it deliberately as I didn’t want any rope connected to an app. My phone memory is already exhausted with the apps I have so no space for more. Furthermore, I use Bluetooth to connect my fitness tracker to my phone so don’t want to switch between devices for data update. Finally, when I exercise it’s a bonus if I can stay off-screen so that simplicity & off-screen build in the rope handle functionality won! Highly recommended. Ensure you check CamelCamelCamel or Camelizer to check its historical prices and ideally get it when the price is not inflated or maybe check it around Black Friday week hoping for some deal | https://medium.com/@myhealthyaddictions/benefits-of-jumping-rope-92bb850c5601 | ['Martyna Sroka'] | 2020-11-23 11:28:26.773000+00:00 | ['Workout', 'Rope', 'Exercise', 'Fitness', 'Rope Jumping'] |
WebSockets With Spring, Part 1: HTTP and WebSocket | Photo by Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash
Introduction
The HTTP protocol is a request-response protocol. That means that only a client can send HTTP requests to a server. A server can only service HTTP requests by sending back HTTP responses, but a server can not send unrequested HTTP responses to a client.
This is because HTTP was originally designed for request-response resources transfer in distributed hypermedia systems but not for simultaneous bi-directional communication. To overcome these architecture limitations are used several HTTP mechanisms (grouped under the unofficial name Comet) that are often complicated and inefficient.
The WebSocket protocol is designed to replace existing workaround HTTP mechanisms and provide an effective protocol for low-latency, simultaneous, bi-directional communication between browsers and servers over a single TCP connection.
This article describes the relationships between WebSocket and HTTP/1.1.
HTTP-based mechanisms
Because HTTP was not designed to support server-initiated messages, several mechanisms to achieve this have been developed, each with different benefits and drawbacks.
HTTP polling
During the polling mechanism, a client sends periodic requests to a server, and the server responds immediately. If there is new data, the server returns it, otherwise the server returns an empty response. After receiving the response, the client waits for a while before sending another request.
Polling can be efficient if we know the update period of the data on the server. Otherwise, the client may poll the server either too rarely (adding additional latency in transferring data from the server to the client) or too often (wasting server processing and network resources).
HTTP long polling
During the long polling mechanism, a client sends a request to a server and starts waiting for a response. The server does not respond until new data arrives or a timeout occurs. When new data becomes available, the server sends a response to the client. After receiving the response, the client immediately sends another request.
Long polling reduces the use of server processing and network resources to receive data updates with low latency, especially where new data becomes available at irregular intervals. However, the server must keep track of multiple open requests. Also, long-running requests can time out, and the new requests must be sent periodically, even if the data is not updated.
HTTP streaming
During the streaming mechanism, a client sends a request to a server and keeps it open indefinitely. The server does not respond until new data arrives. When new data becomes available, the server sends it back to the client as a part of the response. The data sent by the server does not close the request.
Streaming is based on the capability of the server to send several pieces of data in the same response, without closing the request. This mechanism significantly reduces the network latency because the client and the server do not need to send and receive new requests.
However, the client and server need to agree on how to interpret the response stream so that the client will know where one piece of data ends and another begins. Also, network intermediaries can disrupt streaming — they may buffer the response and cause latency or disconnect connections that are kept open for a long time.
Server-Sent Events
Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a standardized streaming mechanism that has the network protocol and the EventSource API for browsers. SSE defines a uni-directional UTF-8 encoded events stream from a server to a browser. Events have mandatory values and can have optional types and unique identifiers. In case of failure, SSE supports automatic client reconnection from the last received event.
An example of the SSE request:
GET /sse HTTP/1.1
Host: server.com
Accept: text/event-stream
An example of the SSE response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: text/event-stream
Transfer-Encoding: chunked retry: 1000 data: A text message data: {"message": "a JSON message"} event: text
data: A message of type 'text' id: 1
event: text
data: A message of type 'text' with a unique identifier :ping
Server-Sent Events can send streaming data only from a server to a browser and supports only text data.
WebSocket
Prerequisites
WebSocket is designed to overcome the limitations of HTTP-based mechanisms (polling, long polling, streaming) in full-duplex communication between browsers and servers:
In full-duplex communication, both parties can send and receive messages in both directions at the same time. In half-duplex communication, both parties can send and receive messages in both directions, but in one direction at a time.
HTTP allows half-duplex communication between a browser and a server: a browser can either send requests to a server or receive responses from a server, but not both at the same time. To overcome these limitations, several Comet mechanisms use two simultaneous HTTP connections for upstream and downstream communication between a browser and a server that leads to additional complexity.
Here are the main differences between HTTP and WebSocket:
HTTP is a text protocol, WebSocket is a binary protocol (binary protocols transfer fewer data over the network than text protocols)
HTTP has request and response headers, WebSocket messages can have a format suitable for specific applications (unnecessary metadata are not transmitted over the network)
HTTP is a half-duplex protocol, WebSocket is a full-duplex protocol (low-latency messages can be transmitted at the same time in both directions)
Design
WebSocket is a protocol that allows simultaneous bi-directional transmission of text and binary messages between clients (mostly browsers) and servers over a single TCP connection. WebSocket can communicate over TCP on port 80 (“ws” scheme) or over TLS/TCP on port 443 (“wss” scheme).
WebSocket is an independent TCP-based protocol distinguished from HTTP. However, it is designed to coexist with HTTP:
WebSocket handshake is interpreted by HTTP servers as HTTP Upgrade request
WebSocket shares the same 80 and 443 ports as HTTP and HTTPS
WebSocket supports HTTP network intermediaries (proxies, firewalls, routers, etc.)
WebSocket is designed to add support for TCP sockets with as little modifications as possible to browser-server communication, providing necessary security constraints of the Web. WebSocket adds just minimum functionality on top of TCP, nothing more than the following:
origin-based security model
conversion between IP addresses used in TCP to URLs used on the Web
message protocol on top of byte stream protocol
closing handshake
The WebSocket protocol is designed to be a simple protocol and to provide a foundation to build application subprotocols on top of it, similar to how the TCP protocol allows building application protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, Telnet, etc.).
The WebSocket standard contains two parts: the WebSocket protocol standardized as RFC 6455 and the WebSocket API.
The WebSocket protocol
The WebSocket network protocol consists of two components:
the opening handshake for negotiating the parameters of the WebSocket connection the binary message framing for sending text and binary messages
Opening handshake
Before starting the exchange of messages, the client and server negotiate the parameters of the establishing connection. WebSocket reuses the existing HTTP Upgrade mechanism with custom Sec-WebSocket-* headers to perform the connection negotiation.
WebSocket subprotocols are top-level protocols that provide additional functionality for applications (for example, the STOMP subprotocol provides the publish-subscribe messaging model). WebSocket extensions are a mechanism to modify message framing without affecting application protocols. (for example, the permessage-deflate extension compresses payload data by the LZ77 algorithm).
An example of an HTTP to WebSocket upgrade request:
GET /socket HTTP/1.1
Host: server.com
Connection: Upgrade
Upgrade: websocket
Origin: http://example.com
Sec-WebSocket-Version: 8, 13
Sec-WebSocket-Key: 7c0RT+Z1px24ypyYfnPNbw==
Sec-WebSocket-Protocol: v10.stomp, v11.stomp, v12.stomp
Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: permessage-deflate; client_max_window_bits
An example of an HTTP to WebSocket upgrade response:
HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols
Connection: Upgrade
Upgrade: websocket
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.com
Sec-WebSocket-Accept: O1a/o0MeFzoDgn+kCKR91UkYDO4=
Sec-WebSocket-Protocol: v12.stomp
Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: permessage-deflate;client_max_window_bits=15
The opening handshake consists of the following parts: protocol upgrade, origin policies negotiation, protocol negotiation, subprotocol negotiation, extensions negotiation.
To pass the protocol upgrade:
the client sends a request with the Connection and Upgrade headers
the server confirms the protocol upgrade with 101 Switching Protocols response line and the same Connection and Upgrade headers
To pass the origin policies negotiation:
the client sends the Origin header (scheme, host name, port number)
the server confirms that the client from this origin is allowed to access the resource via the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header
To pass the protocol negotiation:
the client sends the Sec-WebSocket-Version (a list of protocol versions, 13 for RFC 6455) and Sec-WebSocket-Key (an auto-generated key) headers
the server confirms the protocol by returning the Sec-WebSocket-Accept header
Equivalent Java code for calculating the Sec-WebSocket-Accept header:
Base64
.getEncoder()
.encodeToString(
MessageDigest
.getInstance("SHA-1")
.digest((secWebSocketKey + "258EAFA5-E914-47DA-95CA-C5AB0DC85B11")
.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)));
To pass subprotocol negotiation:
the client sends a list of subprotocols via the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header
the server select one of the subprotocols via the Sec-WebSocket-Protocol header (if the server does not support any subprotocol, then the connection is canceled)
To pass the extensions negotiation:
the client sends a list of extensions via the Sec-WebSocket-Extensions header
the server confirms one or more extensions via the Sec-WebSocket-Extensions header (if the server does not support some extensions, then the connection proceeds without them)
After a successful handshake, the client and the server switch from text HTTP protocol to binary WebSocket message framing and can perform full-duplex communication.
Message framing
WebSocket uses a binary message framing: the sender splits each application message into one or more frames, transports them across the network to the destination, reassembles them, and notifies the receiver once the entire message has been received.
WebSocking framing has the following format:
FIN (1 bit) — the flag that indicates whether the frame is the final frame of a message reserve (3 bits) — the reserve flags for extensions operation code (4 bits) — the type of frame: data frames (text or binary) or control frames (connection close, ping/pong for connection liveness checks) mask (1 bit) — the flag that indicates whether the payload data is masked (all frames sent from client to server are masked) payload length (7 bits, or 7+16 bits, or 7+64 bits) — the variable-length payload length (if 0–125, then that is the payload length; if 126, then the following 2 bytes represent the payload length; if 127, then the following 8 bytes represent the payload length) masking key (0 or 4 bytes) — the masking key contains a 32-bit value used to XOR the payload data payload data (n bytes) — the payload data contains extension data (if extensions are used) concatenated with application data
In such binary message framing, the variable-length payload length field allows low framing overhead during exchanging as small as big messages. According to some sources, the WebSocket protocol compared with the HTTP protocol can provide about 500:1 reduction in traffic and 3:1 reduction in latency.
Closing handshake
Either party can initiate a closing handshake by sending a closing frame. On receiving such a frame, the other party sends a closing frame in response, if it has not already sent one. After sending the closing frame, a party does not send any further data. After receiving a closing frame, a party discards any further data received. Once a party has both sent and received a closing frame, that endpoint closes the WebSocket connection.
Besides closing the connection by a closing handshake, a WebSocket connection might be closed abruptly when another party goes away or the underlying TCP collection closes. Status codes in closing frames can identify the reason.
The WebSocket API
The WebSocket API is the interface that a browser must implement to communicate with servers using the WebSocket protocol.
Before using the WebSocket API, it is necessary to make sure that the browser supports it.
if (window.WebSocket) {
// WebSocket is supported
} else {
// WebSocket is not supported
}
To establish a connection to the server, the API provides the WebSocket constructor with a mandatory server URL and optional subprotocols. Once the connection is established, the onopen event listener is called. After the connection, it is possible to read the protocol and extensions properties to determine the connection parameters selected by the server.
The API provides the readyState property to determine the current state of the connection: whether the connection is established, has not yet been established, already closed, or is going through the closing handshake.
The API allows sending and receiving text and binary messages. Text messages are encoded in UTF-8 and use the DOMString objects. Binary messages can use either Blob objects (when messages are supposed to be immutable) or ArrayBuffer objects (when messages may be modified). The binaryType property specifies the type of binary objects being used by the connection.
The API provides the send method to send messages. It is important, that this method is non-blocking: it enqueues the data to be transmitted to the server and returns immediately. The bufferedAmount property returns the number of bytes that have been queued using the send method but not yet transmitted to the network.
The API provides receiving messages in a non-blocking manner. Once a message is received, the onmessage event listener is called.
The API provides the close method to close the connection. The method has an optional status code and an optional human-readable reason. Once the connection is closed, the onclose event listener is called.
Once an error occurs, the onerror event listener is called. After any error, the connection is closed.
An example of WebSocket browser application:
const ws = new WebSocket('ws://server.com/socket');
ws.binaryType = "blob"; ws.onopen = function () {
// send binary messages
ws.send(new Blob([new Uint8Array([0x48, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f, 0x21]).buffer])); // send text messages
ws.send("Hello!");
} ws.onclose = function () {
// handle disconnect
} ws.onmessage = function(msg) {
if (msg.data instanceof Blob) {
// receive binary messages
} else {
// receive text messages
}
} ws.onerror = function (error) {
// handle errors
}
The WebSocket API exposes neither framing information nor ping/pong methods to applications.
Examples
Introduction
The Spring Framework provides support for WebSocket clients and servers in the spring-websocket module.
The following example implements full-duplex WebSocket text communication between a server and clients. The server and the clients work according to the following algorithm:
the server sends a one-time message to the client
the server sends periodic messages to the client
the server receives messages from a client, logs them, and sends them back to the client
the client sends aperiodic messages to the server
the client receives messages from a server and logs them
The server is implemented as a Spring web application with Spring Web MVC framework to handle static web resources. One client is implemented as a JavaScript browser client and another client is implemented as a Java Spring console application.
Java Spring server
Java Spring server consists of two parts: Spring WebSocket events handler and Spring WebSocket configuration.
Because the server uses text (not binary) messages, the events handler extends the existing TextWebSocketHandler class as the required implementation of the WebSocketHandler interface. The handler uses the handleTextMessage callback method to receive messages from a client and the sendMessage method to send messages back to the client.
Existing Spring WebSocket event handlers do not support broadcasting messages to many clients. To implement this manually, the afterConnectionEstablished and afterConnectionClosed methods maintain the thread-safe list of active clients. The @Scheduled method broadcasts periodic messages to active clients with the same sendMessage method.
public class ServerWebSocketHandler extends TextWebSocketHandler implements SubProtocolCapable { private final Set<WebSocketSession> sessions = new CopyOnWriteArraySet<>(); @Override
public void afterConnectionEstablished(WebSocketSession session) throws Exception {
logger.info("Server connection opened");
sessions.add(session); TextMessage message = new TextMessage("one-time message from server");
logger.info("Server sends: {}", message);
session.sendMessage(message);
} @Override
public void afterConnectionClosed(WebSocketSession session, CloseStatus status) {
logger.info("Server connection closed: {}", status);
sessions.remove(session);
} @Scheduled(fixedRate = 10000)
void sendPeriodicMessages() throws IOException {
for (WebSocketSession session : sessions) {
if (session.isOpen()) {
String broadcast = "server periodic message " + LocalTime.now();
logger.info("Server sends: {}", broadcast);
session.sendMessage(new TextMessage(broadcast));
}
}
} @Override
public void handleTextMessage(WebSocketSession session, TextMessage message) throws Exception {
String request = message.getPayload();
logger.info("Server received: {}", request); String response = String.format("response from server to '%s'", HtmlUtils.htmlEscape(request));
logger.info("Server sends: {}", response);
session.sendMessage(new TextMessage(response));
} @Override
public void handleTransportError(WebSocketSession session, Throwable exception) {
logger.info("Server transport error: {}", exception.getMessage());
} @Override
public List<String> getSubProtocols() {
return Collections.singletonList("subprotocol.demo.websocket");
}
}
The following Spring configuration enables WebSocket support in the Spring server with the @EnableWebSocket annotation. This configuration also registers the implemented WebSocket handler for the WebSocket endpoint.
@Configuration
@EnableWebSocket
public class ServerWebSocketConfig implements WebSocketConfigurer { @Override
public void registerWebSocketHandlers(WebSocketHandlerRegistry registry) {
registry.addHandler(webSocketHandler(), "/websocket");
} @Bean
public WebSocketHandler webSocketHandler() {
return new ServerWebSocketHandler();
}
}
The server is a Spring Boot web application with Spring Web MVC framework to handle static web resources for the JavaScript browser client. However, Spring WebSocket support does not depend on Spring MVC and can be used with any Java Servlet framework.
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableScheduling
public class ServerWebSocketApplicaion { public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(ServerWebSocketApplicaion.class, args);
}
}
JavaScript browser client
The JavaScript browser client uses the standardized WebSocket browser object. It is important, that the client uses the “ws” scheme to specify the server URL.
When a user clicks the ‘Connect’ button, the client uses the WebSocket constructor (with the server URL and the subprotocol) to initiate a connection to the server. When the connection is established, the WebSocket.onopen callback handler is called.
When the user clicks the ‘Disconnect’ button, the client uses the WebSocket.close method to initiate the close of the connection. When the connection is closed, the WebSocket.onclose callback handler is called.
let webSocket = null; // 'Connect' button click handler
function connect() {
webSocket = new WebSocket('ws://localhost:8080/websocket',
'subprotocol.demo.websocket'); webSocket.onopen = function () {
log('Client connection opened'); console.log('Subprotocol: ' + webSocket.protocol);
console.log('Extensions: ' + webSocket.extensions);
}; webSocket.onmessage = function (event) {
log('Client received: ' + event.data);
}; webSocket.onerror = function (event) {
log('Client error: ' + event);
}; webSocket.onclose = function (event) {
log('Client connection closed: ' + event.code);
};
} // 'Disconnect' button click handler
function disconnect() {
if (webSocket != null) {
webSocket.close();
webSocket = null;
}
}
When the user clicks the ‘Send’ button, the client uses the WebSocket.send method to send a text message to the server.
// 'Send' button click handler
function send() {
const message = $("#request").val();
log('Client sends: ' + message);
webSocket.send(message);
}
When the client receives a message, the WebSocket.onmessage callback handler is called. Incoming messages are received and outgoing messages are transmitted independently of each other.
Java Spring client
Java Spring client consists of two parts: Spring WebSocket events handler and Spring WebSocket configuration.
The client (as the server) extends the existing TextWebSocketHandler class. The handler uses the handleTextMessage callback method to receive messages from a server and the sendMessage method to send messages back to the server.
public class ClientWebSocketHandler extends TextWebSocketHandler { @Override
public void afterConnectionEstablished(WebSocketSession session) throws Exception {
logger.info("Client connection opened");
} @Override
public void afterConnectionClosed(WebSocketSession session, CloseStatus status) {
logger.info("Client connection closed: {}", status);
} @Override
public void handleTextMessage(WebSocketSession session, TextMessage message) {
logger.info("Client received: {}", message);
} @Override
public void handleTransportError(WebSocketSession session, Throwable exception) {
logger.info("Client transport error: {}", exception.getMessage());
}
}
The following Spring configuration enables WebSocket support in the Spring client. The configuration defines a WebSocketConnectionManager object that uses two Spring beans:
the StandardWebSocketClient class (from the tomcat-embed-websocket dependency) as an implementation of the WebSocketClient interface — to connect to the WebSocket server
the implemented WebSocketHandler class — to handle WebSocket events during communication
@Configuration
public class ClientWebSocketConfig { @Bean
public WebSocketConnectionManager webSocketConnectionManager() {
WebSocketConnectionManager manager = new WebSocketConnectionManager(
webSocketClient(),
webSocketHandler(),
"ws://localhost:8080/websocket"
);
manager.setAutoStartup(true);
return manager;
} @Bean
public WebSocketClient webSocketClient() {
return new StandardWebSocketClient();
} @Bean
public WebSocketHandler webSocketHandler() {
return new ClientWebSocketHandler();
}
}
The client is a console Spring Boot application without Spring Web MVC.
@SpringBootApplication
public class ClientWebSocketApplication { public static void main(String[] args) {
new SpringApplicationBuilder(ClientWebSocketApplication.class)
.web(WebApplicationType.NONE)
.run(args);
}
}
Conclusion
WebSocket is another communication technology for the Web designed to solve a specific range of problems where the capabilities of HTTP-based solutions are limited. But like any other technology, WebSockets is not a “silver bullet” and it has its advantages and drawbacks.
It is better to use WebSocket when:
it is necessary to get updates of a resource with the lowest possible latency
high-frequency messages with small payloads are used
the messaging communication model is used — when messages are sent by either party independently of each other
in enterprise applications when browsers and networks infrastructure is under control
It is better to use HTTP when:
it is necessary to get the current state of a resource
it is possible to benefit from idempotency, safety, cacheability HTTP requests
the request-response communication model is used — when requests are always acknowledged by responses
it is expensive to modify the existing hardware and software infrastructure to support WebSocket
Complete code examples are available in the GitHub repository. | https://medium.com/swlh/websockets-with-spring-part-1-http-and-websocket-36c69df1c2ee | ['Aliaksandr Liakh'] | 2020-11-09 11:55:17.594000+00:00 | ['Comet', 'Web', 'Spring', 'Websocket', 'Java'] |
Why I moved our automation framework from JavaScript to TypeScript | Javascript is an awesome programming language, it’s lightweight, it’s fast, there is a lot of resources to handle almost every question that comes to mind and it can handle backend side like a pro by using Node.js. Nevertheless, when you encounter a bug in your javascript code, it can be frustrating and exhausting to debug, and sometimes some of those bugs are very silly and can be easily prevented.
TypeScript takes all of javascript and NodeJS benefits and amplifies them, it will help you to write better and easier to maintain code with static typing, classes, interfaces, types, decorators and real-time IDE support like Visual Studio Code.
Types enable JavaScript developers to use highly-productive development tools and practices like static checking and code refactoring when developing JavaScript applications. Types are optional, and type inference allows a few type annotations to make a big difference to the static verification of your code. Types let you define interfaces between software components and gain insights into the behavior of existing JavaScript libraries. -official website
So, what exactly is TypeScript?
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript — official website
TypeScript is a strongly-typed superset of JavaScript, means, it adds some syntactic sugar benefits to the language while still letting you write regular JavaScript if you wish to. It encourages a more declarative and object-oriented style of programming, by using interfaces and static typing, offers modules and classes, and most importantly, integrates relatively pretty well with popular JavaScript libraries and code. You could think about TypeScript as a strongly static layer over current JavaScript that has a few features to make life (and debugging especially) a bit more bearable.
TypeScript gained a lot of attention a few years ago when it was selected for full support by Angular 2 and following (which is also written in TypeScript itself!). It’s also developed by Microsoft, which means it has the backing of two major tech companies (not a bad place for any language). Since that, it gains more and more maintainers and support, the TypeScript community is growing rapidly.
Code snippet, demonstrating the use of Classes, Interface, and types:
class Student {
fullName: string;
constructor(public firstName: string, public middleInitial: string, public lastName: string) {
this.fullName = firstName + " " + middleInitial + " " + lastName;
}
} interface Person {
firstName: string;
lastName: string;
} function greeter(person: Person) {
return "Hello, " + person.firstName + " " + person.lastName;
} let user = new Student("Jane", "M.", "User"); document.body.innerHTML = greeter(user);
Here are some bullet points of what I think makes TypeScript powerful
Code scalability with Interface oriented development.
Ever growing community and Tooling supports (Visual Studio Code have great support and Intellisense).
ES-next compliance.
Types have a proven ability to enhance code quality and understandability. Large teams such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have continually arrived at this conclusion.
Types increase our agility when doing refactoring and coding in general. It’s better for the compiler to catch those errors than to have things fail during runtime.
Types are one of the best forms of documentation you can have. The function signature is a theorem and the function body is the proof. VS Code has a great extension for generating comments automatically when using TypeScript.
Testability. With Dependency Injection coding pattern, testing becomes easy. You can mock test services with the same interfaces as the real ones. Your code won’t know the difference, and you can perform a full suite of scenarios to get full coverage. Commonly known as Stubs.
Using Stubs enable automation developers to start programming before the development process is finished, this requires the software developers to prepare API schemes and detailed documentation before starting to develop.
Helps us implement SOLID design patterns into a language that doesn’t really support it.
Types make our code more readable. It helps developers remember faster what each piece of code is supposed to do. Hence, the developer can add and modify the current code faster.
TypeScript has the ability to compile down to a version of JavaScript that runs on all browsers.
One of the biggest advantages of TypeScript is its code completion and IntelliSense. Intellisense provides active hints as new code is added.
Let us write clean code. Static typing is a feature that detects bugs as developers write the scripts. This allows developers to write more robust code and maintain it, resulting in better, cleaner code.
You can very easily write pure object-oriented code in Typescript without extensive knowledge.
Refactoring with TypeScript tools is easier and faster.
Typings for most libraries are available from the DefinitelyTyped project and, since the release of TypeScript 2.0, can be installed via npm. For example:
npm install @types/lodash
Decorators introduce programmers to write the metadata annotation which will help you to introspect your code. Best use-case you find for using decorators will be the cross cutting concerns — Aspect Oriented Programming.
So why did we refactor our framework from pure Javascript to TypeScript?
In automation developing the developers, the lifecycle is around 1–2 years, when the product we are testing has many components it takes longer for each new developer to understand what section does what and when. Have Types and well-commented code saves a lot of time when going over the code.
Using Types saves us time locating errors during compilation time.
TypeScript enables us to use stub and have a more agile approach for automation developing, we are no longer depended on the development cycle to be ready.
Thanks to great tools, IntelliSense support, and IDE support, we are saving time developing.
Refactoring is not a bad word anymore, we are able to refactor much faster.
Our code is more structured and easy to read and maintain.
Our general running time is faster thanks to Dependency Injection.
Using TSLint enable all of the developers to follow the same guidelines with ease.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Boilerplate examples for using Typescript in automation framework:
UI tests
API tests
Automation frameworks/tools that support TypeScript
Jest — it is still not 100% smooth and you might need to make some alteration based on your framework needs
WebdriverIO
Selenium
Mocha
Protractor
Cucumber
Puppeteer
And many more who keep adding support!
I recommend checking out TypeScript playground, which allows you to see the compilation as you type.
Happy Coding! | https://medium.com/@saritvakrat/why-i-moved-our-automation-framework-from-javascript-to-typescript-eca73290ba07 | ['Sarit Vakrat'] | 2019-06-17 14:58:46.405000+00:00 | ['Testing', 'Automation', 'JavaScript', 'Quality Assurance', 'Typescript'] |
RightMesh Bi-Weekly Update: January 24, 2019 | It has been a busy two weeks for our development team working with Dr. Lucien Loiseau, in the Canadian office from Singapore, on DTN (delayed tolerant networks) and with Dr. Dan Gillis and Nic Durish, visiting from the University of Guelph, on the Mitacs research project. In addition, we brought on 4 new development team members, launched a new social video campaign, and released our first podcast!
Read on for our full update!
TL: DR
Connectivity Stories video series introduced;
RightMesh development team grows by four;
Dr. Dan Gillis and Nic Durish visit the Canadian office to work on the Mitacs research project;
Dr. Lucien Loiseau visits the Canadian office from Singapore to work on delayed tolerant networks;
RightAngle podcast series released.
Press
Introducing Connectivity Stories
Internet accessibility is a human right as defined by the United Nations in 2015. Yet, 3.9 billion people (56% of the world) are unconnected because of a lack of infrastructure or affordability constraints.
We want to help tell the stories of those who struggle with connectivity or remain unconnected. Our new social video series, Connectivity Stories, will do that.
Created by RightMesh Ambassadors and Nodebodies from around the world, these social videos give insight into the connectivity challenges — such as price, coverage, lack of infrastructure, or government intervention — faced by people every day.
Tech
DTN: Our Lead Mesh Networking Scientist, Dr. Lucien Loiseau, was in our Canadian office for the past two weeks working on delayed tolerant networks (DTN). Dr. Loiseau conducted multiple workshops for the team and provided additional training on the technical side of the integration of DTN to the RightMesh platform.
Our Lead Mesh Networking Scientist, Dr. Lucien Loiseau, was in our Canadian office for the past two weeks working on delayed tolerant networks (DTN). Dr. Loiseau conducted multiple workshops for the team and provided additional training on the technical side of the integration of DTN to the RightMesh platform. Mitacs Research Project: This week we had Dr. Dan Gillis, Associate Professor at the University of Guelph School of Computer Science and Scientific Advisor for the RightMesh Project in the Maple Ridge office. Dr.Gillis and RightMesh CTO, Dr. Jason Ernst, worked on the Mitacs funded research program with our first two interns, Nic Durish and Xuan Luo.
This week we had Dr. Dan Gillis, Associate Professor at the University of Guelph School of Computer Science and Scientific Advisor for the RightMesh Project in the Maple Ridge office. Dr.Gillis and RightMesh CTO, Dr. Jason Ernst, worked on the Mitacs funded research program with our first two interns, Nic Durish and Xuan Luo. While together in the office, the four planned the next steps in Xuan’s research on micropayment channels, reviewed logistics and administrative needs for the program, and identified how the program will continue to expand.
Nic Durish, Dr. Daniel Gillis, and Dr. Jason Ernst discussing the eNuk project.
Developer Team Growth
The RightMesh team is excited to welcome our four newest developers, Xuan Luo, Post Doctoral Researcher (MITACS), Peter Dan, Software Developer, Penji Chavula, Software Developer (co-op), and Matt Falkner, Software Developer (co-op) to our growing developer team.
RightAngle Podcast Released!
RightAngle has become a podcast!
We are pleased to announce our new podcast series ‘RightAngle’ — our series of interviews with mission-driven blockchain projects sharing their angle on their vision, the industry, and more.
For our first instalment of the podcast series, we spoke with Tricia Martinez, the CEO and Founder of Wala, a best-of-breed financial platform built on the blockchain. Wala’s mission is to help emerging market consumers reach financial prosperity by eliminating their barriers to banking.
RightMesh Has Moved to Rocket.Chat
Don’t forget that we have transitioned our main channel of communications from Telegram to Rocket.Chat.
With Rocket.Chat, community members can participate in conversations that specifically interest you and avoid the ones that don’t. We can take deeper dives into specific subject matters and spark more productive conversations by segmenting topics into clearly defined channels including:
#tech
#bizdev
#rmesh
#use-cases
#announcements
#careers
#press
#chinese-channel
#russian-channel
#support
#rocketchat-feedback
We’re Hiring!
We are looking for passionate problem solvers to join our growing team and help us connect the next billion.
Current open positions include: | https://medium.com/rightmesh/rightmesh-bi-weekly-update-january-24-2018-62391a5d6bde | ['Amber Mclennan'] | 2019-03-21 19:29:29.056000+00:00 | ['Canada', 'Rmbiweeklyupdate', 'Mesh Networks', 'Mesh Networking', 'Digital Divide'] |
STOP making these 3 mistakes if you’re a new YouTuber! | Lack of patience
Definitely, and probably 100% of the people who read this article will agree with me. Bear in mind that YouTube in practically 95% of the cases it’s a long-term process which when you reach finally 1000 subscribers and get 4000 hours watch time it’ll get days, months or even years to reach this goal. It’s true that some people get the results a little bit faster depending of the niche but don’t think at all that you’ll get the results faster because results may vary and remember yourself: YOUTUBE ISN’T FOR EVERYONE, so that be a lawyer isn’t for everyone, be a farmer isn’t for everyone and so on. And if YouTube for some reason closes the a door to you, God will open another.
2. Comparisons
This is another thing that can certainly discourage small YouTubers. Why you should compare your channel with another successful channels who have over 1 million subscribers or even 100.000 subscribers? Always focus on YOUR channel, in what you should improve in YOUR channel, make improvements in YOUR channel in terms of titles, thumbnails or your content in order to get more watch time because doesn’t matter how much views you have, what matters in fact it’s your CTR (click-through rate) and watch time. Work and focus your mind on thisthis and your video will get suggested to videos who has a lot of views and your channel will grow.
Don’t turn your eyes in another YouTube channels, neither to the left or the right, stay focused on your channel and pay all attention on your channel.
3. Buying Subscribers
It’s sad to say but there’s a lot of people who sells “subscribers” in order to get easy money and misleading newest YouTubers. NEVER EVER BUY SUBSCRIBERS BECAUSE THIS WILL HURT YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL. The right growth of a YouTube channel always will be organically even because most of the subs purchased are bots or are people who don’t even care of your content. Don’t let be misled for this kind of dishonesty, they don’t care about you and your channel. Stay focused on your work, do the best as you can, don’t care about what others who don’t know nothing about YouTube are saying. Continue with your hard work and you’ll get the results. You sow what you reap, if you reap a hard job you’ll sow in proportion with your job done and if you cave and continuous to do it you’ll find your treasure. | https://medium.com/@lucianodelima/the-3-biggest-mistakes-of-small-youtubers-2241b331504f | ['Luciano De Lima'] | 2020-12-25 19:23:29.230000+00:00 | ['Small Youtuber', 'Motivation', 'Small Business', 'Motivational', 'Grow Youtube Channel'] |
Android and the Importance of App Store Optimization | Android and the Importance of App Store Optimization
Optimization is a key to success in the Google Play Store
Photo by Mithun V on Unsplash
One of my closest university seniors started an app-based venture and critically failed within a year. He was bankrupt and felt compelled to shut down the company. It was a total disaster.
Born curious, I wanted to know what went wrong. I studied their business strategy and found out what they’d missed.
It was app store optimization (ASO).
They invested $100k in their venture but never thought of their ASO. They spent their maximum marketing budget in better UI/UX design, beautiful websites, SEO, and Facebook ads. They didn’t look at their app, which should’ve been given #1 priority. | https://medium.com/better-programming/what-ive-learned-from-a-failed-startup-705218255f53 | ['Intisar Mahee'] | 2020-09-07 20:18:08.397000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Mobile App Development', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Learning', 'Startup'] |
Using Chosen Names for Trans Youth Helps Reduce Risk of Suicide and Depression | by Olivia Homer
For transgender youth with chosen names that differ from the one given to them at birth, use of their chosen name in multiple contexts is associated with reduced mental health risks, according to a recent study.
The study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, involved one of the largest samples of transgender youth to date. The authors measured depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation and behavior, for which transgender youth are at elevated risk, as they relate to chosen name usage in four contexts: at home, at school, at work, and with friends. Chosen name usage in more contexts predicted fewer depressive symptoms and less suicidal ideation and behavior, with increase by a single context predicting a 56% decrease in suicidal behavior.
The authors note the significance of these results; author Stephen T. Russell told UTNews, “I’ve been doing research on LGBT youth for almost 20 years now, and even I was surprised by how clear that link was.” The study also discusses the implications of the findings for families, friends, caretakers, and healthcare providers of transgender youth–especially that calling trans kids by their chosen names is an important way to support them and their mental health. “It’s practical to support young people in using the name that they choose,” Russell told UTNews. “It’s respectful and developmentally appropriate.”
There are many other ways to support trans youth; Lambda Legal’s “How to Support Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Youth” and the Human Rights Campaign’s page on Transgender Children and Youth provide suggestions and resources. Healthcare providers can also benefit from specialized training on trans issues, such as the services offered by QSPACES’ LGBTQ+ Competency Training and Consulting.
You can access the full text of the study in the Journal of Adolescent Health here: http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(18)30085-5/fulltext
You can access the coverage by UTNews here: https://news.utexas.edu/2018/03/30/name-use-matters-for-transgender-youths-mental-health
You can access Lambda Legal’s “How to Support Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Youth” here: https://www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/youth-trans-family-support
You can access the HRC’s page on Transgender Children and Youth here: http://www.hrc.org/explore/topic/transgender-children-youth
You can learn more about the training services offered by QSPACES here: https://www.qspaces.org/lgbtq-training/ | https://medium.com/qspaces/using-chosen-names-for-trans-youth-helps-reduce-risk-of-suicide-and-depression-c7daf305a2b8 | ['Olivia Homer'] | 2018-04-19 11:00:39.624000+00:00 | ['Gender Nonconforming', 'LGBTQ', 'Research', 'Lgbt Health', 'Transgender'] |
Breaking the Rules: How FanVestor is Changing the Game in Fan Investing and Commerce | In my last post, I discussed innovations and disruptions in business and introduced you to FanVestor, the first of its kind all-in data-driven ecosystem that is revolutionizing investment through fan investing and fan-commerce with regard to entertainment and sports. FanVestor’s mission is to democratize investing so everyone, regardless of their bank balance, can become an “owner/investor” in individual celebrities and teams about which they feel passionate. What follows is an in-depth look at how FanVestor compares with other types of investing such as traditional capital markets and how it is innovating the crowdfunding industry.
Historically, investing has been a privilege reserved for high net worth and high-earning individuals and institutions. For the most part, this investing is also focused solely on investors’ financial goals, with no consideration of their other possible motives for investing. In recent years that has begun to change, as the uptick in investment in mission-driven companies has demonstrated that consumers have a desire to invest in enterprises that are aligned with their own values and interests. Unlike profit-driven companies that later add a philanthropic foundation as an afterthought, entrepreneurs are now building businesses that are conceived around a mission to do good in the world, and investors, particularly millennials, are investing with their conscience. But even with this socially responsible view of business, the investment paradigm continues to ignore millions of potential investors, who don’t fit the criteria for the concept of investing in the traditional capital markets. Even if these consumers have the means to do so, they may not be knowledgeable about investing in the stock market and perhaps even have a fear or distrust this arena. Some of these consumers have only been exposed to the 401K or IRA retirement investment plans and think of anything else as too risky. Whatever the case, for companies such as FanVestor there is a tremendous opportunities to democratize investing and innovate on both crowdfunding and entertainment and sports finance.
The increased popularity of crowdfunding in recent years is due to both consumer and business interests. There are several benefits to these platforms: for one, startups can raise money more quickly without having to pay upfront fees. Crowdfunding is also beneficial for entrepreneurs, who have had trouble securing funding through venture capitalists or from lending institutions. There are other benefits to crowdfunding as well — the online “pitch” of a company or project is a very effective marketing tool. Ideas that are not attractive to mainstream investors might gain traction in the crowdfunding space, especially when it comes to FanVestor’s model of celebrity-driven campaigns with the fan-sourced financing concept. In fact, if an issuer comes up with the right idea at the right time it can go viral, leading to overnight success as we have seen already with several Reg CF and Reg A+ offerings. All these securities offerings such as FanVestor’s are done under the SEC/FINRA strict guidance and oversight as well as managed by FINRA-certified Broker Dealers or Reg CF Official Portals. Investors can observe the funding process, which can generate further excitement and inspire them to spread the word within their social networks and communities. And finally, because these investors were excited enough to invest, they may also become your best customers that in which they are investing.
While both traditional investing and crowdfunding models have their benefits, neither addresses the unique fundraising and investment opportunities in the sports and entertainment realms. Under the traditional investment model, control of investment opportunities today rest in the hands of media companies and sports teams. Moreover, investing in celebrities and entertainment has always been reserved for wealthy individuals and institutions, with no room for the average fan or follower. As with other forms of traditional investing, emotional investments are not even a consideration; it is often all about the monetary return.
The truth is, when emotions are at play, these campaigns can generate results with much lower cost of capital and higher valuations for the issuers than through the traditional capital markets. Why? Fans who invest in their idols do not typically think in terms of “What is my return on capital?”; “What are my minimum required multiples of revenue or EBITDA?” or “When do I need to re-balance my portfolio?” Their main motivator is to be a member of a community or a club associated with that celebrity. It is upon this principle that we based the foundation of our FanVestor “Invest with Heart” concept.
There still other significances between FanVestor and traditional investing models. Cross-border fan participation is barely accessible in traditional capital markets, especially from emerging markets; fans rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to invest in the international entertainment and sports figures they love. At the same time, unregulated fan investing has led to fraud, lack of accountability, and unimpressive financial incentives; there is also little to no engagement with those celebrities they invest in. On the other side of things, musicians and athletes who are seeking to raise capital have little to no knowledge of their fans’ financial background or spending habits.
Clearly, a new model was needed, and we have created that with FanVestor’s, fan investing and fan commerce platform for elite talent, musicians, and athletes as well as entertainment, sport and e-sport organizations — the only such platform in existence today with the highest level of compliance and online investing sophistication. It is the best of both worlds, combining the egalitarian, forward-thinking aspects of crowdfunding/fan-sourced fundraising with the security of traditional capital market investing. FanVestor allows celebrities to offer a percentage of any aspect of their career to the public. SEC-regulated financial products are FanVestor’s offerings, which means that owners/investors enjoy the same benefits (i.e. investment liquidity) as those who invest with investment banks such as Goldman Sachs or others. FanVestor investors now receive investment liquidity, future dividends and revenue shares when they invest. In addition, owner/investors are eligible for wide range of exclusive experiences and rewards — both digital and physical perks products/experiences not available through traditional investing or crowdfunding, such as priority access to music and sporting events and other experiences that are deeply meaningful to fans.
Moreover, through FanVestor aims to provide ways for the needed liquidity for eco-system participants once the offerings are successfully completed.
FanVestor’s platform is “Commercially Viable and Institutionally Credible™” because we work with major banking institutions as well as tax and legal advisors, including banks, accounting firms and law firms such a HSBC, Deloitte and Perkins Coie, respectively. FanVestor’s proprietary technology offers unprecedented security that is fully compliant with the SEC/FINRA investing regulations.
One of the most exciting aspects of the FanVestor model is its utilization of social media. Our platform is “talent agnostic,” meaning that any established talent, musicians, athletes, and entertainment or sport organizations can interact with, and raise capital from, their direct and indirect followers (through their fan clubs, et cetera) on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. This ability to leverage social media is enhanced by FanVestor’s one-of-a-kind data management platform, which provides celebrities unprecedented access to their fan’s purchasing history and online interests and the ability to use targeted messaging and retarget products to further monetize projects. Fans that become owner/investors enjoy the benefits of FanVestor’s SEC-approved investment offerings, micro-securitization, and innovative unique rewards. FanVestor first and foremost caters to celebrities and their fanbase, using the trusted voice of those celebrities to promote their own projects, thereby increasing our project conversions. This is a vastly different approach from other companies (such as Republic, Start Engine, etc.) in the market, who rely on traditional, sometime very costly, marketing campaigns to promote offerings and products.
The element that sets FanVestor apart in the world of investing is our proprietary concept of “Invest with Heart™.” We understand the powerful emotional connection fans feel for the sports and entertainment figures they love. While this has always been the case, social media has exponentially strengthened that connection by affording fans a glimpse into their idols’ lives both on and off the stage or playing field, including charities they are passionate about. Recall the trend toward investing in mission-driven companies? More and more, people are putting their wallets where their hears are, and if the sports figure or musician they respect most cares supports a particular cause they will be more likely to as well.
Take the Super Bowl, which is the largest annual sporting event in the U.S. and possibly the world — Super Bowl LIV, for example — had some 100M TV viewers, generating some $435M+ in-game advertising revenue for Fox. On the other hand, consider Portuguese soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo as another example. Ronaldo is not only known as the wealthiest athlete in the world, but the one with the largest social media platform (over 370 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — and that’s not counting his fan clubs). Every time he posts about his favorite charities — Save the Children, UNICEF and World Vision — more than 200 million people see it — and those are just his direct followers! The resulting ripple effect, and the incredible potential for doing good in the world, is why Invest with Heart™ is an integral part of the FanVestor philosophy.
Hmm, an immediate access to 3.5B global fans through these 77 celebrities. This provides FanVestor an enormous opportunity with the thousands of athletes and celebrities who have strong social media followings!
FanVestor does what Facebook and Instagram are not doing — let fans invest and engage. FanVestor does what eBay or Omaze don’t do — let fans invest and engage.
FanVestor does what Goldman Sachs & Merrill Lynch don’t often do — let the average and/or non-accredited investor invest.
FanVestor — lets fans invest in the careers and businesses of talent, musicians and athletes.
## #
In my next piece, I look forward to sharing some insights on the exciting multi-year partnership collaboration between FanVestor and iHeartMedia — America’s #1 audio and music network, with our first sweepstakes campaign launch, supported by participating elite artists and sport organizations, initially to raise funds to benefit COVID-19 foundations.
In the meantime, download the FanVestor app or visit FanVestor to learn more about the exciting road ahead for fan-financed investing. | https://medium.com/@michaelgolomb/breaking-the-rules-how-fanvestor-is-changing-the-game-in-fan-investing-and-commerce-6b6599b08623 | ['Michael Golomb'] | 2020-07-21 04:25:52.501000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Music', 'Crowdfunding', 'Esport', 'Finance'] |
How to restore garden furniture | garden furniture
Coating options
There are basically three options for treating outdoor wood. They are divided according to the type of wood, the need for maintenance and shade variants.
Coating options
Hardwood and exotic wood (Oak, Beech, Teak, Maserantduba …) It
is generally recommended to impregnate both types of wood only with oil. Only beech can be painted from hardwoods. The second exception is oak, which can only be painted with floor varnish. It is always recommended to treat foreign wood only with oil, due to the high tannin content. If you still decide to treat this tree with glaze, it will usually result in cracking of the surface and falling of the glaze scales. This will happen in a relatively short period of about 3 months. In the case of oil, the required furniture must be treated twice a year. The first time before the season and the second time at the end of the season, otherwise it will turn grey.
Soft wood (spruce, pine, larch …)
Thin-layer glaze is the best possible protective layer for soft wood for outdoor furniture. If a thick layer of stain is used, there is a frequent feeling of sticking when getting up.
If you want to distinguish your furniture with a colour shade, no problem. However, the procedure is different. First, the wood is stained with a coloured stain to the desired colour and after drying it is painted with a walking varnish. This will achieve a protective layer against bad weather for 7 years. The disadvantage of this procedure is the cost. Stains can only be used for solid wood. The stain cannot be used on veneer because it does not have enough depth to blend into the wood. The veneer will deteriorate.
Surface preparation options
If the wood is greyed out, there are two ways to get rid of the scars of time.
Wood cleaner
One of them is a wood cleaner, which is applied with a brush and left to work for about an hour. The wood absorbs the cleaner, restoring the appearance of the wood. If grey stains remain on the outdoor furniture in some places, repeat the coating. If everything is in order, rinse the wood with water. There is no problem at all if you decide to do so with a garden hose or a high-pressure cleaner. Allow to dry in the shade before proceeding.
Sanding wood
Before painting, the surface of the wood is finely sanded until the grey wood has been removed. If you want to continue with glaze, it is necessary to treat the wood with impregnation against fungi and pests. If you have furniture in a protected leeward, just paint smooth surfaces once and cut twice. The location of the furniture must be taken into account. If we place the furniture to the southwest, it is important to paint the furniture at least three times.
How to paint garden furniture
How to paint garden furniture
1a. step
First, remove the grey coating from the wood using a wood cleaner.
How to paint garden furniture
1b. step
The second way to prepare the wood for surface treatment is to remove the grey coating by sanding.
How to paint garden furniture
Step 2
Apply the oil or stain with a brush on the pre-prepared furniture.
How to paint garden furniture
Step 3
Wipe off excess oil with a dry cloth. If we do not wipe off the excess oil, stains can form.
How to paint garden furniture
Step 4
After the first painting, the wood lets go of our hair. It is necessary to pull off these fibres with fine sandpaper with a roughness of 180. If you do not do so, the individual hair will tear and there is a risk of damaging the protective glaze.
How to paint garden furniture
Step 5
After complete drying, repeat the coating once more. Now without grinding
If you liked this piece why not check out some of my other pieces here. | https://medium.com/@everythingcj/how-to-restore-garden-furniture-be71f65f22d2 | ['Everything Cj'] | 2021-02-07 13:02:34.604000+00:00 | ['Furniture Design', 'Restoration', 'Garden', 'Furniture', 'How To'] |
SECRET TO WIN YOUR NEXT ONLINE SOCCER BET | WAIT!!!! Don’t throw in the hat yet. How much have you rake in since you started online soccer betting or have you lost more or much that you become so frustrated and disappointment that makes you feel like quitting. Well, this article will guide you to your next step in redressing your steps and making you put in best stakes in order to win.
Don’t Guess To Win! Every time you loose you tell yourself that you are going to WIN your NEXT Soccer Bet. Does it happen that you win that next bet? Did that next bet really come? NO!!! You loose again and you tell yourself again that you are going to win your next bet this time. And it never ends! If you give me your 5 minutes, I will whisper in your ears about how you can win your bets and live the life you always dream about.
If you think that betting is about luck then I promise to give you your luck Today…..Now! Do you want it today? If yes then stay with me for 4 more minutes. From today you will not gamble with football betting but will start investing in football betting because I am going to show you my secrets.
I have been betting on soccer matches for last 10 months. I don’t have a regular job because I don’t need it! I bet to support my family so if I loose my soccer bets; my income depreciates. In the first week of my betting career, I lost a lot of bets because I did not know how to win; I was just like you. Then I found the magic formula to win the soccer bets. I will tell you about it very soon. since then I have raked in close to 2,000,0000 NGN from nairabet,nairastake,naijabet,1960bet and 9japredict online soccer betting sites.I have given part of my time to soccer betting. In last 10 months, I learnt about every team, every player, and every football ground, mental condition of players in good and bad times. I have recorded in which session which team scores the maximum goals, especially in the Wales, Italy lega segunda pro A & B divisions, Swedish, Brazilian and Spanish segunda divisions
I experienced the point where a team loses the match. In all these months, I made some great friends who are bettors and data analysts. I have learnt a lot from them also BUT……I have not given them my magic formula. Because I know that with that magic formula you can not loose.
Important: Win Today To Bet Tomorrow
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What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns? | An Appeal for Free and Open Discourse
As of this writing in December 2020, we are all aware of an overall mainstream narrative regarding what to make of covid and how best to respond to it. This narrative is faithfully disseminated through the corporate press and various governmental, nongovernmental, and quasi-official institutions of power. We are also all aware that dissenting views exist. Included within the mainstream covid narrative are instructions regarding how to treat these dissenting views — namely, that they are to be disregarded and censored. Moreover, those who hold dissenting views are to be shamed, ridiculed, deplatformed, unfriended, vilified, and even arrested or fined. Above all else, their views should never be read, listened to, or fairly considered.
Dissenting views are themselves regarded as rivaling covid itself in their virulence and peril. They are the virus of wrongthink, a contagion which transforms a good human into a deranged monster. Fortunately, immunity from this mental disease is possible by simply shutting off one’s mind to it. If an overriding postulate guides the mainstream narrative regarding covid, it is this: The virus must be defeated at all costs, and the only sure method of defeating it is unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities. How are we to know who the Authorities are and what they command? We read and watch mainstream corporate news and media, and we receive our instructions.
I am a dread dissenter. This article summarizes my dissenting view on covid, masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. I do not aim to convince those who adhere to the mainstream covid narrative to adopt my views. My aim is rather to persuade the reader that dissenting views to this narrative ought to be considered fairly, and that numerous, well-reasoned critiques to the Narrative exist. These critiques and objections are grounded in evidence, and they enjoy the backing of many voices in the fields of science, medicine, and epidemiology whose views would carry weight under the societal circumstances that prevailed until March, 2020. Moreover, these dissenting views, critiques, and objections are held and offered from a desire to prevent as much harm as possible — and to effect the best possible outcomes and quality of life for humanity. I seek to persuade the reader that we ought to return to our roots as a free society of open discourse, and we should once again cherish the spirit of scientific inquiry.
We were once a free people who did not fear speech or the pursuit of truth. We ought to become such people again, and the place to begin is through the invitation and encouragement of dissenting views, not their suppression. In particular, we ought to scrutinize both prevailing and dissenting views on covid and the lockdowns. We ought to expose these views to the light and rigor of honest and fair consideration of their strengths and weaknesses. Human society has never been so radically and suddenly altered in all our lifetimes as it has in 2020. We ought to find it both remarkable and disturbing that this alteration has been met with unquestioning obedience rather than open debate and inquiry.
At the end of the article, I will include a selection of links to websites and discourses on these matters. These links will provide the reader with the information needed to begin their own inquiry regarding these dissenting views, from sources unavailable in the sphere of the mainstream media narrative.
This article is secondarily intended to summarize my viewpoint on these matters thoroughly so as to alleviate the need for me to continue restating these points elsewhere — at the cost of much exhaustion and lost time. As stated earlier, I do not intend for this article to persuade anyone to adopt my view, though I welcome that as a possibility. My goal is rather to persuade the reader that dissenting views ought to be reckoned with, respected, and considered fairly on their merits.
At the time of this writing, in December of 2020, my view on these matters is very much a minority view. I believe this will change with time. Put simply, I am in opposition to the mandated lockdowns, masks, and social distancing. I am a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration in my capacity as a medical practitioner in the field of mental health (I am a licensed professional counselor) and also in my capacity as a citizen. This declaration lays out the scientific, epidemiological, and medical case that the aforementioned measures are not effective or necessary in response to covid, and are in fact, counterproductive to short and long-term public health.
The lockdown measures and policies are also harmful to important human values. I endorse the values of sovereign dignity, bodily autonomy, personal freedom, liberty, and democracy. These include the following as foundational elements: freedom of speech, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of movement and of privacy, bodily autonomy, divided and limited powers of governance, and fundamental rights reserved to the people, which are inalienable. All of these values, rights, and freedoms are currently under assault due to the prevailing covid lockdown zeitgeist. For a deeper exploration of these matters, I refer the reader to two companion essays: 1. Lockdown evoked a political and conceptual earthquake in my life,which discusses my journey from lockdown and mainstream narrative believer to my eventual position of dissent, and 2. The Sacred Left and Right, an inquiry into a rising authoritarianism in the covid response, and political implications.
I hold that the series of state mandates issued across this country and the globe are not compatible with a free society and a free people, and I believe that a society and its people ought to be free. I hold that free people are capable of governing themselves when it comes to evaluating personal risk, and they are capable of reviewing the recommendations of governments and experts (including conflicting and opposing views among said governments and experts), and of making their own determinations. I hold that it is proper for different people to arrive at different conclusions regarding risk, based on their own values, reasoning, personal circumstances, and level of risk tolerance. In the case of infectious disease, the more deadly the disease, the more people will willingly take safety precautions. The less deadly the disease, the more people will willingly choose to accept greater risk in favor of other cherished human values. If a government must violate the Constitutional and moral rights of a people in order to forcibly impose more severe isolation than those people would otherwise willingly adopt, I believe this is an indication of two things: First, it means the disease in question is almost assuredly less dangerous than that government insists it is. Secondly, it means the government has become tyrannical.
“But wait,” I hear you say. “All of this talk of rights and freedom and so forth sounds very well and good in theory, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and this calls for extraordinary measures.”
Even if I agreed that we were experiencing a severe enough of a pandemic to justify extraordinary measures, I would also still hold that a free society is something worth sacrificing and risking for. There are few things worth risking one’s life for that are more valuable than the free dignity of sovereign human life. A human life worth living for and dying for is a life that involves human touch and closeness, the dignity of bodily autonomy, the ability to breathe free air, to feel the wind and sun on one’s face, the ability to choose one’s movements, clothing, and activities, the ability to gather, to speak freely, to sing, to dance, to celebrate, to honor sacred traditions and rituals, to choose or refuse medical treatment, and to choose freely — based on one’s own wisdom and liberty, and one’s own cherished and sacred beliefs regarding reality and the divine. These are my values. I realize they are not everyone’s values, and in fact, they do not seem to be most people’s values. But these are mine. And these are values worth living and dying for.
That being said, the need to brave great risk for the sake of these values is not actually relevant in our current situation, for we are not at great risk. Moreover, the lockdown measures that have swept the world collectively expose people to greater risk, not less. I know these statements are rank heresy in the age of The New Normal. In order to explain them, allow me to first lay out the mainstream viewpoint as best I see and understand it.
The Mainstream View:
“This virus is extremely dangerous. It’s a once-in-a-hundred year occurrence. Just look at the death counts. And the case numbers are shooting through the roof. Not to mention the risk of “long covid.” Anyone could have the virus. Even if you’ve already had the virus, you can get it again and spread it again. People without any symptoms at all have the virus and spread it to others. The hospitals are overwhelmed. And even if you’re not worried about getting the virus yourself, you’re putting vulnerable people at risk of death and long illness if you don’t isolate yourself. You’re killing people through your selfishness. It’s a good thing opposing views are heavily censored and shamed. Sensible and responsible people listen to the public health authorities and obey their directives. That’s the way we can beat this virus as quickly as possible, and with the least amount of death and illness. We need universal compliance and obedience. We can’t afford personal rights and human freedoms. It doesn’t matter if you lose your job, your business, or your home; or if your mental, emotional, and physical health suffer due to your isolation and shrunken life. Nothing is more important than stopping covid.
“Fortunately, we know what to do: We stay six feet away from every single person who is not in our own household. (Some people form “pods” of friends and family across multiple households, but this is actually irresponsible, and they ought not to do it.) The best thing you can do is wear a face mask everywhere, and maybe rubber gloves too. The mask significantly stops the spread of the virus. But it’s best not to get too close even if you’re wearing the mask. We can’t take any chances with this terrible virus. The good news is we live in an age of modern science and there are vaccines on the way to save us. If we all take the vaccines when they come out, and we keep social distancing, staying locked down when ordered to, obeying all government mandates and media instructions, and wearing a mask everywhere, then we’ll finally eradicate the virus from the face of the earth. Then, and only then, will we be able to have our normal lives back. The media and government will let us know when that’s allowed. We can trust them.”
Forgive me if I am missing important aspects of the mainstream view. I can’t think of any other major components of this view, as I understand it. There is however one component of the mainstream view I haven’t mentioned yet, and I believe this to actually be the most important factor. I summarize it like this: “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.” Who’s they? The governments, the corporate media, and the influential designated experts in public and private positions. This is the element of reasoning that ensures the mainstream narrative will never be challenged, no matter how inconsistent it is, no matter how much evidence stacks up against it. It is simply too challenging, too frightening, and downright incomprehensible for most people to believe that the governments, media, and influential experts would be conducting themselves this way if it weren’t necessary to keep us safe, healthy, and alive. I’ll answer this element of the mainstream view later. Before I do, I will detail the key points and arguments of the various dissenting critiques. I encourage you to explore the links at the end of this article if you would like to decide for yourself whether you agree with these dissents.
1. How deadly is the virus?
Back in March, we were led to believe that the virus would kill about 3% of all people, which would be around 250 million people worldwide, and 10 million people here in the US. For a brief period, we were even told that the virus might kill as many as 7% of people, based on figures coming out of Italy. That would have been more like half a billion people worldwide and 20 million in the US.
These figures scared us all into lockdown, with Italy leading the way. After all, “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.” But even if one believes lockdowns are an appropriate response for a virus that kills 3% or 7% of all people, one might not agree to impose lockdowns for a virus that kills only 0.2% of people. This figure is where the current CDC estimates have been revised to. Furthermore, it was always a mistake to assume that covid would infect all people and then kill that percentage of them. As data have since demonstrated, a large percentage of people, perhaps between 30–50%, have natural immunity to covid, either from T and B cell immunity acquired from previous coronaviruses, or due to a generally strong immune system. Covid does not kill 0.2% of all people, but only 0.2% of the infected. Consequently, the deadliness of covid in the general population is actually much lower than 0.2%.
Making comparisons between seasonal influenza and covid induces rage and derision in many adherents of the mainstream narrative. But if the mainstream narrative is not simply to be followed unthinkingly, it would be well-advised to keep a cool head regarding this comparison. The usual death rate given for the flu is around 0.1%. This varies from season to season; there are strong flu seasons and weak flu seasons as influenza adapts and mutates. It’s worth keeping that comparison in mind, because there is a good chance that covid will similarly mutate and adapt into a seasonal illness. As the population acquires increased immunity and the virus adapts to become more transmissible and less deadly through natural selection, the covid death rate is likely to drop from the current rate of around 0.2% to a flu-like level of about 0.1%.
These mortality estimates are important in addressing the question of proportionality in response to the virus. It is reasonable to argue that the difference between a 0.1% and 0.2% mortality rate does not merit the unprecedented disruption and devastation of human life, health, and freedom we have witnessed in the 2020 response to this virus. Even if one is convinced that the death rate is higher, say 0.4%, the question of whether extreme measures are proportional or appropriate remains of vital import. Regardless of whether one is more convinced by the mainstream or dissenting view, the dissenting argument is on solid ground and should receive serious consideration. When we consider the monumental human costs of these lockdowns later in the article, I believe it will show the mainstream justifications for the lockdowns to be on very shaky ground. The primary argument in favor of the mainstream response remains: “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.”
The entire preceding argument is based on accepting the official case and death figures as given — but there are also very good reasons to be skeptical about the veracity of those figures. To understand why the virus may be even less deadly than we’ve been led to believe, we need to understand two things: the PCR test, and what gets counted as a covid death.
The PCR test is the primary test used in most places to diagnose a covid case. Kerry Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for developing this test, insisted that the PCR test should not and cannot be used to diagnose a virus. This view is shared by many other scientists. The PCR test has a variety of uses in genetic analysis, but in the case of diagnosing an active virus, the test only supports the possibility of diagnosis, which is then to be confirmed by other factors (in particular, by the presence of symptoms or illness, or by isolating the actual virus). The PCR test is not being used as intended and designed for in its function of diagnosing covid cases.
What does the PCR test do? It produces copies of a single strand of DNA in exponential fashion, eventually creating millions, billions, or even trillions of copies of that strand, for the purpose of analysis. In the case of covid diagnosis, these DNA copies are then scanned for presence of an RNA segment that corresponds to an RNA segment found in the virus itself. It identifies only a segment, never the full virus. The test runs in cycles. Each cycle doubles the amplification of the previous cycle. The first cycle creates one copy of the initial DNA strand, yielding two strands. The second cycle yields 4 strands, the third yields 8, and so on. On this kind of exponential curve, the analyzed biological material has been amplified to a level of over one million strands after 20 cycles. After 30 cycles, it is amplified to over a billion.
After 35 cycles, which yields about 34 billion strands, many scientists (not to mention Dr. Anthony Fauci himself) regard further amplifications to be useless for diagnosis if the genetic material has not yet been found. Only positive tests identified earlier than the 25th cycle are likely to indicate the presence of enough live virus to be infective. Positive tests based on cycle thresholds over 35 are almost certainly only identifying dead nucleotides. It could be a dead segment of RNA from a prior infection, long cleared, or simply a dead strand of the stuff that found its way into someone’s body, though they were never infected with a live virus, or their immunity made short work of it. Put simply, when more than 35 cycles are used, the test yields mostly false positives.
In some countries, PCR tests are not conducted past 30 cycles. In others, the cut-off is 35. In Portugal, the PCR test has actually been ruled invalid as a basis for diagnosis altogether because it is so inaccurate. In Florida, new regulations will require all positive PCR tests to list the cycle threshold in response to this issue. But elsewhere there is no requirement to list the cycle threshold, and many countries are running 40 cycle tests, even as high as 45 (amplification levels of one trillion and 35 trillion strands respectively). In the US, the threshold varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from testing center to testing center, with many tests being run at cycles of 37, 40 and even 45. For positive tests at cycle thresholds this high, regardless of how miniscule the amount of genetic material is found, the patient is designated as a covid case — even if there is no sign of infection and a complete lack of symptoms. This also means that a patient who does have symptoms and receives a covid diagnosis due to a high-cycle PCR test may actually be getting symptoms due to the presence of a cold or flu, not due to covid.
If accurate, this analysis suggests that the case numbers are highly exaggerated due to false positives. In addition to frightening the public through the media, with high case numbers flashed constantly across the TV screen (used as continued justification for lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and rule by executive decree), the inflated case numbers also inflate the death numbers.
To understand the death count, one needs to understand that the CDC issued specific instructions to doctors across the country in March regarding how to fill out death certificates when the deceased has been diagnosed as a covid case. These instructions are viewable on the CDC’s website, which is where I viewed them. Doctors have been instructed to attribute covid as a cause of death anytime someone dies while also diagnosed with covid. The CDC confirmed this in August when they announced that only 6% of covid deaths in their official figures were caused by covid alone. We don’t know how many of the other 94% of covid deaths would have occurred whether or not a covid diagnosis was present. We don’t know how many of those covid cases were asymptomatic and completely unrelated to the deceased’s actual cause of death. We don’t know how many of those covid cases were false positives due to high-cycle PCR tests.
What we do know, is that there is a strong and credible argument that both the case counts and death figures are significantly inflated. There ought to be public debate and consideration regarding this issue, and the level of covid’s lethality generally speaking, in proportion to the extreme measures that have been deployed. I cannot think of any reason why this question shouldn’t be vigorously debated among our politicians and in our news media, other than “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.” Oh yes, and this one too: “The virus must be defeated at all costs, and the only sure method of defeating it is unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities.”
Finally, we must address the question of age of death. From the statistics I have seen in various countries, the average age of death from covid is usually around 80–85. In wealthier countries where people live longer lives, the average age of death from any cause is usually around 80–85. In some countries, the average age of death from covid is actually higher than overall life expectancy. This suggests that a large percentage of people who have died while diagnosed with covid were already close to death. As human beings we are mortal, and death is a natural part of life. Every single one of us will die, and death is not a tragedy when we have lived a full and complete life. But such deaths do become tragic when the dying person is forcibly isolated from their loved ones due to official social distancing measures. This kind of tragedy has been imposed on thousands of people in 2020.
A smaller number of people have died before their time due to contracting covid, who were not otherwise near to death. Anytime death comes early, grief and heartache are experienced by the survivors. My own mother died at the age of 49, and my brother at the age of 38, so I am no stranger to early death. It does not follow, however, that the extreme measures imposed on our society are proportional and proper due to the fact that some number people died of covid before their time. Extreme measures would only be proportional and proper in response to extreme levels of such deaths. The evidence does not indicate that such deaths have occurred or are occurring at extreme levels. What’s more, as I will show later in this article, the extreme measures themselves cause new people to die who would not otherwise have died.
2. What About Long Covid?
It is remarkable that there isn’t much information available regarding “long covid” given how big of a talking point it has been in inducing obedience to the lockdown/masks/distancing regime. At around the time data began showing that covid was significantly less deadly than we were originally told it would be, we began seeing stories in the media about long covid. These stories argued that it didn’t matter that the lethality of covid had turned out to be low — you could still get long covid and have symptoms of ill health for many months after having the illness, perhaps permanent causing damage.
In the media, such reports were always anecdotal. Just as the media overemphasized the risk of young people dying from covid by highlighting anecdotal instances of this, the risk of long covid was similarly overemphasized. A typical article would focus on a handful of anecdotes of specific unlucky people. In the mind of the reader or viewer, the risk becomes amplified significantly due to such coverage. The thought goes, “the media wouldn’t be scaring us about such consequences if those consequences were rare.” They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.
It required some scouring, but eventually I located a study conducted in the UK which found that about 2% of people who experience covid symptoms have some residual symptoms that last longer than 12 weeks after clearing the primary symptoms in the 2–3 weeks of the infection. The study did not measure symptom presence past 12 weeks. The possibility of permanent tissue damage was raised by citing the case of pneumonia, which can cause lung scarring whether pneumonia is brought on by covid, influenza, or some other reason. I have read other anecdotal reports referencing damage to other organs in patients who experienced severe symptoms, just as I understand that any patient who experiences severe symptoms from any illness may experience organ damage. The evidence demonstrates that a low percentage of patients with covid symptoms experience this kind of severe harm, as is the percentage of patients who die.
In fact, recent figures I have read indicate that anywhere from 50–80% of people who get covid have exactly no symptoms at all. (These figures may be suspect, however, if it is understood to include false positives from high-cycle PCR tests. I believe it is likely that a large percentage of that number are actually immune to SarsCov2 and cannot actually be accurately described as having contracted covid, even if a fragment of the viral RNA is found in their body). Elsewhere, I’ve read that instances of long-term tissue damage due to covid represent about 1% of infections and that this figure is similar to the rate of long-term consequences from other infections such as influenza.
I don’t have any particular confidence in these figures; the true rates could be higher or lower. What I find more interesting is how little available data there is on this question. When the media drums up fear about any issue, but does not provide hard figures to back their narrative up, they have not made a good case. In particular, they have not made any kind of case for the appropriateness of extreme measures to prevent non-lethal covid.
In the interests of fairness I will offer the following: I believe I had covid in January. It was the worst flu of my life, and included the dry hacking cough I’ve heard described as one of the telltale symptoms. Since then, I have continued to experience background chest pain that I haven’t yet been able to clear. I may be an instance of long covid. On the other hand, I might not have had covid — I might have just had a bad flu. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference. I had an antibody test in May which was negative. This could have been a false negative, but if it was accurate, then I’m suffering from “long flu.” If I had long covid, is it an argument for extreme measures? If I instead had long flu, is it an argument that extreme measures are not needed? At the very least, this ambiguity demonstrates another instance of the need for vigorous public debate and dialogue regarding the extreme measures we’ve been living with, rather than unquestioning obedience to imposed restrictions without justification.
It should be clear that I am not discounting the possibility that covid can cause severe harm or death. Indeed, for some number of people, covid can be a serious infection. For some number of people, influenza can be a serious infection, resulting in permanent harm or death. For some number of people, tuberculosis can be a serious infection, resulting in permanent harm or death. For some number of people, even the common cold can be a serious infection, resulting in permanent harm or death. My mother died from a common cold, due to weakened immunity from cancer treatment. The question is not whether some number of people experience such harm, but whether the percentage of people at risk of such harm is proportional to the governmental and societal response.
3. Should Everyone Be Wearing Masks?
In keeping with the objective of defeating the virus at all costs, we have witnessed the masking of the world. How did this happen? Is it warranted? The idea behind the masking is simple enough: if the virus spreads through the breath, then obstructing the breath will obstruct the spread of the virus. In addition, every single person is to be considered potentially infectious, even if they’ve already had the virus and cleared it. Although it is widely agreed that a person is mostly infectious only when expressing symptoms, there is a non-zero chance that a person could be shedding the virus during a window of time prior to the onset of symptoms, or could even be shedding the virus without ever developing symptoms.
Some readers will remember when the WHO announced that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in the spread of covid back in June. They were pilloried in the media for several days and were eventually bullied into retracting this statement, although they never retracted the rationale behind the statement. The basic rationale for their retraction was that their scientific statement about the unlikelihood of asymptomatic transmission might cause people to become less afraid of the virus and therefore less vigilant. The Narrative required the public to continue fearing each other despite the lack of symptoms, so this information about asymptomatic transmission could not be allowed to stand. The public was also required to believe they could pass the virus on, without symptoms, to anyone at any time (and to think of themselves as murderers for doing so). This would keep the public anxious, shameful, and obedient — goals which have long been crucial to public health PR campaigns, called “Fear Appeal” by public health policy makers. Moreover, the mask mandates were about to be deployed across the Western world later in June, and these mandates relied entirely on the fear of asymptomatic transmission in order to have any validity.
Please forgive me if I have editorialized the reasons I believe the Narrative has been shaped as it has. From my viewpoint, the purpose of the mask mandates is clearly psychological, not medical. In particular, the masks represents a marker of state obedience and dominance — a form of psychological warfare on the people. It communicates the message that the human body is to be considered infectious and harmful at all times. It symbolically silences people’s voices by covering their mouths. It symbolically induces conformity by obscuring the face, the human being’s marker of individuality and identity. Mask compliance is also imposed as training for vaccine compliance. The state begins with one imposition on the human body in preparation for another. The public is to be trained to think of their bodies as belonging to the state or to corporations, not to themselves. Finally, the mask symbolically communicates to people that their fundamental humanity does not matter, by obstructing their ability to breathe. It is particularly notable that this reduction in the ability to breathe freely has been proposed as a safety measure for a disease that, when it kills people, does so by reducing their access to oxygen through the breath. Nothing is more fundamental to human life than breath. No birthright of the human being is more basic and direct than to breathe fresh air.
If widespread and mandatory masking really does make sense as a public health measure, then perhaps it is only a coincidence that the mask also accomplishes all those goals of dominating the individual and inducing continued fear and separation among the people. But there are good reasons to doubt the wisdom of masking, even if concerns about human freedoms and psychological effects are to be set at naught. The idea that wearing face masks could stop the spread of a virus was first proposed around the time of the early 1900s. Since that time, up until June 2020, a number of scientific experiments and studies were conducted over the course of decades to try and establish whether face masks had any efficacy in this regard. None of these studies found support for the use of masks for this purpose.
This makes sense when one considers how tiny virus particles are. To weave the fabric of a mask tight enough to block virus particles, the openings in the fabric that air molecules can push through would have to be microscopically small, less than 130 nanometers, making it very hard to breathe. Given the fact that breathing is somewhat impaired while wearing most everyday masks, one might reasonably assume that they also block and let through virus particles in proportion to the amount of air they block and let through. If so, they might have the effect of blocking something like 20% of your virus particles. If normally it takes 10 minutes of sitting and talking with someone indoors to pass on enough virus to cause an infection, with the masks on, maybe it takes 12 minutes. In other words, the expected ability of masks to reduce the amount of virus particles coming from your mouth would be negligible — and that’s what numerous studies showed for decades.
It was only in June 2020, the same month that the mask mandates were about to be rolled out everywhere, that the first study was released claiming to show masks reduced the spread of covid. But this study simply compared rates of covid cases from selected jurisdictions with differing mask laws. The confounding variables in the study were so numerous as to be laughable, from testing rates, to differing PCR cycle thresholds, to the rate of spread in each jurisdiction due to other factors such as general health and levels of immunity — not to mention the ability of the researchers to cherry-pick data from jurisdictions that already fit the conclusion they wished to reach, while excluding data from jurisdictions that did not support their desired conclusion. The study was not an experiment that tested a hypothesis. The subsequent mask studies that are meant to support the utility of mask-wearing were constructed the same way.
On the contrary, one can review graphs of new covid cases over time in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. One will never find an example in which introduction of a mask mandate influences the curve of new cases in either direction. I’ve viewed other charts that plot strictness of mask-use in various jurisdictions to case numbers, or deaths, and there is zero correlation. These charts just look like a scatter plot of random points. Recently, Denmark actually conducted an experimental study to test the efficacy of mask use and found no results that supported efficacy. One might also consider the example of grocery store workers, who continued working from March-May without masks during the height of the pandemic. This is the primary population one would be interested in to determine if masks were necessary or useful. But there is no evidence that grocery store workers contracted covid at higher rates than anyone else, either before or after the mask mandates were imposed, and no change in infection rates from before or after.
As mentioned earlier, the whole purported purpose of universal forced masking is based solely on the theory of asymptomatic spread. Many medical scientists and doctors assert that asymptomatic transmission represents a very small percentage of infections. Mandatory masking is a deeply personal imposition of the state on a universal level to target a very small number of people who actually have an active SarsCov2 infection without knowing they even have an illness. For instance, in a population of 1000 people, there might be 10 who have an active infection and are shedding virus. Of these, perhaps 8 have symptoms and are staying home. That leaves 2 people for whom wearing the mask has a purpose out of 1000 forced to wear them — and at best, the evidence that the masks do anything significant is highly questionable.
There are also harms to masking. Taking away someone’s sovereignty over their face and breath is an affront to their human dignity, spirit, and freedom. There are psychological harms to society which I touched on before. The masks induce suspicion, contempt, and fear among the populace. Seeing each other’s faces generates trust and connection on a very basic human level. Faces and smiles create a positive mood and joy in shared humanity. Wearing the mask involuntarily, whether forced or coerced against one’s will, creates a dominated and disempowered psychological effect. The masks create divisions in society, and generate anger, shaming, and condemnation. The masks implicitly silence one’s voice and blunt individuality. For those who believe the masks work to keep them and others safe, the danger exists of false confidence. People who do have symptoms, and would otherwise stay home, may be emboldened to go out and about, believing the mask prevents them from passing on the virus. People who would be vulnerable to a serious illness if infected will be more likely to expose themselves, believing the mask is providing protection it doesn’t. The masks obstruct the wearer’s ability to breathe fresh air, one of the most basic components of health and wellbeing. They can cause skin problems, and they can cause the wearer to breathe and rebreathe little bits of unhealthy bacteria that get caught in the mask, as well as fragments of mask material that break off and become toxic when breathed into the body.
The argument against the utility of masks is a strong one, and it is backed up by the scientific evidence. The argument that masks cause harm is also a strong one, and a valid one. Currently, those arguments are silenced, and most people believe masks are indispensible tools of safety because “they wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.” We ought to be having a public debate about the efficacy and harms of masks in the media and in our statehouses rather than having that debate silenced. Evidence for the efficacy and against the harms of masks would need to be clear and conclusive in order to justify the massive alteration of human experience we are now witnessing. In particular, forcing people to wear masks against their will is an extraordinary measure that would require extraordinary evidence of its need and efficacy to be justified. Instead, this extraordinary measure is being justified by this: “The virus must be defeated at all costs, and the only sure method of defeating it is unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities.”
4. Social Distancing or Herd Immunity?
Adjacent to the entire argument for mask mandates is the question of social distancing and the imperative to stop or limit the spread of covid. Back in March, when we thought the number of cases was limited (now we have learned that SarsCov2 had already been spreading throughout the world for 4 months by then — probably just considered to be the regular flu where it popped up), there was a rationale for attempting to stop the spread. If there are just a few cases of a pathogen, there is a chance of isolating the spread by tracking and quarantining every case. The idea was that if everyone practiced social distancing, the virus might well die out before it became widespread.
By April it had become obvious that the virus was everywhere. There would be no possibility of containing the spread or eliminating SarsCov2. That should have been the point where we realized the virus was going to move its way through the entire populace — it was just a matter of how quickly. Some of us did realize that at the time; it became clear the virus would spread until herd immunity was reached through organic spread, or until a successful vaccine could create herd immunity.
On the question of immunity, the mainstream media very aggressively imposed the narrative that immunity was somehow impossible. Once again, we were subjected to anecdotal accounts of vanishingly rare cases of people who had covid once and then contracted it again. Of course, the possibility that such people had falsely tested positive the first time or the second time was not permitted in the discourse, nor was it permitted to point out that these cherry-picked anecdotes comprised a tiny proportion of the populace. Instead, we were instructed that there was a non-zero chance that prior infection would not confer immunity. Therefore, all people, whether they already had covid or not, would be required to social distance and mask themselves as if they were just as likely to catch and pass on the virus as anyone else.
In addition, the media made a big deal of the fact that covid antibodies in the bloodstream tend to decline quite quickly, lasting just a few months in most cases. The media insisted this meant that no one was actually immune if they did not have antibodies active in their bloodstream. Reports about T-cell and B-cell immunity were almost entirely ignored. But understanding these types of immunity is crucial to understanding why immunity continues to exist even after the antibodies disappear. These types of white blood cells carry the memory of the virus within them. When exposed to SarsCov2, they either fight off and prevent a new infection themselves, or send the signal to begin producing antibodies again, or both. Furthermore, it has been found that T-cell and B-cell immunity already exist in large numbers in the population, estimated from 40–50%, probably due to prior exposure to other coronaviruses of similar structure to SarsCov2.
Understanding that significant amounts of immunity already exist in the populace is also key to understanding why herd immunity is well within reach. If herd immunity adheres when about 65–70% of the population becomes immune, and 40–50% have preexisting immunity, it means only 15–30% of the populace needs to contract the virus and develop immunity to reach this goal. This fact was also predictably ignored and dismissed in the media. Instead, they rehashed the narrative about how no one really ever keeps immunity and therefore herd immunity could never be attained. Incredibly, the media simultaneously argued that immunity was impossible while also insisting we remain locked down, masked, and distanced until a vaccine is developed that makes us immune! Vaccines cannot produce immunity if actually contracting the virus does not produce immunity. But it’s as if a new religion has been declared that requires us to believe the human body has always been incapable of achieving immunity to disease, and that the invention of vaccines made immunity possible for the first time.
The “wait for the vaccine” strategy became the universally mandated solution advocated by the mainstream covid narrative. This strategy was never questioned in the media or anywhere else. It was not permitted to be questioned. Instead we continually heard some variation of “we have to hunker down until we get the vaccine.” Some of us had questions about this theoretical vaccine. We knew that no successful vaccine had ever been developed for a coronavirus, and we knew the fastest any vaccine had ever been developed was four years. We suspected that at best, a covid vaccine would be like the flu shot: limited efficacy, numerous side effects and adverse reactions — really only useful to the very vulnerable, who would be looking for whatever protection they could get. Was it worth it to remain socially distanced, locked down, masked, etc. for a year or more, just to wait for a vaccine that might never come, might not work, or provide limited benefit?
At this writing, the first vaccines have been rolled out and are now being distributed with a few different versions in the works. They do seem to induce significant adverse effects, as I expected, although these adverse effects are actually much more severe than I had guessed they would be. What I did not expect was that the vaccines would not actually confer immunity, nor prevent transmission! And yet this is apparently the case — at least, there is not any evidence they confer such benefits — if they do so, it will be a pleasant surprise. These covid vaccines have only been measured and tested based on their capacity to reduce symptom manifestation when covid is later contracted. The entire rationale for continuing with these extreme lockdown/masking/distancing measures has been to reduce the number of cases and deaths as much as possible while we waited for the vaccines to prevent transmission and provide us all with immunity. If the vaccines don’t do that, there is simply no rationale to the lockdowning. None at all.
Earlier in 2020, a group of notable medical scientists released the Great Barrington Declaration as a counterpoint to this strategy of lockdowning, masking, and social distancing. I am a signatory, as I related earlier in this article. As of December 2020, I have been joined by over 39,000 other medical practitioners, over 12,000 medical and public health scientists, and over 700,000 concerned citizens. The idea behind the Declaration is that to the extent that the extreme measures we are living with are effective at slowing the spread of covid, the only thing accomplished is to prolong the amount of time it takes to develop herd immunity. To the extent that herd immunity is delayed, the vulnerable are at risk for longer periods of time. Thus, slowing the spread is actually likely to cause more deaths among the vulnerable, not less. The strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration is to provide focused protection to those who are vulnerable and desire such protection. Those members of society who do not consider themselves vulnerable go about life as normal. The virus spreads freely among them with very little adverse consequence while the vulnerable stay protected. Immunity is developed naturally in the population at large — the more immunity developed, the more the vulnerable are protected. Eventually, herd immunity is reached and the virus can no longer spread significantly. The vulnerable are now free to discard their protection, sooner than if the society had slowed the spread and hindered the development of natural immunity.
Instead, the alternative strategy imposed on us is for everyone in society to stay sheltered, locked down, and isolated until the vaccine could provide artificial herd immunity. Now the vaccines have been released — and they don’t provide immunity. They don’t prevent transmission. There is no medical or epidemiological rationale for continued extreme measures. If the vaccines do not provide immunity or prevent transmission, our best strategy is to get out of lockdown right away, implement social closeness, and rip those masks off. The sooner we build up that natural immunity, the sooner our vulnerable members of society will be safe. Even if the vaccines did provide immunity, naturally acquired immunity is generally stronger. And for a disease as mild as covid is for the vast majority of people, a very strong argument exists for contracting covid as a superior method of gaining immunity than taking an experimental vaccine with significant and sometimes serious adverse effects. Yet the lockdowns continue. After all, “they wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary. The only sure method of defeating covid is through unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities.”
5. Why Lockdowns?
The next question to consider is whether the harms of lockdowns outweigh the benefits. Society-wide lockdown is an unprecedented strategy that has never been part of public health policy as long as the discipline has existed. Until the advent of covid-19, the WHO did not recommend lockdowns, and in fact, their recommendations for managing a pandemic with such universal spread did not even include quarantine or isolation of exposed individuals. Decades of research and study in the field showed no benefit to such a strategy, just as decades of research and study found no benefit to mask wearing.
What changed? This is indeed something of a mystery. What we know is that China imposed severe lockdowns on its citizens in contravention of decades of epidemiological science, and the WHO and influential related figures started insisting that the world copy China. Why this recommendation was issued, and why countries all over the world listened, led by Italy, is not clear. The decision was certainly not made based on public debate. As soon as the rest of the world went into lockdown, China revoked their lockdown and declared covid eradicated. One wonders why we were required to copy China when they were lockdowning, but we’re not allowed to copy them now. As of October, 2020, the WHO has retracted the recommendation for lockdowns and now advises that lockdowns should not be imposed. Astonishingly, this reversion of policy back to the established science has been ignored. In country after country, lockdown fever has spread once again, but this time without even the excuse of following WHO recommendations, or of copying China, everyone’s favorite totalitarian juggernaut.
Why lockdowns? One would imagine that for such an extreme intervention to be deployed, they must be extremely effective. But there is no evidence to support their efficacy. In jurisdiction after jurisdiction, there is no correlation between severity of lockdown and severity of covid cases, deaths, or hospitalizations. There is likewise no correlation regarding social distancing practices or masking and severity of covid cases and deaths. We have a few control examples of countries that did not enter lockdown at all, including Sweden, Japan, and Belarus, as well as South Dakota in the United States. In addition, we have comparisons between US states that have entered lockdown again in November and December of 2020, and those that have not done so — as well as jurisdictions where there is widespread masking and those where there is very little masking. All of these jurisdictions can be compared against jurisdictions with severe and moderate measures of lockdowning and masking, and no correlation can be found regarding the efficacy of these policies. For in depth analysis of these comparisons, I will provide links to the work of Ivor Cummins at the end of this article. He has compiled extensive data on these comparisons.
In March, we were told we needed to “flatten the curve” in order to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed. Do you still remember that, dear reader? “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was the great rallying call. Then we threw another couple weeks on top of that for good measure. All well and good — society hadn’t been torn apart yet. It was only one month, after all. And then we had great news: the curve had flattened on its own. The hospitals were never overwhelmed. The government had spent millions of dollars constructing field hospitals to handle patient overflow, and aside for a few beds that were used in the New York area for a few days, these field hospitals were never needed anywhere. It was a false alarm. In most parts of the country, and the world, hospitals were not overflowing but largely empty. But the lockdowns remained in spite of the curve being flattened. It was a bait and switch. “Flatten the curve” was apparently never the real goal. The goal was lockdown itself and the seizure of power. Or so I have concluded, seeing no other way to square the evidence.
In December 2020, we are once again being told the hospitals are about to be overwhelmed, despite evidence to the contrary. Anecdotal reports of individual hospitals reaching capacity are once again cherry-picked by the media and projected as indicative of a widespread trend. We are given statistics about the percentage of hospital beds available without the context that hospital beds always fill up during respiratory illness season. The same method is always used of showing a chart with death rates and hospitalizations going up at a sharp rate. Then this rate of increase is projected forward in time infinitely, which if accurate, would quickly outstrip hospital capacity and result in mass deaths. Here, it is useful once again to consult Ivor Cummins, who is able to show that these curves follow a predictable pattern of sharp rise, a curling over after a few weeks, and then a steady decrease. He also shows that covid fits the well-established pattern for a new respiratory illness, with a big initial curve, followed by a much smaller curve the following season, and no third curve. The patterns of these curves are borne out regardless of lockdowns, masks, or other measures.
There is a lack of convincing evidence to support the efficacy of lockdowns. So we just keep telling ourselves, “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.” Sometimes we may start to scratch our heads and wonder if the Authorities are doing the right thing. But then we shake it off as we remember: “The only sure method of defeating covid is through unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities.” Meanwhile, we watch our private lives, our culture, our rights and freedoms, our society, and in many cases our livelihoods and businesses torn apart and destroyed in front of our eyes. We are paying a high price for these lockdown policies.
Even for those who presume the lockdowns must be helping, because after all, “they wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary,” it’s worth making a few comparisons to provide some perspective on the severity of covid and the proportionality of these measures. The Hong Kong Flu of 1968–70 was the deadliest strain of influenza in the past 100 years; it killed an estimated 1–4 million people worldwide. About twice as many people exist in the world today as did in 1970, so by extrapolation, that would translate to about 2–8 million deaths if that flu were present in 2020 and killed the same percentage of the population. Current figures list global covid deaths at 1.6 million. Without knowing the exact number of deaths that will occur in the next two years, it seems reasonable to assume the final number will fall within the same 2–8 million range of the Hong Kong Flu. The world never went into lockdown in 1968–70. No place in the world went into lockdown. No place in the world imposed mask mandates. No place in the world bankrupted small business owners, threw millions out of work, confined the elderly and dying into imposed isolation, closed borders, cancelled sports, concerts, gatherings of all kinds, canceled holidays, or imposed any of the other surreal and dystopian measures we have been suffering under in 2020. If you lived through 1968–70, you probably didn’t even know there was a Hong Kong Flu. You probably went about your life as normal. You almost certainly don’t wish the world had gone wild for lockdowning in those years. I’m just guessing.
How about a more current example? If we accept the covid death toll of 1.6 million in 2020 as accurate, we have a ready comparison at hand. Tuberculosis kills about 1.5 million people every single year. Like covid, this is an infectious disease. There has been a vaccine available for it since 1921. Perhaps some would argue that we made a mistake with tuberculosis. We should have been living in perpetual lockdown and wearing masks all over the world since — well, forever. Evidence currently shows that humans have carried tuberculosis since at least 4000 BC, and presumably for far longer than that. Indeed, this is one of the primary concerns dissenters such as myself have regarding the policies of 2020. If the logic of these policies were to be applied to other infectious diseases and not just covid, the policies would necessarily be permanent. The whispered threats we’ve received in the media about the New Normal, and “never going back” would become permanent reality. Do we really believe all of human history was a mistake? Do we really believe we figured out a better way of living in 2020 that had eluded humanity up until this year? Is this the year we finally realized the number one priority of every human life should have been and should always be to never catch an infectious disease?
I believe most people would not agree that this is a better way of life, or a way of life that should become permanent. But most people are unaware that in tuberculosis, we have been living with the equivalent of covid-19 every single year, for every year in recorded human history. After all, we’ve never had a new media with a running total of the millions of tuberculosis cases and deaths on screen at all times. We were never subjected to a narrative that dictated the eradication of tuberculosis to be the most important goal of human life. So we never worried about it. But don’t believe your own lying mind, or mine. After all, “They wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary.”
Which brings up the next part of the equation: the harms caused by lockdowns. This is where my professional expertise as a counselor is relevant and forms the basis of my signing of the Great Barrington Declaration as a medical practitioner (licensed professional counselor). The lockdowning is devastating to mental health. I can cite statistics (which again can be accessed by exploring the links at the end of this article), I can cite my observations in working with clients this year, and I can cite my knowledge of the basis of mental and emotional health through my training, studies, and experience. Put simply, suicidal ideation is through the roof. Substance addiction is through the roof. Depression is through the roof. Anxiety is through the roof. Old traumas have been reactivated, and 2020 itself constitutes a series of new traumas (very rarely trauma due to the virus itself, but instead, trauma due to lockdowns, isolation, and fear of the virus induced by the media). Social isolation is creating loneliness, self-hatred, and despair. Dreams for the future and personally meaningful goals have vanished into thin air. Economic anxiety and distress has become crippling, and the approaching threat of housing insecurity looms larger with the knowledge that rent and mortgage moratoriums cannot be of indefinite duration.
Human beings are not meant to exist this way. We need social connection, in-person congregation, touch, and bonding. We are being treated as prisoners and criminals for the offense of our very human breath, and in our core we know it. We are locked into an abusive relationship with our leaders who keep us sequestered, silence our speech, deceive us, attempt to terrify us, shame us, and guilt us into obedience, and tell us we are no less than murderers if we do not obey. The constant stress, depression, shame, and anxiety does more than destroy our quality of life and ability to take constructive action. This emotional distress in the body also weakens our immune system, rendering us more susceptible to covid and other pathogens. The lack of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, coupled with stress-eating of junk food and increased alcohol use weaken our physical strength and immune system further.
In addition to these assaults on our mental, physical, and emotional health — and to our human spirit and dignity — and in addition to the ruined businesses, the millions of unemployed, the lost homes, the transfer of wealth and independence from common people to international corporations and billionaires, we can also speak of the deaths these lockdowns have already caused and will continue to cause.
How many suicides have been caused by lockdowns? How many overdose deaths? I haven’t located hard statistics yet, but I’ve seen reports that estimate these kinds of deaths have doubled in frequency this year. In a typical year, 50,000 Americans die from suicide and 70,000 die from overdose. A doubling of those figures would produce additional 120,000 deaths. Worldwide, we see 800,000 suicide deaths every year. A doubling of that figure alone would produce additional deaths equal to half of the deaths attributed to covid. Perhaps the true figures for 2020 suicide and overdose deaths will prove to be less than that. But either way, it puts the lie to the mantra that all the lockdowning is justified on the basis of saving lives. Lockdowning (if you believe it even saves lives in the first place, which is questionable) only trades certain lives for other lives. This imposed state abrogation of human rights will save some lives and kill others.
These policies also trade medical deaths from one cause to other causes. Lockdowning has resulted in the canceling of millions of medical procedures and screenings. In particular, untold thousands of cancer screenings have not occurred. How many cancer deaths will occur due to lockdowns that would not otherwise have occurred? How many deaths from heart disease will occur due to medical care interrupted by lockdowns? How many deaths from a plethora of other causes? Lockdowns have also severely disrupted food supply chains in vulnerable nations all over the world, resulting in rising food prices and scarcity, and widespread food insecurity. The UN World Food Program has estimated that an additional 130 million people in the world are facing starvation and famine this year due to the lockdowns in places like Africa and the Caribbean. Black lives matter — just not those black lives. How many of those 130 million will die from malnutrition? How many will die of disease from weakened immune systems? One percent? If so, that almost equals the entire covid death count for the year. Anything higher than one percent surpasses it.
Aftermath
For now I will set aside the question of why governments around the world decided en masse to copy the totalitarian method of governance employed by Beijing in instituting the 2020 regime of lockdowns, surveillance, censorship, and public fear and shame campaigns. That question deserves its own article. If the rationalization of “they wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t necessary” can at last be discarded, it will be enough to replace that rationale with a new conclusion: “They are doing this even though it is not necessary.” In seeking a motive for such destructive and reckless abusive action, one need look no further than the postulate the Narrative has provided us with: “The virus must be defeated at all costs, and the only sure method of defeating it is unquestioning universal obedience to the Authorities.”
The key ingredient here is the outcome: “Unquestioning Universal Obedience to the Authorities.” That is the purpose. The power seekers saw their chance and took it. As George Orwell once said: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
And that also explains the motivation that prompted me to write this article. As stated earlier, I write with two purposes: 1. To persuade the reader that dissenting voices to the lockdown zeitgeist have a strong case, based on sincerely held values and objections, backed up by solid reasoning and evidence — and ought to be heard and considered in the mainstream discourse. 2. To lay out my views on this subject in one comprehensive article I can refer others to if they question how I could possibly oppose what’s going on.
But my motivation is deeper than these purposes. Through the lens of the dissenting view, it is clear that the purpose behind everything we have been subjected to in 2020 has been to accomplish a sheer power grab — the largest, most sudden collective power grab in human history. In understanding that power is seized without the intention of relinquishing it, I recognize the need for those of us who can see what is happening to speak out against it and make our dissent public.
I admit I have censored myself until now due to fear of public condemnation, including the fear of alienating myself from friends and loved ones, and fear of professional and social reprisal. It took me some time to summon my courage to prepare this article and share it publicly, along with the accompanying articles I have written. The time for silence has passed.
Links and Research
Swiss Policy Research — This website is an impressive comprehensive compendium of linked articles and data points that on its own probably has enough material to back up every statement I’ve made in this article.
Ivor Cummins — Data on Lockdown Harms and Lack of Efficacy
Ivor Cummins has been a tireless researcher and voice of reason throughout the 2020 lockdown fiasco. The page linked above is a collection of 40 different studies and articles making the case for the harms caused by lockdowns and the lack of efficacy of lockdowns.
His YouTube channel is a treasure trove of clearly, patiently explained analysis of the data, coupled with clarifying graphs and charts. This recent video on Lockdowns in Europe and the US is a great example of his work. From there, you can explore all the other offerings on his channel.
PANDA — Pandemics, Data, & Analytics
An multidisciplinary resource for articles, data, and analysis, with specific focus on the efficacy of lockdowns, accuracy regarding case and death reporting, and other pertinent concerns regarding the covid response.
Collateral Global — This site is another great repository of articles and data regarding lockdown harms and the evidence that backs up the dissenting view.
The Great Barrington Declaration — This Declaration was authored by three world-renowned epidemiologists: Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford. Their Declaration can be read here, along with accompanying explanation of its philosophy in greater detail. Those who agree with the Declaration can also add their signature to it at this site.
Fear Appeal and Covid-19 Perception — This interview with Dr. Peter Breggin, who distinguished himself as a leading voice who brought an end to the practice of lobotomy in the 1970s, is an excellent overview of the practice of Fear Appeal in public health to induce desired behavior changes in the public at large.
Kate Wand — Finally, just for a taste of the human values at stake and the psychological and social harms of lockdowning, I recommend these two videos created by Kate Wand.
Lockdown: The Dark Side of History — Lockdown: The New Tribalism | https://medium.com/@raellekaia/what-to-make-of-covid-and-the-lockdowns-ce7d237688e | ['Raelle Kaia'] | 2021-03-05 08:53:43.747000+00:00 | ['Belief', 'Covid 19', 'Liberty', 'Freedom', 'Policy'] |
GDPR, the sequel: Get ready for CCPA | Amidst all the craziness of the global coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that the world keeps turning, and that mundane things like new privacy laws coming into force are still happening. The impact of COVID-19 on global privacy practices is the stuff of a future post, but in the meantime, let’s distract ourselves with a little light reading about California’s new privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and how it compares vs GDPR.
If you and your organization are only now getting over the trauma of achieving GDPR compliance, you may be unenthusiastic to learn that there’s another privacy law to worry about. The good news is that if you’re reasonably good on your GDPR compliance, you should be well-prepared for CCPA. The bad news is, many US organizations haven’t done much to achieve GDPR compliance, so they’ll have a hill to climb to be ready for CCPA.
What is CCPA?
CCPA is only one of a handful of state-level laws in the US that have been approved in the past two years to protect consumer privacy. Since it comes from the home of some of the world’s largest and most data-hungry online firms, however, it has garnered the most attention. CCPA is also worth paying attention to because it is likely to be the template for any federal privacy law that is passed in the United States.
CCPA became law on the 1st of January 2020, and enforcement (by the California Attorney General) will begin on the 1st of July 2020 (apparently the AG is unmoved by pleas to delay enforcement due to COVID-19). This gives any business that operates in California, or interacts with California residents, a very narrow window to achieve compliance. A recent research study from Ebiquity in partnership with the Digital Analytics Association found that 22% of businesses in the US have not done anything to prepare for GDPR, leaving them in a scramble to prepare for CCPA.
CCPA vs GDPR
CCPA and GDPR share many things in common, based in the idea that an individual should have control over whether and how an organization collects and shares data about them, and that that data should be treated with care.
Unlike GDPR, CCPA does not attempt to define whether data processing is legal per se (except in some narrower cases like passing data to a third party). However, it does enable heavy penalties if a company is found to have failed to protect user data adequately, with potential fines exceeding even GDPR’s levels. Most of the fines imposed by European privacy regulators have been for breaches in data security, so it’s reasonable to expect the California AG will behave similarly.
The table below summarises the major areas of difference between GDPR and CCPA. Generally speaking, GDPR’s requirements in each of the areas are stricter than CCPA’s, although there are some exceptions. Below the table, we’ll look at each of the areas in a little more detail.
Legal basis for data processing
The biggest difference between the two laws is how they approach the legality of data collection and processing itself. GDPR sets out the conditions under which data processing is allowed, such as that the subject has given their consent, there is a legal obligation, or the Data Controller has a ‘legitimate interest’ to process the data.
If a Data Controller (such as a business) is processing personal data without one of the above conditions being met, then they are in violation of the law, regardless of whether there is any data breach or complaint from users.
Under CCPA, a business must disclose information about the data that they are collecting about a consumer, and offer users the right to view or delete that data, but pre-emptive consent is not required; additionally, CCPA enables consumers to opt out of having their data shared with third parties.
If a consumer feels that their data is being misused, they can bring action against a business. But CCPA does not define whether a particular usage of data is legal, and has nothing to say about secondary usage (that is, collecting data with one stated purpose and then using it for another purpose) outside of requiring the business to update its privacy notice.
Who’s regulated, and who’s protected
CCPA uses the term Business to describe the entities that are the subject of its regulation, defined as any for-profit organization doing business in California, which meets one or more of the following conditions:
Has annual gross revenues of more than $25m, or
Buys, sells or shares data on more than 50,000 consumers per year, or
Derives more than 50% of its revenue from selling consumers’ personal information.
This is noticeably narrower than GDPR, which includes in its scope any organization, including businesses, non-profits, and public sector entities (including governments).
The target of CCPA’s protections and rights are referred to as Consumers. A consumer is defined as a California resident. This is a narrower scope than GDPR, which covers all EU/EEA nationals, and anyone physically in the EU/EEA at the time of data collection. This means that while US businesses need to be GDPR-compliant if they have any users who are EU nationals (even if those individuals are in the US at the time their data is collected), the same is not true under CCPA — a Washington State resident on a visit to California (or using the services of a California-based business) is not protected under CCPA.
Definition of personal data
The definitions of personal data in the two laws are quite similar — they both cast a broad net in defining personal data as any data that can be connected to an individual. This means that the old idea of “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII) is largely obsolete — like GDPR, the law covers data like purchase history and website behaviour which would not have been considered PII previously.
CCPA does provide a provision that exempts ‘deidentified’ (anonymised) data — that is, data where identifiers (such as cookie IDs) have been removed. However, deidentification is a notoriously grey area — there are many examples of previously deidentified data being able to be linked back to individuals, such as the hospital admissions data that US states share publicly. CCPA says that simply removing explicit identifiers from a user data record is unlikely to be sufficient, because it would be unlikely to prevent reindentification.
CCPA also explicitly calls out “audio/electronic/visual/thermal/olfactory or similar information” as a category of data. This means that sensor data from IoT devices (e.g. smart lights, smart speakers) is covered by CCPA (looking at you, Google and Amazon).
Finally, while GDPR explicitly protects certain special categories of data such as health data, ethnicity, or religious affiliation by even stricter data processing rules, CCPA does not; however, it does make reference to other California and Federal laws (such as HIPAA and VPPA) which protect this kind of data explicitly.
Individuals’ rights
CCPA and GDPR share a similar focus on providing a core set of rights to consumers (‘Data Subjects’ in GDPR). They both provide the following rights to:
Know what personal data is being held about them
Access that data (data portability)
Delete that data (right to be forgotten)
Not be discriminated against (e.g. by reducing the quality of a service) for the exercise of any of the above rights
GDPR, on the other hand, provides its Data Subjects with further rights to:
Require that their data is not used for certain purposes, such as targeted advertising
Have incorrect data rectified
Object to automated decision-making (e.g. automatic profiling)
Privacy notices and consent
CCPA requires businesses to notify consumers of the categories of data they are collecting, and the use(s) they are making of that data; if a business wants to change the data they are collecting, or the purposes they are using the data for, they must notify consumers. CCPA doesn’t require consent to be gathered for this data collection.
CCPA does have a specific consent clause to do with the sale of a consumer’s data to a third party — businesses must have a prominent link on their website home page titled “Do not sell my Personal Information”. This blanket opt-out is quite a good protection for consumers, while being quite manageable for businesses. For consumers between the ages of 13 and 16 years old, a business must gain an opt-in before sharing their data with third parties.
By contrast, GDPR requires organizations to gain opt-in consent from Data Subjects for most non-essential cases of data processing, including for purposes like digital marketing, and especially where data is to be shared with a third party. This need to gain pre-emptive consent for all potential uses of personal data is the reason behind the extremely complex and confusing consent management interfaces that have sprung up on websites.
Data retention and security
CCPA has nothing to say about the security measures that a business should take in order to protect the personal data that they are holding. It does, though, establish a ‘right of action’ for consumers who feel that a business has taken insufficient steps to protect their data in the event of a data breach. On the other hand, GDPR explicitly requires data controllers and data processors to take measures to secure personal data (such as encryption and/or anonymization).
CCPA also does not limit the amount of time that a business may retain personal data; under GDPR, data controllers are required to hold data for no longer than they need for the stated purpose for which they gathered it.
Enforcement and fines
Under CCPA, an accidental breach of the law attracts a fine of $2,500 per consumer affected. The fine rises to $7,500 per consumer record if the breach is considered deliberate.
By comparison, under GDPR, an organization can be fined between two and four percent of its total revenue for a breach, the range again reflecting the seriousness of the breach.
To get a sense of the likely impact of this, consider the example of Facebook, which famously shared profile data from 50 million of its users with Cambridge Analytica in 2014. Not all of these users were in California, but if just 5 million of them were, then Facebook could have faced a fine of between $12.5 and $37.5 billion. By comparison, an equivalent fine under GDPR could range from $1.1 to $2.2 billion, based on Facebook’s 2018 revenues (although its revenues in 2014 were a lot lower).
CCPA also provides an explicit range for the awards to be made to consumers who bring actions against companies who have breached CCPA with their data, of between $100 and $750 per user. If all 5 million consumers in the Facebook example had brought a class action against the company, the combined pay-out could have been as much as $3.75 billion. CCPA clearly has teeth.
Achieving compliance in a world of privacy laws
In early 2019, Ebiquity and the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) fielded a survey on US business readiness for GDPR. The responses were not tremendously encouraging: Although 78% of respondents said that their organizations had taken steps to achieve GDPR compliance, almost half (47%) were not confident that they’d done enough:
This lack of confidence reflects the fact that GDPR remains a confusing law, inconsistently applied by the different data protection agencies throughout the EU. Adding CCPA and other laws to the mix will only generate further confusion for beleaguered CDOs and CPOs who are just trying to do the right thing and stay out of trouble. What’s needed is an overall framework for thinking about privacy and risk when dealing with personal data.
In practice, the amount of work that your organization needs to do to achieve compliance with global privacy legislation will depend on two major factors: Firstly, the extent to which the you have an international footprint, and secondly, the amount of use you’re making of personal data.
The diagram below provides a framework for thinking about the best approach to compliance as these two factors vary.
If you do most or all of your business in one or a few locations, you can comfortably focus just on the legislation that applies to your locale, although it is worth remembering that GDPR applies to all EU/EEA citizens whether or not they are in the EU, and that even within areas like the EU and USA, a patchwork of local laws will be applicable.
For international or multinational organizations, things are more complicated. As the range of laws continues to balloon, the most sensible approach is to establish a set of personal data management best practices which can be used as the foundation for legal compliance in any particular geography. If you fall foul of the law (e.g. through a data breach), you’re more likely to be viewed charitably by both consumers and regulators if your general practices around personal data management are sound and not seen as sloppy or evil.
The best practices below will put you in a good position to achieve compliance with both GDPR and CCPA — though I am not a lawyer, so you should not consider this legal advice:
Establish a set of principles for personal data usage
Before you do anything else, ask yourself what your core principles are for the collection and usage of personal data. Is it necessary for your business and marketing objectives, and if so, what is the minimum amount that will be sufficient for the task? The easiest way to minimise risk and management cost around personal data is to not collect it in the first place.
Treat all individual-level data as potentially sensitive
You need to treat all data at the individual level as potentially sensitive — in line with the GDPR definition. Anonymising or deidentifying personal data reduces the risk of a damaging breach, but does not eliminate it. Even aggregating personal data does not completely eliminate the risk that an individual record could be re-extracted.
Keep track of personal data collection and distribution
This foundational activity entails controlling the collection and storage of all personal data and then tracking and managing the movement of that data throughout your organization, ideally as part of a broader Master Data Management (MDM) program. You can achieve this by severely restricting access to personal data, but this can cause other problems (such as illicit copying and sharing of the data).
Maintain a clear data privacy statement
Your privacy statement needs to clearly state the categories of data that you’re collecting, and the purposes that they are being used for (CCPA provides some quite helpful categories to use for this). Obviously, this depends on the effective management of personal data collection and usage in the first place, per the previous point.
Keep track of data sharing with third parties
Related to the above, you need to keep detailed records of the third parties with whom you are sharing data, both through back-end data feeds and through third party data collection in digital properties such as websites and apps. You need to be able to turn those feeds on and off easily.
Limit duplication and movement of personal data
You need strong policies (and enforcement) around personal data are needed to prevent random Data Scientists in your team making copies of personal data and taking it home for the weekend. Again, a good Master Data Management system is very helpful here, since it can help reduce confusion about the location of the location of certain datasets. An MDM will also reduce data storage, movement and processing costs.
Limit data hoarding
Several privacy laws say that data should not be retained beyond a reasonable period. Just how long to hold onto personal data is a matter of choice, but don’t hold onto old data ‘just in case’ it might come in handy. A good rule of thumb is to expect to hold onto user-level personal data for no more than 12 months; beyond that, data should be aggregated (or at the very least deidentified/anonymised).
Store personal data securely
Storing data securely both reduces the chances of data breaches as well as reducing the likely penalties that you’ll have to pay if you do have a data breach. Encrypt your data, and aim to provide access only via data APIs, so that access can be logged and controlled. Also, anonymize your user IDs, so that if data is copied around the organization the risk of a damaging data breach is lessened.
Respond promptly to data subject requests
A common theme of both CCPA and GDPR is honouring requests from individuals to review, amend or delete the data that is being held about them. You need a robust process to respond to these requests, which will depend being able to locate where personal data is being stored. For example, if a user requests that their data be deleted, and there are multiple untracked copies of that data floating about, it will be very hard or impossible to honour this request.
Offer users meaningful control over data collection and sharing
This is one area where you might want to have different approaches in different markets. The EU takes an opt-in approach to gaining consent for data collection and processing, while the US leans towards opt-out (which is the approach taken by CCPA).
Since opt-in rates are always much lower than opt-out rates, there can be real benefit to taking advantage of the somewhat more permissive rules where they exist. But since laws will likely tighten over time, your consent tools need to be flexible enough to switch from opt-out to opt-in quickly. This is especially true for the controls you provide to manage the sharing of data with third parties.
Appoint a Chief Privacy Officer
Even though may privacy laws (including CCPA) don’t mandate it, you should appoint a Chief Privacy Officer. Your CPO needs to have real power — they must be able to direct resources to build systems that will facilitate the management of personal data and to respond to data subject requests, and should also be independent from the marketing organization so that they can dispassionately assess the privacy risks associated with the collection and use of personal data. | https://medium.com/@ian_thomas/gdpr-the-sequel-get-ready-for-ccpa-a806f47dacfd | ['Ian Thomas'] | 2020-04-23 09:48:17.668000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Ccpa Compliance', 'Gdpr Compliance', 'Ccpa', 'Gdpr'] |
unapologetic and unforgiving | one marigold afternoon
we strapped on our masks
and drove to the plant nursery.
green, wood, and soil
the possibility of growth
enraptured me
as I ambled through the aisles.
when we arrived back home
I carefully clasped the snake plant
between my eager hands
chosen
for its unapologetic beauty
vertical trajectory and sharp tip
its natural shape
beautiful and formidable.
after, I tended to our new cactus
and spent the next few minutes
tweezing unforgiving needles
from my hand. | https://medium.com/meri-shayari/unapologetic-and-unforgiving-cc9db4073aa8 | ['Rebeca Ansar'] | 2020-09-05 16:57:00.640000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Poetry', 'Experience', 'Poem', 'Life'] |
Good Morning | This is to all the people that have problems getting up in the morning. I understand this can be a hard thing to do for some, myself included. Its okay to not want to do something, however it’s not okay to not do it. Think of waking up in the morning as an everlasting chore. Something you have to do everyday, that starts your day. Like brushing your teeth, eating, showering, checking your phone. All those things start your day. Some are optional but it just really depends on the person. Find something that really matters to you. Something that you are looking forward to today, tomorrow, or even next week. Someday’s you will wake up and say to yourself “Man, today is gonna be a great day.” and someday’s you won’t, and that’s 100% fine. Good Morning. Have a great day! | https://medium.com/@vivdial/good-morning-2ecc85fc890d | [] | 2020-12-27 13:56:46.095000+00:00 | ['Teens', 'Waking Up', 'Morning', 'Problem Solving', 'Teenagers'] |
Plutus Service & Product Update | Due to a recent directive by Mastercard to close cryptocurrency-related programmes across the board, Plutus & PPRO have agreed to cease their relationship.
New Card Issuer
With this news in mind, we are glad to report that we are in the final stages of appointing a new card issuer/programme manager using a different payments network. Rest assured, the team is already working on implementing the necessary steps which will include greater coverage, higher quality cards and an improved API!
Please note that while we upgrade our service, all fiat funds that were held on your Plutus cards will now be held in an escrow account with our banking partner (see New Banking Partnership below). These funds will be automatically transferred to your new balance once we resume service. However, users who wish us to credit their bank account immediately may request to do so free of all charges.
Product Updates- Direct to Bank Payments
As a organisation that values bringing true convenience and innovation to our users, we are glad to announce that we will be releasing new functionality whereby users are able to fund their existing bank accounts from the sale Ethereum and Bitcoin (via PlutusDex) — whilst still generating Pluton’s (PLU) our reward token!
The upcoming version of our app will allow you to initiate SEPA payout from your app to your own nominated Euro bank account for instant withdrawal.
Our new feature, embraces our company vision to help worldwide usage of cryptocurrencies effortlessly and anywhere.
We plan to enable this functionality in conjunction with the release of your new Plutus Debit Cards.
Compliance Updates
Regulatory compliance has always been of key importance to our global proposition. This is why due to recent policy card issuance and global compliance changes, Plutus.it had temporarily taken down some materials from the website and blog, rest assured these will be restored in coming days.
New Banking Partnership Adds Brand New Functionality
We are also happy to announce our banking partnership with an FCA approved issuer which will enable Plutus to hold third-party funds in escrow before loading your Plutus debit cards. With this, we are also able to issue our users with unique IBAN’s. | https://medium.com/plutus/plutus-service-product-update-b70d85c5cb3c | [] | 2019-01-15 18:07:32.113000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Announcements', 'Plutus', 'Bitcoin', 'Contactless'] |
The recap of Ethanim roadshow | Host:
Hello everyone, welcome to our Roadshow today. I believe you are all excited about what we mentioned to be ‘extraordinary’. Today, our CEO @angbangr will share it with us. Let’s welcome Dr. Anbang Ruan!
Dr. Ruan: Hello everyone, it’s awesome to see you here again.
Host: Hi Dr. anbang. Nice to see you here!
As we have learned, the “extraordinary new thing” is probably about metaverse. Would you start from metaverse?
Dr. Ruan:
Sure. Metaverse has been really popular lately, however, we’ve been missing one thing.
The current metaverse applications in the markets are not fully decentralized and it’s not proper to call them metaverse.
The real metaverse is supposed to last forever, never to be controlled or shut down by any organization or individual, and your digital assets truly belong to you and can’t be tampered with or taken away.
However, the most popular metaverse applications in the market, such as the gamefi, haven’t fully achieved decentralization. They only issue Token or NFT assets on the blockchain, while 99.99% of the application is deployed on the centralized server, which can completely control the allocation of assets on the chain. These so-called metaverse applications are essentially centralized and controlled by few.
Therefore, the rules for you to obtain NFT equipment or token rewards in various ‘metaverse’ blockchain games may be tampered with at any time by the game manufacturer, or even the whole game may be shut down at any time by the manufacturer.
Even though the tokens and NFT are still in your wallet, imagine if the game is no longer accessible, the tokens you earned through the game will be unavailable, and the NFT you paid for will not be displayed. How do you feel?
Most people probably haven’t considered how much risk we would take when we use metaverse conceptual applications.
However, you might ask, why can’t developers completely decentralize their applications by deploying them on the blockchain, eliminating these risksThis is due to the low performance of traditional blockchain networks.
New public chains like Ethereum and even better ones like Solana and Avalanche have not changed the mechanism of “seeking consensus among untrusted nodes”, which results in networks never performing as well as centralized systems.
As a result, it can only support the chain of digital assets such as token or NFT, but can not be a complete decentralization of logical computation, image rendering, data storage, and other metaverse applications.
A true metaverse cannot be realized without addressing the problem of the complete decentralization of large applications.
Therefore the metaverse requires entirely new blockchain solutions. We have been preparing for this for a long time, and this will be the most exciting moment of the day when you will be the first witnesses to join me in the launch of a new project of Trias Ecology: the metaverse Public Chain — Ethanim
Ethanim, incubated by the Trias Foundation, is a new-generation public chain tailored for the metaverse that could support the complete decentralization of any large application. It adopts a completely new solution that is totally different from the traditional blockchain, creatively combining the trusted computing technology that we have accumulated over 10 years of technology with blockchain.
The traditional blockchain implementation path of “seeking consensus among untrusted nodes” is transformed into “let nodes be trusted and perform computation”, which enables large-scale applications to achieve complete decentralization while maintaining high performance.
Ethanim main chain adopts Trias’ Leviatom Layer -1 core technology to make the consensus speed, node functions and ledger structure richness of the main chain consensus nodes far exceed the traditional blockchain.
Just because of this, the main chain can support the new blockchain network that can be horizontally expanded infinitely.
At the same time, Ethanim’s entire system architecture, like Lego bricks, will be built in a modular form, which can combine the virtual GPU, edge computing, privacy computing, AR/VR, and other technologies related to the metaverse to form a comprehensive solution of the metaverse.
This is an exciting technological innovation and an epoch-making initiative.
Ethanim will make the metaverse truly achievable, and the metaverse depicted in science fiction movies may come sooner than you think!
Not only that, but Ethanim has restructured the underlying technology of the traditional block-chain, which will bring huge transformations to the metaverse, users, developers and miners
For the metaverse:
Ethanim has unprecedentedly realized the complete decentralization of large-scale applications, and clones the application in real-time and distributes storage so that the user’s behavior information, digital assets and virtual identities will continue forever.
Even if the application developer modifies the application rules or even suspends the operation of the application. Any community user can resume the application at any time, and the application will run forever through the DAO to achieve an everlasting run.
Users could modify the metaverse application according to their own ideas and preferences, create a variety of different versions of the game. And users can use virtual identities to shuttle between different versions of the game, as well as the interoperability of assets.
For example, in a game, if the character you use can only walk on land, you can modify the character’s skills to create a new version of the game where the new version of the character could obtain other skills such as walking, diving, flying, etc.
In addition, the NFT assets you own can form different display methods and functions in different applications and can be used freely in different application spaces.
For example, the avatar you use in a game can be used as an avatar in a social app or bought and sold as a commodity in the marketplace.
On the Ethanim platform, you can create your own NFT, virtual identities, etc. in the metaverse application and you can freely travel between different application spaces, and freely exchange these assets at market prices between different applications.
For the users:
The platform is fully compatible with the traditional applications, which we are familiar with such as shopping, payment, and social networking.
These can be directly on the chain without being redeveloped and transformed, becoming a completely decentralized application which is more convenient to protect the user’s information and asset security.
The platform has a system that encourages users to create and transform applications, autonomously and users can form new parallel applications by transforming the original metaverse applications so that they can obtain certain token rewards and create to earn.
This incentivizes users to continue to create and maintain applications, and achieve the perpetuation of applications from the perspective of user motivation.
Users can make different versions of metaverse applications according to their own preferences. For example, multiple users have formed a variety of different versions of the game through the transformation of one game so that users can freely shuttle in multiple versions of the game and enjoy the experience with their own assets, virtual identities, game equipment, etc.
What is more popular is that the cost of using the Ethanim platform will be preferentially deducted from the staking interest from the users when running the verification node. So it is equivalent to the user using the service for free.
For the developers:
Developers can use any familiar language to develop metaverse applications like YouTube, TikTok and other social, e-commerce, and entertainment applications which is fully compatible with the traditional development ecosystem.
Existing legacy applications do not need to be retrofitted and can be migrated directly to Ethanim.
Developers do not have to learn the blockchain technology to develop metaverse apps like traditional apps and can issue Token NFT assets with one click.
In addition, the platform is compatible with assets issued by other public chains.
Even if an app has issued assets on other public chains, its application can still be deployed on the Ethanim platform.
Platform application of free creation does not cause the loss of interest in the application of the original developers or loss of interest in the author.
When a user of the original application on the basis of creation and renovation creates a platform for the new version of the application at the same time. With the new creator being rewarded, the author of the original application will also get a certain reward.
This will realize the application at the same time as constantly being creative, and the original author of the application can also receive a steady stream of rewards.
If a developer develops a successful blockchain app. The more users there are, the more system tokens will be rewarded and a part of the pay-to-use fee paid by the user will be rewarded.
For the miners:
Metaverse requires a lot of image computation, if you have an idle GPU mining machine, you could freely access Ethanim to contribute computing power and get token rewards. Mining in traditional blockchain networks often requires professional large mining machines.
However, the threshold for choosing to become a validator mining on the Ethanim platform is particularly low and could be run by using smartphones or laptops.
Ethanim encourages applications to build their own economic models to reward various nodes.
For example, if you run a validator, you can get the mining reward of the platform at the same time.
You can also become the node of the platform application, get the reward, and build up credit so that you can get more mining rewards.
Ethanim brings a new blockchain solution to the metaverse, creating great value for all parties in the ecosystem, and will become the underlying infrastructure and entrance to the metaverse!
In the end, I believe Ethanim can benefit the Trias community in many ways.
Firstly, Ethanim mainnet uses Trias’s underlying technology of -1 Layer and machines running in Ethanim form node of Ethanim, as well as altogether forming a node of Trias Mainnet. The sum computing power maintains and solidates the Trias Mainnet.
Secondly, TRIAS can be used in the Ethanim economy as a utility token and governance token until the Ethanim community matures.
Afterward, the TRIAS token will be used as a generative token for the mining and swap token for Ethanim token.
In other words, TRIAS holders can benefit from proactive earning by swapping TRIAS for the new token, and also from passive earning of the utility, staking and token burn during the whole process.
In addition, it can connect with many game studios, artists and metaverse builder and enrich the Trias Ecosystem.
I’m personally excited to have the Ethanim team start their work and ventures.
That’s all I want to share with the community in this roadshow.
Host: Thank you, Dr. Ruan, thank you for your wonderful sharing! Ethanim is a great invention to help people live on web 3 for eternity. I believe the whole community is excited about this! | https://medium.com/@triaslab/the-recap-of-ethanim-roadshow-6c1ed2cf1ddb | [] | 2021-12-30 12:21:33.190000+00:00 | ['Ethanim', 'Triaslab', 'Blockchain', 'Metaverse'] |
18 Questions W/ Drippy Say | Recently I caught up with buzzing Florida rapper, Drippy Say, who’s releasing an upcoming banger called “Skrt”. If you’re hip to the current culture and sound of Florida rappers, you will definitely appreciate Drippy’s signature style which is different from anything else coming from the Sunshine State. I asked Drippy Say 18 unique questions about his journey, interests and who inspired him to get to know more about the promising Florida rapper.
LL: WHAT FIRST GOT YOU INTO MUSIC?
DS: WHEN I SAW ROD WAVE IN CONCERT AND HE TOLD ME AND A FRIEND TO JUMP THE GATE, THAT INSPIRED ME TO START MY MUSIC CAREER.
LL: WHO INSPIRED YOU TO MAKE MUSIC?
DS: TLC , BUSTA RHYMES, ROD WAVE, DA BABY, NBA YOUNG BOY, THE LATE GREAT 2PAC AND NIPSEY HUSSLE
LL: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE MUSIC THAT YOU TYPICALLY CREATE?
DS: ITS A URBAN , HIP HOP AND POP TYPE MUSIC
LL: WHAT IS YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS LIKE ?
DS: I FIRST LISTEN TO THE BEAT AND THEN I CREATE MY LYRICS
LL: WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO COLLABORATE WITH ?
DS: CARDI B , MIGOS, DA BABY, LIL BABY AND NBA YOUNG BOY AND MARSHMELLOW AND THE LATE GREAT NIPSEY HUSSLE AND 2PAC
LL: IF YOU COULD OPEN A SHOW FOR ANYBODY WHO WOULD IT BE ?
DS: DA BABY, ROD WAVE AND CARDI B
LL: WHAT IS ONE MESSAGE YOU WOULD GIVE TO YOUR FANS?
DS: NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS
LL: WHAT IS THE MOST USELESS TALENT YOU HAVE?
DS: RUNNING TRACK
LL: DO YOU SING IN THE SHOWER?
DS: MY MUSIC
LL: WHAT WOULD YOU BE DOING RIGHT NOW IF IT WASNT FOR YOUR MUSIC CAREER?
DS: WORKING A 9–5 CUSTODIAL JOB
LL: WHERE HAVE YOU PERFORMED?
DS: APOLLO TAMPA, WHISKEY NORTH, SILVER ULTRA LOUNGE
LL: WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE AND LEAST FAVORITE VENUES?
DS: I LIKE LIMELIGHT IN TAMPA, I DONT REALLY HAVE A LEAST FAVORITE, I LIKE TO PERFORM ANYWHERE
LL: DO YOU HAVE ANY UPCOMING SHOWS?
DS: YES IN ATLANTA , SILVER ULTRA LOUNGE
LL: WHAT FAMOUS MUSICIANS DO YOU ADMIRE?
DS: MICHAEL JACKSON
LL: WHAT IS THE MOST TROUBLE YOU’VE EVER GOTTEN INTO?
DS: GOT INTO A FIGHT WITH THREE GUYS AND WE ALL GOT ARRESTED
LL: WHAT IS THE BEST ADVICE YOU’VE BEEN GIVEN?
DS: ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE BIGGER PICTURE IN LIFE
LL: IF YOU COULD CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT THE INDUSTRY , WHAT WOULD IT BE?
DS: FOR ALL RAPPERS TO COME TOGETHER END THE BEEF AND KILLING EACH OTHER, BE BETTER ROLE MODELS
LL: WHATS NEXT FOR YOU?
DS: KEEP MAKING MUSIC AND ONE DAY FIND MY WIFE AND BUILD MY FAMILY
“Skrt (Own It)” by Drippy Say set to release soon. Stay tuned!
Florida Rapper, Drippy Say at Hoodrich Films Headquarters in Atlanta, GA.
Follow Drippy Say:
Instagram: @__drippysay | https://medium.com/@leshalove/18-questions-w-drippy-say-347e454a2aec | ['Lesha Love'] | 2020-12-18 19:10:32.294000+00:00 | ['Drippy Say', 'Florida Rapper', 'Tampa', 'Rise Up Music Group', 'Hip Hop'] |
You had a lot to say this week | I love when I can read someone else’s work and feel the energy of the piece. It’s like the words are lightning bolts that leap off the page and charge my mind.
That feeling happened a lot this week and our writers are to thank. They delivered moving monologues on love, fear, absence and guilt. Here’s what you missed:
I also jumped in the mix this week with a piece titled Chaos and Creativity. It’s a short think piece on our ability to create through strained conditions.
We already have more stories coming in so next week promises to be equally as inspiring. Keep submitting. We’re staying open to submissions over the holidays so if you feel like you have something to say, say it. We’ll publish it. | https://medium.com/cry-mag/you-had-a-lot-to-say-this-week-a6246e939852 | ['Kern Carter'] | 2020-12-12 12:46:45.529000+00:00 | ['Newsletter', 'Fear', 'Creativity', 'Love', 'Writing'] |
Web Scrapping practice-Michelin Taipei(2) | First of all, we’d like to retrieve data from the first store. To find the HTML tag from store one, we should first find these store is contained in which block. We can find that 20 stores is contained under the div class “col-lg-12 search-results__column”, and each store is under the same class name “col-md-6 col-lg-6 col-xl-3”. That is, you can think of each store as an item list, and combined as a whole list, if you want get data from any store, just specify the list number.
However, we only want to get certain data, such as store name, store category, picture url, etc. Thus, we should apply some code to do so.
We could also convert the data we received into data frame. Same way can also be applied to get picture URL, store URL and store name.
Finally, let’s combine all the code we tried above and write it into functions.
def showsite(siteurl):
html = requests.get(siteurl).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html,'html.parser')
#category is under the ".card__menu-footer--price" class
kind = soup.select(".card__menu-footer--price")[0].text.strip() #delete left and right spaces
print("category:",kind)
print("url:",siteurl)
#get page url function
def getpageurl(page,url):
global n
html = requests.get(url).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html,'html.parser')
rest = soup.find(class_="col-lg-12 search-results__column")
items = rest.find_all(class_="col-md-6 col-lg-6 col-xl-3")
#print out current page and total stores in this page
print("This is the " + str(page) + " page, total " + str(len(items)) + " stores")
link = soup.findAll("a", {"class": "link"})
leng = len(link)
urlList = []
storeList = []
siteList = []
for x in range(leng):
n+=1
print("n=",n)
urlList.append(link[x])
itemurl = urlList[x]['href']
siteurl = rooturl + itemurl
showsite(siteurl)
siteList.append(siteurl)
name = urlList[x]['aria-label'][5:]
print("Store:"+ name)
storeList.append(urlList[x]['aria-label'][5:])
import pandas as pd
pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1)
table = pd.DataFrame({
"store":storeList,
"url":siteList
})
print(table)
#if you want to import csv, use the code below
#table.to_csv(r'C:\Users\user\Desktop\Jupyter\michelin_webscrap.csv', encoding='utf_8_sig')
#main code
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
#set up user-agents
headers = requests.utils.default_headers()
headers.update({ 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +
n = 0 #count items
homeurl = '
rooturl = '
#test for the sencond page
getpageurl(2,homeurl) #show detail information in each storedef showsite(siteurl):html = requests.get(siteurl).textsoup = BeautifulSoup(html,'html.parser')#category is under the ".card__menu-footer--price" classkind = soup.select(".card__menu-footer--price")[0].text.strip() #delete left and right spacesprint("category:",kind)print("url:",siteurl)#get page url functiondef getpageurl(page,url):global nhtml = requests.get(url).textsoup = BeautifulSoup(html,'html.parser')rest = soup.find(class_="col-lg-12 search-results__column")items = rest.find_all(class_="col-md-6 col-lg-6 col-xl-3")#print out current page and total stores in this pageprint("This is the " + str(page) + " page, total " + str(len(items)) + " stores")link = soup.findAll("a", {"class": "link"})leng = len(link)urlList = []storeList = []siteList = []for x in range(leng):n+=1print("n=",n)urlList.append(link[x])itemurl = urlList[x]['href']siteurl = rooturl + itemurlshowsite(siteurl)siteList.append(siteurl)name = urlList[x]['aria-label'][5:]print("Store:"+ name)storeList.append(urlList[x]['aria-label'][5:])import pandas as pdpd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', -1)table = pd.DataFrame({"store":storeList,"url":siteList})print(table)#if you want to import csv, use the code below#table.to_csv(r'C:\Users\user\Desktop\Jupyter\michelin_webscrap.csv', encoding='utf_8_sig')#main codeimport requestsfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup#set up user-agentsheaders = requests.utils.default_headers()headers.update({ 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; + http://www.google.com/bot.html)' })n = 0 #count itemshomeurl = ' https://guide.michelin.com/tw/zh_TW/taipei-region/taipei/restaurants/page/2?lat=24.1506212&lon=120.6433008' rooturl = ' https://guide.michelin.com' #test for the sencond pagegetpageurl(2,homeurl)
This is the basic practice of web scrapping, it still requires a lot of improvement, I’ll go on working. Please feel free to express any idea, opinion, or suggestion. | https://medium.com/emilyshasha/web-scrapping-practice-michelin-taipei-2-1683db629936 | ['Emily Chen'] | 2020-01-16 00:40:28.311000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Web Scraping'] |
How to Order Wine at a Restaurant | Shooting Darts in the Dark
For many of us, ordering wine in a restaurant is like shooting darts with our eyes closed. We set the bar quite low for ourselves when it comes to defining success, and often we’re content just to hit the board. We may aim for a delicious wine (and strive not to embarrass ourselves in the process), but how can we expect to consistently nail our target when we’re shooting blind? Well, I have good news, my friends. You don’t need to be an expert to order awesome wine and impress your dinner companions in the process. I’m going to give you the lay of the land so you know exactly how wine lists and waiters operate, then I’m going to provide you with a trusty wine ordering script. When you’re done reading this article you’re going to aim for that bullseye and know how to hit it every time.
Lay of the Land
The Markup: It’s no secret that restaurant wines have massive price markups, and in a restaurant world that’s astronomically cost-heavy, you really can’t blame them. While there’s clearly fluctuation in pricing patterns from restaurant to restaurant, on average, they sell their wine bottles at three times the wholesale price they paid (about double retail price). So that delicious bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon you bought for $25 at the local wine store will run you about $50+ at a restaurant. Depending on the price level of the wine you buy, the retail markups can run as high as 400%.
Restaurant wine prices and their markups have an inverse relationship, so the cheaper the wine the higher the price markup, and vice versa. There is one exception to this rule— the second cheapest bottle on the menu.
2nd Cheapest Bottle Ruse: Restaurant owners understand that you won’t want to come across as a big cheapo when it comes to ordering wine. And they’re spot-on, aren’t they? Most of us scan the wine prices to find a glass or bottle that’s just barely above the most inexpensive option on the list. It’s not the cheapest, and it’s not all that expensive relative to the alternatives, so what’s not to love? Those who price the wine list penalize you for this tendency by greatly marking up the second tier of cheapest bottles.
Don’t be afraid to go for the cheapest bottle on the list (not to be confused with the unpalatable ‘house’ wine, which is typically only provided by the glass). In my experience, the most inexpensive bottle is usually a lovely wine.
Glass vs. Bottle: Should you buy a bottle, or individual glasses? The typical by the glass wine volume poured at restaurants equates to 1/4 of the bottle, and is generally marked up more than a single bottle. So if you know that at least three glasses of the same wine will be imbibed, buy the bottle!
Sometimes, however, paying the additional markup for individual glasses is worth it. You’ll have more variety amongst the wines you get to experience over the course of the meal, as well as the versatility to pair the wine perfectly with each dish. Furthermore, your dinner mates might have clashing wine preferences, so you may need to go the glass route to keep everyone happy. Just remember, you’re paying a big premium.
‘House’ Wine: Avoid this swill at all costs. While glasses of ‘house’ wine are the cheapest available, the markup is massive. It’s not uncommon for the restaurant to charge for a glass what they paid for the entire bottle. Egregious markups notwithstanding, the quality of this wine is inferior and very little thought went into its quality or taste; the sole focus was profit-margin. Not worth your hard earned money, folks.
Disclaimer: If you’re in the wine wonderlands of the world like Napa, Tuscany, etc. you will find restaurants that provide quaffable house wines, but these are rare gems that are few and far between.
Unique Brands & Varietals: Experiment with lesser known brand names and indigenous grape varietals. These don’t sell as well as the Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignons of the world, so you can rest assured that if the restaurant owners went out of their way to include them on the wine list they must be worth their weight in terms of quality and deliciousness. Moreover, the markups for these mysterious gems are typically lower, so you’re getting a deal.
Anchoring Effect: We are all subject to a cognitive bias known as the ‘anchoring effect.’ Simply put, it posits that our initial observations stay with us, impacting our ensuing perceptions and subsequent decisions. For example, consumers have a tendency to be highly influenced by the first price they encounter when considering a purchase. The effect has been well documented in studies, including chocolates, electronics, and yes, fine wines. When you start perusing through the wine list and see that the majority of bottles are $90 or higher, you may feel inclined to stray above your price target of $50 and buy that $70 bottle. Don’t fall into this anchoring trap!
Food/Wine Pairing: We usually glance at the wine list first, but if you want to be thorough you should determine your food before ordering the wine. There’s a small list of “high risk” foods (most contain significant amounts of sugar, bitterness and/or spiciness) out there that have the potential to completely ruin your wine, and that’s the last thing we want. If you think you’re potentially ordering a “high risk” meal you should let the waiter know so an appropriate wine can be selected. Having said that, many diners can get way too caught up on food/wine pairing to the point where they deprive themselves of wines they really enjoy, so if you’re not in the “high risk” zone order what you like!
The Wine Ordering Script
Now that you know the lay of the land, how do you proceed? I suggest following these five steps every time you order wine.
Image attributed to dievole.com
Step 1) Survey the Table
After you’ve been seated, have a brief discussion with your dinner companions to better understand these two items:
Whether they want individual glasses vs. bottles
Their likes and dislikes (e.g., red vs. white, ill-favored varietals, etc.)
Step 2) Set Your Price Limit
Determine what your price max is and stick to it! Don’t let the median price of the wine list coax you into straying from what you feel comfortable paying. I first fell in love with wine at a price ceiling of $50 per bottle.
Step 3) Utilize the Server / Sommelier
Unless you’re a wine expert and feel comfortable making selections on your own, it is absolutely in your best interest to utilize the server / sommelier for guidance. There is one caveat, though. You must provide the right information. Think of ordering wine in a restaurant like a trip to the doctor — you need to convey your symptoms in adequate detail to get the proper diagnosis. This can be quite intimidating in a restaurant setting, so I’ve boiled the complexities down to the essential points.
Here’s what you need to convey:
Red or White
Fruit-Forward, Earthy, or Somewhere In-Between
The “body” of the wine, which refers to its mouth-feel in terms of weight and thickness. There are three options here: light-bodied (e.g., skim milk), medium-bodied (e.g., whole milk), and full-bodied (e.g., cream).
Price point. This one can get tricky when you’re on that high stakes date or trying not to look like a cheapskate in front of a group of people. How can we communicate our price range to the server without revealing it to our companions? Simple! All you need to do is open the wine list, point directly to a price that you’re comfortable with and say, “I‘m considering a bottle like this.” There’s an unspoken understanding in the restaurant business that this translates to “This is precisely how much I’d like to pay, but I don’t want to say it aloud.” It works like a charm every time.
In summary, the conversation would go something like this. “Hi there! I’d like to order a bottle of red wine to share for the table. We generally prefer medium-bodied wines that are nice and fruit-forward. Brian hates Pinot Noir (blasphemy!), but other than that we’re totally flexible. I am considering a bottle like this (point to price), but would love to hear your suggestions based on our preferences.”
That’s it! You’re officially the wine-ordering Godfather, and your friends’ jaws are on the floor. More importantly, you’ve just given the server more than enough information to make some awesome recommendations for you and the table. Bravo!
Step 4) Sample the Wine
Now that you’ve selected a bottle, the server will begin the wine presentation ritual. First, you will be presented with the bottle to confirm that it is in fact the one you ordered. Don’t forget to check the vintage here. You’d be amazed how often servers pull wines from a year that’s entirely different from what you ordered.
Image attributed to satynmag.com
The server will then pull the cork and pour a tiny taste of the wine into your glass so you may determine whether it’s corked or defective in any way; the purpose of this is not for you to determine whether or not you like the wine! Sorry, but once that cork was popped you committed yourself to buying the bottle. Thankfully, cork taint is a rare phenomenon, only occurring in 3-5% of the world’s natural corks.
Give the glass a few swirls, a deep sniff and a taste. Typically, corked wine will give off unpleasant aromas of moldy newspaper, wet cardboard or dank basement. If something smells/tastes off, do not hesitate for one second to tell your server that you think the wine may be corked. Any establishment that’s halfway respectable will extend their apologies and then head back to pull another bottle from the cellar free of charge.
Step 5) Enjoy!
Once you’ve confirmed that the wine is sound, it’s time to sit back and revel in the fruits of your labor! Be sure to enjoy the wine at your own pace. Some waiters will hyperactively refill your wine glass because they want to kick that first bottle ASAP in hopes that you’ll buy more. And on the flipside if your waiter is slow to refill your glass then do not hesitate to reach for the bottle and do the deed yourself.
Stick to these five steps every time you order wine and it will go from what once felt like shooting darts with your eyes closed to hitting the ball out of the park and into another stratosphere. Your dinner companions will be chanting your name as you make your way around the bases.
*Cover illustration attributed to Mr Vincent Mahé | https://thevintopia.com/how-to-order-wine-at-a-restaurant-4e0d7404043a | ['Mike Peterson'] | 2020-10-08 01:18:01.875000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Food', 'Wine', 'Life Lessons', 'Life'] |
Growing your business with Progressive Web Apps(PWA) | Progressive Web Apps can grow your business and help you win
(PWA)Progressive web apps have come to stay in our world. Everybody uses social media and all our day to day applications from our gadgets. But do we know how all these come to be? Is there a benefit for business owners willing to take advantage of what developers offer?
First of all, what is a Progressive Web App?
Think of a Progressive web app (PWA) as a result of integrating a webpage with any native mobile application. This is because it is facilitated by the internet and is accessed via a web browser of a mobile device or computer.
Medium and large scale enterprises are dashing into progressive web apps. There is a big room for cooperation and business to engage both customers and users with a variety of services and options via advertisement and to crown it all, an excellent user experience.
What your business stands to gain if you use a Progressive Web App
Advantages of Progressive web apps PWA
Forget the App Store
Progressive web apps don’t call the need for a mobile app store. Users can easily download and access progressive web applications. This is enabled by straight access to a browser. However, it all leans on the type of mobile operating system you possess. For Android, you need to run an installation of the PWA. iOS, on the other hand, you can simply add it manually to your home screen.
No internet no problem
With progressive web apps, cached data are saved each time you use the internet. The key here is that you can access a PWA with or without the internet. You can save content, fill forms, and use some other functions but you need an internet connection if you want to send data.
Compatibility
You can build a progressive web app on time than a native app for a mobile platform. You can develop a PWA once and for all, it cuts and works across any platform. This is an advantage of uniqueness and as well as cross-platform compatibility.
After google developed a new technology called the WebAPK it became an icing on the cake. PWAs in the form of an executable file can be installed on any Android device the same way as a native mobile app.
PWAs are also replacing the urgency for Chrome apps platform, developing a PWA that runs with installation by Google Chrome browser, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or any of the leading browsers out there.
Easy Updates
progressive web apps need no any kind of manual updates from the user end. Everything is automated for the user and directly from the developers’ side. This gives the convenience of an easy update without going through the app store.
Accessibility
The progressive web app runs on less technical infrastructures if compared to native apps plus the use of lesser data. It loads and runs with more speed, betting delays even with the oldest mobile network. You can imagine the advantage an enterprise can gain now that we have 5G networks and greater processing speed.
Progressive Web App and your business business
UI/UX Factor
Every organization and enterprise should have it in mind that access to clients begets profit. The advancement of software programming and recommendations from leading developers greatly shows that it is advisable, cheaper, and faster to code a PWA.
Irrespective of the volume of audience, content management, and release for PWA is at once and for all users. The update is easy and fast, happening each time a user connects to the internet and refreshes the webpage.
The user experience of a progressive web app is a catalyst for user engagement and in return more income. It runs seamlessly on any device optimizing the web browsers and making the pages display easily and nicely.
Action time
After all said and done, it is evident that the Progressive Web App(PWA) is the best for businesses and enterprises. It encompasses the optimization of advertising and the drive of traffic through excellent user experience. This makes your brand stand a better chance. You will enjoy productive and efficient business solutions for your businesses and at the same time win the confidence of the users.
iTwis provides custom software development services that cover a vast range of business needs including outsourcing. Our partners and clients are business owners from different private sectors.
We have shown a strong capacity in IT consulting and delivered as a trusted software development team Our consultant would be glad to discuss your software development challenges and come up with the most suitable solution designed for your business needs. | https://medium.com/itwis/growing-your-business-with-progressive-web-apps-pwa-75da049befa1 | ['Ayo Oladele'] | 2020-07-02 05:31:10.937000+00:00 | ['Cross Platform', 'Mobile App Development', 'iOS', 'Android', 'Progressive Web App'] |