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Designing Hybrid Workshops in 3 parts | I hope to run a free 2 hour workshop by Zoom on ideas around designing hybrid workshops at the end of September (probably Friday 24th). I’ll update information as it becomes clearer.
This post is to describe the purpose and structure of the workshop.
Sharing Wonder
The opening of the workshop is not part of the Zoom workshop. It is delivered by podcast and pdf.
I have written a longer post about this content already on Medium. You can read it here.
The key points are:-
Think about what you want to share. Is it Wonder! (here is some skill or knowledge I wish to share) or Wonder? (here is a question I wish to share).
(here is some skill or knowledge I wish to share) or (here is a question I wish to share). Think about your role: are you a Teacher or a Facilitator?
Thinking about these questions is necessary so as to know what kind of workshop you need to design.
Doing this work prior to the 2 hour Zoom encounter means that you can engage more meaningfully with the content and discussions.
I’d also recommend using that time to buy these books.
I recommend Teaching Walkthrus if you are aiming to teach a skill or process to people.
I recommend Liberating Structures if you are aiming to facilitate answering a question with people.
Offering Safety
The Zoom workshop will start with some activities that describe the psychological safety frameworks that I use. They have developed over the years of facilitating in-person workshops and have been adapted as workshops shifted to online only.
I use a number of different tools to describe to workshop participants how they are in control and how their choices around engaging with the workshop content and activities that are prioritised.
Being clear about safety is essential. That need has been heightened by the switch to hybrid workshops.
Being explicit about personal autonomy matters.
This workshop will share ideas I have, tools I use and provide time for people to talk of their own experiences and ideas.
You can read a post about Losing Control To Gain Comfort on some of these ideas.
Architecting Activities
The second part of the Zoom workshop is about practicalities of structuring workshops and content.
I’ll describe a simple structure that I used in a previous Designing Workshops workshop in Aarhus.
I will share a couple of tools that I use to plan activities. These cover two important areas:
Time : how much time any workshop activity takes to complete is easily misunderstood. Errors in planning timings can cascade thru the workshops and create major problems in delivering content. You can read a post about a tool I use on Time.
: how much time any workshop activity takes to complete is easily misunderstood. Errors in planning timings can cascade thru the workshops and create major problems in delivering content. You can read a post about a tool I use on Time. Social interaction: how many people are involved in any planned activity? Group activities can be stressful. What you think is good fun can be psychologically demanding. Think about what you are asking of people. You can read a post on Design Circles which I use to plan around such issues.
What you want to teach or facilitate is for you to decide. All I can offer is some ways of planning and anticipating where errors or stresses may occur.
Online workshops make it harder both to involve people and harder to check that they are fine.
Building on the offer of safety, this architecting of activities is a way of designing workshops that deliver content clearly and confidently.
It is clarity and confidence that are the main points of this workshop. Helping you be clear in what you want to do is the foundation. Helping you feel confident in designing and delivering your own workshop is the main structure.
Let me know if you want to attend the free workshop. I will send information on the event when I know more. Send me an email. | https://medium.com/@acuity-design/designing-hybrid-workshops-a4124955d8f2 | ['Alastair Somerville'] | 2021-09-09 16:21:10.267000+00:00 | ['Workshop', 'UX', 'Facilititation'] |
Frequently Asked Questions About Christmas | Frequently Asked Questions About Christmas
When satan tempted Christ, Christ never used logic to refute satan. Each and every time the devil came up with a logical explanation why Christ should worship him, or tempt God, or misuse His power, Christ used only Scripture to counter him.
Why? Because you cannot defeat satan with logic. You can only defeat him with the word of God. Hence James 4:7 teaches “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
Notice from the above that the only way to resist the devil is by submitting to God.
When you want to defend Christmas and you do not use Scripture, but use logic, you are operating at a level in which satan is stronger than you.
Remember that Eve relied on logic, rather than the word of God. “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”-Genesis 3:6.
How did satan get Eve to do this? He did it by saying “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
satan achieved his aim by attacking the Word of God. By making Eve doubt it. And by making her feel she could go outside God’s Word and create her own doctrine, which God’s Word did not teach.
satan has no new tricks. He has not changed. He is the same devil he was in the Garden of Eden. So, now, let us consider some Frequently Asked Questions About Christmas.
Question 1: Is Christmas not okay since Church Fathers chose December 25th as Christmas Day?
Answer: Then why did Paul say “even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!”-Galatians 1:8?
Question 2: I don’t see anything wrong with it. If you like you observe Christmas. If you like you do not observe Christmas. Why are you disturbing me?
Answer; Then why does 2 Timothy 3:16 say “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”? We are meant to get our doctrine from Scripture, not from “I think”. We are not meant to think up our own doctrine. We are meant to trust and obey Scriptural doctrine.
Question 3: But the three wisemen celebrated the birthday of Christ.
Answer: No they did not. There was no three wisemen. Scripture says “wisemen from the East”-Matthew 2:1. It does not tell us how many wisemen there were. Also, the beginning of that verse says “AFTER Christ was born”. That means they did not come to see a newborn baby, as many have been misled to believe. They only started coming AFTER CHRIST WAS BORN.
Luke 2:7 teaches us that Christ was born as a baby. “in a manger.” Matthew 2:11 teaches us that by the time the Magi (wisemen) visited Christ, He lived a “house” and he was a “child”, not a baby.
And finally, on this score, after King Herod ‘enquired diligently’, “he put to death all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were TWO YEARS OLD and under, according to the time he had learned from the Magi”-Matthew 2:16.
Question 4: Well, Matthew 18:18 said “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Does that not give us power to set our own doctrine?
Answer: When you take Scripture out of context, it becomes a pretext.
To understand Matthew 18:18, you have to read from Matthew 18:15.
“If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”-Matthew 18:15–18
Christ was dealing with sin in the church. He was not given His disciples any authority to establish doctrine outside of Scripture. The binding and loosing He referred to was the forgiveness of sins and we see the parallel in John 20:23:
“If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
Question 5: Paul said “One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Another regards one day as special does so to the Lord”-Romans 14:5–6. Does that not give us freedom to celebrate Christmas?
Answer: Paul here was not referring to holidays. He was referring to the quarrel between Pharisees who became Christians, and non Pharisees who accepted Christ. The Pharisees wanted them to observe worship on the Sabbath day, and the others (mostly Gentiles), did not observe the Sabbath day. If you read verse 1 of that chapter, Paul called such issues “disputable matters”.
God has given us leeway to worship Him on any day we choose. Paul is not saying we should celebrate extra scriptural holidays.
In fact, in 1 Corinthians 10:20 Paul said “the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I DO NOT WANT YOU TO BE PARTICIPANTS WITH DEMONS.”
Christmas is a pagan holiday to a demon god, that was later converted by the Catholic Church to a supposed birthday of Christ. No matter how you slice it, this is tantamount to being “participants with demons.”
The reason Scripture is holy, is because it is the word of God. What does that mean? It means that it is perfect and should not be added to or subtracted from. In fact, Revelations 22:18 warns as follows:
“I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book.”
Question 6: Would I go to hell if I celebrate Christmas?
Answer: I do not know. What I do know is that Cephas (Peter) said “judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?”-1 Peter 4:17.
Question 7: Why are you carrying this Christmas matter on your head?
Answer: Because, according to 2 Corinthians 5:20 “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
Reno Omokri
Gospeller. Deep Thinker. #1 Bestselling author of Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years. Avid traveller. Hollywood Magazine Film Festival Humanitarian of the Year, 2019.
Reno
You have the power to summon a stronger positive thought into your mind whenever a negative thought attempts to break into your mind | https://medium.com/@Omokri/frequently-asked-questions-about-christmas-dcdf10016502 | ['Reno Omokri'] | 2020-12-17 21:14:51.663000+00:00 | ['Christmas', 'Christianity', 'Christian Living', 'Life', 'Christian'] |
Do you have a Creative Bucket List? | Maybe it’s time to create one.
@thejournalgarden unsplash.com
I have a flood of creativity these days. I don’t know where to put it all. I haven’t been a true creative for 20 years. Now, I’m pouring buckets.
This morning, I read this post by Stefani Vader. She has a great suggestion for making a list of all the creative projects that she would like to pursue.
So, I started my list.
Last week, my to-do list was completely shoved aside. I was on a writing rampage on Medium. It was driven by sheer force and the creativity that was pouring out of me.
As I grow in my creative endeavors, I need to look at my to-do list as opportunities to create.
Projects on my to-do list have to be actual line items on my Creative Bucket List.
Otherwise, when I go through one of my creative rampages, all my to-dos on my to-do list become lost in my creative process.
I know, you are thinking that I’m over managing my creative life.
Well, as an analytical person and a creative person, I don’t know how else to manage this “Creative Beast” within myself. I need her to at least acknowledge the fact that being creative is great. But, we also need to channel this creativity into other endeavors such as Marketing, Editing and Communication.
This way our work will actually end up in front of our audience.
Now, I’m going to give some love to my blog and my social media accounts today. | https://medium.com/jun-wu-blog/do-you-have-a-creative-bucket-list-8a3cfe5a2408 | ['Jun Wu'] | 2019-11-07 11:55:05.326000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Productivity', 'Creativity'] |
How to develop spending habits | The Christmas shopping season is here! It doesn’t have to stay a pipe dream to get your fill of shopping and fine dining. Spending smarter can put you on the fast track to turning those “dreams” into reality.
Let’s discover how you can break bad spending habits and create new, healthy ones.
How to break your bad spending habits
Start by focusing on our not-so-great spending habits. There are three spending habits you need to break if you want to make your dreams reality:
1.Spending Without a Plan
It is common that a lot of you would find your money disappears quickly and quietly. You don’t know where it went as most of you don’t have a period budget. Paying too much for a loved bag, overspending on your hang-out budget, or impulse-buying accessories, all these would double as a knife sharpener. Too many people live on more than they make and use credit cards to cover the difference.
2.Making Impulse Purchases
In today’s constantly connected world, impulse shopping becomes the name of the game for many millennial consumers with instant gratification the modern norm. According to the statistics from Finder.com, it shows that 81% of millennials makes impulse buys at least once a month and on average, the amount spent per impulse purchase is $71 online and $82 in store in 2019. However, nearly half proportion of millennials tend to feel guilty after an impulse buy and regret it.
3.Spending Without Keeping Track
Spending money is not one-off. Losing track of the money you’ve spent or payments you’ve scheduled could eventually come back to bite you. When you pay for convenience without keeping track, money will slip between your fingers. So, it is necessary to track your spending and take the time to have a second count of your payments.
Replace Bad Spending Habits With Good Ones
1.Live on A Reasonable Budget
Give every dollar a name at the beginning of the month and make money work harder for you. Creating a plan for your money allows you to prioritize your spending. Put your money goals — perhaps getting out of debt or going on a vacation — at the top of your budget.
2.Understand Yourself and Your Motivations
It is important to have a better understanding of yourself and learn how to control emotion. For every one of us, our daily choices add up over time. Take a moment to think about where your spending habits come from and learn to say no to yourselves in order to gain something greater in the long run — regardless of your current emotions. It takes wisdom to make decisions based on what will drive you forward, and it takes courage to put blinders on to what other people think.
3.Make Room for Spending
Although we need plans for savings, don’t forget that our ultimate purpose is spending smarter. Instead of pretending that spending money is a bad thing, be intentional about setting aside a chunk of money — big or small — each month to do something you love and take your own time. Give yourself permission to spend some money!
Always keep in mind when you spend smarter, your money goes further. And it is not only about spending money, but also about enjoying life.
(Reference: Ramsey) | https://medium.com/@tanggram/how-to-develop-spending-habits-af10bfa0b312 | [] | 2020-12-16 00:25:15.343000+00:00 | ['Spending Habits', 'Money Management', 'Wealth'] |
What is a Product Manager? | When my journey in product management first began, I was in college, and did not fully grasp what it meant to be a product manager. As my career advanced and I gained a better understanding of what the role entailed, I noticed that the people around me who were not familiar with technology also did not fully understand what a PM (aka product manager) does. They often confused being a PM with being in marketing or even being a software developer. Those roles are not product management.
To help clarify, I decided to jot down some thoughts on what exactly a product manager is and does.
Product Manager 101
Think about your favorite website or app. It could be something widely popular, like Instagram, Google, Lyft, or Venmo. Or even something as impactful as a healthy habit-building app that allows people to successfully lose weight. People use these apps frequently because they provide simple and elegant solutions to modern-day problems small and large, whether hailing a car service, sending money virtually, or tracking your meals.
Most popular websites or mobile apps have a team of designers crafting how these services should look. These designers spend a great deal of time creating illustrations of what the website or mobile app should look like. To build it, the designers work with a team of software engineers, testing what’s possible and navigating through limitations.
But what if there is a disagreement between the team on what to build and why? Who can help the team decide what to develop in the first place? Who helps craft a vision of the app or website? What happens after you launch? How will you know if your product is successful?
This is where the product manager comes in.
A product manager is the person who is responsible for guiding a team (usually designers and software engineers) to improve areas of a product (typically a website or mobile app). The PM is responsible for working with and navigating the team through the messy day-to-day life of trying to make something from nothing.
To reach the goal of having the team create elegant, problem-solving products, the PM spends their time:
Talking with various departments internally to align on what problems the team should focus on resolving. This is done by creating new products or updating existing ones.
Creating a manifesto-type document that lists the goals for your product and team’s long-term work ambitions.
Defining what success looks like for the team. In other words, how do you know when you truly made an impact on the people who use your product?
Removing obstacles that block the team from making progress on improving their product.
And much more!
At a high-level, the role of being a PM is the combination of a sports coach, ambassador, artist, and scientist. You are a supportive leader who combines the creative freedom of being an artist with the data-driven mindset of being a scientist.
The Nuances
A PM’s typical day varies depending on the problems they need to tackle with the team, the context for the issues, and the severity. The changing dynamics of being a PM can confuse folks — even PMs themselves!
Thankfully, there are sources that can help. One great example: “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” by Ben Horowitz. Horowitz highlights the qualities that a good PM possesses as well as the qualities of a not-so-great PM. It’s’ a staple read for any PM. I’ve re-read it many, many times. With inspiration from that document, I’ve written the below to outline the nuances of being a product manager.
If “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” helps explain what a great PM is to anyone with a technology or product background, think of the below (or even this entire post) as a prerequisite! The idea here is to help illustrate the nuances that are a part of being a PM.
1) You have to enjoy the process of making a change to a product, but love the impact and outcome even more. A PM’s success is primarily measured not by what changes you implement, but by what impact the team’s changes have on the people who use your product.
2) You need to be able to think in the clouds but live in reality. A PM has to have the ability to help create “out-of-the-box” solutions but also be grounded enough in reality to know what is realistically feasible to implement. Some PMs get caught up in perfecting designs or talking about a theoretical change. Remember, you are measured by what you actually achieve, not by what you plan or assume is going to help.
3) You are not a Swiss Army knife, but possess a wide range of skills to help guide your team to a goal. A common misconception for PMs is that they need to have the skill set necessary to be a designer, engineer, data analyst, and more. That is not the case. A PM needs to have enough expertise and knowledge in these areas to guide the team to make sound decisions. You are not an engineer or designer, but you understand enough about these areas to lead the team to create great products.
4) The people on your team do not report to you, but you hold a position of leadership. Your team usually consists of designers, engineers, analysts, and more who do not report to the PM. In some organizations, the PM may be their manager, but usually, the PM is not the boss of the product team.
An analogy for this is how a surgeon interacts with a team of people such as nurses, operating room technicians, and anesthesiologists. While the team collaborates to accomplish a goal and the surgeon leads the team to achieve that goal, the surgeon typically does not manage the others in the room. The same is true for the relationship the PM has with their product team.
5) It’s not about being right or wrong; it’s about your team and your product being right, in that order. This is important. Since the responsibilities of being a PM ultimately include a leadership role, some PMs mistakenly think that to be successful, they have to have the answer to every question — not true. The PM needs to work closely with their team to create and develop ideas together, not by themselves. Each member of the team has a unique perspective, which allows the team to craft ideas that have a higher probability of being successful. When multiple people of different disciplines review and give feedback on how to improve something, you have a higher chance of reaching success as opposed if you did not.
This isn’t an exhaustive outline, but it highlights some of the essential qualities of a product manager.
Last Thoughts
Product managers have a unique role. They have many hats to wear, they must display constant leadership, and they have a sense of duty to both their company and to their users. There is a delicate balance between all of these areas. The PM is ultimately responsible for the success of both the team and the product. If the team or the product fails, the burden is on the PM.
That said, the reward is great. You can make a positive change in the lives of the people who use your product or service!
For example, at WW I’m part of a team that enables people around the world to join our program and live healthier lives. We’ve developed easy to use tools that allow anyone to learn and seamlessly join our program. Most recently, we worked on the release of a new customized program that matches members with a food plan that best aligns with their lifestyle and food preferences. The work may be challenging at times, but it’s massively fulfilling!
— Jason Saber, Product Management at WW (formerly Weight Watchers)
Interested in joining the WW team? Check out the careers page to view technology job listings as well as open positions on other teams. | https://medium.com/ww-tech-blog/what-is-a-product-manager-e29f268249b7 | ['Jason Saber'] | 2020-01-07 15:07:27.006000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Product Management', 'Careers', 'Product Manager', 'Tech'] |
How Effective Is Facebook Advertising? | My Own Experience
Back in the day, I worked for a few small firms selling various household products as well as running a promotional campaign for a streaming channel. It was not my choice to promote on Facebook, but I have been using Facebook for the past seven years and had a few courses done in social media marketing.
My last assignments advertising on facebook
For most of the firms, I have been told that they desire to promote nationally which meant the United Kingdom, but for one of them I have been told to promote not necessarily internationally but, to research in which countries the advertising campaign would be most effective and choose five different countries that are relatively big in population.
This was a part-time job, but the amount of qualitative research I had to do to ensure that the fund for the advertising campaign was not going to go down the drain and used efficiently made me more of a full-time worker. The research required for any type of social media advertising campaign can be intensive if you want to gain the most from it.
The types of products that I had to advertise were a series of cleaning products and different household gadgets. All of the posts were up to a business standard quality making sure that the products were advertised as well as possible. Most of the banners and posters were done by me and another friend using Adobe Photoshop.
The performance of the posts varied a great deal. Most of the time I ended up getting the views that I had paid for. Rarely that number would double and the reason for that can also vary on many different factors but from my analyses, the post really caught on with the population to which it was advertised to.
Analyzing the performance of the advertising campaign
To make a conclusion on the performance of the marketing or advertising campaign did not go that well based on the amount spent. However, I was aware and expecting such results for the reason of knowing the products I was trying to advertise would not end up being a hit on social media. At the same time, the resources I had at hand did not allow me to do extensive research which could also have been a vital point of the not so good results.
There is a lot more complexity to social media advertising than people would think. Yes, if you have the financial muscle to just throw money left and right at different types of advertising then you are automatically throwing efficiency out the window.
Those examples were startup businesses that were trying their best with whatever resources they had and thought that any product will have a success on social media. However, as mentioned before, there are many more factors to take into account. As a big picture, advertising on its own for most small businesses is like a betting game, trying different things to see what type of advertisement is most efficient.
Looking at this from a marketing perspective
From my own experience as a business adviser as well as a marketer, I will tell you that research is just so vital I am not able to stress it enough in words. Most people fail at research as they either do not have the patience in order to go through extensive research or do not know how to do extensive research. Marketing researchers can end up being expensive for a startup or small business.
To this day I am still quite dependent on Facebook, though I can say it is slowly dying at least in the United States and West Europe. It is very difficult to research this fact with statistics and this is because of the huge number of fake accounts present on social media platforms and especially Facebook. This can also be seen as another reason to not choose to use Facebook as an advertising platform.
With a better look into the marketing perspective, we can say that it very much depends on the number of competitors you are going up against. If the number is big then you automatically will require doing much more advertising than most of them, which is very expensive.
If they decide to promote on the same platform as you, then you either have to promote twice as much so as to overtake them or sell to a different public that has not been exposed to the competitors yet.
So it comes down to those types of factors, If based on your research you think your business can be promoted well through the Facebook platform then go for it, however, do keep in mind other factors that may affect your type of business. Therefore it may work for some businesses and may not for others. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-effective-is-facebook-advertising-1158292b7d37 | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2019-11-15 21:49:30.460000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Business', 'Research', 'Social Media', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
How to set up a Hapi.js project and create your first route? | Hapi.js logo
Hapi.js is basically an abstraction layer on top of Node.js which makes it easier to create restful APIs with it.
In this Tutorial we will create a simple REST API with Hapi.js. We will start by setting up a project and adding all the dependencies needed, then setup the databases and create some fake data, and finally create the CRUD routes.
Ready? Let’s jump right into it then.
First things first, open your cmd and locate yourself where you want to create your new project.
create a folder for your project with mkdir test-hapijs
Go inside your folder with cd test-hapijs
& now initialize your project with npm init -y
This will allow us to install the following packages we need for this tutorial.
npm i @hapi/hapi reflect-metadata sqlite3 typeorm
since we are using typescript, we should also add the types for the libraries we have just installed, therefore run this command as well:
npm i @types/hapi @types/node ts-node-dev typescript -D
The ts-node-dev dependency will allow us to run our code as well as recompiling and re-running our code every time we make a change in our typescript files.
All good? Let’s get started. Open your project with your fav editor. (I personally use VSC)
In order to be able to run our typescript files we should add the following line “ts-node-dev”: “ts-node-dev” to our package.json under scripts.
Once you are done, create index.ts in your root folder.
Now we should go to the index.ts file and write an init function to create a server and run the code. To do so, please follow the following steps:
Don’t forget to call the init function at the end.
To Run the project, open your terminal and paste:
npm run ts-node-dev index.ts
Result
Hallelujah, you are all set up!
Now, let’s define our first hello world route!
To create a route we should do as follow:
The route should always receive an object that contains the HTTP method and a path. The handler is the function that will be executed when the path is called.
If you open your Postman & try calling the route you will definitely have this result.
This is the first part of the Hapi.js series.
I hope that it was a clear and straight forward explanation, please let me know if you have any questions at info@techsoupe.com
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techsoupe/ | https://medium.com/@khouloudkhezami/how-to-set-up-a-hapi-js-project-and-create-your-first-route-with-typescript-ac04943b77ad | ['Khouloud Khezami'] | 2020-12-06 13:54:02.676000+00:00 | ['Hapi', 'Hapijs', 'Typescript', 'Backend', 'Rest Api'] |
Niger Delta communities in ‘great danger’ as month-old oil spill continues | This article originally appeared in Mongabay.
Featured image: Barge transporting oil drums in the Niger Delta. Image by Stakeholder Democracy via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Oil has been spilling from a wellhead in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state for a month now, with the local company responsible unable to contain it.
Experts say the scale and duration of the spill is so severe that it’s imperative that local communities be relocated for their safety.
Oil spills and other forms of pollution caused by the industry are common in Bayelsa, the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Companies, including foreign oil majors, are largely left to self-declare the spills that frequently occur, but face only token fines for failing to respond quickly.
Crude oil from a blowout has been pouring into creeks in the Niger Delta since Nov. 5, with the well’s owner, Nigerian energy firm Aiteo, unable to contain the spill and specialists called in to help.
The blowout, at a non-producing well in the Santa Barbara field in Bayelsa state, has caused extensive pollution of rivers and farmland in the Nembe local government area, according to the state governor, Douye Diri. According to the News Agency of Nigeria, he said Aiteo should not think that “this criminal neglect of its facilities and disregard for human life and the environment, as demonstrated by its conduct, will not be accounted for.”
In a statement released Nov. 22, the company blamed the incident on sabotage. “Aiteo remains committed to ascertaining, immediately the well head is secure, the immediate and remote causes of the leak which will be driven by a [joint investigative visit] that will follow,” it said.
The oil industry in Nigeria attributes many oil spills to sabotage by people trying to steal crude. Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), which relies almost entirely on the industry itself for access to on- and offshore oil facilities, reports that around 75% of spills are caused by sabotage and theft.
The joint team initially despatched to the Nembe spill was unable to determine the cause of the spill, as the wellhead could not be accessed “due to hydrocarbon fumes that saturated the atmosphere in the area.” A video of the spill site, captured Nov. 29, showed a high-pressure stream of brownish liquid spraying through the creeks from a wellhead as technicians worked on the site.
The scale of the spill has overwhelmed local disaster response capabilities, and U.S.-headquartered oil-well control specialist Halliburton Boots and Coots has been drafted in to “kill the well,” a process that involves injecting cement into the well to plug it.
“Work is still ongoing at the site to stop the spill,” NOSDRA director-general Idris Musa told Mongabay last week, but all activities around the well were temporarily suspended Nov. 29 to allow the well-kill operation to proceed.
Decades of destruction
The Niger Delta is rich in biological diversity and natural resources. Its creeks, swamps and mangrove forests are home to fishing and farming communities as well as threatened species including manatees (Trichechus senegalensis), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ellioti), and the Niger Delta red colobus (Piliocolobus epieni).
But decades of oil production have made the region one of the most polluted places on Earth. NOSDRA recorded 639 oil spills in just the past two years, resulting in 28,003 barrels spewed into the environment, according to the agency’s data.
Bayelsa is where oil was first discovered in Nigeria, in 1956. In the decades since, oil spills from wells and pipelines have contaminated farmland and water bodies, and exposed residents to toxic chemicals. Flaring of gas has led to acid rain falling on the area, while contributing to making Nigeria the 17th largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
This environmental destruction has been caused by oil majors including Shell, Chevron and Eni. The Nembe well was bought from Shell by Lagos-based Aiteo in 2015.
“It is extremely disturbing because the trend we are seeing now is that international oil companies know that their equipment are dilapidated, and to avoid responsibility, they move offshore and sell to gullible local companies who think they can make profit and are not ready or equipped to [deal with] this kind of emergencies,” said Nnimmo Bassey, an environmentalist and founder of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), a prominent green NGO in Nigeria.
Dead and dying trees near the site of a previous Niger Delta oil spill in 2020. Image by Sosialistisk Ungdom (SU) via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).
Consequences — just not for oil companies
The impact of the Nembe spill on local communities and the environment is still to be determined, but Samuel Oburo, an environmental activist affiliated with Friends of the Earth, who lives about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Nembe, says villagers in the area have been badly impacted.
“I can tell you that the people there face great danger. They have started crying out. They have started experiencing strange illnesses due to the unfriendly atmosphere this spill has exposed the community to,” he told Mongabay over the phone.
But getting oil firms to clean up or pay for environmental crimes in Nigeria is difficult. Legal claims for compensation can take years, even decades, and companies are expected to pay relatively little in fines when they err.
NOSDRA’S regulations say oil companies have 24 hours to respond to the discovery of a spill. A joint visit by government agencies, company officials and community representatives should take place as soon as possible. But a 2018 study by Amnesty International found frequent delays, with some spills continuing for months after they were reported.
Shell, one of the largest operators in the country, visited spill sites within 24 hours on just 26% of occasions, Amnesty said. The slowest response time recorded was when Eni took 430 days to respond to a spill in Bayelsa state. “These delays point to serious negligence. Shell and Eni are wealthy, powerful multinationals: why can’t they act faster? Why can’t they do more?,” the report said.
But the penalties for noncompliance are negligible: 1 million naira ($2,400) for an initial default, and an additional 500,000 naira for every day after that.
“How much is N500,000 to an oil company?” NOSDRA’s Idris Musa said. An amendment increasing the fines is in progress.
Speaking to the ongoing spill at Nembe, HOMEF’s Bassey said that considering the apparent scale and duration of the latest spill, the safest option for residents of the area is to be relocated. “This area does not have pipe-borne water, and when the river is covered with crude oil, it means they have to depend on imported water,” he said. “Some may drink from that river because these areas are permanently polluted and they have no option. Children will swim in that river and people will drink from that river.”
“Crude oil contains very toxic heavy metals like lead; you know, lead affects a lot things concerning people, the nervous system, causes cancer. You have mercury in oil, you have cadmium, you have arsenic and benzene and many others,” he told Mongabay.
“So anybody eating fish from that river is in trouble already. So the relief that they are giving, I believe they should actually evacuate people from that territory at this time.”
Oburo agreed: “So long as the spill continues, there is nothing that can be done to restore the air quality. The only solution is to evacuate those people from there because their lives are precious.”
Bayelsa government spokesperson Dan Alabrah said the state is providing relief materials to communities, but had no plans to relocate them. | https://medium.com/@deepgreenresist/niger-delta-communities-in-great-danger-as-month-old-oil-spill-continues-30393bb648a4 | ['Deep Green Resistance'] | 2022-01-14 13:16:28.085000+00:00 | ['Energy', 'Featured', 'Oil', 'Food Security', 'Human Health'] |
Jump For Joy | Lying restlessly in bed
early Saturday morning,
The sun filtering through
the dusty blinds,
I pick up my phone,
and a notification
Flashes like a beacon
across my screen.
My heart jumps for joy.
Today I can buy my book-
Not just any book
but the book I have
Been Obsessing over
Languishing for
longing for
With as much anticipation
As a woman waiting
for her lover
To come home from a long
seemingly never ending
Untenable war.
The book that is a sequel
To the book
I read over a year ago
But the characters
still live within me
Every day they
whisper enticingly
Mulling over possibilities
wanting desperately to tell
Me their story:
what happens next
On their danger fraught
journey through life.
anticipation mounting-
I shower and head out
Glad that
Barnes and Noble
Offers hot steaming coffee
Along with that piece of
heaven I plan to fall
into as soon
As my purchase
is firmly in my hand.
The problems I am facing
Along with the
desperate blankness
Of this sometimes
unbearable life
Will be shed
like a snake shedding
Her worn out
and well used skin.
And I will tumble into
The welcome oblivion
of creative imagination
As I assume the persona
Of my favorite character
And live our her life-
A welcome respite from
The monotony of my
assembly line like
Routine focused existence.
I will savor each decision
Each moment of her life
As it unfolds miraculously
minute by minute
Hour by hour
Day by day
Page by page
As we travel together:
souls merging on our
Engrossing exciting quest
For the end of the story.
And I wil cry her tears,
Love with her love,
be braver than I have
Ever been in my own life:
Chasing my nirvana
Through the pages of my
Long coveted-soon to be
hoarded and devoured
treasure of words. | https://medium.com/@millerdebbie511/jump-for-joy-5365a85701bc | ['Debbie Miller'] | 2021-01-04 05:40:41.409000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Illumination', 'Scrittura', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry'] |
Baby related consultants are stealing parent confidence | In Israel COVID 19 has ruled supreme. Well-baby clinics, lactation consultants, mommy and me groups all but vanished in the beginning of march.
Mothers are usually pretty lonely during maternity leave, and now the little interaction they had was ripped away. Dealing with parenthood on their own, flooded with information from the internet, tuning their parenting compass alone.
The perfect setting for a public opinion storm to arise. On a daytime radio show a public figure, talked about the trials of putting her 4 month old through sleep training, focused on the baby going to sleep by herself with no aids.
Attachment parenting, and co-sleeping proponents attacked on social media insisting baby’s needs need to be met day and night. In response, extinction focused sleep consultants lashed back claiming that helping baby fall sleep can lead to sleep problems in the future.
The poor mother, just 4 months into parenting, in a global pandemic no less, found her parenting scrutinized, in a very ugly verbal war.
As a lactation consultant I had my opinion, discussed with colleagues, thought I should write my own response, and then I saw so many other responses. How are parents supposed to know who to listen to?
Ask 5 health care professionals about parenting, and you will get 5 different answers.
Working in a well baby clinic, following parenting groups on social media, I find parents feeling unsure at every turn, looking for answers.
Should I hold my baby or will it spoil him? Are they spitting up because they ate to much? Is she hungry? Is it gas? Does my baby need a day and night routine at 4 weeks old?
Mothers usually play the self blame game answering to themselves: I am spoiling her, she can’t sleep because of me, she has gas because I fed her too much, she can’t sleep because we don’t have a routine.
While reflecting on this latest scandal I found myself setting a clear intention for every parent I meet from now on: Grow their confidence.
The parent that spends their time nurturing baby knows them best. Health care professionals and parenting consultants need to help parents find their groove. We all have our instincts, our gut tells us if we are parenting well.
Help them listen to their instincts, ask them, if the tools you are bringing to the table are the right fit for their family. Allow them to start a process and find that they need a different path.
At 2:00 AM, parents are alone with their baby. They may be following the advice of a sleep coach, they may be ignoring that advice. They need the tools to cope and the confidence they are parenting well. | https://medium.com/@hitamarshaked/baby-related-consultants-are-stealing-parent-confidence-6c583504e77b | ['Tamar Baharav Shaked'] | 2020-07-07 10:50:13.219000+00:00 | ['Baby Sleep Training', 'Lactation Support', 'Baby Sleep Consultant', 'Lactation Consultant', 'Baby Sleep'] |
OVER THE T-OPTIMISM: POSITIVITY HAS A LIMIT TOO! | Source: theaggie.org
Ever come across someone who is a ray of sunshine, always smiling and so optimistic that you want to… punch them in the face? Everyone has. Not to sound like a Negative Nancy, but enough with the positivity!
While arithmetic may state otherwise, all positives do make a negative. The phenomenon of toxic positivity has been brought to light relatively recently. But like they say, better late than never! Before we delve too deep, let’s first discuss what toxic positivity really implies.
In simplest terms, If I’m an optimist, I would say something like, “I’m here for you, no matter what.” However, if I practice toxic optimism, I would say, “Everything happens for good.” Positivity would be looking at life solution-oriented, expecting good out of situations, and being hopeful. Now imagine a life full of rainbows and roses, where everyone is humane, and you’re Louis Armstrong, and the world is wonderful, sorrow is a construct of society, and happiness isn’t a feeling anymore. It’s an imposition. That’s where you cross the line to the dark side. Toxic positivity isn’t something made up by the pessimists of the world, it is rather a realist’s perspective.
It is always nice to help others out, make them feel good about themselves, and contribute to making the world a better place. But you never know when you might cross the line. For instance, one of your friends is going through a tough time. Would your first reply be “We are lucky, some people have it much worse”? Or something to the effect of “Happiness is a choice”? It may sound like a pep talk to you, but it’s a big thumbs down. You, my friend, unfortunately, have been affected by toxic positivity.
Source: mhhsnews.com
In a global pandemic where many have lost their loved ones and role models, the most common virus to affect us will have to be the toxic optimism virus. This may not have landed people in quarantine, but it sure has affected the lives of many. The cause? Exposure to too much positivity. The coronavirus came with its ups and downs, with anxiety throughout the world, initially about what led to the pandemic and recently about the vaccines and their effects. In this atmosphere of paranoia and apprehension, one needs reassurance and warmth, and toxic positivity is a potential threat to an individual’s wellbeing. So the takebacks from the pandemic would be: Wear a disposable mask, not one that hides your authentic self!
While “toxic” has become a commonplace word nowadays, considering how relationships fall like dominos, how does the phenomenon of “toxic positivity” affect one?
This situation causes one to suppress one’s emotions. Research shows that emotional repression may cause an increase in heart rate. More significant levels of negative affect, lower positive affect, more unfortunate social change, and diminished wellbeing have been connected to the concealment of feelings. (Campbell-Sills et al., 2006)
Another consequence of this is invalidating one’s feelings and emotions. This essentially makes the person feel ashamed to have felt a particular type of way.
Parents across the Indian subcontinent manage to make one’s problems seem minute because “kids are dying of hunger, at least you have a shelter over your head.” You could be struggling with your grades but, hey! You have access to education, and you’re going to a private school. You can’t complain.
Finally, toxic positivity can also discourage expression and ultimately arrest growth as a human being.
Source: edtimes.in
Now that the basics have been covered, the question is, where do you draw the line? It’s simple. In one word: Empathy, in many: Would you want to hear what you’re going to say? More importantly, understand that negative feelings are also feelings. Suppression would only cause build-up, which, not unlike a volcano, would unavoidably lead to an explosion.
Life isn’t about making the best out of everything or seeing the good in every one or putting quotes on your Instagram that tell you to keep smiling through it all. It’s about acceptance, about making peace with the fact that if you didn’t have the bad days, you wouldn’t value the good!
Not every cloud has a silver line,
and feeling good is as valid as feeling just fine! | https://medium.com/@malvikakapoor/over-the-t-optimism-positivity-has-a-limit-too-b6fc0af2c497 | ['Malvika Kapoor'] | 2021-09-05 15:52:29.010000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Emotions', 'Psychology', 'Optimism', 'Positive Thinking'] |
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars “2021”| Series 6 Episode 1 (Full) Episode | ⭐A Target Package is short for Target Package of Information. It is a more specialized case of Intel Package of Information or Intel Package.
✌ THE STORY ✌
Its and Jeremy Camp (K.J. Apa) is a and aspiring musician who like only to honor his God through the energy of music. Leaving his Indiana home for the warmer climate of California and a college or university education, Jeremy soon comes Bookmark this site across one Melissa Heing
(Britt Robertson), a fellow university student that he takes notices in the audience at an area concert. Bookmark this site Falling for cupid’s arrow immediately, he introduces himself to her and quickly discovers that she is drawn to him too. However, Melissa holds back from forming a budding relationship as she fears it`ll create an awkward situation between Jeremy and their mutual friend, Jean-Luc (Nathan Parson), a fellow musician and who also has feeling for Melissa. Still, Jeremy is relentless in his quest for her until they eventually end up in a loving dating relationship. However, their youthful courtship Bookmark this sitewith the other person comes to a halt when life-threating news of Melissa having cancer takes center stage. The diagnosis does nothing to deter Jeremey’s love on her behalf and the couple eventually marries shortly thereafter. Howsoever, they soon find themselves walking an excellent line between a life together and suffering by her Bookmark this siteillness; with Jeremy questioning his faith in music, himself, and with God himself.
✌ STREAMING MEDIA ✌
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the procedure of delivering or obtaining media this way.[clarification needed] Streaming identifies the delivery approach to the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies especially to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio tracks CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the web. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of this content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content.
Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, an activity in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user may use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as for example live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”.
This brings me around to discussing us, a film release of the Christian religio us faith-based . As almost customary, Hollywood usually generates two (maybe three) films of this variety movies within their yearly theatrical release lineup, with the releases usually being around spring us and / or fall respectfully. I didn’t hear much when this movie was initially aounced (probably got buried underneath all of the popular movies news on the newsfeed). My first actual glimpse of the movie was when the film’s movie trailer premiered, which looked somewhat interesting if you ask me. Yes, it looked the movie was goa be the typical “faith-based” vibe, but it was going to be directed by the Erwin Brothers, who directed I COULD Only Imagine (a film that I did so like). Plus, the trailer for I Still Believe premiered for quite some us, so I continued seeing it most of us when I visited my local cinema. You can sort of say that it was a bit “engrained in my brain”. Thus, I was a lttle bit keen on seeing it. Fortunately, I was able to see it before the COVID-9 outbreak closed the movie theaters down (saw it during its opening night), but, because of work scheduling, I haven’t had the us to do my review for it…. as yet. And what did I think of it? Well, it was pretty “meh”. While its heart is certainly in the proper place and quite sincere, us is a little too preachy and unbalanced within its narrative execution and character developments. The religious message is plainly there, but takes way too many detours and not focusing on certain aspects that weigh the feature’s presentation.
✌ TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY ✌
A tv set show (often simply Television show) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. Tv shows are most often scheduled well ahead of The War with Grandpa and appearance on electronic guides or other TV listings.
A television show may also be called a tv set program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies is The War with Grandpaually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and so are The War with Grandpaually split into seasons (The War with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new episodes. A show with a restricted number of episodes could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The War with Grandpa show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television set rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video.
Television shows may very well be Bookmark this sitehey are broadcast in real The War with Grandpa (live), be recorded on home video or an electronic video recorder for later viewing, or be looked at on demand via a set-top box or streameBookmark this sited on the internet.
The first television set shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within an extremely short range from the broadcast tower starting in the. Televised events such as the 2021 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 2021 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famoThe War with Grandpa introduction at the 9 New York World’s Fair in the The War with Grandpa spurreBookmark this sited a rise in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 2021 World Movies inspired many Americans to buy their first tv set and in 2021, the favorite radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a well balanced, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The firsBookmBookmark this siteark this sitet national live tv broadcast in the The War with Grandpa took place on September 6, 2021 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in SAN FRARuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars CO BAY AREA was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets.
✌ FINAL THOUGHTS ✌
The power of faith, love, and affinity for take center stage in Jeremy Camp’s life story in the movie I Still Believe. Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin (the Erwin Brothers) examine the life span and The War with Grandpas of Jeremy Camp’s life story; pin-pointing his early life along with his relationship Melissa Heing because they battle hardships and their enduring love for one another through difficult. While the movie’s intent and thematic message of a person’s faith through troublen is indeed palpable plus the likeable mThe War with Grandpaical performances, the film certainly strules to look for a cinematic footing in its execution, including a sluish pace, fragmented pieces, predicable plot beats, too preachy / cheesy dialogue moments, over utilized religion overtones, and mismanagement of many of its secondary /supporting characters. If you ask me, this movie was somewhere between okay and “meh”. It had been definitely a Christian faith-based movie endeavor Bookmark this web site (from begin to finish) and definitely had its moments, nonetheless it failed to resonate with me; struling to locate a proper balance in its undertaking. Personally, regardless of the story, it could’ve been better. My recommendation for this movie is an “iffy choice” at best as some should (nothing wrong with that), while others will not and dismiss it altogether. Whatever your stance on religion faith-based flicks, stands as more of a cautionary tale of sorts; demonstrating how a poignant and heartfelt story of real-life drama could be problematic when translating it to a cinematic endeavor. For me personally, I believe in Jeremy Camp’s story / message, but not so much the feature.
FIND US:
✔️ https://cutt.ly/On71E6z
✔️ Instagram: https://instagram.com
✔️ Twitter: https://twitter.com
✔️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com | https://medium.com/@rpdr-all-stars-6x01-vh1s/rupauls-drag-race-all-stars-2021-series-6-episode-1-full-episode-bedc0ef22ef3 | ['Rpdr', 'All Stars', 'Series Episode'] | 2021-06-24 08:30:03.748000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Technology', 'Covid 19'] |
What are Flavonoids? | We often speak to people who are highly educated about CBD. But even some of these users are unfamiliar with “flavonoids.”
While understanding what flavonoids are remains rare, the compounds themselves are common. Like our other favourite compounds terpenes, flavonoids appear in a range of natural products you’ve likely come across already today.
The Natural Colour Palette
The vibrant green of a parsley bunch, the enticing rouge of a summer strawberry or the translucent colour of a juicy grape. The vibrancy of fauna enriches our daily lives.
In fact, studies show houseplants improve our daily mood, reducing anxiety and providing a calming presence.
Flavonoids are responsible for the diverse range of colours we experience in all fruits and vegetables. They are the largest group of phytonutrients, with over 6,000 types.
However, they can be very delicate to heat during cooking. Shorter cooking times and lower heat can help to preserve these phytonutrients.
One way of telling if the flavonoids have been destroyed is through colour. This is why your broccoli may lose its vibrant colour when over-steamed!
Scientific Support
In recent years, the scientific community has awoken to their potential benefits. The Linus Pauling Institute has noted flavonoids may exhibit anti-inflammatory and immune system boosting properties.
There is a reason you have been told to eat five fruit and veg a day, since you were young. Diets rich in fruit and vegetables are associated with preventing cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.
Flavonoids in CBD
The Cannabis Sativa L. plant (our favoured species) is no different to other plants. There are about 20 known flavonoids produced in the cannabis plant. These phytonutrients lend the dark green colour to cannabis.
Flavonoids play an important role alongside other plant matter and terpenes in the “entourage effect.” This is as they also bind to cannabinoid receptors, and thus affect the ratios of processed compounds.
Flavonoids are typically more present in Broad Spectrum oils, displayed by its darker colour and richer taste. You may also be able to taste these phytonutrients more with a higher strength CBD oil, for more experienced users.
Meet the Flavonoids
1. Cannflavin
Ranging from Cannaflavin A through to Cannaflavin C, this range of Prenylflavonoids are abundant in cannabis.
A & B were discovered in the 1980s and Cannaflavin C was only identified in 2008.
These compounds help with the dark green colour in the cannabis plant.
There is ongoing scientific research to investigate whether they have anti-inflammatory properties.
2. Anthocyanin
This flavonoid is common in a range of plants and it’s a pigment that gives off red, purple and blue colourings.
This may seem very unusual to be a common flavonoid in cannabis. Yet, many strains of cannabis actually have purplish hues to the flowers. The most popular of these pay testament to the nutrient through their names- such as Granddaddy Purple, Purple Haze, Sour Grape and Purple Diesel.
Anthocyanins can be found in red onions, berries, grapes, pomegranates, tomatoes and elderberries among others. The media have labelled foods high in anthocyanins as “superfoods”, however, it’s too early in research to come to a conclusion.
They’re also responsible for the pigmentation of unusual vegetables such as purple carrots, sweet potato and broccoli!
However, as its such a delicate molecule, this pigment may be released into the cooking water when boiled.
3. Apigenin
A typical dietary flavonoid that is common in fruits, vegetables and Chinese medicinal herbs.
This compound has been used in traditional medicine for centuries. Like other flavonoids, Apignen can be found in many fruits and vegetables.
In particular, Apignen is ubiquitous in parsley, celery and chamomile. It even lends the yellowish hue to the latter.
It’s also commonly used to dye wool, seen as a more natural alternative to industrial chemicals.
4. Quercetin
The unusually named quercetin is a bitter flavonoid whose name comes from the latin name for oak forest.
It is frequently used as a dietary supplement in its own right in the United States.
Frequently found in the Cannabis Sativa plant, Quercetin also features in bitter foods such as watercress, rocket and capers. Surprisingly, it’s even included in some of our favourite drinks- such as green tea, coffee and red wine.
What are Terpenes?
Not unlike Flavonoids, terpenes are often found in cannabis. Yet, typically little is known about them.
The alluring fragrance of a citrus fruit, the calming scent of a pine tree, or the hot aroma of black pepper. Terpenes are the compounds responsible for all these smells, and much more.
A family of organic, aromatic compounds that are typically produced by plants, terpenes typically have strong, distinctive scents. These smells affect the behaviour of fauna that engage with the plant.
These scents affect the behaviour of animals that come into contact with the plant. This includes deterring animals that might want to eat the plant, or more positively attracting pollinating insects.
Mycrene is the most abundant terpene found in the Cannabis plant. It’s often described as having an earthy, fruity, clove-like aroma and is found in a huge variety of different plants, ranging from the fruit of the mango tree to wild thyme. A Swiss study from 1997 suggests it could comprise up to 50% of the terpenes in one strain of Cannabis Sativa L.
Limonene is the terpene found in many varieties of citrus fruit. These range from lemons (surprise surprise) to grapefruits. It’s also abundant in many different strains of Cannabis Sativa and those sold for recreational purposes in the USA. So, it gave rise to a variety of flowery names: lemon haze, lemon kush, orange kush, etc.
Limonene even lends its characteristic aroma to Broad Spectrum Dragonfly CBD Oil!
Which CBD Oils contain Flavonoids?
Not all CBD Oil contains flavonoids. In fact, you need to keep your eyes peeled for the right products.
A Broad Spectrum extract is best placed to deliver the range of plant matter needed for the appearance of terpenes and flavonoids. Made from Cannabis Sativa L. extract, Broad Spectrum Dragonfly CBD Oil retains the plant’s natural complexity. This CBD Oil harnesses the harmonising entourage of flavonoids and terpenes.
Using a special double-distillation process, our Broad Spectrum Oil is THC-free, which is uncommon for many similar products. | https://medium.com/dragonflycbd/what-are-flavonoids-9f51fa0f945d | ['Team Dragonfly Cbd'] | 2020-12-15 14:40:40.055000+00:00 | ['Cbd', 'Flavonoids', 'Cannabis', 'Cannabis Industry', 'Uk Cbd'] |
Deploy a Load Balancer and multiple Web Servers on AWS instances through ANSIBLE! | !! 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼 all!!
Welcome to my article based on TASK-3 of RH-294 -Linux Automation using Ansible (RHCE8) Training
🔰 TASK DESCRIPTION:
🔅Provision EC2 instances through ansible.
🔅 Retrieve the IP Address of instances using the dynamic inventory concept.
🔅Configure the web servers through the ansible role.
🔅Configure the load balancer through the ansible role.
🔅The target nodes of the load balancer should auto-update as per the status of web servers.
What is Load Balancer?
Load balancing is defined as the methodical and efficient distribution of network or application traffic across multiple servers in a server farm. Each load balancer sits between client devices and backend servers, receiving and then distributing incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling them.
So let’s start this task.
Create 5 ec2 Instances. Here I am taking a mixture of t2.micro and t3.micro. You can take any instance type. But be sure take t3.micro for Ansible Node. In which you have to Install Ansible.
1 — — Ansible Node (Controller Node) — t3.micro
1 — — LoadBalancer — t2.micro
3 — — Webserver — t2.micro
here I have used ansible to launch ec2 instances. code for launching ec2 instance using Ansible.
An image guide for better understanding.
Now we have to first create a role inside ControllerNode. Create two roles one for LoadBalancer and another for Webservers.
Set the webservers and load balancers inside Ansible hosts.
create a role folder mkdir /etc/ansible/roles all the roles will be inside this roles folder.
ansible-galaxy init webserver ---> role created for webserver ansible-galaxy init loadbalancer ---> role created for LoadBalancer
Also, create a directory to manage hosts files. Here i have created
mkdir /etc/ansible/roles/projects
Here a complete picture of the above explanation looks like.
Also, you need to set the path of role inside ansible configuration file (ansible.cfg).
Now we can start writing the playbook inside projects directory.
- hosts: web
roles:
- role: webserver - hosts: LoadBalancer roles:
- role: lbserver
After that, we have to configure the webserver of each instance. We have written the tasks in the tasks folder and handlers in the handlers folder.
now we can write the tasks inside main.yml.
- name: "install httpd"
package:
name: "httpd"
state: present
- name: "copy the content"
copy:
src: "/etc/ansible/roles/index.html"
dest: /var/www/html/
- name: "restart httpd"
service:
name: "httpd"
state: started
Here we have completed with configuring webserver. You can also use Handlers to restart the apache server. Now we have to configure the Load Balancer. First, install haproxy inside Controller node.
yum install haproxy -y ----> it will install haproxy
Then you need to change the port number binding. You can use any port eg 1234. Here I have used 8080. also, you need to provide the public IP of all the instances with 80 port. To give Ip randomly here we can use Jinja Template to extract the hostname of each ec2 instance.
backend app
balance roundrobin
{% for host in groups['web'] %}
server app1 {{host}}:80 check
{% endfor %}
Now go to configuration file of haproxy → /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg and copy the haproxy.cfg and paste inside /etc/ansible/roles/lbserver/templates. You can also give the location of configuration file of haproxy.
- name: "install HAPROXY"
package:
name: "haproxy"
state: present
- name: "copy HAPROXY configuration files to LoadBalancer"
template:
src: "haproxy.cfg"
dest: /etc/haproxy/
notify: lb restart
- name: "restart HAPROXY"
service:
name: "haproxy"
state: "started"
Now we are ready to run the ansible-playbook. go inside /etc/ansible/roles/projects.From here we can run the playbook.
ansible-playbook playbook name
Now we can check the weather our load balancer is working or not. Take public IP of load balancer with port 8080 (binding port)
As You can see the load balancer using Ansible on AWS is in action.
Summary: One-Click Instance Launched, Web Servers provisioned and Load Balancer ready!
If you find it useful please upvote it.
Connect with me in Linkedin | Github | https://arnabsaha1.medium.com/deploy-a-load-balancer-and-multiple-web-servers-on-aws-instances-through-ansible-6e950c43e4ca | ['Arnab Saha'] | 2020-11-05 09:59:20.589000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Haproxy', 'Ansible', 'Load Balancer', 'Redhat Linux'] |
McConnell shoots down bipartisan $900 billion coronavirus stimulus plan as stalemate | Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected a proposed bipartisan coronavirus stimulus package Tuesday amid months of congressional inaction on curbing the economic damage from the outbreak.
The Kentucky Republican, who has supported about $500 billion in new aid spending, said he wants to pass what he called a “targeted relief bill” this year. McConnell said he spoke to White House officials about what President Donald Trump would sign into law. He plans to offer potential solutions to GOP senators and get their feedback.
“We just don’t have time to waste time,” he told reporters in response to the roughly $908 billion plan put together by bipartisan members of the GOP-controlled Senate and Democratic-held House.
McConnell said a must-pass spending bill and pandemic relief provisions will “all likely come in one package.” Congress needs to approve funding legislation by Dec. 11 to avoid a government shutdown.
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WATCH NOW
VIDEO02:32
Lawmakers unveil bipartisan $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package
The framework of the bipartisan relief bill released Tuesday includes $288 billion in small business aid such as Paycheck Protection Program loans, $160 billion in state and local government relief, and $180 billion to fund a $300 per week supplemental unemployment benefit through March. It would put $16 billion into vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing, funnel $82 billion into education, and put $45 billion into transportation. It would allocate funds for rental assistance, child care and broadband.
The proposal would not include another direct payment to most Americans. It also would offer temporary federal protection from coronavirus-related lawsuits — a provision Democrats have opposed — while states determine their own laws.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a member of the congressional group that has discussed a new relief plan, earlier called it an “interim package” to provide support until President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.
“If there’s one thing I’m hearing uniformly it’s: ‘Congress, do not leave town for the holidays leaving the country and the economy adrift with all these initial CARES [Act] programs running out,’” Warner told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday.
WATCH NOW
VIDEO04:18
Where the money comes from for your stimulus check
It is unclear whether lawmakers can craft a plan that can get through both chambers of Congress before the end of the year, when many programs expire. Democrats have opposed liability protections and pushed for a $600 per week supplemental jobless benefit, while the GOP is against new state and local aid.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who worked on the proposal, said the group had no assurances from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., that they would vote on the plan.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McMcConnell (R-KY) speaks to reporters as Senate Republican leaders hold a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 1, 2020.
Kevin Lamarque | Pool | Reuters | https://medium.com/@pocnumber18/mcconnell-shoots-down-bipartisan-900-billion-coronavirus-stimulus-plan-as-stalemate-a6725600eb87 | [] | 2020-12-08 17:29:03.411000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Wdm', 'Eos'] |
One Eskimo For A Tuesday Morning | It ain't what you think. Former newsman, car salesman, teacher. Everything is Thou, if you so allow it. You can find some of it at https://youtu.be/w6RtVjMDHzE
Follow | https://medium.com/geezer-speaks/one-eskimo-for-a-tuesday-morning-12f8167aaf5b | ['Jeffrey Field'] | 2018-04-17 12:54:31.118000+00:00 | ['Loss', 'Animation', 'Love', 'Music', 'Adventure'] |
Best Winter Winter Jackets for men online at Powerlook | A lightweight, weather-resistant men’s jacket that is ideal to wear for everyday use. Features include Multifunctional hood adjusts to block the elements from your face at the push of a button, Full front zipper with wind placket seals out the elements and keeps you warm, 2 cargo pockets allow for convenient storage of small items such as your phone or book, Powder skirt zips on or off with included straps to keep snow and cold air out, Adjustable powder skirt also keeps your legs warm and comfortable. | https://medium.com/@powerlook1/best-winter-winter-jackets-for-men-online-at-powerlook-27d85c87acbf | ['Ritesh Bhuwad'] | 2020-12-25 11:17:00.750000+00:00 | ['Denim Jacket', 'Online Shopping', 'Bomber Jacket', 'Winter Jackets', 'Winter Jacket Online'] |
Extract text from image in Android using Firebase ML Kit | Firebase ML Kit is a mobile SDK for Android and iOS that enables developers to build apps using machine learning with ease. It has various capabilities including text recognition, image labelling, on-device translation among others. In this post, we are going to create a simple Android app that recognizes text from images we take with our camera. So let’s get started.
Firebase ML APIs
Create the project
First off, create a new Android project with an Empty Activity. We are going to use minimum SDK version 23 and our primary language will be Java.
Create new project
Create the layout
Next, we need to create the layout for our app. The layout looks as below:
Connect your app to Firebase
We need to connect our app to Firebase in order to use the APIs. Android Studio has a built-in Firebase tool for easy linking of your app to Firebase. Click on Tools->Firebase in your Android Studio top menu. On the sidebar that will pop up, navigate to Firebase ML and Connect to Firebase then add the dependencies required by clicking on Add Firebase ML to your app and accepting the changes.
Firebase Assistant in Android Studio
In your build.gradle(app) file, check for this dependency:
implementation ‘com.google.firebase:firebase-ml-vision:24.0.0’
Also add this line of code to your AndroidManifest.xml file
<meta-data android:name=”com.google.firebase.ml.vision.DEPENDENCIES” android:value=”ocr”/>
MainActivity
In our MainActivity.java file we are first going to bind our layout elements which we had an id for each in our layout. Next, we should set a click listener to our button that will perform the necessary operations. The first is checking for the camera permission. Don’t forget to add the permission to your AndroidManifest :
<uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.CAMERA”/>
In the method onActivityResult() , we perform the main operations of our app after the permission is granted by the user. We create a FirebaseVisionImage object from our image/bitmap. We then need to display the recognized text from our image to the TextView in our layout.
This project is hosted on GitHub:
And the Kotlin version:
https://github.com/liciolentimo/MobiVisionKt | https://medium.com/devcnairobi/extract-text-from-image-in-android-using-firebase-ml-kit-4bec9191d080 | ['Licio Lentimo'] | 2020-12-15 09:06:20.077000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'Firebase Ml Kit', 'Android', 'Firebase', 'Machine Learning'] |
Prevén que “e-commerce” aporte 15% de las ventas del retail en tres años | 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/krrrunch/prev%C3%A9n-que-e-commerce-aporte-15-de-las-ventas-del-retail-en-tres-a%C3%B1os-eeecf58fcfac | ['Julio Camacho'] | 2020-12-16 16:03:26.672000+00:00 | ['Ventas Online', 'Retail', 'Ecommerce'] |
Wyze Sprinkler Controller review: 8 zones, 50 bucks | The sprinkler controller is not such advanced technology that it should command more than a hundred bucks at retail. And yet it does. That’s in part because this market is so small that it has been able to resist significant price competition.
But now Wyze has arrived to shake things up, as it does in every product category it enters. In a market where most options hover around $150, the Wyze Sprinkler Controller hits the ground at a mere $50.
In order to keep costs down, Wyze’s devices tend to be simple affairs, and this controller is no exception to the rule. The fairly trim, oblong device offers eight zones, connecting to your valve wiring via simple spring clips, so no screwdriver is required to install the controller except for mounting it to the wall.
This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart sprinkler controllers, where you’ll find reviews of the competition’s offerings, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.A simple series of eight lights on the front illuminate to tell you which zone is actively running, and a set of four buttons to the right of the display can be used to run manual “quick runs.” You simply use the arrows to select a zone, and the other two buttons to start and stop the run.
Christopher Null / IDG The primary display offers a weather forecast plus info on both your prior run and the next.
The system sets up in Wyze’s do-everything app (I tested with final hardware but a beta version of the app, in advance of the January launch of the product) and connects to your network via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (only). In my testing, installation went quickly and completed successfully without incident, and soon I was able to begin working with my zones in earnest.
Numerous options are available for configuring your zones, including fixed scheduling based on time and day of week and a “smart” scheduling system called Sprinkler Plus, which uses localized weather information to manage your watering. Sprinkler Plus is a subscription add-on that costs $10 per year, but three years of the service are currently included with the product. Note that weather-based skips can’t be activated without a Sprinkler Plus subscription, even if you’re using an otherwise fixed schedule. Scheduling can, however, be set based on sunrise and sunset times without a current subscription.
[ Further reading: The best smart home systems ] Christopher Null / IDG It’s unclear how Wyze derives this soil moisture estimate.
The biggest catch with the device is that Wyze doesn’t do a great job of holding your hand during setup. To start with, I wasn’t presented with a wizard to set up my zones but was instead just dropped into the interface, complete with a default schedule that was set to deliver 20 minutes of watering over a 2-hour, 20-minute period (pausing frequently for 30 minute “soak” sessions). It also wasn’t clear how often this schedule would run—the upcoming calendar was blank—but after the first night of watering concluded, another instance appeared in the calendar three days following the first run.
I tried deleting this schedule, tweaking some characteristics of my lawn, such as sun exposure, slope, and soil type, and was then presented with a new smart schedule of a 40-minute block of watering (which is definitely overkill for my yard). Again, there was no indication how often this would run, as if Wyze decides day by day based on its arcane estimate of soil moisture and that day’s weather conditions whether or not it is going to water your lawn. As well, you must set up a separate backup schedule that Wyze uses in the event that your internet connection is lost (for more than 2 weeks).
Ultimately, I turned off the confusing smart watering schedule—as I’ve done with every other sprinkler controller I’ve tested—and set a fixed schedule of 10 minutes each evening. The good news is that you can fine-tune whether this schedule runs based on rain levels recorded, temperature, or wind speed (provided you have a Sprinkler Plus subscription). You can also skip certain days of the week based on days of the week or even if the date is even or odd. Wyze also offers a solid, calendar-based log of your watering cycles, and it provides push notifications whenever a watering run begins and ends. (All told, the interface is suspiciously similar to Rachio’s, with only a few modest differences.)
It’s nothing fancy—Wyze products rarely are—and if you don’t mind the $10-per-year surcharge come 2024, it’s a capable way to cover the basics, without having to fork over the 100-plus bucks that other controllers command.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@justin52792144/wyze-sprinkler-controller-review-8-zones-50-bucks-31034ffdeaa8 | [] | 2021-02-01 08:15:28.759000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Home Theater', 'Home Tech'] |
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Medium’s failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not operate as a waiver of such right or provision. These Terms, and the terms and policies listed in the Other Terms and Policies that May Apply to You Section, reflect the entire agreement between the parties relating to the subject matter hereof and supersede all prior agreements, statements and understandings of the parties. The section titles in these Terms are for convenience only and have no legal or contractual effect. Use of the word “including” will be interpreted to mean “including without limitation.” Except as otherwise provided herein, these Terms are intended solely for the benefit of the parties and are not intended to confer third-party beneficiary rights upon any other person or entity. You agree that communications and transactions between us may be conducted electronically.
Other Terms and Policies that May Apply to You
- Medium Rules
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- Custom Domains Terms of Service | https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e0f | [] | 2020-09-01 17:50:41.653000+00:00 | ['Terms And Conditions', 'Terms', 'Medium'] |
Women Who Inspire Us — Kajal Gada | Hello guys!
Welcome to the last interview of this year with: Kajal Gada
Hope you all are having amazing holidays with your friends
Let’s start with your awesome introduction:
Kajal: I am Robotics software engineer and a youtuber. My love for robots was an extension to my love for coding — it is the ability to create logical pieces that come together to change the world.
Which brings me to being a youtuber. Growing up my sphere of influence didn’t have women who worked cause they wanted to — they only worked to alleviate financial burden. I created my channel to change this mindset. My channel is a space where you see women with different careers along with advice on how to grow your career. It is simple — you see someone like you doing it and you believe you can do it too.
Wow! Splendid to hear Kajal the way you are changing the world. Check out her youtube page here.
Q) Tell us something about your journey:
Kajal: This is going to be a fun roller coaster. As a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. Then I encountered Biology and knew that this wasn’t for me. Somehow I ended up in the realm of engineering.
I remember my first coding class in college — I failed. I couldn’t understand anything. So a friend and I started learning from her aunt. She taught us the basic — if else, classes, etc. Enough to pass the course.
Next came my internship and that was the turning point. For the first time, I was coding beyond — creating a class to store information about students. I had a real world project. I built a vehicle tracking system — a small device that you plug into your car and you can know anything you want: where all did the car go, how fast was it being driven and you can even know your car is about to be towed!
This got me excited and my mentor told me about robotics. And that was it. I found my area of interest and then worked hard to make it. I would watch YouTube videos to improve my coding skills. I started playing around with an arduino and made my own fun robot.
I went to pursue my Masters in Robotics from University of Maryland. I graduated in 2017 and went on to work in the industry. I have about 3 years of experience.
There were a whole bunch of failures and struggles in each step. Each failure was a lesson that made me better and got me to where I am today.
Loved your roller coaster journey Kajal.
Q) Next up, what inspires you to move forward in your career?
Kajal: Seeing the robot move in the real world. I think that is the best part of being in the industry (apart from the money :P). You get to create and see your code running on robots in the real world.
Yes! Can imagine your excitement, we can definitely imagine how you write a few lines of code and with thousands errors and failures you finally get a result. Exciting indeed.
Q) Throw some light about your vision for your life
Kajal: Seeing more women in the workplace. Having a career is not just about money. It is also about using your talents to create something. Then use it to boost your confidence, create freedom of choice and enjoy life.
I do this through my YouTube channel and would like to reach a larger audience.
As a roboticist, I want to create robots that can make everyone’s job easier. Yes it is fun to have a robot that you can play with. But I would like to work on robots that do the boring repetitive jobs so we humans can work on more meaningful things. :)
Yes! Agreed. Work to build yourself, grow and show you talents, and for your freedom.
Q) Who or what inspired you to start your journey?
Kajal: Kalpana Chawla.
She was an astronaut and a roboticist. There was a brief period when I wanted to be an astronaut. When that didn’t work out, I went for robotics.
She taught me to go chase dreams and be brave and step on a space shuttle not knowing what the future holds.
Q) Which simple pleasures in life do you enjoy?
Kajal: Reading books. I absolutely love reading and disappearing into a world of imaginations. I enjoy reading detective and mystery novels. And Harry Potter.
Woohoo! Potterhead in the room.
We too as an avid reader can completely relate to your love for reading and escaping into different world via it.
Q) Lastly what is your message for young girls/women trying to achieve their dreams against all odds?
Kajal: Get comfortable with failure. It is very rare that you see people have a neat path to success. You will fail, so learn to be comfortable with failure. Then get back up and try again.
Be it college admissions, job hunting, starting your own company — there will be a few failures. The thing is you retrospect, find your mistakes, learn from it and go back to it again.
For example, I changed my dream a couple of times before I found the one I was passionate about. I tanked 7 interviews before nailing one that ended up with an offer. Truth be told I was laid off from that one in 2 months.
But since I had failed so many times already, I just got up and went job hunting again. And I found a new one in a month.
So get comfortable for a series of failure. :)
Our key takeaway:
Try different paths until you find what you love the most, be comfortable with failures as it is an undying path of your life, and don’t stop until you find your passion. | https://medium.com/women-who-inspire-us/women-who-inspire-us-kajal-gada-f731c5560af3 | ['Hiral Amar Thaker'] | 2020-12-27 12:33:06.675000+00:00 | ['Robots', 'Robotics', 'Women In Business', 'Women', 'Women In Tech'] |
Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack | Salesforce Nonprofit success pack is a part of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. It is an open source add-on application to salesforce.com with pre-built constituent and donor management features. NPSP is a number of managed packages, installed on top of Salesforce Enterprise Edition. It enables all the non profit organizations to manage some of their regular business forms. It is as of now perfectly in synchronous with Salesforce Classic, and some other Known issues with lightning version too. It is referred to as Nonprofit Starter Pack, which is a combination of managed packages developed and preserved by salesforce and made accessible for free through the Salesforce AppExchange.
Features of NPSP
To get the best of the NPSP, here are some top features to know
Synchronization of processes you do:- Nonprofit success pack is a business standard of salesforce customization, which meets every industry standards known for nonprofits. It is the base of a flexible platform that empowers nonprofits of any size to run your organization better and engage the process more deeply with customers which advance their missions.
Brings adaptability in Data Architecture:- Speed-Up your time to get opportunity and impact with NPSP to implement salesforce organization wide and extend to reach thousands of AppExchange or other Salesforce tools like Marketing Cloud and Pardot.
Donor Management & Constituent for Building Blocks:- NPSP provides accessibility built-in tools to manage events, donations, employees and other supporters for a single place. Its deep donor management allows efficient engagement of fundraising process. Manages the individual constituents and households, Tracks the information of Donor management like their demographic and contact information, and view their relationships and organization affiliations.
Globally powered-community movement:- NPSP supports joining a community of global trailblazers with tens of thousands of organizations and a lot of users in over 80 countries which shares best practices and help them to improve the code, documentation and more. Take advantage of the tremendous biology community of master execution accomplices that are energetic about helping you to turn into a connected Nonprofit.
Einstein for Nonprofits:- Einstein integration helps you to track donations which are received from different sources. It can determine whether an action should be taken to close a donor. It uses scoring to help and determine when to send messages as well as other activities like enrolling the donation in an engagement plan.
There are some other features like Engagement, Volunteer, Campaign Management and collaborative Quip reports.
The article was originally published at MicroPyramid blog | https://medium.com/@micropyramid/salesforce-nonprofit-success-pack-cdb5d35948f0 | [] | 2020-03-17 09:39:10.687000+00:00 | ['CRM', 'Nonprofit', 'Salesforce'] |
See it, Fix it, Cherish it | Much to my surprise, I suddenly got this amazing feeling of being freed from something. Like, the space around me was much wider, and my room was no longer congested. Not to mention the tiny sense of achievement I was having. Looking back at my watch, it hardly took me a minute to accomplish the task and I wondered, what keeps me from doing this every day?
Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was nothing but lazy and I would have surely succumbed to my “laziness” had it not been for an assignment. But a simple phenomenon such as this made me realize that all the small things in life that we could fix, should be fixed. If only we put in a little bit of extra effort throughout the day, our house, our workplace, and our personality would really blossom and it would benefit not only us but our companions as well. It all depends on us to take the initiative and organize our life and environment. We are our own leaders. Our behavior with our surroundings defines our behavior with our life. We could either let it unfold itself, or we could identify the problems, fix them, and cherish our lives.
In a commencement speech at the University of Texas, McCraven, a former US Navy SEAL, said,
“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.”
He added,
“If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made.” | https://medium.com/@hasanfarooq/see-it-fix-it-cherish-it-c2d9394aaf4d | ['Muhammad Hasan Farooq'] | 2020-12-18 22:20:31.917000+00:00 | ['Organization', 'Fixing Stuff Around You'] |
Bitcoin awaitings next year | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/gocryptoteam/bitcoin-awaitings-next-year-7ebb8cc1d410 | ['Igor Geronemo'] | 2018-11-09 21:20:26.385000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Year', 'Perspective'] |
Say A Little Prayer | Say a little prayer
for the person next to you
for the ambulance that passes by
the couple getting married
the person jogging on the street
the friend who needs it
the family member you love and support
the power of three
Hail Mary’s is unimaginable
Say a little prayer
miracles are bound to happen | https://medium.com/@annethanyamendis/say-a-little-prayer-f6741b3ba0fd | ['Anne Mendis'] | 2020-12-21 16:15:09.230000+00:00 | ['Faith and Life', 'Home', 'Prayer', 'Faith', 'God'] |
5 Life Skills I Gained As A Food Allergy Mom | From first reaction, to diagnosis, to hitting my stride — What I’ve learned from raising a child with food allergies.
Imagine the excitement of going to birthday parties when you’re a 3-year-old, where one of the most exciting parts is the birthday cake. Not so much when you’re the only kid in the room allergic to eggs. Just one of the many skills I’ve mastered as a food allergy mom is the ability to soften the blow beset upon the host when we politely decline the slice of cake passed his way. I prep myself for the response as they slowly make the connection: “Felix is allergic to eggs” and “this cake has egg in it.” “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even realize…”
At 11 months old I gave him his first forkful of eggs. Although he usually took great afternoon naps I thought the “No-Nap-Today-Mommy” attitude was perhaps the new, age-appropriate behavior I’d yet to be introduced to. But then he started to look at me funny, and pull on his ears. I had seen a lot of odd things in my first 11 months as a new parent but I don’t recall this one being covered in my “What To Expect, The First Year” manual. A diaper change was in order, a clean diaper would make anyone snap out of a funk. As I laid him down, he looked me right in the eye, and started to chatter his teeth. Adrenaline pumping, I scooped him up, grabbed my keys and headed to the car. We made it to the clinic just before the vomit started.
The blood antibody test concluded he was allergic to egg whites, almonds (tree nuts) and peanuts — three of the top nine allergens which cause the majority of food allergic reactions. Based on the potential for cross-contamination, the allergist recommended avoiding cashews and walnuts as well. While his first reaction didn’t result in “anaphylaxis — he did have vomiting, jitteriness, diffuse erythroderma, and some mottling, so he should therefore avoid all items with egg on the ingredient list, baked goods with eggs, casseroles with eggs and eggs of course.”
My job description was completely warped from one day to the next. I was scared to feed him anything at all. And even then, one month after receiving his diagnosis, I gave him pre-made lasagna from a grocery store for dinner, not realizing that it was made with egg noodle! A whole lot of hives, and one chunky baby thigh jabbed with an EpiPen later, we were back in the Emergency Room. I was failing at this.
Eventually, I found my groove. I realized that grocery shopping is made easy since most items sold in a store are required to denote any of the top nine allergens they may contain thanks to the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (FALCPA). I researched eggless pancake and muffin recipes and really put a lot of effort forth (ask my husband) until I realized that some things are just better left to the experts. Thanks to Bloom Bake Shop, a neighborhood bakery (Madison, Wis.) that makes “allergy-friendly” part of its business model, we have never been without a proper birthday cake, OR a substitute, vegan cupcake for whatever kind of birthday party came our way.
Albeit with a lot more experience under my belt navigating food allergies now compared to seven years ago, it feels like we are making progress. The fact alone that I no longer have to go to specialty grocery stores to buy SunButter® or Vegenaise® is testament that slowly but surely, society is starting to accommodate the food allergy community. Nonetheless, I’ve learned some valuable life skills along the way, like how to: | https://medium.com/@katielynnmoreno/5-life-skills-i-gained-as-a-food-allergy-mom-fd4b746e36f3 | ['Katie L. Moreno'] | 2021-09-16 01:44:47.632000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Parenting', 'Parents', 'Advocacy', 'Food Allergies'] |
My 2019 recap and the answer to my lifelong question… | My 2019 recap and the answer to my lifelong question…
My wonderful Improv 201 class at the Upright Citizens Brigade in LA
Welcome to Katlyn’s first annual year in review.
Why should you read this?
Well, maybe you are a friend or family member who felt neglected by me this year, and you wanna know what the heck I’ve been up to. Or maybe you’re a stalker of mine — in which case I’m flattered, but please don’t murder me this year. I have big plans.
Or maybe you’re a complete stranger. In which case, why should you read this personal blog post about a very specific person’s very specific year? Well, maybe… just maybe… you can relate to another human being on a deeper level than you expected. (Wow. What a beautiful thought, Katlyn. Thanks, Katlyn.)
In this post, I want to capture the theme of my year, a few epiphanies, a few mistakes, and the answer to a very big question.
First: the theme of 2019.
Lemme say: I highly recommend themes. Themes are great. A year is a compilation of countless moments that can really only mean anything if we give them meaning. That is what a theme does: unifies those moments and gives them meaning.
The theme of my 2019: Stretching.
Not like this kind of stretching. (My year was nowhere near this zen…):
More like this (in that it was sticky and messy. Plus, there is actual literal slime all over my house because my kids decided to run a children’s game show in my house, apparently.)
I started 2019 with many (oh-so-many) anxieties, whiney complaints, resentments and questions that I’ve held in my heart and my mind (and that big knot behind my shoulder blade).
“Am I a good mother?”
“Will I forever feel stuck?”
“Am I a good partner?”
“Can I still be a feminist and get botox?”
“How old are these Oreos? Should I eat them? I’m going to either way.”
And the biggest question of all….
Am I supposed to be a comedian?
This was the year to answer that question.
And I got my answer.
What does this have to do with stretching, though???
In my quest to answer these questions, I did something pretty big: I lived in NYC for 2 months and LA for 2 weeks — doing so much dang improv and stand-up. And I did all of this away from my kids. I left them in Chattanooga and went off on my own.
That. Was. Stretching.
Improv 101 at the Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC
It hurt like hell (like when you do that butterfly stretch and bend down just a little too far and and all those bits down there turn to fire…)
But I knew deep down that I had to go. Because this year I learned that being a good mom doesn’t mean sacrificing everything for your kids. At least that’s not what it means to me.
It means being a role model. An example.
The little ones :)
And not only do I want to be an example of love and general badassery, which I have worked hard over the years to instill. It also means being an example of hard work, commitment to your goals, and most importantly, commitment to taking care of yourself. I have not taught my daughters those virtues. Nope. Not at all. And I sure as heck don’t ever want them to lose themselves the way I did these past 10 years.
This decision to “chase my dreams” came at great cost and much stress. But something priceless was gained: I learned to trust my gut.
This marked the first time ever in my life that I ignored the haters and listened to my gut. Some side-effects of listening to my gut included:
A lot of crying
Stress dreaming about bears (not sure why bears, exactly… interpretations welcome.)
Stress eating (so many Oreos, y’all)
The urge to write angsty poetry
An obsession for The Great British Baking Show (not sure if this is related…)
Oh. And a glimpse at inner peace. (I really breathed for the first time in a long time the moment I stepped off the plane in NYC. ((And yes I did have headphones on and listened to “Welcome to New York” by T.Swift. OBVIOUSLY.))
SO… What is the answer? Are you supposed to be a comedian, or not???
Ok. Fine. I’ll answer the question!
The answer…
Is….
YES.
DUH.
OBVIOUSLY.
I’ve always known that I’ve gotta be a comedian, but I was too afraid to accept it. I was afraid people would find me irresponsible and naive. I was afraid of failure.
I’m not afraid anymore.
And so, as I enter 2020, I do so with great optimism and a much lighter load. I’m no longer carrying the weight of others’ expectations. Well… at least not as much.
A few other notable moments and lessons learned the hard way:
Sometimes you have to be selfish. And it does hurt other people. Especially if one of those people is 18 months old and has never been away from her mom and is suddenly without her for 2 whole weeks. When I got back from LA, my littlest wouldn’t even let me hold her for a whole day. I hurt her a lot. (This was by far the low point of my 2019. I still get teary-eyed thinking about it. But don’t worry, she loves me again.)
Especially if one of those people is 18 months old and has never been away from her mom and is suddenly without her for 2 whole weeks. When I got back from LA, my littlest wouldn’t even let me hold her for a whole day. I hurt her a lot. (This was by far the low point of my 2019. I still get teary-eyed thinking about it. But don’t worry, she loves me again.) Discuss. Don’t argue. I learned the hard way the impact my words can have. And I learned that being right in an argument is rarely worth it.
I learned the hard way the impact my words can have. And I learned that being right in an argument is rarely worth it. Don’t wear a bra. Except maybe when you’re running because that hurts. Otherwise, bras make boobs sad. #HappyBoobsIn2020
Except maybe when you’re running because that hurts. Otherwise, bras make boobs sad. #HappyBoobsIn2020 You’re only an adult when you take responsibility for your own life. You are only truly an adult when you accept the past and own your decisions moving forward. At 31, I finally became an adult.
You are only truly an adult when you accept the past and own your decisions moving forward. At 31, I finally became an adult. Take care of your body. It’s the only one you have. I suffer from Myalgic encephalomyelitis (or chronic fatigue syndrome). I have for many many years. (I don’t like talking about it. But fuck it. It’s 2020 and I’m free, baby!) This year I realized that my symptoms are most often triggered by anxiety and general lack of self-care (not getting enough sleep, too much stress, not eating enough…). My lack of self-care stemmed from that weird thing a lot of parents do (especially moms) where we put their own basic needs at the very bottom of our endless to-do list. (Hey, moms. Stop doing that.)
Ok, enough life lessons. You’ve got plenty of those on your own. In fact, feel free to share what you learned this year in the comments. I would love to read all about them. Also, feel free to share this post with others. Get more people in on the #HappyBoobsIn2020 hashtag…
And now 2019 in a bunch of scrunched together images! | https://medium.com/@katlynwhittenburg/my-2019-recap-and-the-answer-to-my-lifelong-question-8c67e6870f7f | ['Katlyn Whittenburg'] | 2020-01-14 16:09:55.109000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', '2019', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Improv', '2020'] |
A Mask Allows Me a Small Wins #11 | A Mask Allows Me a Small Wins #11
A poem that places a face on Coronavirus
Life is intimacy
The little happy moments
Time with friends
Love of family
Joy of pets
Humans were placed in the universe
Left to our own devices
Provided choices
I choose to wear a mask
It is my action to
Politicize caring for others
Campaign to stop the spread
Lobby for safety
When governments don’t care
People must
My world has been infected
By bedbugs
They crawled in unnoticed
Silently, took up residency
Between my blankets of security
Interrupted my dreams
Infected my nightmares
And people I love
Why do I wear a mask?
Masks allow me
Small wins and
Hope for tomorrow
Sara, 24-year old female | https://medium.com/the-pom/a-mask-allows-me-a-small-win-11-f7df3db7bc4a | ['Brenda Mahler'] | 2020-12-29 12:31:45.124000+00:00 | ['Faces Of Covid', 'Reflections', 'Poetry', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
Once upon a Casa: Part 1 | When we shortlisted Casa Clementi as a possible location to move to, it was early May 2020, while we were still deep in Merlion City’s Circuit Breaker. This meant that we were unable to do a site recce and any physical flat viewing.
Constrained to doing just desktop research, I found the original BTO brochure for Casa Clementi online.
(image credit: HDB)
Out of the seven blocks in the development, only two blocks have 5-room flats. In these two blocks, each level has four 5-room flats and two 4-room flats.
(image credit: HDB)
What I really liked about the flat layout in Casa Clementi was the design of the common bathroom. The WC and the shower area are segregated (like how it was in old HDB flats), allowing access to the wash basin outside when the WC and/or the shower area are being used. In addition, the common bathroom can be accessed from the balcony as well, making it even more convenient.
There are two 5-room layout configurations — one with a more squarish kitchen (“Layout 1”) and the other with a more rectangular kitchen (“Layout 2”). We preferred Layout 2 as non-structural walls can be hacked to expand the kitchen and the shape of the living room is more ideal. Moreover, units with Layout 1 are directly next to the lifts.
The two blocks with 5-room flats are 40 stories high. The “1st storey” is actually the 3rd storey due to two levels of parking space beneath. 2 blocks x 37 stories per block x 4 units per storey = 296 units available. At that time, 17 + 18 units had already been sold in the resale market, which meant only 261 units were “in play”
Given our criteria of a potential unit having to be at least on the 10th storey or higher (I adjusted it to 12th storey in this case), this left us with 29 stories that were viable. Since we didn’t like Layout 1, we could only go with Layout 2 — 29 stories x 2 units per storey = a total supply of 58 units, without even considering those that had already been sold.
I also researched the past transacted prices for the resale 5-room flats in the two blocks by checking the HDB (up to past 2 years) and 99.co websites. This would allow us to know if advertised asking prices were within range or nonsensical.
The bigger problem was that existing flat owners might not be looking to sell their units at the same time when we were looking to buy a unit there. The scarcity of supply to match our extremely specific demand meant that if a unit was to be advertised for sale, we would not only have to act quickly, but also likely pay a much higher price. | https://medium.com/@themoneypit/once-upon-a-casa-part-1-8be8ab5dcdaa | ['Money Pit Digger'] | 2021-01-03 07:03:14.636000+00:00 | ['House Hunting', 'Property Search', 'Singapore'] |
The Neuroeconomics of Reselling your House Clutter | The Neuroeconomics of Reselling your House Clutter
When I came back from my first trip to Japan in May 2018, I was welcomed home by my two feline friends and utter chaos. I mean…things were neatly stashed and tidily arranged, so why did the encumbered view give me a nauseating sense that I already needed another vacation?
After this warm welcome, I began the arduous process of de-cluttering my home, like many other trend-followers. At first I didn’t know where to begin: should I start in the pantry or with my clothes? Maybe I should first clean the bathroom so I can take a well-undeserved bath after.
I started with Marie Kondo’s method of tidying up and “sparking joy”, but because of my known ADHD and compulsive/impulsive behaviour, it didn’t look tidy and I wasn’t getting any joy out of it. Moreover, I wanted to take it all a step further — you know, go to the root of the clutter cause, so I don’t relapse (which I did, because that’s what happens when the process isn’t done mindfully and for the right reasons).
I’ll dive into these less fascinating details another time. The key thing is that my clutter didn’t go away for a long time. Even today, as I’m typing this all self-righteously and sh*t, there’s a pile of neatly organized “pending” items on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be re-homed, but for a price of course.
I don’t think I’m the only one who can’t get rid of her crap because of that initial investment into the item — what, you expect me to just throw away a perfectly good shirt? Donate it to “non-profit” thrift stores so it gets dumped into third-world countries under the pretext of humanitarian aid!? I spent money on it, I can’t just let it go for free! This, my friend, is a classic textbook example of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy.
Sunk-Cost Fallacy — also called the “Concorde fallacy” — happens when you use your past expenses/investment as a rationale for continuing the investment, instead of cutting your losses. It’s like crying over spilled milk.
The reason we fall prey to this bias is because we do not want to waste. But “waste” can be quite subjective; as a young adult female of immigrant background and limited entry-level income living alone, if I can get back 2$ from an item, trust me I will.
12 months ago I would have been called cheap, skimpy, tight-fisted, Scrooge etc. But as more people have suffered job loss during this capharnaüm of a year, I’ve been positively re-baptized as “frugal, careful, money smart”.
And yet I am still struggling to stay in the black at the end of the month, even with a full-time job and frugality on speed dial. This is why I got into the re-selling game early on as a university student. Yes, part of it was so I don’t feel like I am wasting something that still has a subjective and biased “value”, but the other part was that I needed to re-allocate this unused “value” to my pantry and my electric bill. The sheer enjoyment of this process allowed me to remain positive even when sales were scarce.
In the past few years of doing this consistently I’ve picked up a few insights, although I’ve still got miles of learning to go. I think sharing them here could be beneficial, especially if you are also going through tough times. I reckon there are substantial guides out there, and creating an exhaustive list of tips for all available reselling platforms isn’t realistically feasible right now, which is why the experience I am drawing from relates mainly to the platforms of Kijiji, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.
Without further ado, here’s an incomplete guide to the neuroeconomics of reselling platforms and buyer/consumer behaviour.
Keep your title short.
People often don’t read past the title, so whatever you wrote in there, it had better be good. The title generally allows for a blurb no longer than half a Tweet, but you should still try to include the following: name of your item, brand, size, condition, clickbait-y attention grabbers (such as FREE whatever) as well as other gap fillers that have absolutely no purpose but we include them anyway because we believe they do.
The buyer will still only read 2 words out of it because they’ve already scrolled through 4 photos even though the price made them think “nah” before they even clicked on your ad, but they clicked anyway because they’re trying to prolong the bathroom break from the screaming hungry kids on lockdown.
This is why you have to use the tags. If the platform allows, do go the extra mile and include tags. These are literally the same concept as Instagram hashtags — it helps the algorithm to narrow down your buyer’s search but also to suggest your ad if the tags have similarities with other items in their search. These are an extension of your title, which is unfortunately limited in number of characters and scope.
Location — yes, full address — no
In an ideal world, this is common sense. But if you are posting the ad from your smartphone, the device can fill in the blanks from your phone’s saved data. 15 years ago had I made such data-tracking claims from my Internet-less small city in Eastern Europe, I would have been called a conspiracy theorist, but today we all know that our phones are Zuckerberging us. So before you save your ad, go back and make sure it didn’t pre-fill your whole address, credit card info and search history too. Don’t want the buyer ringing your apartment doorbell at 11:00 PM for a salad spinner and asking to pay by Visa with Square, do you?
Patience is a virtue
People will still ask for your location even though you took the time to enter the postal code on the map, detailed the pick up spot in the description body of the ad AND in that small a** title then typed it on each of the pictures with that vomit-looking pink virtual paintbrush. Take a deep breath, and remember to remain professional and patient; copy paste the answer as many times as needed. And be nice upfront — for you this may be the 18th inquiry in the last 10 minutes (koodos for you if it is!), but for them you are only 1 seller.
Be honest
…about the realistic condition of the item. Seriously, don’t try to bury that sh*t under the rug like it’s kitty business. Many times the buyer will accept the item’s current condition if it’s disclosed upfront and if the price reflects said condition.
But if you lied and the item is not as described at the sale meet-up, then you’ll not only have wasted everyone’s time and potentially d*cked yourself out of a sale, but you’ll also get one hell of a review from the buyer. Good luck making your next sale once you’re rated as dishonest.
Think twice about the price.
Research has shown that the simple sense of ownership over an item causes us to over-value it. I’ll loop this idea back to the sunk-cost bias — the more we paid for an item, the more we want to get back for it.
Fret not, this is just your homo sapiens brain f*cking up your sale and I’ve got just the fix. Other variables can decrease the value of your item so in order to put a somewhat objective price on it, ask yourself: what condition is the item truly in? Did you take care of it well? How long did you realistically use it for and how did you use it? Is it clean (especially important now during a pandemic)? If not, are you willing to clean it before the sale (admittedly, you should have done this before posting it in the first place)? Is it damaged in any way? Are you pricing it higher simply because of greed or because you still value that item and are not ready to part with it? If you saw this exact item at a garage sale, how much would you be willing to pay for it? What about a thrift store? If this is still to subjective, here’s my personal rule of thumb: after factoring in all of the above, I take off another 10–15% — I call this my “bias percentage”.
Once your ad has been up for a couple of days, it’s time to make price adjustments. If you’ve gotten a few inquiries then adjust your price based on those. If you had no inquiries at all, take off another 20% — but make sure that the platform you are posting on publicizes the price decrease. We’re so basic at our human core, we can’t help it when we see a sale.
If the price decrease doesn’t work, offer a yummy incentive; free shipping works well with eBay but it might not always be cost-efficient for you, unless the item is in the higher price brackets. Do this with caution since platforms like Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji and Craigslist do not regulate shipping and your buyer can always claim they didn’t receive the item.
D*ck move but with all kinds of Nigerian prince wannabe scammers out there, a better incentive is a freebie (humans we love this sh*t). Some time ago I was reselling my entire beading/jewelry making paraphernalia — a gargantuan-sized collection if I do say so myself. Because of the high (yet well warranted in my biased opinion) pricing, I had a hard time selling it. Until I offered to include a travel-handy storage box for free. The messages began pouring in shortly and I sold everything within a day. People want value — or at least the perception of it — so make it worth their while.
A photo is worth a thousand…sales?
Look, unless you’re Mike Yamashita-sama or you’ve got IG influencer skills or whatever other hidden photography talent, the photos will look amateur. But in the resale market, photos are the most important part of your ad, even more important than your title. And the cover photo? That’s the buyer’s very first impression, so make it count. Here’s a short checklist to help with this step.
Include several photos, of all angles; put another item next to it to show the scale. You can use a banana for scale if you dissociate into your 9Gag-er alter, but I suggest a basic ruler or measuring tape. I don’t have anything against bananas, but for this endeavour requires measurement accuracy.
Photograph your item in daylight. Wouldn’t be inconvenient for the buyer to show up and the item isn’t the colour they thought it was, just because of the photo quality? Save yourself the trouble and take the photos around 11:00 AM next to the window.
Unless you’ve got beautiful hardwood floors, put the clothes you are selling on a hanger or on the table. I cringe a little when I see clothing on the floor; of course I’ll wash it before wearing, but you never know how it might snag or damage while it’s sitting there. My cats’ hair goes everywhere, but I try not to include with the item for sale (unless the buyer specifically asks for it — no judgement, I respect all fetiches).
Include photos of the damage, if any (review point about Honesty and Price)
Metrics and don’t lie, even if people do.
It’s a good idea to keep an eye on these things, especially if you want to thrift flip full time. How did that porcelain china ad do? How many views did it get and which platform did you end up selling it on? After how many days did you sell it? If you’re becoming a heavy hitter in the reselling game, check out Google Trends.
If people are searching for polymer clay earrings then it’s time to get that Fimo out of storage and put it up for sale. Facebook Marketplace offers small insights too on your homepage, but although it’s a good starting place, it’s not as exhaustive as Google Trends. Another tip is to use tags, if you can (see point #1 — Title)
Accommodate the buyer
People fly on their own time so the more flexible you are, the higher the chance of you making the sale. If your buyer lives far, offer to meet them halfway; if they can only pay by e-transfer, accept that if you can; if they can only pick up the item at a certain time, try to make that work. I don’t have a car and if I have to buy large items sometimes the seller agrees to bring the item to me for a little extra $. A lot is possible with good communication and fair negotiation.
Admit defeat if what you are selling is simply junk.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet — yes I’m talking about that pair of ripped-up Vans from your high school days that smell like a bouquet of tulips. Some things just can’t be sold; the sooner you accept this and dispose of your junk as ethically as possible (recycling, donate for scraps/education etc, reuse, throw away) the sooner you can move on.
Do some good instead
The benefit of a good-hearted donation far outweighs the cost of $5.00 less in your pocket. Although thrift stores are swamped with donations, their prices aren’t decreasing to match an overflowing inventory; and unfortunately some people still can’t afford a $3.99 shirt at Salvation Army.
With low temperatures approaching, that pair of yellow rubber boots that’s been sitting in your garage since Motorola Razr was a thing, can be given to someone in need. Doing some good reminds us to be human, so let’s try to do more of what keeps us grounded so that our community as a whole can see the light at the end of the pandemic.
To those of you who treated this tirade like an academic journal and read the intro, headlines and then skipped to the end, here’s the resume.
2.5 years later into this Re-Selling my House Clutter & Chill game, I’m less anxious and I have more time on my hands (since there’s not so much sh*t laying around to take care of) — time which I am putting to good use in other ways. Minimalist gurus say that decluttering is not the goal, it’s gaining clarity on the truly important things once the clutter is gone. Decision fatigue is real and it’s affecting many of us, even leading to burn-out in severe cases (been there, done that).
When we are overwhelmed by clutter, we make poor decisions or worse, we make no decisions at all. We forget our passions and aspirations. We allow the vital wants and desires of the adult child in us to be silenced and weighed down by the daily mundane of superficial needs.
I’ve decreased the clutter of physical things, toxic people and unnecessary activities; and with more free time, the adult kiddo in me has come out and started writing again, picked up rock climbing and woodworking.
I’m not saying that the only way to reach somewhat of an Earth-bound Nirvana in this lifetime is to sell all your belongings and move to a self-sufficient mini container home off the grid (although it’s certainly something I personally dream of). I simply wish to plant the seed of this idea: what would you do with an extra 1–2 hours per week? What about 1–2 hours per day? Heck, even 30 minutes. Would you savour this time wisely or scroll it away on TikTok? Don’t worry, I also chose the latter — that sh*t’s hella fun. | https://medium.com/@silvanatoma/the-neuroeconomics-of-reselling-your-house-clutter-555843c9a5ea | ['Silvana Toma'] | 2020-11-20 21:30:58.476000+00:00 | ['Adhd', 'Bias', 'Reselling', 'Decluttering', 'Marie Kondo'] |
Scars and Burial | Scars and Burial
A Poem
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
The wind tore down one of my eavestroughs
and I don’t have the heart
to bury the damned thing, but I haven’t
got a ladder, either
Change keeps carving deep ruts here
miniature explosions of dust
and the rubbish we keep
hanging onto to be alright with the world
I’d be a better letter-writer
if I had anyone to send things to
but then I don’t want you to have to know
any of this
Immobility frees me up
to do some more sentencing
but the verdictive tendencies can
get me in trouble
I really don’t know
why I keep pointing at the scars
I guess it’s just a wrestling
with skin that doesn’t go anywhere | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/scars-and-burial-efe2c19c4d94 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-14 05:23:06.138000+00:00 | ['Thinking', 'Musing', 'Illumination Curated', 'Poetry', 'Image'] |
Not Content With Contentful | This is the fourth in a short series on my attempts to monetize my parked domains. This covers my goals with Git-based work flows better and actually starts to provide code.
I’ve been looking for a centralized data store that 100+ domains can pull content from. A headless CMS is a must, the same content may be served under vastly different formatting and styling between sites. As a developer, a git-based solution would be ideal. I couldn’t find one I liked, so I started building one.
Contentful Reader Data Flow
Contentful — Headless CMS
Contentful is the leading headless CMS provider. I’ve used Contentful for some of my own blog content as well as at places I’ve worked. It makes it easy to create complex, multi-dimensional data that is fully localized. Contentful even have a free Community Space that supports a pretty complete site.
The Cons:
Only one free space is allowed and additional spaces start at $489.
The number of object types or schemas is limited.
The response time are not amazing, especially for a “CDN”.
Netlify-Git-based CMS
I’m intrigued by the promise of Netlify. It is git-based to fit in with the rest of the workflow and you could even store an editor with the code.
The Cons:
Tightly coupled with the Netlify website.
No easy way to mix and match content on sites.
Ghost — Headless CMS
Ghost seemed like it would be a good fit for a blog. But making a single blog stream into hundreds of blogs is more of a job for an application.
The Cons:
A limited object model paradigm.
No easy way to mix and match content on sites.
The Solution —Create a CMS on AWS
The intent was never to write any code, I thought maybe I’d end up with a couple CDK or Cloudformation resources. Being a cloud engineer building a solution on AWS is always appealing. Done correctly it can be cost-effective and can scale forever with zero changes or human attention. Using AWS it can be fast and reliable with very little effort.
Start with Contentful Export Files
As I said, I have some blog content in a free Contentful account and would like to use that. If I can export it I can use my free Community Space for playing with and testing Contentful using other content. Contentful also has a strong object paradigm that will be easy to build upon.
Break it up!
To make use of this large export file I created a Contentful Reader. Given a single large Contentful file it breaks up the JSON into many smaller files for each content type or entry. The reader can handle files that are GB’s in size and can process 60+ entries per second so a 1 GB file with 500k entries should take less than 15 minutes to process.
Git it together
These files are ideal for committing to a git repository. This allows you to apply all the git workflow tools in the market to your Contentful data. Git-based workflows with CMS data are like peanut butter and chocolate, they go great together.
Benefits of Git
Easily support multiple concurrent branches or versions.
Increased auditability.
Easy to revert mistakes.
Integrates with other development processes.
Dynamo is Dynamite
The last step between the CMS and web page still benefits from the flexibility of a content stored in a database. Flat git files a lone can’t support a performant GraphQL API.
For that we turn to DynamoDB and single table design. I use denormalization and hydration to create a Dynamo structure that can easily match my expected query patterns.
The non-key field data in the table looks much like the data in the JSON files. The magic is in the keys created for the data. The JSON files from the repo are used to create complex partition key, sort key and GSI key values. These keys make it easy to fetch the data already formatted in the way we need it.
Serve it up
The Dynamo data can easily be served through both a REST API and an AppSync GraphQL API. The data is stored in an optimized format so that little if any processing needs to take place when serving the data.
Due to the nature of AppSync and its resolvers it’s unlikely the same Lambda would be able to service both REST and GraphQL requests. Any logic that is shared between the two would be moved to custom JavaScript modules. I have a simple Cloudformation file for creating your own NPM and PIP repository using AWS CodeArtifact.
Save cash with cache
From a consumer perspective the Dynamo data is read only. This means we can easily implement a Cloudfront distribution in front of it with caching enabled. This can limit the max calls to the backend to handful in a month no matter how much traffic a site may generate.
Optimizing the Dynamo Schema
First let’s address a common misconception, DynamoDB shouldn’t be thought of as “schemaless”. It should be thought of as multi-schema or flexible schema. A single table can have items that adhere to different schemas. The schema for those items may not be explicitly defined but it is there or the data would be useless in an API. I highly suggest defining your schema as explicitly as possible.
Optimizing keys for parts and aggregations
For the use-case of breaking one blog stream into many there are two important considerations.
How are sub-parts of the data used? How are parts of the data aggregated?
I’m still trying a few different things and modeling how things will work for importing, updating and serving efficiently.
Part 1 — Parking for Pennies
Part 2 — AWS SSL Certificates
Part 3 — Mass Hosting Paradigm | https://medium.com/swlh/not-content-with-contentful-5b4d3bdb21b3 | ['Brian Winkers'] | 2020-11-20 19:02:42.253000+00:00 | ['Contentful', 'CMS', 'JavaScript', 'Headless Cms', 'AWS'] |
Creating Employment Opportunities for the Youth of Pakistan | Ayesha Khan — 20161–21221
UN SDG #4: Quality Education
UN SDG #8: Decent work and Economic Growth
TED Talk I got Inspired From:
In the Ted talk by Mona Mourshed about “Solving global youth unemployment” she makes us ask the question “why is a 4 year university degree not providing the youth with skills they need to secure entry level positions? She conducted a survey of over 10,000 educators and young people around the world to understand what the rift is between employers and the unemployed youth. Mona gives the example of Yasmine, a 24 year old graduate in Jordan who is unable to get a job despite having graduated at the top of her class.
She also talks about Mark, the HR head of a manufacturing company in the USA, who has approached many community colleges to start a mechatronics program but has been rejected and is disappointed by the students he meets at college career fairs. Lastly, Eduardo, an educator was also talked about. She said that the youth feel their education does not prepare them enough to secure a job, since the skills taught by educational institutions are not the same as the skills that employers want. Therefore, educators and industry professionals need to interact more with each other to make education meaningful, and students should go out of their way to take educated decisions about their future.
The Solution:
My solution for youth unemployment is based on the TED talk summarized above. I aim to provide work opportunities for the youth while they are studying, so they can gain valuable industry-level skills that propel them into the industry as well as give them more insight they can bring back into their classroom for their peers.
Youth unemployment is on the rise in Pakistan and is becoming a cause for concern as there is no proper way for the youth to earn an allowance and they have to remain dependent on their parents until they start a career. Most university graduates are not equipped with the skills they need to secure even entry level jobs after studying for four years.
My platform will aim to provide small employment opportunities such as internships or entry level jobs that require minimal skills to the youth. For this, I will collaborate with universities and companies in multiple industries so that students can get a chance to experience work life in multiple roles. This collaboration will be based on a promise that every 4 months, the company has to take a fixed number of students from the company into their trainee/internship programs and teach them some basic industry level skills.
The company will also partner with the university to provide them with a list of skills from their specific industry that they believe graduates should possess. The university is then responsible for creating a curriculum that incorporates those skills and the rest of the skills will be taught to the student as they start to work for the company. This collaboration can be fruitful to provide a sustained pool of workers to the industry each year that possess the skill and the ability to take on jobs.
Target audience:
This platform will be targeting young adults between ages 16–28 who prefer being independent but there are no such opportunities being offered in Pakistan where a young person can earn before they graduate.
The main idea:
The idea is to introduce a set up that would give job seekers i.e. the young adults a platform to connect with the employers and will offer part-time employment opportunities.
As there is no job exposure in our country at initial stages, this may even comprise of small level jobs such as photographers, accountants, and other miscellaneous work. This will not only prepare the youth for their future professional lives but also help them earn money without having to ask anyone for it.
Companies and universities will collaborate to make these opportunities more accessible to students who teachers may see as fit for a certain skill.
There also various restaurants and cafes where these young people can work as cashiers, cooks or managers. This culture is very common in the west however not everybody in Pakistan prefers doing low level jobs.
But this is not it, I have thought of more categories and do not want to limit this platform’s services to the educated youth but also aim at targeting the uneducated masses, and provide them with jobs that could greatly enhance and raise their living standard. Also they will be better able to provide for themselves and their families.
Another important feature I want to include in this platform is the mentorship feature. This feature will connect students with industry leaders and thought leaders to allow them to learn important skills such as coding, SEO, and more. These skills will not be just to develop them to entry level positions, but prepare them on basic skills such as Excel, to more high level skills that Silicon Valley entrants will also be able to use.
This library of information will be made available at a minimum sign up fee charged monthly. Since the target market is students, this fee needs to be at a minimum level so everyone can afford it.
Benefits:
I predict that such a platform will have industry-revolutionizing benefits as it can change the economic structure of Pakistan. With more than 90% of people in Pakistan comprising of young adults, there is a serious gap in the economy that can be addressed.
Giving these youth a creative outlet and allowing them to explore their potential also keeps them from getting into the wrong activities which can damage their future.
I believe that there is a large pool of talent in Pakistan comprising of young people that just needs to be given the chance to show its potential. With such a platform, we aim to bring this opportunity to them, as well as change the way that the economic system works, and make education a ladder on the way to a meaningful career, not a barrier towards a good job. | https://medium.com/@std-21221/creating-employment-opportunities-for-the-youth-of-pakistan-7823d1ed2a59 | ['Ayesha Khan'] | 2020-12-15 19:52:42.254000+00:00 | ['Employment', 'Youth Development', 'Pakistan', 'Youth'] |
Should Returning Australian Citizens Pay for Hotel Quarantine? | On July 10, Prime Minister Scott Morrison released a statement from National Cabinet saying that that all travellers returning to Australia from overseas should now pay up to $3,000 for their mandatory hotel quarantine. Everyone has had time to get come home so this is fair, said the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian. You’ve had three or four months to get back, said the prime minister. And I’d agree if they were talking about ordinary, regular, everyday tourists. People who had booked a two, three or even six week holiday overseas or cruise or safari. People who were returning home from a brief interlude of international travel. You know. Travellers.
But what if you’ve lived overseas for some time? Months or even years? What if you have employment contracts to honour, children in school? What if leaving the foreign country means apartments and houses to pack up, bank accounts to close, friends and work colleagues to say good-bye to, businesses or companies to wind up? If you’re an expat wanting to come home, it’s not as easy as just getting on a plane, assuming that a) you can afford to purchase a ticket b) the flight isn’t cancelled and c) you’re actually one of the lucky few allowed to fly in to Sydney or any other Australian airport at this time, given the caps on numbers (which is a whole other issue that I’ll address).
In my case, I have a cat to repatriate, which because of Australia’s quarantine laws — that haven’t been relaxed at all to make life easier for returning Australians — has made my homecoming doubly complicated. And quadruply expensive. And exponentially more stressful.
I’ve been living in Hanoi for almost four years, and had decided to come back to Australia in January. It was time. I had set in motion all the requirements to bring my cat home: Rabies testing, engaging a pet transporter, completing a mountain of paperwork, fainting at the cost of it all. I had brought her to Vietnam in 2017, not anticipating the changes to Vietnamese immigration laws in 2019 which has made staying long-term increasingly difficult.
In February 2020, Malaysia was removed from the list of pre-entry countries due to dodgy agents doing dodgy import processes. This delayed my cat’s export out of Vietnam — my pet transporter and I had to scramble to come up with alternative solutions, and we decided on Doha in Qatar, as the cheapest and easiest option. Wheels were set in motion. Again.
In the meantime, COVID was ramping up, culminating in the prime minister and DFAT calling all Australians home in March. Panicking, I tried to expedite my cat’s export, but to no avail — like falling dominoes borders closed, flights were cancelled and airlines that usually accepted pets refused to fly them. One after the other.
I had to make a tough choice: either put my beloved cat in boarding for an unspecified amount of time and come back to Australia, or stay in Vietnam until I could get her out. I chose the latter because it wasn’t her choice to be in Hanoi: it was mine. She’s as Australian as I am. How could I leave her?
Now it’s July. I have been watching borders open and flights resume, waiting and hoping and praying that the few the airlines now flying out of Hanoi will accept pets. It’s a waiting game, and one that seems to have no end. No one can give me a definite date. Or a definite date is given, then rescinded. Qatar Airways told me via Twitter that everything is up in the air:
‘…our flights operate following the latest advice of the government authorities. Schedules may get canceled or changed without prior notice.’
I would come home tomorrow if I could — assuming I can get on a flight — but it’s not possible. Qatar was supposed to fly out of Hanoi on July 3. This has been rescheduled to August 2, but not showing up in flight ticket bookings until September. Even if they do start flying, who knows when they will accept pets? Emirates is flying, but Dubai is not an option because there are too many restrictions on importing pets at this time, and the difficulty in getting my cat to Doha.
And now the only quarantine facility in Australia, which is in Victoria, is now off limits for international flights, so pets are stuck in limbo. And so are many owners. Why didn’t AQIS, with all the modern diagnostics that are available, relax regulations at this time so people with pets could return easily and more cheaply? After all, aren’t humans more of a risk to Australia’s bio-security than animals now? AQIS could easily have extended the quarantine period from two weeks to four or six for pets, and sensibly, opened more facilities to cope with any expected influx.
So to Gladys and Scott and any other politician who thinks it’s easy to come home, I say this: their one size fits all policy that declares returning Australians should pay for their hotel quarantine is ill-considered, misinformed, discriminatory and ultimately, cruel. Verging on unAustralian, it needs to be rethought, and quickly. Expats returning to Australia need all the support from their government they can get, not less.
We are still citizens, after all. | https://medium.com/abroadingly/should-returning-australian-citizens-pay-for-hotel-quarantine-5808a27fd15a | ['Diane Lee'] | 2020-07-22 01:34:05.819000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Politics', 'Cats', 'Law', 'Australia'] |
What Tom Holland tells us about AR / VR | Spiderman: Far From Home is a great movie for many reasons. The only one I care about today, however, is that it contains a pretty cool scene in which Peter Parker uses some of Tony’s holographic workspace technology to engineer a new spider suit for himself. Since my job is to reimagine the engineering workspace of the future, this moment really stood out to me when I saw Far From Home in theaters. Here is the scene I’m refering to (skip to 0:48 if you’re impatient). Now, there are a few things going on in this scene:
At 0:48, Tom Holland sees a holographic (i.e. 3D) representation of various spider suits. At 0:51, he “grabs” a virtual object. A second later, he uses a pinch gesture to expand this object into what seems to be a menu. At 0:53, he scrolls through this menu in a way that is reminiscent of pickers, the scroll-type date & time selector interface from early versions of iOS. At 0:56, Happy (Jon Favreau) expresses quiet satisfaction in seeing Peter Parker follow in the late Tony’s footsteps. At 1:00, Tom Holland “puts on” a virtual arm piece, which stays attached to his arm much as if he were physically wearing it. Starting at 1:20, we see a series of gestures: he selects the web shooter device from one of the spider suits holograms, expands it using a pinch gesture, and selects an internal component of the web shooters to view.
To an engineer like me, this scene conveys a lot of information in a very short timeframe. We see that Tom Holland’s workspace uses a hologram to convey 3D information. The gestures he uses to interact with this display are a direct consequence of its “physical” nature. He’s able to grab something from the workspace simply because there is a physical-seeming object to be grabbed at a definite point in 3D space. Such a gesture would make no sense in the context of a keyboard and mouse. Now, this may seem like an incredibly obvious point I’m making, but it exemplifies a crucial point about interfaces in general: the way a user interacts with data is entirely dependent on the way in which that data is represented to the user.
Now, if I had to guess, I would say that AR / VR (XR, for short) is a much more plausible solution to displaying virtual 3D environments than hologram technology, mainly because I’m pretty sure the latter doesn’t even exist. This means we have to start considering what gestures are natural to the XR medium. A fairly obvious point would be to say that, since XR attempts to perfectly simulate the interaction between our sensory system and the physical world, we should simply look to real life for the set of gestures that will dominate interactions with XR.
I think there is merit to this idea, but that we have to consider the ramifications of the fact that XR (which stands for extended reality) does indeed extend reality. There are things users can do in simulations that can’t be done in real life. For one, users should be able to alter the settings of a simulation. This implies menus and buttons. Will we see scroll wheel type interfaces like the one Tom Holland uses? How will the transparency of virtual objects be adjusted? The brightness? All this to say that the existence of menus will complicate the process of transcribing gestures from real life.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, users of XR will have to deal with the file management. In our daily lives, we address this problem using the only method that the laws of physics allows: space-division multiplexing! No, think about it. Physical objects can be thought of as files, and we organize and store them by distributing them in space. This type of file management has worked for humans for millennia, primarily because humans have learned to not have too many things. The enduring internal debate of “do I really need this?” is, in essence, an artifact of the constraints imposed upon us by our physical operating system (physics!).
A shift to XR, however, will dramatically change the way we think about our 3D files. There is nothing stopping users from having a video-game-style endless backpack. Now the question becomes, how do we search through that backpack? Or, restated, without the constraints of physics, what is the optimal way to organize a large number of objects? The question of file management is mundane, to be sure, but significant. If users have to spend five hours searching through an infinite backpack for their toothbrush, they’ll probably just opt back in to the real world.
In the scene where Tom Holland browses menus, opens up 3D files, and interacts with those files, we see one vision of what an XR interface might look like. However, there are a few details that the director left out: can Tom Holland feel the holographic objects? If not, does that mean he’s using sight to ensure his hand doesn’t pass through the menu? Physics does a really good job of preventing our body from passing through objects. In fact, that’s the only thing that allows us to “select” which things we want. The human body is only mediocre at knowing it’s own position in space; instead, it relies primarily on touching other objects—the floor, doorknobs, handles, railings, screens—to know where it is. One of the biggest challenges in designing an XR interface is to transcribe the sensation of touch into the digital world, so that users can precisely select the region of space with which they’d like to interact. Thank you, Tom Holland, for this very valuable lesson. | https://medium.com/@telex-robotics/what-tom-holland-tells-us-about-vr-21068c835d3e | ['Tim Foldy-Porto'] | 2020-12-16 01:25:16.134000+00:00 | ['Human Computer Interface', 'AR', '3d Modeling', 'Extended Reality', 'VR'] |
Rebuilding the user typeahead | Devin Finzer, Jiacheng Hong and Kelsey Stemmler | Pinterest engineers, Discovery
A core part of Pinterest is giving people the ability to discover content related to their interests. Many times, a Pin can be discovered when people share it with one another, through features like Group Boards and messages.
To make the experience of finding a person as seamless as possible, we recently rebuilt our user typeahead. The goal was to quickly surface the most relevant contacts for the user given what we know about that person’s social connections and following activity on Pinterest.
The legacy typeahead was often slow and unresponsive, and limited the number of contacts a user could store. Additionally, all of the logic for the typeahead layer resided in our internal API. We set out to not only make the typeahead faster, but to also split it into a separate service that could be deployed and maintained independently of our API and web application. Building our typeahead in line with our service-oriented architecture would improve testability, ease the process of adding and deploying new features, and make our code more maintainable.
Developing the Contact Book signal
To surface the most relevant contacts, we leveraged the Pinterest following graph, and social graphs from Pinners’ social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. Still, many users don’t link their social networks to Pinterest, so additional signals based on mobile contacts were used.
Asking for permission to access contacts on mobile can be tricky if intentions aren’t clear. Simply showing users a native dialog can result in a confusing user experience and a low acceptance rate. To build a seamless permissions experience, we integrated learnings from other companies, such as that the best way to ask for permissions is to explain the value of connecting upfront before asking for native permissions.
We also leveraged the Experience Framework for our mobile permissions flow, which allowed us swap out the text of the mobile permissions flow without changing client code. It also meant we could easily experiment with different flows to further optimize our success rate.
Building the new backend
We built a separate backend service (we call Contacts Service) to store the data for the new user typeahead. The new system consisted of three major components:
A modifiable, real-time online “index” for fast access of any user’s contacts from different sources.
A Thrift server (which we call Contacts Service) exposing interfaces to manage this index. This allows clients to update the index and look up top contacts using prefix-matching.
A set of PinLater tasks that keeps the index in sync with the contacts sources using the Thrift interface.
We chose HBase as the storage solution for the contacts index because it met all of our requirements:
Speed: The primary requirement of the typeahead is to look up names quickly. If names are sorted, the operation is simply a binary search using the prefix combo to locate the position then scan until we have enough results. This is a typical HBase scan operation. Our performance data shows that a scan of 20 rows in HBase takes less than two milliseconds — fast enough to meet our requirements.
Scalability: HBase is horizontally scalable, and adding more machines to a cluster is easy with minimal manual intervention, and gives linear throughput increase.
Fault tolerance: HBase supports auto failover. If a box dies, the HBase cluster moves the data to other live servers and the whole process takes a few minutes to finish with no change required on client side.
Writable: We chose to maintain an updatable index instead of two-layer system solution involving base index and fresh index to simplify the implementation and maintenance. HBase provided us with great write performance.
Supporting millions of contacts for one user
We support and aggregate contacts from various sources for each user in the contacts service. Therefore, it’s extensible if we want to add new sources, and flexible if we want to query contacts from certain sources. In most cases, the number of contacts from each source is under two hundred. However, some Pinners have millions of followers, so to tackle this challenge, we used two kinds of schemas to store contacts: wide schema and tall schema.
Wide schema: This is the default schema, which is expected to fit most sources. Contacts in one source for one user are stored together in one row. Each name token is stored as the prefix of column name. With our own implementation of ColumnPaginationFilter (which provides similar feature as Scan but inside one row), we are able to batch these GET requests to all sources in the wide schema in one RPC to do a prefix lookup.
Tall schema: This schema is specifically designed for sources (e.g. Pinterest follower) with potentially large number of contacts. The wide schema cannot support this use case because data in one row cannot be split across regions in HBase. In the tall schema, for each user we store contacts from one source in nearby rows, where the name token is part of the row key. Then for each source, one Scan request can achieve the prefix lookup among the contacts in this source.
Ranking and de-duping contacts
As we provide contacts lookup from different sources, it’s important that we display the most relevant contact at the top. It could also be annoying if we returned the same contact multiple times because it appears as a contact in multiple of your sources. We found an accurate de-duping logic to filter out contacts was highly beneficial to a user’s typeahead experience. To further improve on the above two areas, we relied on many of our existing services to provide real-time data access and enable Contacts Service to return de-duped contacts in the pre-defined ranking order.
Ranking: We have configurable ranking order based on different sources. For example, mutual followers is a strong signal of relevancy, so we always want to boost mutual follower contacts at top. This ranking order is configurable, which can be easily replaced with another one.
De-duping: Contacts Service talks to Friend Service for social network (including Facebook, Twitter, G+) id to Pinterest id lookup, and Data Service (with our own positive and negative caching) for email to Pinterest id lookup. With this information, we can easily tell whether these contacts are actually the same person based on their Pinterest id.
In order to store the data for efficient lookups, we tokenized each of the contacts names, and store each token with a reference to the original contact. We use the same algorithm to tokenize the contact’s full name, and the query string. This guarantees consistent results. We were able to use this tokenization to help score each match based on the proximity of the terms within the contact name and query string. For example, searching for “John Smith” should yield “John Smith” as a stronger match (higher in the results) compared to “John Michael Smith.”
How to enable real-time results?
We considered running an update job daily, to refresh the index with all of the new connections, but decided real-time results were far more useful. For example, when you connect your Facebook account to your Pinterest account, you should be able to send pins to your Facebook friends almost immediately.
In order to have real-time results, we hooked in updates to the new backend service for every time a user’s contact information changes. There are a few places this can happen:
Pinterest name change: When a Pinner changes his/her name, it’s reflected in all of their contacts. That way, others can search based on this new name, and the old name will no longer yield this contact as a result. It can get tricky for those with millions of connections for a particular source, though. We wrote a chained PinLater task that uses pagination to help fan out the updates without overloading the system.
Connecting / updating social network source: When a user connects their Pinterest account to Facebook, Twitter, etc., we want them to be able to send pins, and so we created a new PinLater task for this user, to lookup their new connections and update the backend Contacts Service accordingly. We also hooked up these updates in the existing social network refresh tasks.
Updating follower relationships: When a Pinterest user follows or unfollows another Pinterest user, those changes should be reflected immediately.
Getting all that data loaded
Since we wrote a new backend service for the new user typeahead, we had to populate it somehow. The initial set of data was not small by any means.
To upload the initial data, we wrote a task to upload all of a user’s connections for each supported source type. We ran this task for every Pinterest user, which took about three days to complete, even with a dedicated PinLater cluster.
Timing was critical. We needed to write all of the real-time updates before doing the initial upload so the corresponding updates would be done on top of the base set of data. So, first we added the real-time updates logic, and then we did the uploaded all of the data. Any actions, thereafter, that changed a user’s contacts updated the backend automatically.
Introducing a faster typeahead
The new user typeahead is markedly faster than the original implementation, with a server-side p99 of 25ms. When we A/B tested our new typeahead implementation against the old version, we found that message sends and Pinner interactions increased significantly.
The next improvement is to compute second-order connections to expand the breadth of the typeahead. Stay tuned!
Devin Finzer, Jiacheng Hong, and Kelsey Stemmler are software engineers at Pinterest.
Acknowledgements: Dannie Chu, Xun Liu, Varun Sharma and Eusden Shing | https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/rebuilding-the-user-typeahead-9c5bf9723173 | ['Pinterest Engineering'] | 2017-02-17 22:29:18.406000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Typeahead', 'Data', 'Search', 'Thrit'] |
New Manager? Five New Manager Tips To Be Successful | The success of any organization hugely depends on a successful manager. Apart from driving the team and following up on the work progress, they are also responsible for interconnection between team members.
But the opportunity of taking up a new manager role in an organization comes with anxiety and uncertainty. You should ask yourself if you are prepared enough to deliver effectively in your new role?
In this blog, we will discuss five new manager tips to set you up for success:
Planning:
The most significant difference between the Successful and Unsuccessful New Manager is Planning. The most effective way for a new leader to create results and build culture is to adopt a rolling focus, 30 60 90 day plan.
What is a 30 60 90 day plan?
A 30 60 90 day plan details the milestones you should focus on in the first 30, 60, and 90 days of your role. By setting concrete goals that align with your abilities and company goals, you can make a smooth and empowering transition into a new organization. A 30 60 90 day action plan keeps you constantly moving towards your goals. Below are a few templates that can help you plan for the first 90 days.
View 30 60 90 day Plan Template Collection
One of the key ingredients for a successful 30 60 90 plan is defining clear and realistic goals. Learn in detail the art of goal setting and how to create an effective by setting clear personal and performance goals for new managers.
Experience Matters:
Apart from rigorous planning, the managers’ functional backgrounds, experiences, and competencies determine how they take charge. The influence that the managers’ experience holds over the taking charge process is astounding. In case the new manager lacks experience, he should compensate by taking mentorship from seniors or peers with relevant experience.
Relationships with key people:
One of the most salient differences between the success and failure of a New Manager is the quality of the new manager’s working relationships. These interpersonal problems arise due to rivalry issues, disagreement about goals, and different beliefs about performance.
Developing effective working relationships is a critical task. Managers in successful transitions confront interpersonal problems by the end of the immersion stage and resolve them promptly.
Conflicts in management style:
The conflicts involve control and delegation and arise partly because managers have not clarified expectations with their senior management or subordinates. However, the main reason is generally less rational factors, including understanding what is good management.
How can new managers deal with differences in style? Simple. The new managers have to take the initiative to set common expectations and understanding with all the people he is working with. This is important for successful onboarding to a new job, as unresolved expectations and conflicts become a hindrance and often cause a failed succession.
Your Own Management style:
Each Manager defines his own management style. This includes how they spend their time — in meetings, on tours — what kinds of meetings and interactions they prefer- one to one, recurrently scheduled or specially scheduled meetings, etc. How good he is in soft skills — empathy, compassion, active listening, problem-solving mindset.
Managerial style affects how people respond to an executive initially and influences the entire taking-charge process, including how they make decisions. Successful Managers are compassionate, problem solvers, keep the team environment congenial and conducive to efficient working.
Conclusion:
The taking charge process for a new manager can be grueling, uncertain, and difficult. The foremost requisite for a successful new manager is planning. Do rigorous 30 60 90 day planning for a smooth transition in an organization. Apart from that, prior experience, ability to form relationships, management style, etc., are crucial factors that can also affect a new manager’s success.
Now you don’t have to scour the web to find out the right templates. Download our PowerPoint Templates from within PowerPoint. See how?
About SlideUplift:
SlideUpLift is an online platform to help professionals make compelling presentations using principles of vision science and storytelling. The platform contains an online library of pre-designed presentation templates that can be used across industries and functions.
Check out our library of Free PowerPoint templates, which are weekly updated to serve the presentation needs of professionals. You will find out the simplicity and ease in downloading the editable template, filling it with your content, and building world-class presentations in just a few clicks. | https://medium.com/@slideuplifts/new-manager-five-new-manager-tips-to-be-successful-26fef62a2104 | [] | 2020-12-21 08:58:16.631000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Manager', 'Project Manager', 'Product Manager', 'Management And Leadership'] |
Using Rust for Scientific Numerical applications: Learning from Past Experiences | Image: courtesy of Chiara Caratelli
I am a software developer at the Netherlands eScience Center, where we empower all researchers across all scientific disciplines in the Netherlands by providing the right digital tools for their research. Picture this, a scientist comes to us with a brilliant idea about creating a novel material for improving solar cells or a revolutionary algorithm to grasp the science of protein interactions, but she needs to come out with the high performance software to run hundreds of simulations. Therefore, we work together with them to develop the software tools that can bring their ideas to concrete results.
Some of these projects involve a lot of number crunching and therefore we need tools to produce lightning-fast applications: enter Rust. Rust is a low-level language with a welcoming community that stands as a strong competitor to traditional languages like C/C++/Fortran for numerical applications thanks to its performance, memory management system, high abstraction level, and flourishing ecosystem. Check the Rust book to get a feeling of the language!
What I love about Rust is that it has been developed to solve concrete problems, built on top of the lessons (painfully) learnt while implementing real systems.
At the Netherlands eScience Center, my main focus is on computational chemistry and materials science. In these fields, the principles of quantum mechanics are used to generate models that allow the computation of interesting physical and chemical properties. These computations boil down to a lot of Linear Algebra. In case this sounds like an esoteric math concept to you, let me tell you that linear algebra is the mathematical bedrock upon which all modern machine learning applications are based.
The beauty of linear algebra is that many scientific and engineering problems can be modeled using numerical operations on vectors and matrices. Among the powerful tools in the linear algebra toolkit, the algorithms to find eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a given matrix are the cornerstones for generating quantitative solutions to diverse questions like: “how much energy does a molecule absorb?” or “how much force can be applied on a bridge?” Since the start of computational physics, the scientific community has produced a plethora of libraries and tools to solve those numerical problems, mainly written in C/C++/Fortran.
Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash
Now the question is: how does Rust compare to the traditional approaches for building number-crunching applications? In this post, I am not going to present benchmarks comparing performance (check this benchmark if you are curious about how Rust compares to C/C++). Instead, I will focus on what I consider the most important aspects of developing scientific software: development speed and maintainability.
Do not take me wrong, performance is a top priority. However, if we build a weather model that predicts if we are going to be underwater in a couple of weeks (I live in the Netherlands), making sure that the model is well tested and ruling out the possibility that a segmentation fault is going to pop up (after a couple of weeks of simulation), it is then more important than squeezing out the last bit of performance. Therefore, I am going to address the following questions:
How much effort is needed to build and deploy the software?
How do I manage the dependencies?
Can we develop a minimum viable product (MVP) in a reasonable time?
How much effort is required to test, document, and maintain the code?
How do I parallelize the application?
Implementing an Eigenvalue solver
I will address the aforementioned questions using the experience that I gained while creating a Rust package (a.k.a crate) called “eigenvalues” where I have implemented a couple of algorithms to compute the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a given matrix.
Here is the link to my eigenvalues library. You can also have a look at the documentation.
The following code snippet shows how to use the eigenvalues library,
How much effort is needed to build and deploy the software?
Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash
Number-crunching software usually relies on highly optimized math libraries (e.g. OpenBlas, Lapack, Eigen, etc.) offering low level operations which are used as building blocks to develop more complex calculations. Those dependencies are usually installed by the system administrator or using a Linux package manager (e.g. apt). These dependencies, together with other miscellaneous libraries to parse, log, etc., are then tied together using something like CMake, which gracefully compiles and links your dependencies. Go ahead, start laughing!
The previous approach works great on paper, but in reality, developers spend considerable time learning and writing CMake configuration files (CMake may not be a programming language by itself but it gets the category of a dialect with its own peculiarities). In addition, looking for the right compiler version and installing the correct dependencies without messing up the other libraries make things so complicated that people literally prefer to write and maintain their own set of tools instead of having to deal with the dependency hell. So, you end up juggling different compiler vendors with their corresponding version, CMake, your core dependencies, the miscellaneous libraries that you have implemented yourself, and (of course) your code. Finally, the cherry on top: you share the software with your collaborators and they will need to install it in their own environment and deal with their own dependency hell, which will probably be different from yours!
How does Rust (partially) solve this mess?
Say goodbye to CMake! You (or your system admin) still need to install the core highly optimized math libraries, but the Rust package manager (a.k.a Cargo) will solve, install and compile all the dependencies for you.
The Rust community offers mature packages providing the common functionality that you need to write numerical applications.
Check my dependencies file to get an idea of what kind of information Cargo (Rust package manager) needs to build your application. In this case, I am using the excellent nalgebra library to build some algorithms on top of nalgebra’s arrays manipulation API.
Can we develop a minimum viable product (MVP) in a reasonable time?
In scientific applications, we often start with a model or a hypothesis in mind and we then build software to prove it (or disprove it) and to connect theory to experiments. Given the high levels of uncertainty, we cannot be sure that what we are developing is going to work out, we need to explore a prototype or minimum viable product to corroborate that our ideas are correct, before investing valuable human resources in a project.
Therefore, it is common to write an MVP in a language like Python that allows to quickly implement an algorithm or method, at the expense of runtime performance (Python is painfully slow, but great for prototyping!). It is extremely risky to develop an MVP in C or Fortran given the complexity and low abstraction level of those languages, meaning that to implement the same concepts we need to write many more lines of code compared to Python.
But what if we could implement something almost as quickly as in Python but with the C++ speed? Rust again to the rescue!
Every experienced programmer knows that both their productivity depends on the abstraction level of the language. The fewer lines of code you write, the fewer bugs you introduce. However, an increase in abstraction often results in a higher runtime cost (code that needs to run extremely fast is often very ugly). Rust zero-cost abstraction allows you to write more concise code by using a higher level abstraction without additional computing cost at runtime. Rust iterators are a great example of the power of Rust zero cost abstraction. It is fair to mention that zero-cost abstraction is also central in C++.
How much effort is required to maintain the code?
If you have ever worked in a medium to large size C/Fortran code base, you certainly know how incredibly difficult and frustrating it can be to maintain it. A recurrent complaint among the programmers in these languages is the dreadful bugs related to unsafe memory management that can take days to trace and reproduce. Fortran programmers are famously known for having segmentation faults for breakfast.
The Rust type system stands out for its capabilities to rule out memory errors at runtime. The Rust borrow checker is the killer feature that helps to eliminate all those memory bugs while still offering lightning-fast speed.
Also, as mentioned previously, Rust’s zero cost abstraction allows you to keep a lean code base that is easier to maintain.
Note for C++ developer: smart pointers partly alleviate the memory management issues, but the borrow checker can help you to extend the safety guarantees to multithreading code.
How much effort is required to test the code and write documentation?
Writing documentation in C/C++/Fortran involved bringing a third-party tool like Doxygen that we need to install and add to our CMake zoo. Also, we need to learn this tool’s special syntax to write documentation and then pray that the documentation builds.
Software documentation is essential for scientific code due to the volatile nature of scientific research. Scientific software without documentation is not legacy code but dead code. Given the high barrier imposed by traditional languages to write documentation, it is expected that most scientific software is stillborn due to the impossibility to understand what has been done, even by experts in the same field (or sometimes even by the person who wrote it).
Documenting a Rust project only requires that you write the documentation in markdown inside the source code as shown in this example. Then you just need to run the cargo doc command and that is it!
Testing in C/C++/Fortran has a similar fate, they required third-party frameworks that need to be installed and added to CMake. Fortran is particularly painful for testing due to the lack of a standard testing framework, forcing programmers to maintain a bunch of scripts to call the binaries, parse the output, and check the results.
Rust has a built-in system to test your code, with no third-party libraries. You can have unit tests to check the functionality of a given module at a time, but also integration tests to check the public interface of your code. You can even run and test the examples in the documentation! In summary, writing and running tests is as effortless as you can get it.
Lowering the barrier to write tests and documentation is an undervalued feature of Rust. I bet that we all agree that code without tests and documentation is short of useless.
How do I parallelize the application?
Image: courtesy of Chiara Caratelli
Disclaimer: due to my ignorance of the latest Rust developments on multi-node computing (MPI) and GPU integration, I am going to blatantly ignore those two subjects.
Scientific simulations like weather prediction, protein binding, fluid dynamics, etc. are computationally intensive but often parallelizable (at least on paper!). It goes without saying that we want to make use of all cores available in a given machine. The standard approach is to use something like OpenMP that consists of runtime libraries, compiler directives, etc. to support shared-memory multithreading programming.
A quite dreaded moment for scientific software developers is when the serial implementation is working and a new parallel version must be implemented. Seriously, parallel implementation in C/C+/Fortran means that all your unknown unknowns about unsafe memory management suddenly uncover all the obnoxious bugs that you didn’t know about until now, and that you need to track for endless hours.
As a remedy for all that frustration and wasted time, Rust offers a novel approach coined as fearless concurrency. This concept refers to the possibility of writing parallel applications that are free of subtle bugs and can be refactored without introducing new bugs.
But how does Rust achieve this marvelous formula? It turns out that the Rust type system and ownership system keep track of what is safe to share across threads, refusing to compile illegal concurrent memory transactions that would have resulted in runtime issues. So, the Rust compiler happily raises compilation errors whenever you are trying to use memory in an unsafe way instead of unleashing Godzilla in the middle of your simulation.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Since Rust is a system programming language, rather than choosing a single parallelism model, it allows multiple low level models like message-passing, share-state, etc. The good news is that we don’t need to use the primitives ourselves, instead, we can use the community-provided libraries like Rayon that build on top of those primitives. Rayon offers powerful functionality like parallel iterators that allow us to execute operations on the elements of an iterator in parallel, with minimal changes in the source code.
What is even better, you can use libraries like ndarray that has a Numpy-style API to manipulate arrays, while simultaneously offering features like an interface to Rayon to run your array operations in parallel.
The Challenges of using Rust for scientific applications
Rust is a promising language for scientific applications but there are several challenges that need to be overcome before the language can gain significant traction by the scientific community.
Rust is a low-level language with many powerful features . In other words, actually you do not learn Rust during a Saturday afternoon while drinking mojitos. It takes significant effort and time before you can start writing with confidence. Fortunately the Rust community is very open and welcoming and there are always people willing to help. Besides, the compiler has the most informative error messages that I have seen in any programming language. In short, the learning curve is steeper than Python, but you will have a single memory-safe language to rule them all.
. In other words, actually you do not learn Rust during a Saturday afternoon while drinking mojitos. It takes significant effort and time before you can start writing with confidence. Fortunately the Rust community is very open and welcoming and there are always people willing to help. Besides, the compiler has the most informative error messages that I have seen in any programming language. In short, the learning curve is steeper than Python, but you will have a single memory-safe language to rule them all. There may be some functionality that is still missing or unstable . The Rust ecosystem is growing rapidly and more people are coming out with great libraries. The community is always happy to help you to come up with a solution for your missing functionality.
. The Rust ecosystem is growing rapidly and more people are coming out with great libraries. The community is always happy to help you to come up with a solution for your missing functionality. Interoperability with C/C++. We certainly do not want to rewrite everything from scratch, therefore we would like to reuse as much code as we can from C/C++. For the Rust community, smooth interoperability with C/C++ is a top priority.
Any further thoughts?
I hope that I could give you an idea about using Rust for scientific software applications. Comments and thoughts are appreciated.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Chiara Caratelli from providing the great drawings. Also my special thanks to Florian Huber, Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Patrick Bos and Tom Bakker for their help editing the text. | https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/using-rust-for-scientific-numerical-applications-learning-from-past-experiences-798665d9f9f0 | [] | 2021-04-14 12:36:02.349000+00:00 | ['Scientific Computing', 'Rust', 'Research', 'Linear Algebra', 'Software Development'] |
How to Share the Joyful Abundance All Around You | The measure of your life will not be in what you accumulate but in what you give away. — Wayne Dyer
On Thursday night this week, I made two batches of highly spiced, delicious gingerbread dough. Yesterday I set out to roll, cut out and bake all of the pieces for our cookie creations. On this day, I learned a powerful lesson about abundance, appropriate for my 100-day journey.
I laid out the flour, parchment paper, rolling, paper patterns, and baking sheets. We were excited to create pyramids, cars, and my son’s space ship schematic, all out of gingerbread dough.
Once I had cut out the shapes that we desired, I noticed I had a lot of extra dough. From that, I continued to roll, cut, and bake bear shapes, circles, mini trees, and small gingerbread house parts. All afternoon I baked, watching Christmas movies, and enjoying the sweet scent of cinnamon and ginger in the air.
After I assembled our creations last night with the help of delicious royal icing, I was in awe of how much I had created out of that dough. I had enough house kits, bears, and trees to gift two families a whole afternoon full of decorating fun.
That magical dough that never seemed to end brought me so much joy. There is a unique type of happiness in your heart when your cup overflows, and you know you have a lot to give away. | https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-share-the-joyful-abundance-all-around-you-292d388a6477 | ['Trista Ainsworth'] | 2020-12-19 20:51:29.828000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Abundance', 'Giving', 'Joy', 'Life Lessons'] |
Tales of a NYC Sex Worker, Part 2: Welcome to Shitsville | Be it ever so fucked up, there’s no place like home.
The NYCTA Subway C train.
I spent the first couple of weeks I lived in Brooklyn with my head down, commuting to and from Manhattan to wait tables. But eventually I had time to explore my neighborhood a little.
Where I live is a corner of Brooklyn that Bedford-Stuyvesant residents tend to insist isn’t part of Bed-Stuy, Bushwick residents will generally deny is in Bushwick, Ocean Hill residents reject, and Brownsville residents ignore. In 2017 you could charitably have described it as “up and coming,” but even in 2021 there’s still a lot of “up” left for it to come. It’s not pretty.
And that’s okay, because the neighborhood also has a lot of character. There’s been construction and renovation of some kind or another going on since the day I moved in. I’ve met some wonderful people there who own or work in local shops and restaurants, play dominoes on sidewalk card tables while sharing the accumulated knowledge of three generations of Brooklynites, or just hang out on the corner shooting the shit. And at the very least, most people smiled and waved back when I passed by and said hi, including those loud guys on the corner.
Some of my coworkers at the restaurant were worried for me when I told them where I’d moved to live on my own. Those guys hanging out on the corner were bad news and I should cross to the other side of the street, they said. If I was heading home after dark, I should get off the subway in a safer neighborhood like Clinton Hill and take an Uber the rest of the way, they warned. But most importantly, I was a small girl, and I had to be careful around the locals. They danced around the issue enough that nobody ever said it in so many words, but the subtext was pretty clear to me: I was a small white girl, and I had to be careful around the black and brown locals.
The first time I came home from work in broad daylight, after subbing for someone’s breakfast/lunch shift, I walked past a couple of loud, active construction sites. As I approached the last one before home, I heard a wolf whistle. I ignored it and sped up a bit, then I heard a second one, followed by a shout: “Don’t walk that ass away so fast!”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been harassed at a construction site since moving to New York City, but this was my new neighborhood, and it was discouraging to think I might not be able to escape it. My train of thought was broken by the sudden appearance of two guys in front of me who must have just come around the corner. “Honey, we said we need to take a closer look at that ass!” said one of them, and I tried to walk around them as they laughed. They weren’t that big — honestly, if I’d had to describe them to police later, I would’ve said, “short, stocky white guys” — but there were two of them and they were bigger than me, and suddenly they were blocking my path.
“Just turn around and give us a quick look, that’s all we want!” the second one said, and I felt tears start to form in my eyes.
“Guys, I’m tired and I just want to go home,” I said, my voice cracking.
They were starting to laugh again when I saw a blur out of the corner of my eye, and all at once there were three more guys standing next to the curb. I started to panic, because it didn’t register at first that these were a few of the guys who I’d seen hanging out on a street corner not far from my place.
“Yo, Billy and Jack, how y’all doin’?” shouted the tallest one of them in a mock redneck twang, and I took a step back, my heart pounding. The two construction guys and I all turned to see a trio of African-American locals, smiles on all their faces, staring at them.
“None of your fuckin’ business,” the first construction guy said. “We’re just makin’ friends.”
The tall local laughed, then continued in what must have been his actual, somewhat Caribbean accent. “Sound to me like the girl decided she got enough friends. Think you should let her pass.”
“I said it’s none of your fuckin’ business,” came the answer. That’s when the tall one slowly stepped up onto the sidewalk and gradually got close to the construction guys, staring down at them.
“Everything this side of that wall is my business,” he said with controlled calm, tilting his head toward the wooden fence around the construction site. “I don’t go on your side getting in your business, you stay out of mine. Yeah?”
For a moment it seemed like the construction guys were weighing their chances against these odds. Then without a word they shook their heads and walked back around the corner. As my three rescuers turned toward me, the tall one lifting his hands to shoulder height to signal he wouldn’t come any closer if I didn’t want him to, I finally burst into tears. Abandoning his plan to keep his distance, he rushed over, got down on a knee, and gently grabbed my arms.
“Baby girl,” he said, “you gonna be fine. We got you, okay? We got you.” I looked up at him, then at his two friends, who nodded their agreement. We got you, we got you. “You live in Shitsville now, baby girl, and East Shitsville belong to me.”
I laughed through my tears at the absurdity of his welcome, but it was oddly comforting, and I fell into his arms and hugged him tightly. He hugged me back. “Call me Dev,” he said.
“Hi Dev, I’m Melinda,” I replied, sniffling.
Dev stood up and gestured for me to follow. He introduced his friends, though I wouldn’t be able to remember their names for a long time after that. They walked me the rest of the way home, and it was only as I was climbing my building’s stoop that I realized I hadn’t told them where I lived — where I’d lived for less than a month. They already knew. I turned around to see Dev smiling at me. “We got you, baby girl,” he said, and they waited until I was inside before they turned to go.
On my regular dinner shift the next night, I was ready to tell a couple of coworkers about the whole thing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized they would just see it as proof that I lived in a dangerous place. The skin color of the assholes didn’t matter if I wasn’t safe, and it would probably sound like I’d invented Dev and his friends no matter how I told the story. So I kept my mouth shut.
Still, I knew the truth. That night when I knocked off work, I felt a little bit better about where I lived than I had the day before last. I walked the several blocks to the subway, and waited on the platform for the one of the last few C trains of the evening before the A train would take over. A few minutes later, I stepped through a set of sliding doors and grabbed a pole. The conductor’s voiceover crackled, and I smiled as I imagined her saying, “This is a Brooklyn-bound C train to Euclid Avenue, making all local stops, including East Shitsville.”
“Stand clear of the closing doors.”
Part 3 is now available here. | https://medium.com/@MelindaByNight/tales-of-a-nyc-sex-worker-part-2-welcome-to-shitsville-90a86783bdd0 | ['Melinda Night', 'Brooklyn Beck', 'Call Girl'] | 2021-09-11 12:31:36.585000+00:00 | ['New York City Subway', 'Brooklyn', 'Sex Work', 'Street Harassment', 'Waitress'] |
Handling Static and Dynamic Test Objects | Introduction
Test Objects are one of the most crucial parts of building a successful automation project. Some of them are static (do not change at all) and some of them are dynamic (they are dependent on some dynamically changing parameters). This tutorial shows you different approaches for handling different types of test objects.
Requirements
You should be able to write your tests in the Script view. You should also know the basics of Java/Groovy.
Static objects
Static objects are very easy to handle. Just go to Object Repository, choose New Test Object and use your favorite selector (I prefer XPath, so all my examples will be for XPaths, but the approach is the same also for other selectors). Save your element and use Katalon static built-in method findTestElement(String pathInRepository) to get your Test Object.
Dynamic objects
Dynamic objects are a bit trickier to deal with than static objects, but it is not so difficult as it may look like. There is a Katalon way to handle parameterized objects, but I want to introduce other possible approaches.
Define your test object directly in a test case
The easiest way to define a test object. See a sample code below:
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.ConditionType
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.TestObject
import com.kms.katalon.core.webui.keyword.WebUiBuiltInKeywords as WebUI String dynamicId = ‘Katalon123’
String xpath = ‘//div[@id=”’ + dynamicId + ‘“]’
TestObject to = new TestObject(“objectName”)
to.addProperty(“xpath”, ConditionType.EQUALS, xpath)
WebUI.click(to)
Without counting the import statements, the first two lines are simple — create a String variable dynamicId and put it into another String — xpath. The magic is happening on the next two lines. You create a new instance of TestObject (let’s call it to). Then, you assign your selector to this new test object using method addProperty(String selectorType, ConditionType type, String selectorValue). Finally, you use the test object directly in the default Katalon keywords. For details on ConditionType, please refer to API documentation.
Easy, isn’t it? Well, yes, but there are also cons of this solution. It is hardly maintainable, especially when your XPath changes often and when you create the same test object in multiple test cases.
Create a separate keyword for dynamic selectors
A better way to handle dynamic selectors is to extract them into separate keywords. You can have several keywords in your test project, one for a single page or so. It is up to you.
I will show a simple keyword holding dynamic selectors.
package mypackage public class MySelectors {
public static final String dynamicIdPath = ‘//div[@id=”%s”]’ }
As you can see, there is the same path as in previous example, but there is a small difference. Instead of using a variable, I use %s wildcard for the String.format() method. Let’s update our original test case accordingly.
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.ConditionType
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.TestObject
import com.kms.katalon.core.webui.keyword.WebUiBuiltInKeywords as WebUI import mypackage.MySelectors String dynamicId = ‘Katalon123’
String xpath = String.format(MySelectors.dynamicIdPath, dynamicId)
TestObject to = new TestObject(“objectName”)
to.addProperty(“xpath”, ConditionType.EQUALS, xpath)
WebUI.click(to)
As you can see, the only change is on the line defining xpath. If you are not familiar with String.format(), please refer to Java documentation.
Alternatively, you can use your own wildcard in the selector value. Then, use String.replace() rather than String.format().
public static final String dynamicIdPath = ‘//div[@id=”<<dynamicId>>”]’
// a line in test case:
String xpath = MySelectors.dynamicIdPath.replace(“<<dynamicId>>”, dynamicId)
The advantage of storing dynamic selectors in separate keywords is that you keep all selectors in one place. When a selector changes, you change only one place instead of all tests where you use it.
Create a method which returns a dynamic test object
Now we extend the MySelectors keyword by adding a new method to return TestObject. This will eliminate a few lines of code in your test case, making it more maintainable.
package mypackage import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.ConditionType
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.TestObject public class MySelectors {
public static final String dynamicIdPath = ‘//div[@id=”%s”]’ public static TestObject getMyTestObject(String selectorType, String selectorValue) {
TestObject to = new TestObject()
to.addProperty(selectorType, ConditionType.EQUALS, selectorValue)
return to
}
}
And our test case will look like this:
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.ConditionType
import com.kms.katalon.core.testobject.TestObject
import com.kms.katalon.core.webui.keyword.WebUiBuiltInKeywords as WebUI import mypackage.MySelectors String dynamicId = ‘Katalon123’
String xpath = String.format(MySelectors.dynamicIdPath, dynamicId)
WebUI.click(MySelectors.getMyTestObject(“xpath”, xpath))
As our new method returns TestObject, we can call it directly using the default Katalon keywords. In the test case, you do not have to worry about creating a new instance of TestObject. You can customize it however you want, you can add more parameters into this method (i.e. ConditionType), or simplify it to pass only a TestObjectProperty instance.
Conclusion
The main point of this tutorial is that there are several different approaches to deal with dynamic selectors. This tutorial presents a few examples (more or less difficult) which can help you with this topic. I am 100% sure that there are even more effective ways how to do it, I will be glad if you share your own approach.
For further reference, refer to Top 10 API Testing Tools in 2020 or Best Automation Testing Tools 2020 Review.
About the author
Marek Melocik is currently working as Test Automation Engineer in Brno, Czech Republic. He has been working in QA industry since 2014.
Meet Marek at www.linkedin.com/in/marek-melocik | https://medium.com/katalon-studio/handling-static-and-dynamic-test-objects-f49d04667e9d | ['Katalon Studio'] | 2020-07-01 07:10:21.389000+00:00 | ['Continuous Integration', 'Software Development', 'Testing', 'Programming', 'Web Development'] |
What’s Next? The Astrology of 2021 | We made it! We survived the year that was 2020. Can we all just put this terrible year behind us and begin 2021 as if it all had never happened? Can we just go back to how it used to be? Well, yes and no. Yes, we will get back to some kind of normal. But it will surely be a new normal. Because the world to which many of us want to return can never be the same after the experiences and events of 2020. The reality of our world has simply changed, for better and for worse — depending how you look at it.
We can say that 2021 will be different than 2020 in many respects. As we have discussed at length over this past year, the weight of 2020 was connected to the very powerful stellium of three outer planets all in Capricorn — the sign of society and structure, rules and regulations, law and order, hierarchy and authority. All these aspects of our lives and our society came under enormous pressure when Pluto — planet of death, transformation and rebirth, combined its energies with Saturn — planet of limits, restrictions, challenges and losses, which was then exacerbated by Jupiter—which expands everything it touches. Thus, our entire world seemed to implode under the influence of these three major forces. Pluto represented the destructive nature of the pandemic, Jupiter the expansive energy that witnessed the coronavirus rapidly spread around the world, and Saturn the limits and restrictions of lockdown and shelter in place orders, along with the pain, suffering and loss of life. It was a sobering experience that brought the world to its knees and the global economy to a screeching halt. But now, we are left to ask ourselves, why did all this have to happen?
Because everything happens for a reason. And if astrology teaches us anything, it’s that there is always a deeper meaning to be recognized, a pattern of growth to be observed, and often a cycle of opportunity to be seized. For all the reasons I mentioned above, many of us in the astrology community had been looking ahead to 2020 with some degree of trepidation for many years. We could see the proverbially writing on the wall. Because these types of configurations — especially the conjunctions of Saturn and Pluto — almost always signal times of great difficulty and strife. War, terrorism and disease are all the usual manifestations of this cycle. And adding Jupiter to the mix only foreshadowed a magnification of the potential for massive disruption. That’s why astrologers were so anxious about 2020. And it certainly delivered on many of its dark promises.
But there was another piece to this picture that gave astrologers more hope, and that was the Great Conjunction of 2020 that occurred between Saturn and Jupiter on the Winter Solstice. In what became referred to in popular culture as the “Christmas Star,” the world got to witness a rare astronomical phenomenon where the two biggest planets in our solar system appeared as one bright star in the evening sky for several days right before Christmas. And in a year where we all needed something big and bright and awe-inspiring to focus on, the universe seemed to deliver us a rather poignant message in the evening skies. Now as astrologers, we recognize that part of the sky where this “Christmas Star” conjunction occurred as 0º Aquarius — which is very significant, because we interpret this as a sign of radical change and the beginning of a brand new cycle in history.
So the twin events of 2020 — the heavy-duty stellium in Capricorn, and the Great Conjunction in Aquarius — served as cosmic bookends to this most unprecedented of years. I wrote a few articles on both of these subjects (The Astrology of 2020 and The Great Conjunction of 2020) where I took a pretty deep dive into these “once-in-a-lifetime” astronomical events. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading them as a way to help you orient yourself and really understand why we experienced the events of 2020. It will help give you a proper context — a proper astrological framework for interpreting the meaning and the message of the year that was 2020.
If you didn’t have an astrological perspective going into 2020 — the year likely caught you by surprise. But now, having been shaken by the experience, many of us are awaking to the fact that a very significant shift is taking place in our world, and that we need to start paying closer attention to the signs and messages that we are receiving from the universe at this time. We’ve received our cosmic wake up call. No doubt, that’s why many of you are reading this article and others like it. You don’t want to be caught off guard again by what happens next. You really can’t afford it — mentally, physically, emotionally, financially or otherwise. You want to be prepared. You want to be ready.
Well, fortunately, you’ve come to the right place — because astrology can help us out here.
Now, I wanna be clear. I’m not saying that by using astrology we can predict the future. No. But what I am saying is that by using astrology we can better understand the energy patterns that are unfolding around us at this time and learn to work with these energies in a way that serves our highest purpose. We can align with them in a way that allows us to ride the waves of these energies like a zen surfer, and not get pulled down into the undertow of tumultuous events or get dragged out to sea by the riptide of the times. When we can see the waves coming, when we can time it up, paddle out and jump on our surfboards and ride the waves — then it’s actually thrilling, it’s epic, it’s what it’s supposed to feel like to be fully awake and alive.
So, how do we learn to surf the waves that are coming our way in 2021? Well, we look ahead and we observe where the planetary energies are pointing, we correlate them to our past and present circumstances, and we begin to map out a plan to navigate these energies and surf them towards our desired outcome — to reach the beach of our near future selves while learning to grow and evolve in harmony with the energy currents that are unfolding.
So in this article, we’re going to take a look ahead at the major astrological trends for 2021. We’ll be taking a “big picture” overview and trying to get a sense of the territory we’ll be charting in the coming year, so that we can begin to build out a good road map for how we intend to navigate these times of unprecedented change and hidden opportunity. To my mind, this is the true value of astrology, and why I’m so motivated — perhaps now more than ever — to share with you my understanding and my perspective on the times, so that we all might benefit from the wisdom encoded in what I believe to be at once a lost art and sacred science. I think we’re seeing that it’s a practice whose time has come… again. Astrology is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance in our culture. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the astrology of 2021.
You can also check out Daljeet’s YouTube video on the Astrology of 2021
Beginning of the end, or end of the beginning?
So, is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? This is the big question of the day. What does this moment in time reflect? Where do we stand? What is really going on? And how are we to best move forward?
There’s a reason why these questions seem so monumental right now, and why we might be struggling to articulate clear answers. Because we are straddling between two worlds. It’s as if a chasm has begun to open up between the way things were and the way things ought to be—between the past and the future—and many of us are sensing we have one foot on either side of this chasm. But the chasm is starting to widen, quickly, and our intuition is telling us that the time is rapidly approaching when we are going to need to make a decisive move: either leap forward into the future, which is uncomfortable and unknown, or fall back into the past, which is comfortable and known. There’s also a third option: try to keep one foot on either side of this widening chasm. But the end result of that effort will be to get torn in two or plummet into the depths of chasm. The truth is, we are likely to witness groups of people exercising all three of these options in the coming years. The question is: which group do you want to join?
I know my answer, and I’m hoping I can enjoin you to see the way forward together. Because we’ll need each other to get there in one piece. It’s a leap of faith for sure. But one I think we all have to make, both individually and as a collective, if we want to keep this human experiment going much longer. Something old is ending, and something new is waiting to be born. The sense that there is a profound and rather pressing choice to be made between past and future is really going to be a major theme of 2021. We will see this play out in the conflicting energies of Saturn and Uranus — which is the major astrological theme of 2021.
Saturn Square Uranus: Clash of the Titans
For most of the coming year, Saturn will be in a challenging square aspect with Uranus. These two planets represent somewhat opposing energies. Saturn, on the one hand, represents limits and boundaries, codependency and control, structure and hierarchies, tradition and the past, and the comfort of the known, while Uranus, on the other hand, represents boundless freedom, unlimited independence, new horizons and a fearless exploration of the unknown. This is a classic Clash of the Titans. Both these energies are pretty formidable in their own right. And the energy pattern of the square aspect dictates a clash of wills between these two planetary forces. This is why the theme of past vs. future will likely predominate our consciousness in the year to come.
We are indeed at a crossroads in the history of humanity. I think anyone awake and alive right now has at least a dim awareness of this being true, if not blindingly obvious. We are standing at the threshold of some major evolution in consciousness. The human species is about to make one of its characteristic “great leaps forward” in its evolutionary journey. The convergence of artificial and human intelligence, the complete and total global integration and interdependence, the specter of world-wide systems collapse, self-terminating exponential technology and extinction-level environmental catastrophe. If you can’t see that we’re speeding headlong towards the cliff while driving forward and only looking through the rearview mirror, then you’re probably not paying close enough attention. It’s as if our culture has been strapped into a baby seat in the back as we’ve willingly handed the keys to who we thought were the adults in the room — the experts and the authorities. But it turns out they in fact are just an insecure clique of teenagers at best, and in many cases are really proving to be just a bunch of emotional and intellectual children who have no clue what’s really going on. Witness the way our politicians act more like bullies in a school yard than like mature adults. The emperor indeed has no clothes!
2020 really woke a lot of us up to the fact that no one is really at the wheel here, no one is really looking out for us, and we’re all on our own. And it was this fracturing—this tearing at the social fabric—that was wrought by Saturn and Jupiter conjoining Pluto in Capricorn. Capricorn is society. It is structure, it is hierarchy, it is all the institutional systems that make up an organized and functioning society: political systems, financial systems, agricultural systems, medical systems, communications systems. So whenever Pluto comes around and transits through the sign of Capricorn — as it does every roughly 250 years — then all these major systems of society come under intense scrutiny during such times. They all get stress-tested, to determine if they still function properly, if they still serve the greatest good and the needs of the ever-changing times. This is what Pluto is all about. Whatever sign it is transiting, it seeks to transform the aspects of life ruled by that sign.
So we are in an era where the entire structure of society is coming under Pluto’s transforming influence. And the energy of Pluto can be worked with in one of two ways: either you embrace its call for transformation and engage in a slow and gradual evolutionary process, or you can try to resist its call for transformation, which invariably results in rather cataclysmic changes and catastrophic events. Either way, the change will occur. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And perhaps more importantly — how.
As a society, we have been resisting some necessary changes for quite some time. When Pluto first entered into Capricorn back in 2008 we received an early warning sign that big-time change was on the horizon. That year a global financial crisis paralyzed the world economy and caused a “Great Recession.” In the aftermath of that catastrophic event, there was an opportunity to enact sweeping changes to the global financial system. To begin to build towards a more equitable future. But the calls for reform were largely ignored. The powers that be (Capricorn) resisted the necessary changes (Pluto), and chose instead to cling onto the old system, the old values. To selfishly protect their own interests (Capricorn). Instead, they tried to put a trillion dollar band aid on deep systemic problems. They bailed out Wall Street and the big banks, and stuck Main Street and the middle class with the bill. There was outrage. There was Occupy Wall Street.
At that time, Uranus was in Aries square to Pluto in Capricorn. This is a classic signature of revolution and upheaval, protest and rebellion. These are the characteristics and qualities that always emerge when these two planetary energies combine. Which is why that period saw witness to not only movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, but the Arab Spring and a wave of pro-democracy movements that spread around the world. Many of these protest movements were fueled by youth movements (which is typical of Uranus in Aries — it has a very youthful, rebellious energy). So the vanguard of the youth (Uranus in Aries) was clashing with the old guard (Pluto in Capricorn). And, at the end of the day, it seems like the old guard had managed to successfully fend off the rebellion and keep the established system in tact. But the rebellions all moved underground, and would emerge as a many-headed monster in the years to come.
Fast-forward to 2020. With the outbreak of the coronavirus, the quarantines and lockdowns, the economic shutdowns, the killings of George Floyd and Briana Taylor, the emergence of Black Lives Matter, Me Too and the Antifa on the left, Q Anon, Proud Boys and MAGA on the right, and a divisive and self-destructive administration inside the White House, and you now have a system under siege from all sides, within and without, on the verge of collapse. Astrologically, we now we had Saturn joining Pluto in Capricorn, and the power structure (represented by Pluto in Capricorn) was getting bolstered by Saturn — law and order, authority, restrictions, limits, control, and that combination was enhanced by Jupiter — bringing its global and expansive qualities to this mix. As a result, 2020 witnessed a world on lock down.
We all hit the collective pause button on our modern day-to-day lifestyles. There was a lot of fear, anxiety and uncertainty — fueled by a rather polluted information ecology that is making it harder than ever to make sense of the world, reinforcing the suspicion that there are no adults in the room looking out for us all. We’re on our own. And in that moment, many of us had what recovering alcoholics call a moment of clarity: we saw through the foggy haze of our hamster-wheel existence and realized there is something more, a deeper purpose to our lives that we were neglecting, ignoring, missing out on. This created a rather tectonic shift in the consciousness. It’s really quite powerful when events coalesce to allow for such a mass reorientation to occur. The synchronicity of so many people having this realization all at once produced an energy pattern that now must find expression and be channeled into new ways of being.
So 2020 and the powerful stellium of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn served as the catalyst for a Great Awakening. A major percentage of the population “woke up.” And now many of us are looking around at each other as if to say: “Now what do we do?” And this is where astrology offered us a way forward, with the symbolism of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn at 0º Aquarius that put a punctuation mark on the end of 2020, and opened the door to the way forward in 2021.
I mention all of this as a prelude to our discussion of 2021, because all of these planetary energies will be reactivated in new ways in the year to come. In particular, the energies of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus will combine in new ways that will challenge us to embrace necessary changes, and offer us opportunities, as well as the potential for sudden losses. The energy of Pluto in Capricorn, while less activated than in 2020, will continue to stress-test our social systems to the breaking point, forcing the necessary changes to be made on a massive scale. We will ignore or neglect facing these monumental changes at our own peril. We’re at a “buck stops here” moment. We can no longer continue to kick the can down the road. We’ve reached a collective dead end. The sweeping social changes we endeavor to undertake (or try to avoid) over the next 3 years while Pluto completes its transit through Capricorn will likely set the tone for the next 50–100 years. Yeah, it’s really that consequential.
Which is why we all need to be awake, aware, alert and proactive at this time. Don’t blink. Don’t go back to sleep. We’re all in this together now, and for each other. Let’s not forget this important fact. It’s all hands on deck. We all have our role to play. The challenges are big, but if we all pitch in and do our part, we can effect a massive shift in life on this planet for decades to come. That’s why we were all born at this time. We wanted to participate. We wanted to contribute our own small part in our own seemingly small way. But it’s not small when you multiply it by millions of people. It’s massive. It’s powerful. It’s a force to be reckoned with. That’s the true power of the people. And we are entering the “power of the people” era. This is it folks. The Age of Aquarius. The dawning of a New Age. So, let’s make our game plan.
2021 Energy Patterns
We will begin the year of 2021 by riding the wave of energy initiated by the recent Great Conjunction in Aquarius. This really gave us the opportunity to end the year of 2020 on a bit of a hopeful and optimistic note. It became known as the “Christmas Star” and served as a literal beacon in the dark and foggy night of what had been a rather insufferable year. This event signaled a palpable shift of energy from Capricorn into Aquarius, and initiated a new cycle in our society. We are now moving on from 200 years of earth-focused energy to a brand new 200-year period of air-focused energy. We’re moving from gravity to levity, from heavy to light, from slow and methodical to fast and energetic. This is the true shift to the New Age: the information age, the age of interconnectedness, the opportunity to create a truly integrated global village of ideas.
But again, it starts small. It starts on the personal level. It starts with all of us. How can we, as individuals, begin to form better connections, strengthen our communities, improve the quality and capacity of our social networks? This year of 2021 is set to begin with an incredible surge of energy for social growth, as expansive Jupiter begins to separate from its conjunction with restrictive Saturn and blaze a trail through innovative and socially-aware Aquarius. We will also experience an incredible urge to burst forth into the new year. Jupiter’s characteristic optimism and exuberance will stimulate us to grow beyond our previous limitations. It will motivate us to seek out new ideas and deeper truths. In Aquarius, this means a more detached and rational way of seeing the world. While Capricorn is all about attachment: whether it be to our old habits, our cherished possessions or our tried and true ways of doing things, Aquarius invites us to shed those old patterns and find new ways of being, to innovate, to invent and to reform.
In the first 6 months of the year, Jupiter will actually speed through the entire 30º of the sign of Aquarius, and even begin to dip its toes into Pisces by the time of the Summer Solstice on June 20th, at which time it will then station retrograde. So with this energy pattern, we could expect to see many of the grassroots social movements that emerged and fomented during 2020 to continue to grow in reach and scope during the first half of 2021. Many people will be feeling a need to participate in something real, something meaningful, to be a part of some cause to effect the changes they desire to see in the world. This should bolster the ranks of many of the grassroots organizations. There is also a tremendous potential for the various factions within these movements to unite under a common cause and interconnect their networks as a means of mutually empowering their various progressive platforms.
The energy of 2021 is ripe for a coalition of progressive movements to join forces. (Credit: Logan Weaver Source: Unsplash)
Now, we do have to consider that as Jupiter moves to separate from its conjunction with Saturn, the pull of the old taskmaster will still be felt for the first month or so, so it may take a few weeks to ramp up to speed. But, while the Great Conjunction is still in aspect through the month of January, it remains a great time to make some solid plans for the New Year, to leverage the combined power of Saturn and its ability to create structure and build practical and valuable foundations with Jupiter’s inspiration and optimism. As I’ve been saying all year, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a fresh start, a new beginning. And for those of us who have already made significant changes, this is a time for growth and expansion.
Uranus: Great Change Agent
At this point we need to bring Uranus into the picture, because it will have a major influence on the energy of 2021. Both Jupiter and Saturn will begin the year forming a tense square with Uranus, the great change agent. And while Jupiter’s square with Uranus will only be in effect until mid-February, Saturn will remain in this challenging aspect throughout most of 2021. This will prove to be the major theme of the year to come. The first 6 weeks or so — while both Jupiter and Saturn square Uranus — will likely set the tone for the entire year, then Saturn and Uranus will be left to work out their differences over the remainder of the year.
I really wanna focus in on the rather dynamic relationship that exists between Saturn and Uranus. Because, by nature, there is an inherent conflict between these two energies, which will only be exacerbated by the challenges presented by the fact that they’ll be in a tense square aspect over the course of the entire year. This is going to be the most challenging energy that we’ll be called to work throughout 2021. So let’s try and unpack this relationship a bit.
When we talk about Saturn and Uranus we often use the work antithetical. While Saturn is conservative, practical and restrictive, Uranus is radical, revolutionary and unbounded. So we can expect a great deal of tension between these two energies and impulses. Saturn prefers the past, the tried and true, the proven, the known. Uranus is focused on the future, the unexplored, the unknown.
So which planet wins out in this Clash of the Titans? I’ll be honest, this is really a tough configuration to handicap. Especially when we consider that we have conservative Saturn in progressive Aquarius squaring off with progressive Uranus in conservative Taurus. Neither has a decided advantage here. So we will likely see a great deal of push-pull action between the two forces. It seems as if the cosmic energies are challenging us to walk a tightrope and strike some perfect balance here.
Perhaps the energy of Aquarius is the key to finding this elusive common ground. Because Saturn is the traditional ruler of Aquarius while Uranus is its modern ruler. This creates the potential for some mutual receptivity between the two planetary energies.Within the sign of Aquarius these two rivals can find areas of agreement. Perhaps the changes won’t come fast enough for the overly Uranian types, while things feel like they’re moving way too fast for the overly Saturnian types. But for those who can strike a balance between the two, and intuitively hold the tension of opposites with a rational detachment — a quintessential Aquarian trait — then there’s likely a sweet spot to be found in there somewhere.
What’s the Fix?
One of the other themes of this Saturn/Uranus configuration is that this is a fixed square. Because both Aquarius and Taurus are fixed signs, with Aquarius being fixed air and Taurus being fixed earth. And fixed energies are all about consolidation — they’re about harnessing potential power and actualizing it. This is the dynamo energy of astrology, which is why we often find the fixed signs are often very capable and productive. So the energies of this Saturn/Uranus configuration will need to be grounded and channeled into practical outlets.
This brings to mind the notion of embodied practices like Yoga, Tai Chi, walking meditations — anything that fosters the mind–body connection. Beginning, developing or further expanding such practices will be an excellent way for all of us to ground these powerful energies of 2021. Our bodies are being charged by the powerful electrical current of Uranus in Taurus while our minds are being stimulated by the intellectual currents of Saturn in Aquarius. Practices like Yoga are the perfect bridge to connect these two influences and combine their strengths.
This will also help us avoid a natural pitfall to these fixed energies, which is to become too rigid in our positions or our beliefs. We will witness a lot of people “standing their ground” this year, refusing to budge, refusing to give an inch, for fear that they will lose their grip on their cherished beliefs and ways of being. There will be a lot of shouting matches in the public squares around the world. Saturn in fixed Aquarius is particularly susceptible to this behavior, and Uranus in Taurus can be equally as stubborn and prone to arrogance and a sense of superiority. So we just want to be careful that we aren’t being so rigid that we miss opportunities for growth this year. Because under the influence of Uranus, things may come suddenly and unexpectedly. And Saturn might resist change, insisting we need more time to figure out the best way forward.
This will be a tension we’ll all have to negotiate in our personal lives, and it will also be a theme playing out in the collective in 2021 as well. How do we move forward? What are the best next steps? Whose plan is sound? Whose vision is clearest? We are all going to be asked to walk new paths in the coming years. We are entering uncharted territory. So the better we can get in touch with our own needs and motivations, the better we can navigate our way forward.
But it will all come back to the theme of Aquarius: how do we move forward in a way that serves all of us, not just the privileged few. What social forces can generate the kind of rising tide that lifts all boats? This type of future-oriented Aquarian vision is what is being called for on the planet at this time. And the hope is that it will help us navigate our way out of the inertia of the past and all its unnecessary baggage. With Pluto still in Capricorn for another 2–3 years, there is still some major work to be done on a societal level.
Hopefully the energy of this year can stimulate the change in thinking that allows us as a society to pivot away from our reliance on heavy, earth-focused resources like fossil fuels and move to more renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydro-electric. Some form of a Green New Deal — hopefully with broad bipartisan support, might be put in motion in 2021. But it only happens when the people demand it. The energy patterns of this year might stir Americans to wake up and decide to take back their political system. It’s been rather successfully hijacked and captured by huge transnational corporations with armies of lobbyists. It’s no secret that our politicians have become beholden to the wealth donor class than to their constituency.
And We The People have become rather complacent with this as the status quo, distracted by advertisements for latest shiny new toys in consumer electronics or the latest buzz show on Netflix. But in 2020, the veneer of our consumer culture was tarnished a bit. It lost its luster. We stopped and looked around and saw a deeper reality hiding in plain sight beyond the illusion of the perpetual rat race that we’ve all been running. This was the silver lining of 2020: a chance to make a major shift in how we live our lives. What’s really valuable? What’s really important? And now, with the energy patterns aligning in 2021, there’s a real opportunity for a coalition of well-organized and concerted grassroots efforts to mobilize enough support to effect real and meaningful changes in our political system at this time. So if you’ve ever had an inkling to participate in the process, now is the time.
Now is the time to get involved. Now is the time for change agents. And this can happen on many levels, from national to local, from collective to personal. It can be as big as solving global warming or as small as changing your diet to reflect that desire. No action, done with conscious intention, is too small or insignificant. It all matters. It all counts. It all adds up. We all have our role to play in creating the greater good. So what parts of yourself or your own life are you dissatisfied with? What steps can you take in 2021 to change that? How can you become your own change agent?
Remember that you always have agency over your own life and the decisions you make for yourself. Exercise that right. Exercise that personal sovereignty. Empower yourself. And then empower others around you to do the same. Mutual cooperation and support: that’s the highest expression of Aquarian energy. And that’s the name of the game in 2021.
So, I think you get the idea here. We’ve spent a lot of time on this topic, but it really is the major theme of the year, and so I wanted to get you properly oriented so you can make well-informed resolutions for yourself for the New Year.
There are a lot of other themes and issues that will present themselves over the course of 2021, and I’m going to cover them in future articles. In the next article I’m going to focus on money, because that’s likely to be a major issue this year with Uranus in Taurus. We can expect some sudden disruptions in the economy and the financial markets this year, and we’ll want tobe prepared for that. I’ll also be writing an article on what I’m calling Summer of Love ‘21 — because this summer during the month of July, we’ll have a conjunction of Venus and Mars in Leo, so we can look forward to a steamy summer on the love and romance front for sure. I’ll also preview the eclipse seasons for 2021, as well as highlight some of the opportunities that will present themselves via Saturn’s elegant dance with the Nodal Axis in the coming year.
I hope this information has been helpful and insightful and motivating you to become your own personal change agent. Let’s all set our intentions for the new year. And then let’s all paddle out and ride the big waves coming in 2021 like the Zen Surfers we were born to become. All right. See you out there. Happy New Year, everyone. Sat Nam. | https://medium.com/astrolab21/whats-next-the-astrology-of-2021-f87f46008a6a | ['Daljeet Peterson'] | 2020-12-30 00:55:42.745000+00:00 | ['2021 Prediction', 'Personal Development', 'Society And Culture', 'Self Improvement', 'Astrology'] |
Why am I starting this? Hmmm… Great question I just had to ask myself. | Why am I starting this? Hmmm… Great question I just had to ask myself. Jeanét Moore ·Dec 23, 2020
I am starting this as a means to share relevant and potentially helpful mental wellness strategies and tools that align better with the lived experience of those from the African diaspora. Sure, some of this may be helpful for anyone; I just find it important to specify how important it is to create and hold space for those of us who already navigate so many systems that aren’t made for us.
I am a neurodivergent Black mother who has found purpose in advocating for those working through “doing the work” of processing and healing from intergenerational trauma and reducing the stigma of seeking mental health related support and/or treatment within the Black community. | https://medium.com/@mindfulwelloak/why-am-i-starting-this-hmmm-great-question-i-just-had-to-ask-myself-1dd2eb97b517 | ['Jeanét Moore'] | 2020-12-23 21:59:39.708000+00:00 | ['Anxiety And Depression', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Adult Adhd', 'Adhd'] |
Leveraging Tech to Create Operational Efficiency | Ombori on Creating Operational Efficiency
All businesses strive for some level of efficiency within their company, whether that means ensuring that owners are not doing everything themselves or using the right technology to streamline processes. The leaner and more efficient your company is, the more likely it is to succeed over the long term.
While efficiency is a good overall goal, defining what that means for your company can be tricky. What is very efficient for one company may not work well at all for another business. Individual companies have to define what operational efficiency means for their unique company, industry, and goals. Once these metrics have been defined, business owners and operators can work toward creating operational efficiency.
The High-Level Overview: What is Operational Efficiency?
At the very basic level, operational efficiency is the relationship between an organization’s input and output. Operational efficiency is the goal to produce a high-quality product with as few resources as possible. Operational efficiency generally leads to increasing revenue by cutting down on unnecessary costs.
Distinguishing Between Productivity and Efficiency
Productivity and efficiency are often used interchangeably in business. However, they are very different concepts. Productivity essentially means that you are doing more with the same resources. Efficiency, on the other hand, means doing more or achieving the same level of production with less or fewer resources.
Productivity really focuses on performance. It might mean increasing costs, such as by improving current equipment or asking employees to go through more training. Although there is some “upfront” investment, the cost is justified because the overall output increases.
Efficiency, on the other hand, generally does not make any upgrades. Instead, it focuses on producing at the same (or increased) level, but with fewer resources. The most common example is in the manufacturing context: producing the same amount of product with fewer machines.
The Importance of Focusing on Efficiency First
It can be tempting to try to focus your efforts on both productivity and efficiency at the same time. After all, they can both lead to increased revenues and a more attractive bottom line. However, if you want to improve the overall performance of your company, focusing on efficiency first will be a better use of your time and resources.
By creating as much as you can with the resources you have, you create an optimally efficient environment that can be improved upon later. Going extremely lean first will help you use resources effectively. Then, you can increase productivity by building upon an already highly efficient operation.
Start by Creating a Baseline of Operations
Your baseline of operations includes all of the functions that must be in place for your company to run. This requires an in-depth understanding of what each department does and how it contributes to the overall goals and functions of the company. In smaller businesses, the roles of each department may overlap quite a bit.
Creating the baseline of operations requires an understanding of:
The purpose of each department (or person)
Responsibilities of each department
Steps that each person or department must carry out to fulfill their role within the company
Once you have this high-level overview of understanding, you can move on to actually calculating efficiencies.
Creating Metrics to Measure Efficiencies
All of the understanding of operations and cost-cutting in the world cannot do any good if companies do not have a meaningful way to measure relative efficiencies. This step is necessary to have the means to evaluate efficiency. Without some type of metric to assess efficiency, you cannot tell whether improvements are actually being made or measure the overall health of an organization.
To start, you must decide which input and output measures are the most relevant for your company. Every industry and individual company are different, and many efficiency measures will not make sense across more than one industry.
Key performance indicators might include things like:
Cost of goods sold
Hours necessary for production
Average transaction values
Overtime or labor hours generally
Transportation costs for products
Gross margins on investments
Conversion rates
Cost of raw materials or producing specific component parts
Foot traffic and digital traffic
Inventory turnover
Reviewing metrics from other comparable companies might be a helpful starting point. Review annual reports or quarterly updates to shareholders of companies in the same industry. Determine what they see as performance indicators and what kind of measurement they think is good or bad. There are also many resources available that provide industry-wide averages for various indicators that might be helpful for your company as well.
As you work through measurements like time and quality indicators, you can begin to spot bottlenecks that make processes slower.
Addressing Operational Bottlenecks
Bottlenecks in operations are critical points where efficiency can be improved. They might be unnecessary tasks or points in the product lifecycle that can be improved by altering current processes.
Consider an example. Imagine that workers have to have two quality approvals from different department managers before a final product can be shipped to a customer. Getting these approvals is time-consuming and delays getting products out the door by at least a day each time a batch is ready.
To address this bottleneck, you might be able to eliminate one of the approvals required. Alternatively, perhaps you could ensure that one approval happens as part of an earlier quality check and not as part of the final check. As a third option, you could incorporate a quality control worker at the end of the line whose job it is to instantly do a quality review, instead of moving the product from one location to another or waiting for specific people to come to the product.
Creativity is often very helpful in addressing bottlenecks that curtail operational efficiencies. You should also keep in mind that removing or reducing bottlenecks will generally require working closely with a particular department or employee to develop a new process or strategy to accomplish the same goal.
Once you have addressed a bottleneck, be sure to continue measuring key performance indicators to check for improvements. Continue communication with your team to make efficiencies even better as you work through implementing the new solution.
Implementing Technology to Increase Operational Efficiency in Employees
Technology can play a huge role in increasing efficiencies. Although implementing new technology may be seen as a move toward productivity rather than efficiency, it can actually increase both concepts. Using the right type of technology can not only help increased output, but it can cut down on costs as well.
Although operational efficiency is often viewed from the perspective of manufacturing or similar industries, the retail industry can benefit significantly from increasing efficiencies even at the tail-end of the product cycle. Increasing employee efficiencies is perhaps the easiest place to start improvements in retail.
Scheduling and Appointment Setting
Implementing technology that allows employees (and customers) to be more organized can have a profound impact on efficiency and productivity. A simple switch to a scheduling software or appointment setting technology allows employees to not only track their schedules better, but they can often communicate with customers better as well.
Curbside Pickup and BOPIS Services
Customers get a lot of value out of services like curbside pickup or BOPIS (Buy Online, Pickup In-Store) options. However, employees can also significantly increase efficiencies in serving customers when clients use this service as well. It allows them to coordinate services in a way that best fits the customer’s needs. It also allows business owners to schedule more effectively to meet client demands.
People Counting Systems
People counting technology allows business owners to know exactly how many people are in their brick-and-mortar store at any given time. Over time, companies can spot trends, including situations where more workers are necessary to meet demand. The workforce can be decreased on slower days as well.
Real-time people counting technology can also help companies spot bottleneck customer service areas and address them immediately. Over time, you can see trends that create bottlenecks and stop them from occurring before they cause any additional waiting time for retail customers.
Queue Management
An effective queue management system will allow your team members to work much more efficiently. Instead of herding clients and dealing with angry customers who have had to wait, a good queue management system will stop bottlenecks before they happen and allow your team to address client needs proactively instead of reactively.
Using Ombori Technology to Increase Operational Efficiency
If you are looking for ways to make your company more efficient and productive, Ombori may have the solution for you. The team at Ombori will work with you to develop the personalized system you need to decrease costs and increase outputs. Learn more by contacting Ombori today. | https://medium.com/@omborigroup/leveraging-tech-to-create-operational-efficiency-e469c4bb311f | [] | 2021-07-02 14:16:45.909000+00:00 | ['Retail Technology', 'Retail', 'Efficiency', 'Customer Experience', 'Operations'] |
Who has the final say: UX or PM? (Hint: you’re missing the point) | What’s the solution?
I don’t think we should accept this as the status quo. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. By and large, I‘ve avoided almost all of these problems, and I believe that by following two proven principles you can too.
(1) Common Goals and (2) Communication
Yeah, it’s kind of that easy. But don’t think I’ve presented these here as empty platitudes, let me explain how you can actually leverage these.
But first, let’s get this out of the way: does UX or PM have the final say in product decisions? Simply: it doesn’t matter.
This is the wrong question. It’s a distraction. An immature inquiry to settle petty squabbles. It wrongly assumes that any one role is equipped with the definitively correct answers.
“The data should win!”, you say. Sure, I believe that is generally true, but data is too easily tainted by interpretation. Especially in discovery stages. Sometimes you just have to make a decision, ship it, and see how it performs.
So, it’s NOT about answering this question and more about having a common understanding of where we want to be as a team and then doing our best to get there together.
Common Goals
What should a product team’s common goal be? Easy: the business must win.
It’s almost that simple. All internal disagreements aside, the company for which you are building products must succeed. It’s futile to argue if UX or PM wins if the company loses.
A close second is: the team must deliver.
Only team’s that deliver value can justify their existence. If a team isn’t contributing value, it’s simply a liability.
Further, it’s not just one discipline that is responsible for delivering value, it rests on the shoulders of the whole team! Even if one role is performing perfectly, it still takes the rest of the team for that person to actually deliver value to the business.
So what do you do when two members of the team have strongly held opposing views? It may seem a simplistic answer, but there really is no other way: give and take.
“But what about the user?!”, a Designer cries. “What about our business needs?!”, a Product Manager wails.
Look, you’re both smart people. Your organization is trusting you to do what is best. So do your best. Together.
This is where the give and take comes in. The truth is, many products launch with less-than-ideal user experiences and the world hasn’t ended. Sometimes a product is behind schedule or may not have every feature you’d like and somehow the company goes on. It’s up to each role to make concessions where it can. Give here, take there. And if you are both doing it with the common goal of winning, everything will be fine.
Remember: a team is only as good as what it delivers together.
A product with great UX is worthless if it never makes it to market.
A product shipped on time might be full of bugs.
A product with elegant code may fail to generate revenue.
If you want to utilize the principle of Common Goals on your product team, keep these things in mind:
The best product is usually a released product!
product! Defer to the domain expert when feasible, but focus on team wins.
There’s more than one acceptable way to build a product, find one that helps the company win.
Communication
Having common goals points to where you want to go; communication is how you get there. We’ve already established that we have the same goal, this principle is about communicating in such a way that the team actually gets there.
I’m not going to wax-poetic on this one, let’s just get to it:
The Designer and Product Manager should be involved in all discovery efforts.
This is just good practice. Do it, you’ll thank me. People see the same things differently and having an extra set of eyes on the problem will pay dividends. You need more than one subject matter expert and nothing beats first-hand knowledge. As a PM or UX, don’t think that you can just explain things after the fact. It’s harder, takes more time, and is less reliable.
Even when you are in the same discovery sessions it’s helpful to have post-discovery debriefs to check for converging/diverging interpretations on what you just observed. Once you check for understanding you can decide on next steps and get to work.
This applies to face-to-face discovery sessions and even short one-liner chat questions (just make it a group chat). If one of you discovers something asynchronously, do your best to let the other know what you learned.
This is key: if this type of communication and collaboration is happening in discovery it’s very likely that you can (and you should) extend this to all other aspects of the product lifecycle: design, testing, grooming, and even development. PMs if you hear something about business strategy let your designer know. UXers, if you have a few design ideas you are considering, get them in front of your PM. If there is a clarifying question from development about requirements, discuss it together.
Learn to rely on your team-mate’s help and expertise. I’ve never regretted being fully integrated with a Product Manager. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to rely on my PM’s memory to answer tough questions. | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/who-has-the-final-say-ux-or-pm-hint-youre-missing-the-point-63ea19a23998 | ['Jake Carter'] | 2021-05-18 01:17:16.701000+00:00 | ['Team Collaboration', 'User Experience', 'Product Management', 'Resources', 'Technology'] |
Just Started Investing? Be Careful! | 2020 will be known as a record-breaking year in many regards. The amount and the size of IPOs (Initial Public Offering = stock market launch of a company) was exceptional.
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Many of the companies that launched an IPO in 2020 have one thing in common: the numbers were really bad. The following concept explains why:
With the increasing amount of new investors on the stock market, also the TAM (Total Addressable Market) increases for companies. Those “new” investors are apparently buying everything right off the shelf. We are in the middle of a buyers-market and many companies are taking advantage of that. Especially for companies running business models with a calculated loss (DoorDash for example), this new momentum comes in handy. By funding huge amounts of money on the stock market with an IPO, companies like DoorDash are trying to grow fast until they have a monopoly position.
It’s quite easy to grow fast if you sell your goods below the cost price.
Let us have a closer look at DoorDash.
About DoorDash
Photo by Griffin Wooldridge on Unsplash
DoorDash was founded in 2013 by four Stanford students led by CEO Tony Xu. The startup focused on the suburbs instead of entering a battle for Manhattan or downtown Los Angeles. Today, Doordash is the market leader in the U.S. ahead of Uber Eats. DoorDash focuses its business on smaller restaurants that have no possibility to provide a delivery-service. By using DoorDash, the restaurants have no risk on their side (no drivers or fixed costs).
In 2019, Doordash’s revenue was $900 million and its loss was $450 million. The company spent more and more in a race to capture the US market. However, the industry had recently benefited from the effects of the corona crisis. Doordash’s leadership believes that trend will continue. Berlin-based food delivery service Delivery Hero had also recently seen strong revenue growth. Delivery Hero has been listed in Germany’s leading Dax index since summer and most recently had a market capitalization of just under 20 billion euros.
Valid Business Model?
The company achieved 700 million orders last year, with an average of 33$ per order. That means they have had external sales of 20 billion dollars. Sounds profitable, doesn’t it?
NO
External sales include also the salary of the driver and the restaurant’s payout. About 60% goes to the restaurant. The driver gets 8$ per order (roughly 25% on average). 15% stays with DoorDash, being used to finance the platform, the acquisition of the clients, setup of the restaurants, workshops with the drivers, handling of the payments, and the infrastructure.
Even though they managed to conquer more than 50% of the US market, the company is still not profitable.
Careful, Young Padawan
Still basing on DoorDash’s business model: do you think the company will be profitable with 40 billion of external sales? Maybe, but actually (just my personal opinion) I guess not — and that’s the crux:
I really enjoy seeing so many new investors in the markets, but most of them are only following the hype without a profound knowledge of the area. After all, investing in stocks means investing in real companies.
“The secret to investing is to figure out the value of something — and then pay a lot less.” — Joel Greenblatt
Warren Buffett, known as one of the most successful investors, has taught us value investing. Value investing essentially consists of determining the book value of a company and buying when the stock’s value is less.
Value investing is an investment strategy that involves picking stocks that appear to be trading for less than their intrinsic or book value. Value investors actively ferret out stocks they think the stock market is underestimating. They believe the market overreacts to good and bad news, resulting in stock price movements that do not correspond to a company’s long-term fundamentals. The overreaction offers an opportunity to profit by buying stocks at discounted prices — on sale. — învestopedia.com
If you do not take the time to “study” the companies numbers, goals, and structures, you may end up with a gamble instead of an investment. Be careful!
Invest in books, not IPOs
For anyone starting with investments, which is highly appreciated, consider an investment into books and self-education first.
The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you earn. — Warren Buffett
There are many different ways to invest profitably, and there are many sources where you can learn the information. There’s nothing new under the sun, and no marketer has a corner on teaching any particular type of investment strategy. There is no right or wrong, but the best you can do is to inform yourself and figure out your own opinion.
Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
Take Away
DoorDash is no bad company by any means, but if you are just starting your investments you should keep in mind that “All that glitters is not gold”. Do your research, if you still think DoorDash (or any other company) is a great deal: go for it! | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/just-started-investing-be-careful-47473252c2b6 | ['Maximilian Perkmann'] | 2020-12-17 11:00:16.364000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Business', 'Investing', 'Finance', 'Stock Market'] |
Data Science Scholarships-Full-list Compilations. | Data Science has been described as one of the best jobs in the world consistently, and of course the sexiest job in the 21st century. Data Scientists have on average a masters’ degree and people invest more in gaining degrees in this field.
Currently, a Data Science degree cost more than most of the other courses and some as much as $57,000. This huge cost creates a big barrier for people to enter into this field.
However, there are several forms of financial aids that can help to lessen your financial bill as you enter into the Data Science field. Finding them is a time-consuming activity.
Today, I share with you a complete compilation of various Data Science and Analytics Scholarships and other forms of Financial Aid.
Coursera Data Science Scholarships for Learners in India
Data Science Masters/PH.D. Degree Scholarships
Top 5 Scholarships For Data Science And Machine Learning Programmes
Google PhD Fellowship Program
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship
IBM PhD Fellowship program
The Facebook Fellowship Program
17 Ph.D. in Data Science Scholarships 2020
Comprehensive List of Data Science Scholarships
Women in Data Science Scholarship
20 Great Scholarships for Data Science and Big Data
MASTER OF SCIENCE (MSC) — DATA SCIENCE AND BUSINESS ANALYTICS
15 Data Science Masters Degree Scholarships 2019–2020
Sponsorship Opportunities at CDS
Data Science scholarships 2020–2021
Data Sciences Research and Study Opportunities
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
Master of Data Science Scholarship
Masters in Data Science in Canada: Top Universities, Admission Process, Cost, Scholarships, & Job Prospects
Data Science and Artificial Intelligence PhD
81 Data-Science scholarships in Canada
Australian Government Research Scholarship 2020 (Fully Funded)
FELLOWSHIP.AI
MSc Scholarships in Data Science for International Students, 2019
UBC Master of Data Science
Masters in Data Science in Germany — Best Programs for 2020
Data Science MSc
The Data Science for Social Good Fellowship
data science PhD Projects, Programs & Scholarships in New Zealand
The only impact that will differentiate you from the thousands of candidates applied to the same job is the proof of skills. Building a Data Science Portfolio is what can ACTUALLY get you your dream job.
REGISTER NOW
MrBriit
Total Data Science | https://medium.com/total-data-science/data-science-scholarships-full-list-compilations-d2e2738f91f1 | [] | 2020-11-14 01:44:52.109000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Visualization', 'Data'] |
Join the PR Resolution | Join thousands of communications professionals around the globe and get the Resolution email straight to your inbox.
Every two weeks I collate the stand-out five things you need to know in PR.
You will receive a simple bullet-pointed mail informing you of the best new tools, how-to cheat sheets, eBooks and inspiring examples of innovation from PR teams and thought leaders. | https://medium.com/the-resolution/join-the-pr-resolution-7f8460ba2456 | ['Stella Bayles'] | 2017-04-17 09:20:06.597000+00:00 | ['Pr Measurement', 'Communications', 'Newsletter', 'Public Relations', 'Pr Resolution'] |
What Does Lizzo Owe Us? | What Does Lizzo Owe Us?
Did a detox “betray” the body positivity movement?
Photo courtesy of @lizzobeeating on Instagram
Anyone who listens to Lizzo’s music or follows her social media channels knows that she marches to the beat of her own drum. For some, when Lizzo arrived on the scene, it was shocking. A big girl twerking in a thong dress at a Lakers’ game? A big girl openly talking about her sexual desires and sexual past?
For many of us, what Lizzo did was liberating. Because skinny girls twerking doesn’t make headlines. Skinny girls talking about their sexual desires don’t make headlines. But when a big girl does, it’s suddenly news.
But Lizzo’s existence is a double-edged sword, as is the existence of any big girl in the public eye, as the songstress learned when she shared that she was detoxing.
First, let’s address the term detox.
The word “detox” makes a lot of people scoff. And rightfully so, because it’s a term that has been co-opted (primarily by skinny people) to mean drinking something like the Master Cleanse. That is, detox to many means not putting any solid food in your body and just drinking water to “flush out toxins.” It should be noted that there’s no magic reset button on your body that appears because you did a detox or cleanse. Your body can flush out toxins on its own.
Some detoxes can indeed be dangerous and they should never be done just because you saw it on TikTok. Never, ever undergo a drastic change in your diet without a doctor’s knowledge and approval. Even then, though, as fat people are aware that many doctors exhibit weight bias, it’s best to do your own thorough research as well.
Like Lizzo did before she began her detox.
Why did Lizzo detox?
On Dec. 14, Lizzo, who is often on TikTok sharing snippets of her life with fans, posted a “What I Eat in a Day” video. In the very first clip, she shared that she was working with a nutritionist and warned others not to try the detox at home without similar research. The detox in question is called the J.J. Smith 10-Day Smoothie Cleanse.
If the words “cleanse” or “detox” immediately turn you off, I hear you, they do for me too. But it’s important to keep in mind that, according to Lizzo’s own video, she wasn’t just drinking smoothies and water. She was eating solid fruits, vegetables, nuts, and peanut butter. And also, again, she was engaging in a “detox” that was nutritionist-approved and self-researched.
And yet, here are just a few of the comments the seemingly-innocuous video received.
“So much for body positive. Detox’s [sic] don’t work and they go against all actual body positivity. I’m so disappointed.” “When she first came out she was so body positive and I loved it. Now it kinda hurts how bad she’s been feeling.” “Lizzo baby no please eat, this isn’t healthy for anybody.” “Noooo I’m so upset! Another person lost to diet culture.” “I hate when we have a celebrity telling to love our bodies and later on they end up doing dieting and surgeries to lose all their body weight.” “It’s almost like people who were concerned about your health were right! And you shouldn’t have promoted being overweight.” “Lizzo, I’m so disappointed. What are you doing girl?”
This needs to be said: Lizzo is not body positive.
And I’m not saying that because of any actions she’s taken. I’m saying that because of her actual words.
“The body-positive movement is the body-positive movement, and we high five. We’re parallel. But my movement is my movement,” Lizzo told Allure in 2019. “When all the dust has settled on the groundbreaking-ness, I’m going to still be doing this. I’m not going to suddenly change. I’m going to still be telling my life story through music. And if that’s body positive to you, amen. That’s feminist to you, amen. If that’s pro-black to you, amen. Because ma’am, I’m all of those things.”
But a year later, she moved further away from the body positivity movement. Lizzo wants body normativity. “I think it’s lazy for me to just say I’m body positive at this point,” Lizzo told Vogue. “It’s easy. I would like to be body-normative. I want to normalize my body. And not just be like, ‘Ooh, look at this cool movement. Being fat is body positive.’ No, being fat is normal. I think now, I owe it to the people who started this to not just stop here.”
So, if Lizzo embraces being fat, why would she do a detox to lose weight? Simple. She didn’t. She followed her video up by saying that she suffers from gastrointestinal issues and her diet while on vacation hurt her stomach. The detox was meant to help her stop stress eating and doing “things that were kind of self-harming.”
She then followed that video up with another one saying that people assume that when big girls do things like detox that “when you are doing something for health, that you’re doing it for a dramatic weight loss, and that is not the case.”
What’s one of the top comments on that video? “Girl, loosing [sic] weight is not for beauty, it’s for health. People should not criticize no one for their bodys [sic]. Be proud of you.”
Lizzo neither owes you a “weight loss success story” nor a “body positivity icon.”
Lizzo did not detox to lose weight, although that notion, unfortunately, went over a lot of people’s heads. Although she sometimes posts about feeling down in her body, that doesn’t mean that she should or has to lose weight. We all have down moments in our bodies.
But if she wants to lose weight, we need to not think about it as a personal betrayal. Lizzo did not arrive in the music industry screaming that she was the role model for body positivity. We put that moniker on her because she’s a big girl in Hollywood and, sadly, we still consider that to be brave. No one is walking around saying that Taylor Swift or Selena Gomez or Camila Cabello have to be role models for skinny girls. We put an extra burden on Lizzo because she’s a big girl, and that’s not a fair tax for her to have to pay.
This year has been ripe with celebrities who have debuted weight losses, from Rebel Wilson to Adele. And each time they come out with their new weight, it seems we have the same bad takes over and over again.
We put an extra burden on Lizzo because she’s a big girl, and that’s not a fair tax for her to have to pay.
The first take is that it’s some kind of betrayal. How dare they take away our fat representation? As if they aren’t people. They’re just symbols we can hold up.
The second take is the one that screams back at the first one. “How dare you be mad at her for getting healthy?” It’s this take that personally infuriates me, as someone who was fat and lost weight through an eating disorder. Losing weight is not the same thing as getting healthy. This take is another way of trying to use a formerly fat person as a symbol. “Look!” cries a fatphobic society. “She lost weight so you all can too!” In this way, it becomes a little easier to see why a fat person would feel like a celebrity losing weight is a betrayal.
But both of these takes are not helping to further a conversation that would move any body positivity or body normativity movement beyond where it is today. If Lizzo decides to lose weight, why is she not allowed to feel positive in her body every step of the way? At the same time, she doesn’t have to shout it from the rooftops that she’s losing weight in order to show the world “how great she looks” according to societal standards.
The next time Lizzo posts about doing a detox, the proper response is nothing. No comments of disappointment, no comments of congrats. Just, nothing. Regardless of why she’s engaging in any diet change, it is no one’s business and none of us should have a stake in it. Normalize her body, at any size. Lizzo is right that the body positivity movement doesn’t go far enough, because we are still othering Lizzo. She’s still different, so we prop her up and say how amazing she is. Why? For existing in her body? Lizzo said it herself on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction: “I’m sick of being an activist just because I’m fat and Black.”
Our movement needs to be to allow Lizzo to just exist. No more headlines about a big girl in a thong dress, no more attempting to claim her as a body positive queen. Just let her exist. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/what-does-lizzo-owe-us-b57a77c42b08 | ['Jackie Gualtieri'] | 2020-12-19 19:16:54.553000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Lizzo', 'Fat', 'Body Positive', 'Feminism'] |
Recipe 94: Hot Chocolate | This is one of the many recipes that Aaron and I want to share with you. We are overjoyed for you to come with us on our journey as we put together different concoctions and laugh together (all while hoping to not burn our apartment down). Please enjoy these recipes as much as we have. We welcome you to a small, but intentional, part of our lives.
If you would like to read the post that accompanies this recipe, check it out here. | https://medium.com/cooking-with-sarah/recipe-94-hot-chocolate-47ca86b6ff70 | ['Sarah Charles'] | 2018-02-11 21:01:00.794000+00:00 | ['Drinks', 'Cooking', 'Recipe', 'Food', 'Marriage'] |
Na-young: A Survivor | Protesters holding signs calling for the rapist Cho Doo-soon’s castration trying to block his release from prison on Saturday in Seoul, South Korea. Credit…Yun Dong-Jin/Yonhap, via Associated Press
Ansan, South Korea. December 11th, 2008
This marks the exact date when that case happened. Na-young (fictitious name), an 8-year-old girl was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by the criminal Cho Doo-Soon (then 56 years old). This brutality caused Na-young left with permanent damage to her lower abdomen and was told she would be permanently disabled. Na-young also suffered from depression and mental stress after the assault. In trial, Cho who was originally sentenced to life in prison, his sentenced was reduced to 12 years in prison because Na-young testified that he smelled like alcohol, as he was not sound of mind while committing the crime.
If you are not familiar with this case, you can read Cho Doo-Soon case or watch Hope (2013) movie that made based on the true story of that case.
December 12th, 2020
Cho Doo-Soon, now 68, was released from prison. His released was sparking angry demonstrations and anonymous death threats that led to an increased police presence outside the predator’s home. He returned to Ansan to live with his wife less than 1 km away from the victim’s house. He will have to wear an ankle monitor and will be under constant surveillance on probation for 7 years. Ansan’s city government said in a statement that a team of 12 security guards — formerly special forces’ soldiers or martial arts specialists — have been put on shifts patrolling the area around Cho’s house 24 hours a day. Officials are also adding 20 more security cameras as well as new streetlights.
Now, what will happen?
I don’t have law background, and I am not a South Korea’s citizen. I don’t have the capacity of talking about the judgment or law-related things. But I wonder, what will happen next?
What will happen to Na-young? Now she’s 20 years old, only 4 years younger than me. It is reported that one year after the case, after receiving psychiatric treatment, she was said to have recovered 70%. She also started attending school again but avoids news completely to avoid any possible chance of seeing something related to sexual assault. But now, with the perpetrator is living close to her, it is reported that the victim’s family will move away from Ansan. Will she feel safe and be able to overcome any past trauma from that assault?
What will happen to Cho? Public anger has surged, around a million people since 2017 signed multiple petition opposing Cho’s release. He also has various violent case history (including rape) with for most of his cases he was drunk. With extra-monitoring from police with cameras, and streetlights, will it make him come to his sense?
What will happen to other unreported sexual assault victim in my country, Indonesia? Will they live in fear for the rest of their life? In Na-young case, I do believe that psychiatric treatment is one of the most contributing parts which helped her cope past horrible event. But rape is under-reported case. With fear of shame and victim-blaming, it will also become harder for the victim to muster up courage and report to the police. A study by Singapore-based research company ValueChampion has found that Indonesia is the second-most dangerous country for women in the Asia Pacific region.
What will happen to sexual violence eradication bill (RUU PKS)? What will happen to men and women in Indonesia? What will happen to false allegations of rape case? What will happen?
Well, I don’t know. I wish that I know, but I don’t.
But, here is what I know…
What will happen to me?
Honestly, something disgusts me, especially when the sexual assault mostly happened to women.
No, I’m not talking about #MeToo or any kind of short-term feminist movement. Just let those people speak up about their concerns. What really disgusts me is when the default will change. The new normal.
I think what if someday women don’t feel safe anymore near men? Will they appreciate men because they don’t rape of assault them? Will they reward us as good men because we respect consent and not making sexual jokes? Will they respect us because we don’t catcall them? No, it shouldn’t be, and hopefully won’t be, the default, the new normal.
I also wish that Na-young can heal and cope with the past trauma and be happy on her own. I wish she received much love from people so she won’t live in despair. I wish she can be success on her own without people adding “despite of that case”. And lastly, I wish someday she can talk about that case casually. I do believe there is still hope for anyone who experience the same thing. Always realize that it was not your fault, you’re brave and amazing, and deserve to be loved by somebody.
At least, I am that somebody.
Other news and references:
· https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2020/12/13/national/socialAffairs/Cho-Doosoon-Nayoung-rape/20201213181000542.html
· https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/world/asia/south-korea-rapist-cho-doo-soon.html
· https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/south-korea-child-rapist-cho-doo-soon-protesters-eggs-13756164
· https://www.thestar.com.my/aseanplus/aseanplus-news/2020/12/15/rapists-release-sparks-outrage
· http://komnasperempuan.go.id/file/pdf_file/2020/Catatan%20Tahunan%20Kekerasan%20Terhadap%20Perempuan%202020.pdf | https://medium.com/@dannyhidayat/na-young-a-survivor-2aecc80d1b9d | ['Danny Hidayat'] | 2021-03-22 01:32:13.244000+00:00 | ['Rape Victims', 'Rape Cases', 'Sexual Assault', 'Rape', 'Survivor'] |
Why I used Rails sessions instead of JWTs | After doing my research about JWT tokens, I decided to enable Rails sessions and start using them for my authentication system. What changed my mind was an article I found on cryto.net:
If an attacker manages to inject a malicious script into your front end (which is vulnerable to XSS), then they can use that script to make HTTP requests to your server (directly from the user’s browser) and your precious httpOnly cookie (containing the user’s valid session ID) will be attached to every request so the server will service them without suspecting anything.
How I enabled sessions if my app was using an API Rails app you can find out here: Rails sessions does not persist?
Creating an app that will not be used a large number of users at the same time will not have any problem handling the cookies on the server-side.
That being said, my app is ready to receive users, and they can perform the authentication parts securely. But, no content yet. Web sockets and their implementation fill follow. | https://medium.com/@antonzaharia/why-i-used-rails-sessions-instead-of-jwts-b38a745a161d | ['Zaharia Anton'] | 2020-12-03 16:05:05.826000+00:00 | ['Auth', 'API', 'Jwt', 'Authentication', 'Rails'] |
The Truth About ‘Winterizing’ Your Vagina | By Molly Longman
PHOTOGRAPHED BY SOPHIE KING.
The idea that seasonal changes could affect vaginal health makes sense — kind of. Anyone who’s ever sat around for too long in a wet swimsuit knows the annoyance of a summer yeast infection, for instance. But if you’ve heard the term “winter vagina” floating around, or read headlines about how to “winterise your vagina”, rest assured: That’s not a thing.
The term “winter vagina” was used a few years ago by The Sun, in a headline asking: “Are ‘winter vaginas’ really a thing?” Yes, according to one midwife they interviewed, who said vaginas can dry out just like your (face) lips do in cold weather.
In the same article, though, The Sun quoted Jen Gunter, MD, author of The Vagina Bible, who’s known for debunking women’s health myths. She’d previously side-eyed the idea of a “summer vagina” (yes, tight, wet clothes can lead to thrush; no, the weather itself doesn’t lead to vaginal pH changes). And you can bet she had something to say about winter vaginas, too. “The Ice Queen cometh and she’s a cruel mistress,” Gunter joked in a post at the time. “The air is apparently so fucking dry in houses in the United Kingdom that it is going to suck the moisture right out of your vagina.” As you can imagine, the rest of the post explained all the reasons that this is not a real issue.
Even if you’re living among the polar bears in the most brutal of winter tundras, weather doesn’t impact how wet you get. Unlike your hands and lips, your vagina is lined with a mucous membrane, explains Karen Duncan, MD, OB/GYN, an assistant professor at New York University Langone Health, tells Refinery29. Cold weather doesn’t affect mucus production. Sure, the skin on your vulva or mons pubis could, theoretically, get a little dry if you tend to have dry skin in general — but a fragrance-free, natural moisturiser that’s formulated for sensitive skin should fix the problem (just keep it away from your labia). For the most part, the vagina is weatherproof.
One thing you may have heard about winter and vaginas has to do with diet, not weather: that the sugar in the holiday cookies we’re eating can lead to yeast infections. But in fact, most of the studies only showed this to be true in patients with diabetes. For people without diabetes, “munching on the occasional gingerbread should be fine,” says Heather Bartos, a Texas OB/GYN and the founder of MindShift Medicine.
If anything, your risk of certain vaginal-related issues is lower in the winter than in the summer. People may be more likely to get urinary tract infections in the summer, for instance, based on a study looking into when UTI medical sales spike that was published in the journal The researchers couldn’t say for sure why, though they speculating that the reasons may be behavioural — people may have more sex in the summer, and sex can lead to UTIs.
But in general, to quote Dr. Gunter, “Vaginas function quite well in all seasons.” If you get a yeast infection or a UTI, if you seem abnormally dry or itchy, or really, if you notice any changes at all, see an OB/GYN to get diagnosed and get the right treatment. Otherwise, you can hang out and continue to let your vagina take care of itself all year long. | https://medium.com/refinery29/the-truth-about-winterizing-your-vagina-415a03b3b8f9 | [] | 2020-11-28 12:27:42.402000+00:00 | ['Seasons', 'Womens Health', 'Obgyn', 'Winter', 'Vagina'] |
Deploying Applications in Kubernetes Using Flux | What is the entire story all about? (TLDR)
We will be using Flux to synchronize the Helm Charts stored in a version control system to our Kubernetes cluster. We will use HelmRelease ( CRD ) with Flux.
Installing Flux
Let us now Install fluxcd in our Kubernetes cluster using a helm chart. If you are not familiar with what a helm chart is, refer to this guide. Before we Install fluxcd we will have to Install the HelmRelease CRD ( Explained later in the article ).
#Adding the Flux Repo helm repo add fluxcd https://charts.fluxcd.io
#Installing the HelmRelease CRD kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fluxcd/helm-operator/master/deploy/crds.yaml kubectl create namespace flux
#Create the namespace for flux Installation
Flux connects to the Git Repository using an ssh key. If the ssh key already exists, A Kubernetes secret can be created from the key. Else configure the key with your GitHub given by fluxcd after installation. Since I already have an existing key pair I would be creating a Kubernetes Secret from the Private Key.
kubectl create secret generic flux-git-deploy --from-file=identity=./id_rsa -n flux --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -
#This would create the kubernetes secret for flux to communicate with GitHub
Since we have made the configuration for our flux deployment to communicate with our git repo let us deploy fluxcd and HelmOperator deployment.
helm install flux fluxcd/flux --set git.url= git@github.com :pavan-kumar-99/medium-manifests.git --set git.branch=fluxcd --set git.secretName="flux-git-deploy" --set git.user=flux-user --set git.path=helm-releases --namespace flux #Install fluxcd deployment helm upgrade -i helm-operator fluxcd/helm-operator --set git.ssh.secretName=flux-git-deploy --namespace flux #Install helm-operator deployment kubectl create ns fluxcd-demo #Create a namespace to deploy our HelmRelease
Helm Operator
The Helm Operator is a Kubernetes Operator, allowing one to declaratively manage Helm chart releases. The desired state of a Helm release is described through a Kubernetes Custom Resource named HelmRelease. . Based on the creation, mutation, or removal of a HelmRelease resource in the cluster, Helm actions are performed by the operator.
Fluxcd with helm operator
Here is a sample repo which contains some sample helm charts and a sample HelmRelease file. We would now understand what is written in the HelmRelease file.
kind: HelmRelease ( Kubernetes CRD ). metadata.name: The name of the HelmRelease. metadata.namespace: The namespace in which the HelmRelease is supposed to be deployed in. metadata.annotations: fluxcd.io/automated: To enable automation for fluxcd. spec.releaseName: The name of the helm chart release name. spec.targetNamespace: The namespace into which the helm chart has to be installed. ( Make sure you create the namespace before the HelmRelease gets Installed ) spec.chart.git: The Git Repository URL from which the helm charts has to be installed. spec.chart.path: The path from GitHub Repository. spec.chart.ref: The name of the GitHub branch.
Demo
Once the fluxcd and helm operator charts are installed you should see the flux components created in the flux namespace.
fluxcd components
Now go grab a cup of coffee and wait for 5 minutes. You should now have all your resources created in your cluster defined in the helm chart. These are the resources defined in our helm chart.
Resources in the helm chart
Let us watch the resources in the fluxcd-demo namespace ( spec.targetNamespace-> HelmRelease file )
watch -n 5 kubectl get all -n fluxcd-demo
fluxcd-demo namespace
And now you have all the resources defined in the helm chart created in your Kubernetes Cluster.
Woooo !!!
As we know that fluxcd will watch, pick up the changes from git, and will update our cluster, let us update the number of replicas of fluxcd-demo deployment.
Number of replicas = 1
Let us edit our HelmRelease manifests to override the values defined in the values.yaml file of the Helm Chart.
I have updated the number of replicas to 5 in GitHub by overriding the replicaCount value in the HelmRelease file.
Now go grab another cup of coffee and wait for 5 minutes.
Number of replicas = 5
We have now successfully deployed our first HelmRelease using fluxcd.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading my article. Here are some of my other articles that may interest you.
Reference
https://docs.fluxcd.io/en/latest/tutorials/get-started/
Recommended | https://medium.com/swlh/deploying-applications-in-kubernetes-using-flux-a9d171b11917 | ['Pavan Kumar'] | 2020-12-26 16:37:50.005000+00:00 | ['Helm', 'Gitops', 'Github', 'Kubernetes', 'Flux'] |
Don’t Give In: Giving in the 21st Century | 2019–09–30
America has long been a leader in charitable giving, and still ranks near the top of the World Giving Index rankings. This is clearly a positive thing. Private gifts are critically important for supplementing public programs that support arts and sciences, education, food accessibility, and civil rights. However, as fallout continues from the school admissions scandal and Jeffrey Epstein’s generous “gifts”, it is important to more closely analyze the American philanthropic tradition.
The good that can be done with large no-strings-attached gifts cannot be understated. Research efforts ongoing at the Koch Institute (anti-environmental industrialists) will lead to new cancer treatments. The Guggenheim can now afford to curate and display priceless works of art in the security of the Sackler Wing (opioid pushers). But when does a private nonprofit institution have the responsibility to reject these large donations?
Intent matters. As wealth disparities continue to grow, philanthropy can increasingly be used as a tool for the wealthy and powerful to advance their own interests. These can range from minor issues, like increasing the odds of a child being accepted into a selective school, to major causes like trying to get the Bible into (and evolution removed from) ALL schools. Well run institutions have formal committees to review private gifts, rejecting those made by donors with unsavory reputations, but the status quo is not working.
Buying Legitimacy
Association with the right credible institution goes a long way towards hiding personal shortcomings. Remember that insufferable 40-year-old colleague who wont shut up about his Ivy League undergraduate degree? Legendary conman Bernie Madoff donated millions to various high-profile causes and managed the endowments of a number of prestigious nonprofits. This helped to bolster his image as a mysterious financial genius right up until he turned himself in to the authorities as a total fraud. His philanthropic activity likely reduced the level of scrutiny placed on his fund.
Jeffrey Epstein had no clout on Wall Street; most major players in financial markets didn’t take him seriously. Before his 2006 arrest he cultivated ties with major research institutions and scientific luminaries to bolster his own image and credibility. After the arrest, these donations continued with MIT and Harvard accepting millions to specific research initiatives and departments. In the fallout surrounding Epstein’s second arrest and death, an internal investigation has shown that MIT President Rafael Reif personally approved the acceptance of these gifts from Epstein, carefully making sure that they were designated as anonymous donations… As recently as 2016, Epstein, a known abuser and monster, was among the largest donors to the Harvard Hasty Pudding Society, a fact that has been quietly removed from their website.
Two morally bankrupt leaders outside of MIT. (President Rafael Reif with current donor and journalist-butcher MBS)
Buying Access
The Clinton Foundation has been a global force for good in the developing world. However, the decision to keep the Foundation running as Hillary continued her political climb and mounted a presidential campaign was highly questionable. If the Clintons had both fully retired from politics, the lines would have been less blurry. Instead, the Foundation continued operations through 2016 with a weak promise to reject or return foreign or corporate donations.
This structure created a clear opportunity for unscrupulous donors to buy access and favor under the guise of philanthropy. The Clinton political machine and the Clinton foundation were impossibly entangled. Many other major foundations have similar entanglements at the leadership level.
Legacy Polishing
The most common flavor of American philanthropy is done late in life or even posthumously, enabling those with the means to control the narrative around their lives. Capitalism in America has historically allowed corporate tycoons to amass huge fortunes. While I regard this as a fundamentally good thing, some will use aggressive, unethical, or downright illegal tactics to build their wealth. Late in life or on their deathbeds, these titans of industry may begin to worry about how they will be remembered. Philanthropy can become a tool to shift public perception.
Andrew Canegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Howard Hughes, John D. Rockefeller…these are arguably the founders of American philanthropy. Each was dominant in their respective industry and absolutely ruthless towards competitors and organized labor. Of the group, only Rockefeller showed any real interest in philanthropy prior to his twilight years.
Vanderbilt showed nothing but contempt towards women while alive and married two of his first cousins. Hughes was an addict, philanderer, and all-around strange dude. Yet they are now remembered, not for the bad things they did in life, but for their significant deathbed philanthropy.
The Koch Institute
21st Century Philanthropy
A new breed of mega-philanthropist has recently appeared: self-made billionaires who typically made their fortunes with innovative products in software or hardware technology. This includes Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet. These individuals take a careful longterm active approach to philanthropy, focusing on impact rather than boosting their own images. Their philanthropy is not an end-of-life attempt to make amends for earlier transgressions or scandals, but instead an attempt to improve the human condition and to save lives.
Philanthropy is important and good. Even donations made by modern-day robber barons can be a powerful force for positive change. While I disagreed with the politics of the late David Koch and his systematic financing of climate change denial, the cancer center he endowed will result in new treatments that will undoubtedly save lives. But without external oversight and careful internal reviews, large philanthropic gifts are no different from the dark money pools that now plague politics. Donors who seek influence and access or to burnish a tarnished reputation can easily accomplish these goals under today’s rules.
Our institutions must do better. The ability to selectively determine which donations are to be categorized as “Anonymous” gives universities and foundations the ability to take gifts that have invisible strings attached. Internal review mechanisms need to focus on the intent and potential conflicts presented by any large gift, rather than instead reviewing the potential for embarrassment to the institution. We need to demand transparent public disclosure of all gifts taken by tax exempt foundations and universities in order to determine what exactly is going on behind the scenes. | https://medium.com/@isaacstoner/dont-give-in-giving-in-the-21st-century-c3d7541a8966 | ['Isaac Stoner'] | 2019-10-24 16:46:31.030000+00:00 | ['Harvard', 'Giving', 'Philanthropy', 'MIT'] |
Doing Science thoughtfully | In plenty of countries, research persues prestige and increasing the number of publications, and not for solving people’s problems, improving our way of living, helping nature to heal, or even to save the lives of sick people.
Science and its developments throughout history have been one of the most useful tools for humankind in solving practical problems and challenges that the environment presents to us as a species. Along this road, we developed our basic knowledge into the current theories and models we have today. Nowadays, we separate sciences mainly into two branches, basic and applied sciences. Basic sciences focus on discovering phenomena and trying to elucidate the deepest points behind them and also focus on postulating theories to explain nature. The final goal is to generate novel knowledge. In contrast to basic sciences, applied sciences provide solutions to different problems in nature by applying the knowledge generated from basic sciences. Unfortunately, the basic sciences in several countries are still based only on generating as much as information as possible without considering its usefulness, leading to the waste of human and economic resources in countries that really need efficient solutions to their urgent problems. Although basic sciences are indispensable tools that applied sciences must use in order to provide solutions, sometimes the information generated from basic sciences cannot be used to create solutions.
Essentially, we should say that scientists are involved in describing phenomena and trying to understand it in order to contribute to the improvement of humankind. However, the scientific system of credits and impact index in publications of papers are slowly destroying science’s main aim. Scientists are starting to be like robots that only research “publish secure” topics, and publishing has become the main priority. This way of doing science looking at publication results and not at real improvements, even when the results may not be useful, is dilapidating the major role of science.
Now, we research for prestige and for increasing our amount of publications, and not for solving people’s problems, improving our way of living, helping nature to heal, or even to save the lives of sick people.
Therefore, a drastic change is needed in science. Most importantly, we should highlight pharmaceutical scientists and their fundamental role in eradicating sickness and improving patients’ quality of life. Pharmaceutical scientists are involved directly in finding efficient solutions for health issues. Both pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists are trained similarly in academia and have a mindset of the patient first before anything else. These professionals are meant to direct all their efforts to innovate, create, and find strategies and resources to improve public health. The tendency in this field for the last 20 or 30 years in pharmaceutical sciences was to provide short-term solutions. The advance of technology provided some very good solutions in some areas, but almost nothing in other areas like chronic diseases. As a consistent example of this, antimicrobial resistance to antibiotics has been a major issue. According to the scientific community, there has been a lack of innovation in antibiotics over the last 25 years.
In fact, “antibiotic discovery — which peaked in the 1950s — has dropped precipitously. Of greater concern is the fact that nearly all antibiotics brought to market over the past 30 years have been variations on existing drugs. Every currently available antibiotic is a derivative of a class discovered between the early 1900s and 1984.” (1)
Keeping this in mind, innovation in pharmaceutical sciences seems to have become focused on finding short-term improvements that are forced into the market, instead of focusing on finding a solution to the real, underlying public health issue. Therefore, we as pharmaceutical scientists, pharmacists, and even students must direct our efforts to a new way of doing science so that we can provide real and long-term solutions to the health problems existing nowadays. We must do science that is attentive to patients concerns, struggles, and barriers.
We must research never as a robot, but as a human deeply conscious about our true goal, which is to save lives. The education and resources we have are provided by nature and from people, so we cannot be scientists without working to give back some of what we have received from others. In the end, science is supposed to be for improving lives and saving our planet. I invite you to raise awareness in this topic, to change the way we do science, and we will have a better future where knowledge, application, and the improvement of humankind can all move forward together.
Resources: (1) ‘Challenges of Antibacterial Discovery’ Lynn L Silver. Clinical Microbiology Review (2011) | https://medium.com/@rechaile/doing-science-thoughtfully-40a2a6bc73ea | ['Roberto Chaile'] | 2019-05-17 20:35:25.690000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Impact', 'Science', 'Health', 'Research'] |
How to personalize your Knowies dashboard | You can fully personalize your Knowies Dashboard on the desktop version, so you can decide for yourself what you will get to see on your homepage. Changes will also be visible in the mobile APP. For now it is not yet possible to personalize your dashboard via the mobile APP.
Personalizing your dashboard can be done on the home page by clicking on “Personalize dashboard” in the top right of your screen, shown under the arrow in the image.
Once you select Personalize dashboard you can sort the various elements and put them in the order you want by dragging them or by clicking the arrows. You can also remove elements with the cross icon.
If you want to add elements (collections, community’s, topics and people) to your dashboard you can select the add new button on top of the screen. After you select the button can select different options to add to your dashboard.
After any change you make you have to press the save button on the right top of the page.
Go create your own perfect dashboard and please let us know if you have any suggestions!
Knowies Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/knowies/pkkmmclebdkjeogkjgpfhplogpgdhcnn
Knowies Firefox Extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/knowies/ | https://medium.com/@Knowies/how-to-personalize-your-knowies-dashboard-be370ed182e2 | [] | 2020-04-08 10:21:44.166000+00:00 | ['Bookmarks', 'Social Media', 'Network', 'Knowies', 'Knowledge'] |
Social Innovation and the Blockchain | Social Innovation was the topic of my talk at the University of Toronto last November (2018). I promised the organizers that I would write a thought paper following up with my presentation. I will take this chance to leave some additional insights which didn’t fit into the precious time allocated on stage. Comments are appreciated. Let me start by sharing a little bit about my bias to make it clear where I’m coming from.
A social innovation bias
No stranger to the idea of working for the common good, I spent the first 20 years of my career as a public servant engaged in open innovation and volunteering abundantly for the not-for-profit sector. I was organizing Summer Camps and teaching kids before I could get a driver’s license. I made the jump to the private sector only recently, joining Cisco’s Industry Transformation Team in 2013, to accelerate the adoption of technology and innovation in the Education sector. Eventually, I started to spend more time working in other industries, especially in the Financial Services, the Government Services, and the Natural Resources sector last year. It’s during my tenure at ConsenSys that I gave this talk on Social Impact. ConsenSys is arguably the largest company in the world focusing on Blockchain, as a venture production studio that has incubated more than 50 startups since its inception in 2014.
As a mathematician and computer scientist by training, I’ve always been interested in the theoretical aspects of distributed computing and digital cash. I remember following quite closely the news on Slashdot, especially the Mt. Gox saga from humble beginnings to its walk of shame. I failed to get excited by the monetary angle and the technology was embryonic at best. Although I started following the Bitcoin phenomenon early on, I only started to delve professionally into Blockchain in 2016 after I got carte blanche from my team at Savoir-faire Linux (who have been following Ethereum and developing an identity application on it). I eventually jumped in entirely in the latter part of 2017 after the launch of ColliderX, a not-for-profit created to incentivize Open Source R&D in emerging technologies, particularly in Blockchain. As a twenty-year veteran in Open Source, it was a refreshing journey.
Lots of interest started to rise in 2017 about Blockchain and I felt that Canada should strategically invest on its people and its industry, considering Toronto was the birthplace of Ethereum and several other technologies. Together with the two Blockchain associations of Canada, as well as the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), and the Blockchain Research Institute we raised $50 million in pledges that year for a proposition to rally industry, community, and government in a joint effort to strengthen Canada’s leadership in Blockchain technologies. Although this group, unfortunately, lost cohesion and eventually disbanded, I had a chance to witness the level of engagement of many of the players in the Canadian ecosystem. Eventually, we will come together as one voice at some point. We have to.
But what is social innovation?
On the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ website, we can read that
“Social innovation is the process of developing and deploying effective solutions to challenging and often systemic social and environmental issues in support of social progress.
To put it simply, Social Innovation is something we do to improve social and environmental outcomes. Let’s first start by asking “who” is the subject really exercising Social Innovation. For example, democratically elected governments, and the public service (the apolitical administration) can arguably not -and should not- drive social innovation. In democracies, the people are making those directional choices by electing the representatives they trust more to write legislation and to implement the vision of the people for the country. It would be wrong for a government (and public servants) to take a departure from their election platform to implement new ideas, as much as it would be to pretend they know best what’s good for us all, the people.
It is not to say that public servants should not contribute to social innovation, in fact, they often do. Social innovation is a process that spans the boundaries of any single sector and organization. It happens when all stakeholders collaborate to co-create a better system, and when they empower all actors to implement it. What the public sector can do -and should do- is creating the conditions for this innovation process to unfold.
For example, during my work at the province of Ontario (2006–2013), we experimented with human-centered design and with design thinking. We encouraged these practices across ministries, as well as the creation of a centre of expertise (inspired by the MindLab: the world’s first public sector innovation lab created in Danemark, sadly closed since then). We were so lucky to have Christian Bason visit MaRS where he inspired the Toronto social innovation community. Since my home-base ministry (Education) is especially data-oriented and evidence-driven, as any good academic would be, we were very fond of the Logic Model approach to plan and monitor system changes, and the use of SMART goals as one of the ways to foster continuous improvement and better governance of the school boards, which are accountable to the ministry.
Beyond the favourable OECD and McKinsey reports, I remember the strong leadership and the culture of knowledge-sharing that eventually led to Ontario leading the world in system change. We were receiving more than a hundred foreign delegations every year, all wanting to hear how we were doing it. Interestingly, we didn’t change the system to centralize power, and we didn’t make all the decisions at the ministry, but we made our partners (the school boards) stronger while empowering the main actors (the teachers) to play their role as efficiently as possible, by giving them the support they need. I believe that giving a voice and proper support to all the actors was the key to tearing down long-standing systemic barriers to social innovation. The Student Voice was the brightest and most precise compass directing us to improve schools. Students as young as early teens had no taboo addressing the most sensitive issues such as student suicide, equity, and well-being. Eventually, all the actors in the education system did was to act in concert to improve student success and well-being.
Secondly, we should note that social innovation is focusing on both the social and the environmental. In my experience, the Youth are the most vocal and the most truly committed about the environment. Sadly, older generations have been at best very lenient with environmental practices or lack thereof, but voices have started to rise to noticeable levels. For several decades, many business leaders have argued that the aim of corporations should not exclusively be the pursuit of profit for their shareholders. The idea of a triple bottom line emerged, emphasizing that firms have also a duty to care about the people and regions they do business with (and eventually hiring), and they should care enough about the environment to maintain livable conditions for their customers and for their employees alike. Standards such as the GRI standards emerged to provide guidance to business leaders.
On the contrary, followers of Milton Friedman have argued that the only legitimate social responsibility a firm may have is to use its resources effectively and exclusively to the aim of increasing its profits, for it is its only purpose and raison d’être. They believe the invisible hand of the free market will make sure that all is taken care of. There is no reason, according to them, to deviate a corporation from its true purpose.
Nevertheless, social innovation leaders have made significant progress in recent years, by focusing on the concept of sustainability, which derives from three principles: Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG). Investment firms such as BlackRock evidenced that sustainable investment funds have better performance than traditional ones. In end, it seems that economic interests and social & environmental interests converge after all.
My team and I are spending quite a bit of our time in the ESG space these days, developing technology for a promising startup. The Sustainability.Exchange is one of the 9 winners of the Green FinTech Challenge working with the UK regulator (the FCA). We’re leveraging the Gnosis prediction market technology to create real-time and forward-looking ESG ratings data for investors. Prediction markets have appeared to be very good predictors of “where the puck is going to be”, while traditional analytics is looking through the “rear-view mirror” with historical data. Better data will lead to better investments, which will accelerate the trends towards ESG investments across the globe. We’re greasing the wheels of investment with better data and analytics.
In conclusion, Social Innovation is a complex process because it involves several individuals and organizations with seldom conflicting priorities working together. Leveraging data, scientific rigour, and modern approaches to innovation will accelerate the pace of change. At the end of the day, people are driving social innovation: communities (groups and associations), business and community leaders, and the rest of us: investors, consumers, educators, innovators…
Who is responsible for social innovation?
Going back to the definition, we should ask who is responsible for “social progress”? We all are. That is certainly the principal reason why social innovation is so slow and tedious. It needs the participation of the many, and the simultaneous approval of the many. Contrary to democracies, which have a way to make decisions with a simple majority rule, social innovation projects often require all stakeholders to be on board (so they can make the required changes in their respective areas or silos). In these conditions, a single veto can often derail or stop the process altogether. Meanwhile, a group could oppose a decision for good reasons or short-sighted reasons, individuals can seldom block a process for ill-advised personal reasons, even when it could benefit the group they represent.
The major problem I have observed in my public sector and not-for-profit career is precisely this centralization of decisions in time and space. Everybody needs to agree on the same thing at the same time. If that sounds hard that’s because it is. In the public sector, getting more than 5 decision-makers in the room at the same time was already a serious challenge. It becomes exponentially more difficult as more stakeholders are involved, and as the issue becomes polarizing. In these conditions, only the simplest and smallest step can ever be made forward.
What if we could democratize progress by pushing decision-making to the edge (ultimately to the people)?
Enters Blockchain, a technical solution that shines for i) managing and implementing decision-making through automated consensus, ii) creating incentive structures that can nudge participants into behaving constructively, and iii) creating trust and transparency by securing access, enabling mechanisms of proof, and making records tamper-resistant.
I won’t dive here into the details of what is Blockchain and why its properties work almost magically the way they do to create a layer of trust in business and social activities alike. Authors such as Paul Vigna and Michael Casey are doing a far better job than I ever could in their recent book “The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything.” The readers will also find in the book a good summary of the main episodes of the Bitcoin and Blockchain saga, where they will learn about the main characters and the historical references that are key to understand today’s Blockchain community.
Suffice it to say that the ethos of this community is against the establishment, the “too big to fail” corporations, and the oppression of the common folks who have become the “product” rather than the true beneficiaries of the digital world. This community believes in equal rights, in collaboration, in transparency, and in equity. It’s no surprise that social innovation has been one of the first areas of intense progress in this space. I expect this mindset of empowering every single human being will eventually become the modus operandi on this planet. Blockchain technology, much like the Internet in its time, will provide the rails for our collective intelligence to realize great wonders while compensating and treating everyone fairly.
Social Innovation in the Blockchain space
In the following section, let’s look at a few examples of practical applications of Blockchain in social innovation.
Wealth and Financial Services
The first application of Blockchain, before the term was even coined, is Bitcoin. My first use of Bitcoin has been to send money cheaply and almost instantaneously to my family abroad. In the research for a talk I gave to retail bankers in 2016 I realized the commission charged by the incumbent players was close to 15% (way to high in my opinion). It would go up as high as 30%, in the poorest countries (where the options are limited of course -a perverse effect of the law of supply and demand). At the time, the World Bank had said that a 5% reduction in remittances prices could save up to $16B per year. If you asked me, this money should better go in the pockets of the most fragile populations: those who feel obligated to send a family member abroad so they can feed their children at home.
At the time of this writing (April 2019), the World Bank says the average cost of sending remittances is 6.94%. It is still quite high, but for the last few years, a good number of challengers have been launching their services at much lower commission rates: Abra, Transferwise, Xoom (Paypal is in the game), and many others. Bitcoin still works fine of course, and it has become easier to use with the popularization of ATMs (about 700 in Canada alone according to Coin ATM Radar). However, newer applications are the easiest to use, as people don’t need to figure out what Bitcoin is, nor learn how to securely manage crypto-assets and dealing with taxes.
Financial service providers (including the banks) have been using Blockchain technology to create this improved user experience. HSBC announced it has settled $250B in trades on Blockchain in 2018 alone. The Royal Bank of Canada partnered with IBM for their US/Canada cross-border payments. ConsenSys has several interesting case studies on cross-border payments, real-time gross settlement (similar to project Jasper in Canada, but for the South African Central Bank), and a very interesting financial inclusion project in the Philippines (i2i) which can lead to a fully digital and blockchain-based national currency. This is where I see the action going for the near future, especially as the IMF and the World Bank encourage these practices.
In recent months, we’ve been working with Société Générale (aka SocGen) to accelerate innovation in Africa. This project goes back to my roots of driving corporate change from the inside out. After training a select group of intrapreneurs on Blockchain applications for the Enterprise (especially financial services), we went into corporate hacking. In the end, a startup was selected to pursue its dream of helping wannabe entrepreneurs gain a better access to financial services, while improving trust and security thanks to a Blockchain layer. Eventually, it will end up helping everyone take control of their data, positioning African populations competitively in the global economy. West African countries are already experimenting a record GDP growth. I’m proud of contributing in some capacity to this initiative lead by SocGen.
Saving time and especially money to people is indeed a good idea. People are tired of paying too many taxes and fees while barely making ends meet (e.g. Gillets jaunes in France, the rise of populism across Europe and the Americas). At the same time, the global debt doesn’t seem to get under control and, ten years after the last financial crisis, many people are worried that governments will have to save “too big to fail” corporations once again. According to the IMF, “On average, the world’s debt now exceeds $86,000 in per capita terms, which is more than 2½ times the average income-per-capita.” (emphasis added)
While the debt levels remain high, wealth is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. The number of billionaires has doubled since the last financial crisis according to Oxfam (see the infographic below). The cryptocurrency community believes that Blockchain will democratize investment, allowing regular people to participate in otherwise inaccessible economic rent flowing from the capital. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) can be the poor man’s IPO. All kinds of financial instruments, including cryptocurrency-backed debt and derivatives, will contribute to further democratizing this field (e.g. Celsius, and 3iQ in Canada). The financial institutions are after the cryptocurrency pie as well (e.g. the $2.5 trillion life insurance market in France, Fidelity’s $7.2 trillion in client assets).
I mentioned earlier our work with the Sustainability.Exchange. Prediction markets are implemented with Blockchain technology as a game rewarding those who are providing the best data forecast. This novel approach has several interesting benefits. Participants are incentivized to report data and insights about corporate ESG performance. They are also self-curating the data, keeping each other honest. Finally, the Open Source nature of the Blockchain technology ensures a fair level of fairness, allowing everyone to audit how fairly the game works.
Maybe more important for those who don’t have a lot of capital (or otherwise more debt than savings), Blockchain can help them get a better return on their work. It has been hard for certain categories of value creators to capture the fruit of their labour, particularly artists. The many intermediaries (studios, publishers, managers, etc) were already eating their margin, but the digital revolution has further limited their ability to even get paid. Access Copyright, a Canadian not-for-profit that helps creators and publishers, has launched Prescient to explore the future of rights management and content monetization. The first step forward is an Attribution Ledger that keeps track of the relationship between a creator and his or her work of art.
A few years ago, ConsenSys funded Ujo Music, to connect artists and fans directly. What if singers and musicians could self-publish their art and avoid both traditional intermediaries and newer ones such as Apple Music and Spotify, which are known to flow very little money back to the artists? With Youtube and other social media, many have become producers. What if they could become “solopreneurs”, and get rid of the intermediaries? The Gig economy and the rise of the freelancer is a growing trend beyond the art world, as the CEO of Oxygenmat explains on Forbes.
Kevin Owocki has launched Gitcoin (Gitcoin is not a coin) to help software developers earn money working on Open Source Software projects that benefit everyone. Today, coders using Gitcoin get paid up to USD$62 an hour. The positive portfolio effect popular on GitHub, still works: about 25 developers were picked up by head hunters. Gitcoin is on a good trend, making it easy for developers to focus on what they do best.
The Bounties network goes one step beyond Gitcoin to make every type of work available to freelancers. Construction, cleaning, art, marketing, algorithm design… anything works. Last December, the platform launched a Bounties for the Oceans in partnership with Coins.ph to clean up Manila Bay. Anyone could receive the equivalent of USD$10 for picking up trash. The Bounties Network has a mechanism to manage the proof of (human) work so that people get paid fairly.
Social Good
Beyond financial literacy and financial inclusion, there are more Blockchain applications that improve human condition across the globe. Here are a few examples.
Hala Systems is a US (for-profit) social enterprise aiming to protect populations living in war zones. The team is using several emerging technologies. Blockchain is used to provide immutable evidence that events took place. When bombing occurred, for example, you’d like to maintain evidence of it so that people can eventually be taken accountable. Hala Systems is using a public Blockchain to secure that information.
NeedsList is developing a registry for humanitarian aid. They used Blockchain to maintain a decentralized list of much-needed resources such as food and clothing required for disaster response. NeedsList is a finalist at the SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards this year (2019).
The project Bifrost is another humanitarian project to help populations in needs. ConsenSys, MakerDAO, and Dether have partnered to move funds to charities on the ground more efficiently. Blockchain is leveraged to move money (fiat) through a cryptocurrency rail using stable coins (a cryptocurrency that is pegged to the US dollar, or any other fiat money).
To improve worker welfare, Harvard, Levi Strauss and ConsenSys developed a Blockchain application that enhances factory audits with self-reporting. The project is deployed in three Mexican factories employing 5,000 workers. This is a step forward that can help global brands enforce high standards and governance in their complex network of subcontractors abroad. Both Nike, Gap and H&M have been suffering from backlash in past sweatshop scandals that impacted their brand, and their economic profits as well. Blockchain is a solution allowing to govern a very complex supply chain while keeping everyone honest.
Millennials have set new standards through their consumption and their relationship with the brands. WhatRocks aims to disrupt the advertising industry by becoming the leading label for social impact advertising. Consumers earn Rocks (coins circulating on Blockchain rails) when they view ads showing the WhatRocks label. They can use these Rocks to make a donation and to get free or discounted event tickets. Blockchain makes possible the use of the Rocks cryptocurrency securely and efficiently.
Unfortunately, facts and evidence are under attack in Western societies. Everyone has in mind the so-called “alternative facts” that suddenly appeared in the American public discourse -if such a thing can actually exist. Civil has put together a Blockchain solution that is designed to keep everyone in check about their facts. The team fights for a professional and independent journalism, a true civil discourse, and the freedom of the press. Again, Blockchain proves to be an ideal tool to keep everyone honest about their data. Let’s dream with them about a future when we can all agree on the facts.
The environment
There are a fair number of Blockchain projects aiming to improve the environment. I already mentioned the bounty to clean the oceans. During my work at ConsenSys, I must have encountered a handful of projects on carbon pricing across several continents. Blockchain allows the measurement and tracking of anything. Carbon units can be sold on peer to peer market places allowing price discovery and near immediate settlement. Blockchain is ideal to enable those market places.
Luxarity is an interesting social venture that educates the fashion-conscious consumer and fostering sustainable and responsible consumption. Luxury goods can have a second life in a secondary market, whereby some of the funds are donated to charity. The Blockchain enables this secondary market while ensuring the donation are effectively transferred to the intended party.
To protect the fish population, the World Wildlife Fund has worked with Viant on an initiative to demonstrate food provenance. The project Bait to Plate helps customers understand what they’re eating. Unfortunately, the majority of fish labelled Tuna is not really Tuna. Again, blockchain is an ideal record of the facts, and a database that modern applications (Dapps) can use to create delightful experiences on our phones.
We can start imagining collaborative tools built on Blockchain anyone can use to monitor the tree population, any type of living organism, and location in this planet. The first step to make and enforce laws is to secure hard evidence. Blockchain can be the global database that everyone can trust. As it seems, the development of applications leveraging Blockchain technology is just getting started.
Let’s do more
We can mention only a few examples of social innovation projects leveraging Blockchain. It is only the beginning. There are (only) 2,000 application (DApps) on the public Ethereum network today (the largest number as far as I know). There will be many more. Looking at the future, let me share some parting thoughts.
1. Social Innovation
It may be wishful thinking, but I think that Social Innovation is becoming a common mindset across Wall Street and Main Street alike. Business leaders and everyday people have begun to envision work, life, and play through a social and environmental lens.
2. Blockchain
The Ethos of the Blockchain community is aligned with the spirit and methods of Social Innovation. Blockchain draws from the best technical and social practice, from the Open Source community and from the social activists who have risen after the 2008 financial crisis.
3. We are all in
Social Innovation requires everyone to participate. Blockchain, pushing decision-making and ownership to the edge of the network, empowers every one of us to take control. The locus of control is shifting to the edge.
4. Barriers to innovation are low
Technology has given everyone a voice through social media, and the ability to create an app from a dorm room and to deploy it in the cloud with lunch money. Grants are available from the not-for-profit organizations (e.g. Ethereum Foundation, AION Foundation, Bitcoin Foundation) to improve Blockchain technologies. The big IT organizations continue to offer grants for social innovation projects. More importantly, investment in social ventures is rising.
5. Canada is home to Blockchain technologies
Canada is a great place to start a business. Toronto is the cradle of many leading Blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Cosmos, AION, Shyft… and the home of world-class development shops. That’s where I decided to launch the Metamesh Group, a new consulting practice focusing on making business, life, and society more purposeful and impactful, leveraging new technologies such as Blockchain.
Ping me if you’d like to be part of this adventure! | https://medium.com/@marclijour/social-innovation-and-the-blockchain-ed862ba75823 | ['Marc Lijour'] | 2019-06-11 21:51:59.537000+00:00 | ['Governance', 'Environment', 'Social Impact', 'Esg', 'Blockchain'] |
AAJA’s End of Year Top 10 Lists | 10 Documentaries by AAPI Filmmakers
Be Water — ESPN’s Bruce Lee documentary, directed by Bao Nguyen, uses archive film to chronicle the actor, director and martial artist’s movie career and highlights his social awareness and inspiration of millions. He would have turned 80 this year. Sky Blossom: Diaries of the Next Greatest Generation — Richard Lui’s* directorial debut looks at the millions of teens and twenty-somethings caring for a veteran parent or grandparent. The movie, with a production team stacked with AAJA members and predominantly comprising women of color, tells the quietly heroic stories of young caregivers. First Vote — A Chinese immigrant and first-time voter in 2020, filmmaker Yi Chen* documents the journey of four politically-engaged Chinese Americans in battleground states from the 2016 presidential election to the 2018 midterms. A Thousand Cuts — Maria Ressa*, co-founder and CEO of Rappler, and her team of journalists are at the center of Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary about the erosion of democracy and free press in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. Check out our talkback from AAJA Visibility Fest (#AAJA20) featuring Maria Ressa and Ramona S. Diaz in conversation with Benjamin Pimentel* of Business Insider.
5. Standing Above the Clouds — The documentary follows Native Hawaiian mother-daughter activists seeking to protect their sacred Mauna Kea volcano from the building of a megatelescope. The film is directed by Jalena Keane-Lee, co-founder of Breaktide Productions, an all-women-of-color video-production company.
6. How My Family Dealt With the Coronavirus Outbreak — Junting Zhou chronicles the quarantine experience of his family back in his hometown, Guangzhou, not long after Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, went into lockdown. This New York Times Op-Doc reflects life in a major Chinese city during a historic time.
7. 76 Days — Directed by Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and Anonymous, the documentary chronicles the struggle of frontline hospital workers and patients in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan, which was locked down for 76 days.
8. Asian Americans — The most comprehensive documentary series to date about the Asian American experience, the five episodes, produced by WETA and the Center for Asian American Media for PBS, examines the history, contributions and challenges facing Asian Americans through their stories.
9. Patutiki: The Guardians of the Marquesan Tattoo — Screened in the native Polynesian language of the Marquesas, the film uncovers the cultural puzzles left by the Patutiki, or Marquesan tattoo, which was declared illegal in the early 1900s. The film was co-directed, written, and produced by a Marquesan, Heretu Tetahiotupa, and Christophe Cordier of France.
10. Noodle Kid — Mei Xiang, 14, opens a noodle shop, a common story among ethnic Huis in western China, where the Muslim Chinese minority is besieged. The documentary by Gary Shih and Ning Huo looks at their religious life through his lens and apprenticeship; he wants to be an imam one day. | https://medium.com/@aajaofficial/aajas-end-of-year-top-10-lists-319db5705614 | ['Asian American Journalists Association'] | 2021-01-04 16:44:53.830000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Asian American', 'Top 10', 'Documentary', 'Asian American Literature'] |
Handle Registration in FastAPI and Tortoise ORM | And shed a tear or two in the process — Part 3
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
In the previous parts of the tutorial, you configured the application and wrote some services. Now it’s time to use them.
You are going to define two endpoints:
/api/auth/register
/api/auth/verify
I cover some obligatory features, like validating the token. I won’t cover resending a confirmation. Ideally it would be available only for authenticated users, which is out of scope of this tutorial. | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/handle-registration-in-fastapi-and-tortoise-orm-a673263bdba3 | ['Bartosz Konikiewicz'] | 2021-03-09 06:29:20.929000+00:00 | ['Registration', 'Python', 'Fastapi', 'Tortoise Orm', 'Authentication'] |
Manager of Product Management — Ryan Burgoon | Manager of Product Management — Ryan Burgoon
Stories of getting started in product management
As part of our Getting Started in Product series, we look at some people who have already made the transition into a product role and ask them all about how they got started.
What’s your current role?
I’m a Manager of Product Management at Verizon Media.
What did you do before you got into Product Management?
I was a Manager of Systems Operations also in a technology company and was responsible for the team managing our 10s of thousands of servers across the globe.
How did you get your first product role?
I applied internally at the same company and my manager helped out by reaching out to the Chief Product Officer at the time.
I did a few lunch and learns and then interviewed with the internal product team. They accepted me as intern while I kept my Manager, Systems Operations job and then during my 60-day review was offered a full-time position.
What was your biggest challenge when you started in product management?
I knew very little about being a product owner/manager for a software development team.
I didn’t know how they organized work, Scrum/Agile, how to get useful feedback from customers, how to gather data and use it to make decisions, but the biggest surprise was my lack of business acumen.
I studied Graphic Design for my undergraduate degree, which lead me to seek out and obtain an MBA
What is the one piece of advice you’d give someone starting out in product?
I actually have two pieces of advice:
Always put the customer’s needs first, but make sure you truly understand those needs and and can deliver a superior experience; and If you’re going to move into product, it’s going to be next to impossible to get hired in a different company without prior experience. You must have Product experience, domain expertise, or both. So, look for opportunities to transition laterally in your current company or intern through a degree program because it’s going to be MUCH easier than trying to find a company that will be willing to take a large risk on an unproven PM.
More from Ryan
If you’d like to get in touch with Ryan then you can visit him on LinkedIn.
Get content like this direct to your inbox
At Getting Started in Product we write about how those who want to get into product can go about doing so, as well as how to do the job when they get there. | https://medium.com/getting-started-in-product/manager-of-product-management-ryan-burgoon-7c39d66e200d | ['Robert Drury'] | 2020-12-29 09:59:34.773000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Product Manager', 'Product Management', 'Career Change', 'Product'] |
Use Code Snippets and Make Your Life Easier! | Learning to make difficult syntax easier.
Dogs love to fetch and you could too!
Hi there, I’m Nic and I’ve been going through the intensive process of learning multiple computer languages at a coding bootcamp. This means in 12–15 weeks, I’m supposed to grasp things that take people several years of college to get to a level of proficiency at. I had no background in coding coming into the school and often I felt like my mind was like a fridge with everything falling out.
This is how I feel!
When I was learning Ruby on Rails, a popular web framework, I had one piece of important help from my instructor, Ian, who told me about an extension for my Visual Studio Code editor called ‘Simple Ruby ERB’.
Very useful!
This, just like VSCode itself, was totally free and gave me lots of cool helper functions like typing “link_to” with easy syntax, which was nice to help me with some tricky syntax with Rails that was new to me.
Neato!
As you can see, just typing “lin” pulls up a simple menu that generates the syntax for “link_to” with easy to replace fields, even including the Ruby evaluation “squids” or “<%= %>” to help me evaluate my code. This is massively useful.
However, there were other Rails-specific functions like “form_for”, “collection_select” and “delete_button” that had difficult syntax and, even worse, I had learned Rails on a Thursday and I was expected to be tested on it by the following Wednesday! I was just beginning to understand this thing!
Halpppppp
Luckily, I found the greatest resource available to me in my coding bootcamp: other nice coders! A fellow coder, Gene, told me about user snippets, the ability to write as a user our own shortcut methods like the ones given to me by Simple Ruby ERB!
When I was preparing for that less-than-a-week-away code challenge, Gene gave me his code snippets and even showed me how to add them. | https://medium.com/@nicholas.feitel/use-code-snippets-and-make-your-life-easier-81e3425216f9 | ['Nicholas Feitel'] | 2019-11-27 17:42:24.921000+00:00 | ['Flatiron School', 'Ruby', 'JavaScript', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Rails'] |
Why Don’t Americans Believe in Climate Change? | In a study by the European Investment Bank, 79% of Americans reported that they think climate change will have an effect on their children, with only 42% believing it certainly will. This is compared to the 90% and 98% from Europe and China respectively who believe that climate change will have a future impact.
The numbers reflect the way Americans live their lives versus the rest of the world. Americans maintain an extremely high standard of living which has not been sacrificed in the name of combating climate change. While Europeans drive small, energy efficient cars, utilize public and alternative transportation, hang dry clothes, and locally source food; Americans are more likely to view these changes as an inconvenience, rather than a necessary mitigation effort.
Part of the reason Americans are so hesitant to change their habits is because many are unconvinced there is any reason to. The United States, unlike the rest of the world, has effectively been able to deny 97% of scientists who have told us that global warming is in fact happening.
America’s path to denial is complex and non-linear, but rather a cocktail of free enterprise lobbyists, a polarized political environment, and a highly individualistic value system, that contributed to our pseudo-reality where climate change is not a pressing issue.
Free Enterprise Lobbyists
Big business has long had an interest in denying climate change. Environmental protections meant more regulations which were seemingly a threat to their bottom line. Instead of researching ways to be both climate conscious and profitable, American corporations began looking for ways to stonewall the problem.
Drawing on strategies from the tobacco industry in the 1970s, corporations set up “independent” think tanks to thwart the climate change narrative which was justifying government regulation. By both pushing out counter-data and funding legislators who would support their cause, they kept the climate denial movement alive.
Former Vice President Al Gore called out Exxon Mobile in his book The Assault on Reason, stating that the corporation was looking to skew the data to manipulate the public. He writes:
Wealthy right-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal, and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudoscientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public’s mind about global warming. They issue one misleading ‘report’ after another, pretending that there is a significant disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there is actually a broad-based consensus.
Corporations who saw climate change as an economic threat continued to fund candidates in the hopes that their agendas would be respected. In 2012, Mitt Romney received over $4 million dollars from the fossil fuel industry compared to the $710,277 that Obama received. In 2020, President Trump received over $10 million from one fundraiser alone hosted by an oil pipeline businesswoman.
Corporate support for an anti-climate narrative in politics helped to push the message to question science and encouraged politicians to support their message by funding their campaigns, but it was not the whole story. Their message worked so well because the recipients maintained an ideology that was highly susceptible to rejecting measures which called for more government.
Political Polarization
Denying climate change has become part of the litmus test in conservative circles, along with illegal immigration, abortion, and lower taxes. In the 2012 primary, Mitt Romney who had been active on climate policy in his term as Governor of Massachusetts, actively distanced himself from climate groups, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, in order to secure the nomination.
Congress now has about 130 members who deny climate change, with a wide partisan gap where Republicans are more likely to reject climate change science.
The climate change denial movement has been highly attractive to small government conservatives and libertarians in the Republican party because it allows them to continue to push their message of reducing government intervention. If climate change were to be acknowledged, conservatives would also have to rationalize their need to mitigate global warming with their interest in deregulation. Instead, denying climate change is a far more efficient way to push their economic and political agendas.
Tying climate change to an ideology, conservatives have been able to sell the anti-science rhetoric by exploiting typical conservative fears. Republican leaders are quick to use phrases fraught with controversy like “environmental socialism” and speak to the ills of big government intervention.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Republican leaders readily critiqued the Democratic contenders, saying they would take take away your jobs, your cars, limit your right to eat meat, and ban travel on an airplane. Donald Trump often spoke at rallies about how he would bring back jobs to coal miners, while Joe Biden would actively try to take them away.
By doing so, they not only push a message that the science is questionable, but they create a story that is about individual freedom, personal liberty, and individual safety, suddenly aligning climate change denial with one’s values making it easier to deny.
A Country of Individualists
The United States was founded on ideals of individualism. The ‘American Dream’ rests on the idea that if you work hard enough, you can be successful and climb the social ladder. At no point does the American Dream speak about receiving help from your neighbor.
But combating climate change policy is going to require a multilateral approach where every individual and business small and large contribute to mitigate its damage. Americans will have to work collectively and rely on one another to achieve the goal of a healthier planet, even when the benefits are not immediately felt on an individual level.
For countries that embody a more collectivist mindset, this is easier to set in. Scandinavian countries, for example, are not new to the idea that one individual’s contribution goes toward a societal good like healthcare, education, or the environment.
But denial can be easier than accepting a truth which requires action inconsistent with your worldview.
Some Americans have been able to rely on their own cognitive dissonance and accept that which aligns with their pre-existing beliefs of how the world should be. This means engaging with the anti-science message that more easily lines up with a value system based on individualism, personal freedom, and small government.
And the information is out there for the taking. It has been funded by large corporations, spread by politicians and lobbyists, and absorbed by those looking to rationalize their political beliefs against mounting scientific evidence. All together, the combination has resulted in a significant portion of the electorate, public officials, and businesses that subscribes to climate change denial. | https://medium.com/discourse/why-dont-americans-believe-in-climate-change-a89f21f417ca | ['Liz Vincento'] | 2020-11-20 13:54:18.842000+00:00 | ['Comparative Politics', 'Global Warming', 'United States', 'World', 'Climate Change'] |
Cutlets of cod | Cod cutlets are one of the most delicious options for fish dishes. Fragrant, rosy, with a crisp crust. In addition, cod fillet is incredibly useful, it contains unique fish oil and healthy vitamins. And cod dishes go well with sauces. Try serving burgers with Tabasco sauce or tartare. Just delicious!
Photo by the author
Ingredients
Designed for 8 servings
Olive oil 6 tablespoons
Celery stalk 2 pieces
Onion 1 head
Garlic 1 clove
Potatoes 14.11 oz (400 g)
Cod fillet 15.87 oz (450 g)
Breadcrumbs ½ Cup
Mayonnaise 3 tablespoons
Dill 2 tablespoons
Parsley 1 bunch
Egg yolk 1 piece
Lemon juice 1 tablespoon
Butter 2 tablespoons
Salt to taste
Ground black pepper spoons to taste
ENERGY VALUE PER SERVING
Calories 358 k cal
Proteins 13.3 grams
Fat 25.1 grams
Carbohydrates 21 grams
Instruction
Cooking time 1 hour 50 minutes
Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add the celery, chopped onion, and garlic and simmer, stirring, until soft for about eight minutes.
Cover the potatoes with salted water, bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium and cook for about fifteen minutes until soft. Drain the water and put half the potatoes on a plate. Transfer the remaining part to a bowl and knead, adding the onion mixture.
Season the cod fillet with salt and pepper to taste. In a large frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil, put the cod and cook, turning once, for ten minutes. Cool the finished fish and break it into small pieces.
Add breadcrumbs, mayonnaise, herbs, egg yolk and lemon juice to a bowl with potatoes and onion mixture, mix well with the remaining potatoes and fish fillet. Divide with your hands, form cutlets (8 pieces), put them on baking paper, cover with clingfilm and put in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to harden.
In a pan over medium heat, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 2 tablespoons of butter, lay out the cutlets and bake, turning once, until golden about eight minutes. Bon Appetit! | https://medium.com/elena-sunshine-magazine/cutlets-of-cod-a5d3da8dd134 | ['Elena', 'Sunshine', 'Petrova - Elena Sunshine Magazine'] | 2020-12-26 15:49:31.496000+00:00 | ['Elenasunshinemagazine', 'Fish', 'Cooking', 'Recipe', 'Fod'] |
Heathcliff’s Requiem | In that moor’s strict seclusion,
He would happily die.
He’d let the wind and rain (which he loved too much)
Take him deep into their sweet, deadly arms.
A calm, final movement.
A smooth, long fall through marsh grass -
Like Alice down the deepest well.
There shall be no pain.
There shall be no sorrow.
No one to cry.
Only a most-elemental death.
A slow fall from consciousness. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/heathcliffs-requiem-1ebc70bcb9a1 | ['Paul Austin Murphy'] | 2020-03-17 09:22:25.079000+00:00 | ['Moors', 'Poetry', 'Heathcliff', 'Requiem', 'Wuthering Heights'] |
“I Was Willing To Kill for Manson” | Tex Watson just prior to the Tate/LaBianca Murders
In early December 1968, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson left the Manson Family to pursue his own pleasures. His departure followed his visit to 10050 Cielo Drive, the home of Columbia Records producer Terry Melcher. Watson had been sent to Melcher’s Benedict Canyon home by Charles Manson, to get money to bail a mutual friend out jail.
Watson was not at Melcher’s home for long, but during that time he saw the upscale lifestyle of Melcher and his girlfriend, model/actress Candace Bergen. He was treated rather shabbily by Bergen, and by their maid. He was given a Jaguar to drive, but not the cash (Melcher claimed he didn’t have any on him that weekend) and then abused the offer by driving the car not just to the county jail, but up to Ukiah and back.
In his 1978 memoir, he recounted:
“I felt out of place, over my head, especially when a glamorous star, who was living there with Terry at the time, walked in on me and demanded to know what I was doing there.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
Then just a few days later, he leaves Manson, the Family and Spahn Ranch so that he can reconnect with his old friend Rich. Rich was his former roommate, and his business partner in a wig shop that had closed several months before. It doesn’t seem like conjecture to imagine that Melcher’s wealth and privilege had reminded Tex of his own greater possibilities and ambitions. Perhaps enough so that when he returned to Cielo Drive the following summer, Watson was resentful and angry to the point of homicide.
Watson called Rich, who arranged to pick him up in Topanga. He walked out the back door of the house where he and Charlie were visiting, Manson listening to The Beatles’ White Album. Tex didn’t even say goodbye as he left.
Rich nearly didn’t recognize Watson, who had grown out his hair and wore the first scruff of a beard. More importantly, he noted that his old friend seemed somewhat different in personality — dazed, dirty and spouting a bunch of weird philosophies about death and NOW and the Soul. But Rich brought his friend to the apartment he and his brother rented, to stay.
Tex’s first week of freedom away from Manson was spent on getting out of his scheduled Army physical, using a prior knee injury to get a deferment. Rich wasn’t so lucky: he went to his physical and, knowing he was about to get drafted, enlisted the next day.
But Watson soon grew bored. He bought some marijuana, then he called up a flight attendant he knew back in Dallas. They made plans to connect on her next layover in L.A.
“When I appeared at her hotel in the old 1952 Chevy that Rich had left me, with my wild mane of hair and old jeans and boots, she and the girl friend she had with her were stunned. She must have assumed I’d made it big in California — she didn’t even work very hard to hide her disappointment. I drove the two of them around town, trying to make up for her embarrassment by taking them to Dennis’s house, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Strip, and by talking about all the show-business people I knew. These two Texas girls were not impressed. Finally I decided I’d take them to meet Terry. We drove up Benedict Canyon and… I went into that gate at 10050 Cielo Drive. There was no one home and as we drove back to the airport I realized that they probably thought I just made up a story about knowing people in Hollywood or being friends with the celebrities who lived at the top of Cielo Drive. Even the lunch I’d bought them in Beverly Hills hadn’t done the trick. For the first time, I was embarrassed by how I looked.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
So, he decided to clean up his act and ditch the hippie look. But he didn’t have a job or any money. So he rang up a former girlfriend of Rich’s, a 26-year old woman named Rosina Kroner, and moved in with her.
Rosina was a drug-dealer, and Watson became her lover, her protégé and her business partner. She lived on Franklin Avenue in an apartment in the Hollywood Heights neighborhood. Kroner took care of Watson, buying him mod clothes and paying for his hair to be cut. Plus, she provided a lot of drugs.
“She had an old Hollywood-Spanish apartment with eucalyptus trees all around and a patio that overlooked the driveway to an exclusive private club for professional magicians and entertainment stars. Sometimes we’d sunbathe on the deck, drinking beer and smoking grass while we watched all the big limousines drive up for parties, dumping out beautiful people whom we could never quite recognize.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
To make extra money, the two overcharged friends and clients extra money for every lid of grass they sold. But as much as Watson enjoyed the Hollywood Heights lifestyle, parts of Manson’s rhetoric still seeped into his brain. Everywhere the Texan went, something would remind him of Charlie. He was especially cognizant of Charlie’s message about Hollywood people, and how shallow and plastic they were.
Plus, the situation with Rosina was not going well. Watson did not want to be faithful to her, even though he knew she had fallen in love with him. He tried to convince her to date other men, even resorting to using Manson’s pimp talk on her, but to no avail. Then she got pregnant. Rosina went to Mexico for an abortion which was botched, resulting in her checking into U.C.L.A. Medical Center for treatment. A later trip to Mexico for the couple ended in a bad car crash, totaling Kroner’s VW Bug.
Watson’s girlfriend Rosina Kroner
All of this bad luck made Tex think that maybe this lifestyle, as Charlie had warned, was wrong and he grew more restless. The great drugs, beautiful clothes and other Hollywood accessories just weren’t enough for him.
One day that March, Watson picked up the phone and called Spahn Ranch. He’d decided to go back to Manson.
The Family had just returned to Spahn Ranch, and upon their return had turned one of the buildings (The Longhorn Saloon) into a nightclub. Watson arrived the night the nightclub opened.
“I appeared at Spahn Ranch with my styled hair and my silk shirt and leather jacket and I felt like there were two of me standing there, the old Tex whom Charlie and the girls were so glad to see and Charles from Hollywood, noticing the dust that was getting on his expensive leather shoes. That night I saw the club. It was one of the old ranch buildings painted all black inside, with a huge parachute covering the ceiling and black lights and posters and HELTER SKELTER and other lines from Beatles’ songs scrawled all over the walls in luminous paint. There was a large jar in one corner marked DONATIONS. ‘That’s so we can buy things to get ready for Helter Skelter when it comes down,’ one of the girls explained… There was one tune the whole Family joined in on, repeating the chorus over and over: ‘You better get your dune buggy ready . . . you better get your dune buggy ready.’ Everybody started dancing, Susan-Sadie in the middle of things doing her go-go number, while Charlie and the others sang at the top of their lungs and the psychedelic posters throbbed with their sickly colors in the black light. I was home.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
The club was opened only a few evenings when the cops showed up. George Spahn was fined $1500 (as property owner) for allowing minors to drink.
During the time Tex had been away, he’d grown greedy and unscrupulous with his small-scale drug operation. These exploits continued when he returned to Spahn Ranch. On April 13th, Watson is alleged to have robbed Joel Rostau, a drug dealer. Rostau (who worked for a Boston-based mob guy named Eugene ‘Geno’ Massaro) was dating Charlene McCaffrey, the receptionist at Sebring International — the company owned by Jay Sebring.
Rostau was an intermediary in Massaro’s L.A. drug ring in the late 60’s. The police had a large file on his activities. Joel was found murdered, in the trunk of a car parked at Kennedy Airport, in May 1970. Many people believe that he is an important, maybe even key piece of the TLB (Tate/LaBianca) puzzle.
Rostau and Massaro were reputed to use a vending company as a front for their business. In Charles ‘Tex’ Watson’s own words:
“I’d arranged to buy a kilo of grass from the dealer who’d been supplying the Family. He fronted the dope with a vending-machine company and people said he was with the Mafia.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
Rostau claimed that two armed men came into his home on April 13th and tied Charlene and him up with rope. This was the same modus operandi that Tex used at Cielo Drive four months later. In fact, author Nicolas Schreck claimed that Watson used the same gun at both crimes. The robbers beat Rostau and demanded he give them his drugs. The taller of the two intruders, both with Southern accents, shot Rostau in the foot as they fled.
A neighbor heard the gunshot and called police, who arrived to find Rostau and McCaffrey tied up. After they released the pair, the cops discovered narcotics on the scene. So, Rostau and Charlene were arrested for possession. Marijuana, hash and cocaine were found, which begs the question of whether the robbers actually made off with any drugs or perhaps Rostau only gave them some of what he had. Either that or the burglars were particularly inept.
On April 23rd, Tex was arrested for public intoxication. Days earlier, Paul Watkins spotted a Belladonna plant (the deadly nightshade) growing wild in the hills near Spahn Ranch. He’d been introduced to the plant while living on a Hopi Indian Reservation and knew how to brew it into a narcotic drink.
Watson’s mugshot for his April 1969 public intoxication arrest
A few days later, Paul brought the Belladonna roots to the kitchen at Spahn Ranch, where Brenda (true name Nancy Pitman) brewed them into a tea. But while this was happening, Tex Watson walked into the kitchen.
Watkins later testified that he watched Tex pick up a hunk of root, then announce that he was leaving to go find his motorcycle. He left, chewing the root which is highly poisonous if ingested raw. When asked when he saw Watson next, Paul said it was three days later and Tex’s face was all banged up.
“I was… crawling on my knees and my mouth was foaming cotton. My body was sort of red and I fell down three or four times… and then I couldn’t stand. The last thing I remember, the police were dragging me out of some car in the Valley. I was in Van Nuys Jail the next morning.” — Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, according to the August 1971 trial testimony of Dr. Kenneth Grosvenor Bailey
He couldn’t even sign his damn name when he was taken to the precinct; he was so out of it. That famous mugshot of Watson (the one of him grinning, with scruffy hair and filthy teeth) wasn’t taken in August, when the Family was arrested at Spahn Ranch. In fact, Tex was in Death Valley during that raid. His mugshot was taken April 23rd in the throes of his belladonna intoxication. He was hallucinating, unable to talk and his cellmates had quite the time with him. They beat him up, splitting his eyebrow open and requiring several stitches in the county jail.
Watson was released the next day but left behind a powerful piece of evidence: his fingerprint. That print later placed Watson at the gate of Cielo Drive on August 9th.
Tex wasn’t himself after that bad trip.
“He’d disappear for long periods of time, or sit comatose for hours and have to be hand fed… I remember it really messed him up.” — The Myth of Helter Skelter by Susan Atkins-Whitehouse ©2012 Menelorelin Dorenay
“Mary, Ella, and Tex took acid before a trip to the city for supplies… when they returned, the girls looked haggard. Everything was fine, they said, until they were about to come home, and Tex began literally picking up children, saying he had to get them to the desert before sundown. The girls had to disengage him from a child and get him into the car.” — Reflexion by Lynette Fromme ©2018 Peasenhall Press
Tex was becoming a complete zombie, although his addled senses didn’t prevent him from continuing to deal drugs. Charlie may have believed that Tex and Sadie were starting their own drug ring that season, with speed. He was displeased.
“Charlie, for all his use of acid, was absolutely against speed. He believed it was bad for your body. But when a young guy from one of the neighboring ranches began sneaking it over, Susan-Sadie, Bruce Davis and I started carrying it around in the bottom of a cigarette package. Later we hid it in a Gerbers’ baby-food jar under the porch of one of the buildings. I liked the way speed worked. You’d stick your finger in, sniff it up each nostril, and everything came to life. Sometimes time moved past you so fast you could barely keep up with it… I was willing to kill for Manson, but I wasn’t willing to give up my speed.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
The Family were acquainted with a man named Charles Melton, sometimes known as ‘Black Beard Charlie’. He lived in Topanga. In April he visited Spahn Ranch. Melton, a mystical far-out dude or Dharma bum, wore a long beard. When Tex saw Melton’s facial hair, he commented that he wished that someday Manson would let him grow a beard.
But Watson, despite the pressure he felt to live up to Manson’s rules, was never under anyone’s thumb. He only became a fixture at Spahn Ranch after he blew out his mind on belladonna. According to several people, Tex turned mean and pushy after that bad trip.
Tex was not a ‘follower’ of Manson. He came and went as he pleased. He dated women who were not in the Family. He set up his own drug deals, often without Manson’s involvement and once, famously, without thought to the domino effect it would create.
That was the July 1969 drug burn of Bernard ‘Lotsapoppa’ Crowe. We will get to that in all due time.
That June, the Family got their newest addition when one member (Catherine ‘Gypsy’ Share) visited Charles Melton in Topanga and was introduced to Linda Kasabian, a young hippie wife and mother originally from New Hampshire. Linda, who had a little girl named Tanya, was not happy with the state of her marriage. Upon Gypsy’s recommendation, she left that day with her and brought Tanya to stay at Spahn Ranch.
Charlie wasn’t at the ranch the day Linda arrived. But that night, in a shack on the Spahn property, sheand Tex made love.
“Tex was gruff and greasy, but he just always had this beautiful smile and these beautiful eyes. I was attracted to him and he kinda had me, that first night.” — Linda Kasabian from the documentary “Manson” ©2009 The History Channel
Linda Kasabian
After sex, Linda told Tex that Charlie Melton had received a large inheritance. Tex told her that money wasn’t something any one person could own. That possessions, including cash, were meant to be shared. Money belonged to anyone, everyone. Of course, he was trained to say those things by Manson. Watson was as prostituted as the women were. He was the primary stud at Spahn Ranch and knew what Charlie wanted in a new girl.
He didn’t come out and ask her to take the money, but Linda understood what he was implying. She wanted to leave her husband and these people had welcomed her and Tanya with open arms. She felt a debt of loyalty to them.
The next day she went back to Melton’s trailer and found it unoccupied. She confiscated $5,000 in cash. She also took some acid tabs she’d brought to California, and a buck knife.
“I was willing to take the money,” Linda confessed. “I didn’t do it to hurt my husband but for acceptance within the Family.” — Linda Kasabian from the documentary “Manson” ©2009 The History Channel
Days later on July 1st, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson approached his ex-girlfriend Rosina Kroner about setting up a drug deal.
“I called Luella {the alias he gave Rosina}… on July 1 and said that the Family had $100 and wanted to buy a kilo of grass, but our Mafia vending-machine connection would only sell 25 kilos at a throw, for a cool $2,500” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
Rosina didn’t have that kind of cash, she told him and hung up. But then,
“She called back and told me that she knew somebody who was interested in buying the extra kilos, but she needed to make some money out of the deal as well.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
The somebody Rosina referred to was her dealer. His name was Bernard Crowe, but he was known as ‘Lotsapoppa’. Tex explained to Rosina that the plan was to get $2,500 from Crowe, buy the drugs, and sell most of them to her clients at a $25 markup per kilo. Then he would bank the extra weed (three kilos worth, to Tex and the Family), pass a few hundred dollars back to Rosina, and then reimburse Crowe. But Watson had a more nefarious scheme in mind.
He told Rosina that he must meet alone with his dealer. The guy won’t trust anyone else, he argued. He’s got to get the money from Rosina’s contact and meet privately with the dealer. Rosina called Lotsapoppa who agreed to meet at her apartment. Tex asked TJ to drive him to Los Angeles from Spahn Ranch.
“TJ would… drop me near Luella’s apartment to make it look like I’d hitchhiked. He’d then go on to the dealer’s place on the other side of town, parking in the back of the apartment house out of which the man worked. Luella would drive me back there with the money, and I’d go in the front door and out the back with the bread, leaving her to explain things to her friend.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
He wasn’t planning to buy drugs, at all. He just needed $2500. Tex was not only planning to rob a drug dealer but also to burn his ex-girlfriend in the process. What a prince! But Crowe thought the plan seemed hinky from the start. When Watson arrived, Crowe had his guard up — and he wasn’t alone. Three of his friends had accompanied him to Rosina’s apartment.
“He and one of his boys waited downstairs in their big black Caddy… I tried everything I could think of, including walking out of the door, but finally we ended up riding out to the connection’s apartment in Crowe’s… car, with his men on either side of us, just like something out of a movie.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
Meanwhile, TJ had driven to the dealer’s place in El Monte and parked out back, where he wouldn’t be seen. When Tex, Rosina, Crowe and the other men pulled up, Tex was ready to spring into action. He was gonna walk into the apartment complex with the cash and give the others the slip, sneaking out to where TJ was waiting for him. But Crowe said, wait a minute. He could just picture this grimy Texan making off with his money and told him he wanted a guarantee. He told Tex that if he was on the up and up, he wouldn’t mind leaving Rosina with them while he went inside to score. She was his promissory note.
“When Crowe threatened violence to her if I tried to cheat them, I gave him one of my Texas grins and drawled that they should know I’d be coming back when they had my girl.” But Tex didn’t give a shit about Rosina. “It didn’t much matter to me what they did to Luella, as long as I got the money for Charlie. They gave me the cash and I went straight into the front of the apartment and straight out the back. TJ and I were off to the ranch.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell
Crowe and his friends waited a while before realizing what happened. They drove Rosina back to her apartment at 6933 Franklin in Hollywood Heights. Crowe demanded Rosina tell him where that Southern son-of-a-bitch went. She said that Watson lived on an old movie ranch in Chatsworth.
Crowe asked Rosina if she knew the phone number. As a matter of fact, she did. At 2:00am, she called the ranch and handed Bernard Crowe the phone.
Back at Spahn, Manson was having a good old time. That crazy Tex Watson had shown up with $2500 in cash and everyone was celebrating. Crowe told the young lady who answered the phone to put ‘Charles’ on the line.
Crowe had no idea that nobody at the ranch knew Tex by his Christian name, Charles. There was only one Charles known there, and that was Manson.
Charlie came to the phone, only to hear the drug dealer threatening him. Initially, Crowe thought he was talking to Tex and said he was going to kill him. When Manson interjected and explained that he was a different Charles (and claimed he hadn’t seen Watson in weeks) Crowe said he was going to show up at Spahn Ranch nonetheless, kill everyone there and slit Charlie’s throat from ear to ear. He told Manson that he had Rosina and he’d better get down to her apartment to make good on the money stolen, before he did something horrible to her and then drove north to Spahn Ranch.
Manson had given Watson a lot of leeway that year. This was the thanks he got: now he had to go and fix Tex’s mess.
He assured Crowe that he was coming to Rosina’s to settle the matter. He sent Tex to the caves to camp overnight. Then Manson had TJ drive him back to Rosina’s apartment.
The situation at the Franklin Avenue apartment did not go well. It ended with Manson shooting Lotsapoppa, who he believed died as a result.
Two days later, he heard on the local news about the body of a Black Panther member turning up at a local hospital and Charlie went into a tailspin. Not only did he (erroneously) believe he had killed a man, but now he also feared retaliation from the Panthers.
A week after shooting Lotsapoppa, more than two dozen black people arrived at Spahn Ranch to ride the ponies! Manson was convinced they were Panthers, checking the place out to report back to their leadership.
Even though Crowe survived his wounds, the Panthers weren’t lying in wait for Charlie and he wasn’t facing a murder rap — Charlie knew none of these things. Lotsapoppa’s shooting resulted in two dire things:
One: Manson urgently needed to get out of town, which meant he needed even more money; and
Two: Manson was SUPER PISSED at Tex Watson.
“Believing he had murdered Bernard Crowe, Charles Manson became frantic… he came up with a plan to protect himself… He could hardly admit he had just killed a Black Panther and the entire brotherhood of Black Panthers was about to come screaming into Spahn’s Ranch to wipe them all out. Everyone would have left… Manson had to figure out how to turn Spahn’s Ranch into a fortress without letting anyone know what the real reason was. And then it came to him. The answer was right before his eyes.” — The Myth of Helter Skelter by Susan Atkins-Whitehouse ©2012 Menelorelin Dorenay
The answer was Helter Skelter: the apocalyptic race war. He could convince these kids that they were imminent danger without revealing that he had ‘killed’ a Black Panther, by citing examples that Helter Skelter was actually happening.
Helter Skelter took over everything in July 1969, with Manson ordered Tex Watson (as a form of penance) to train everyone in military-style maneuvers including martial arts, gunmanship, stabbing, and surveillance.
And then, just a month later, Charlie told Watson they needed to start Helter Skelter themselves, and he told him to get in the car and drive to Cielo Drive to slaughter everyone there.
Watson did as he was told.
To learn more about the Manson Family murders, please visit MansonFamily.net | https://themansonfamily-mtts.medium.com/i-was-willing-to-kill-for-manson-7ae9ea5f059e | ['H. Allegra Lansing'] | 2020-11-11 21:34:01.194000+00:00 | ['True Crime', 'Drugs', 'Manson Murders', 'History', 'Drug Dealing'] |
AYS Daily Digest 03/03/2021: Iuventa crew and others may face legal charges for SAR work | AYS Daily Digest 03/03/2021: Iuventa crew and others may face legal charges for SAR work
Anti-racism group in Cyprus faces closure // Desperation after evictions in Greece // Rescues off the Canaries // Calls for volunteers in France // First meeting of Frontex working group // New judicial cooperation over human trafficking Are You Syrious? Follow Mar 4 · 12 min read
Photo source: Twitter
FEATURE — Under fire for search and rescue in the central Med, 1,309 days later
Yesterday in the digest we celebrated the wonderful news that Sea Watch 4 was freed from detention and Sea Watch 3 was given a safe port for the 363 people on board. But every triumph in one arena, it seems, always comes with a setback in another.
The next setback came the following day, with the news that Italian prosecutors have completed a probe into three NGOs and 21 individuals for allegedly aiding illegal immigration in the central Mediterranean—“aiding illegal immigration” being, of course, search and rescue (SAR) work.
Now, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the German organization Jugend Rettet are under legal scrutiny for SAR operations they conducted in 2016 and 2017. The Iuventa ship, which was running migrant-rescue operations for Jugend Rettet, was seized by authorities in Lampedusa in 2017, some 1,309 days ago.
“This is a political declaration of intent to criminalise solidarity, and it has a deadly consequence: people die, when they could be saved,” Iuventa wrote in a press release following the news of the probe.
The prosecutors department in the Sicilian city of Trapani has notified the three NGOs and the 21 individuals that they have concluded their xczv investigation, a move that usually precedes the request of indictments.
The crew of the Iuventa could face up to 20 years in jail for their work in rescuing more than 14,000 people from drowning in a mass grave.
In its press release, Iuventa maintains its innocence and points out several major flaws in the prosecution’s case:
The main so-called “eyewitness” who collected evidence against the Iuventa crew publicly revoked his testimony. He then stated to the press that he had been promised a job within the Italian right party Lega Nord in exchange for his witness statement. Furthermore, through a detailed reconstruction of events, renowned team of scientists “Forensic Architecture,” disproved the theses of the prosecution in a public analysis of Iuventa operations.
Sascha Girke, the former Head of Mission onboard the Iuventa said: “Although we stand accused, it is us who accuse European authorities of refusing safe passage and of letting people drown.”
This terrible news about Iuventa comes just on the heels of the announcement of the investigation by Italian prosecutors in Ragusa into Mediterranea Saving Humans and the Maersk Etienne tanker for their SAR work, which you read more about in yesterday’s digest. | https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-03-03-2021-iuventa-crew-and-others-may-face-legal-charges-for-sar-work-d7f644f671e4 | ['Are You Syrious'] | 2021-03-04 18:47:01.447000+00:00 | ['Mediterranean', 'Digest', 'Frontex', 'Search And Rescue', 'Refugees'] |
What Light And Darkness Reveal | Light and darkness are twins
You must take that as a matter of faith
For you will rarely be able to see them together
Darkness and light also appear under different guises
Further confusing attempts at being easily defined
Natural light in the daytime uncovers
Flaws obscured when there is
Only moonlight to rely upon
With its romanticized pretensions
And promises revealed
As illusory upon awakening on the morrow
Darkness can be threatening when,
Imagination running wild,
You walk unfamiliar streets,
With only artificial brightness as a guide
Yet evening time can bring comfort
As night touches your body and your mind
Making you feel more alive,
In tune with nature,
As you lay in the grass
Watching the sky become vibrant
With stars finding their way
Through the fog of life
Directly to, and especially for, you alone
There is the light that comes from within
Its sight allowing one to view others
As surprisingly like yourself,
Unique in external appearance
But touched by the same divine light
That marks you as part of one universal family
There is a darkness that bursts forth with an energy
And fire of its own design
That helps you
To see the kindred spirit
In each and every person you meet
And knowing that you all share
The same fears, desires, and hopes
Light and darkness
Should never be mistaken for
Being synonymous with good and evil
Their bond is far deeper
And more complementary
They nurture one another
Tell each other necessary truths
Set a star in the heavens
For you to follow all your days
Light and Darkness together
Give voice to this message:
“Be faithful all your days
To your search
For your Mistress, Truth
She alone will satisfy your hunger
And give meaning to your journey” | https://medium.com/the-pom/what-light-and-darkness-reveal-5abbb105cae6 | ["John O'Neill"] | 2020-12-29 12:31:13.428000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Spirituality', 'Darkness And Light', 'Poem', 'Poetry'] |
Three Competitors and Why U.CASH Is Different | At U.CASH, we’re committed to developing a network of retail and online converters that facilitate the conversion of cash fiat to digital currencies (and back) on top of Blockchain technology. We’re incredibly proud of what we are building, and that’s why today we’re taking a look at 3 product offerings from competitors — and showing you why U.CASH is different.
Bitcoin ATMs — access to cryptocurrency
Bitcoin ATMs provide a convenient way for individuals to convert their cash to cryptocurrency. Users give the ATM the public key of their cryptocurrency wallet, and the cash deposited into the machine is then credited into the wallet. Bitcoin ATMs have many problems, however. The first concern is that Bitcoin ATMs charge high fees, usually in the range of 10% of the transaction — and sometimes as high as 15%. Second, Bitcoin ATMs are only available in countries that Bitcoin ATM companies have deemed profitable — meaning there are still a number of countries around the world that don’t have access to cryptocurrency. Third, not all Bitcoin ATMs offer withdrawal services, with many offering just depositing of cash.
Cashaa — value locking
Cashaa is a blockchain-based service, on top of a token called CAS, that enables individuals to use their smartphones to send, receive and spend money globally. We applaud Cashaa’s goal of providing services to those who lack traditional access to banking. And we also welcome Cashaa’s ability to store national and digital currencies in one wallet. Where U.CASH is different is that we believe physical, paper fiat money will be here for a long time — and that there is a need to bridge the divide between paper fiat and digital currencies. Cashaa doesn’t appear to support the ability to take your own physical money that you have on hand, and lock it into that same currency — or other fiat or digital currency. That’s a core function U.CASH offers to its users globally.
Abra — sending and receiving digital currenct
Abra enables consumers to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum using a variety of funding options, including through their bank account. In some countries, Abra will allow individuals to use cash to purchase Bitcoin, although this feature is only available in the Philippines (whereas U.CASH aims to have this service in almost every country around the world). Abra is also getting into the remittance game, allowing individuals to not only transfer their Bitcoin, but convert it to fiat currency through “Abra Tellers.” So far these tellers are only in Philippines, unlike U.CASH’s approach, but we welcome a healthy system of remittance services around the world.
How U.CASH Is Different
U.CASH plans to be operational in almost every country across the globe. Our network of converters will be able to set their own service fees when loading and unloading user’s U.CASH account, allowing market competition to flourish and drive down the price of fees. We also believe that, for better or worse, physical paper fiat money is going to exist for a while, and we will provide a way for individuals to lock in the value of that paper money digitally within their U.CASH account — in either a fiat or one of many popular digital currencies.
Pay your bills with UCASH!
U.CASH hopes to provide a global alternative to traditional banking and financial services. Individuals will be able to access P2P loans within U.CASH, much like Cashaa, but one thing that sets U.CASH apart from their three competitors is that users will be able to pay bills with their digital funds — either on a one-time basis or for recurring payments. This, along with U.CASH’s other suite of features, will allow for complete financial empowerment for the 7 and a half billion people in the world. | https://medium.com/ucash/three-competitors-and-why-u-cash-is-different-8cd630eb9dd3 | ['Andy Bui'] | 2018-04-11 17:58:18.336000+00:00 | ['Ucas', 'Bitcoin', 'Ibo', 'Bounty'] |
The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver | The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver
Myfather died of alcoholic liver cirrhosis four years ago. It came as a surprise to all of us, even though it was clear he had a severe drinking problem for decades. It was especially surprising to me, as a former nurse and a recovering alcoholic. You would think I’d know more about liver problems and alcohol use than the average person. But the truth is, in the months before his death, I had no idea my father’s liver was struggling at all. Most people know about cirrhosis, but few people know how a liver goes from early damage to end-stage liver cirrhosis.
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The combination of my father’s death and my personal background lit a fire in me to know more. He was admitted to the hospital on June 24, 2016, and he died on July 18. Only 24 days passed between the first sign there was a problem and his subsequent death.
Now, hearing that he was in end-stage cirrhosis didn’t surprise me, given his heavy drinking. What did surprise me was that he’d visited several doctors and specialists in the months before his death, and no one knew his liver was struggling either.
So what happened? Does end-stage liver cirrhosis really sneak up that fast? Were there other signs that would have alerted someone to his failing liver?
As for why the doctors and specialists didn’t know what was happening, that mystery resolved reasonably quickly. The plain truth is that alcoholics rarely divulge the amount and frequency of their drinking to their doctors. This was the case for my dad. He had many health issues that he was trying to solve, but he protected his drinking habit fiercely. So he refused to spill the beans, even when it mattered.
The problem is that liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
As he was dying, my father told me that he didn’t think to tell the doctors how much he was drinking. He said it was as if he blanked out and “forgot” to mention it. As crazy as that sounds, this strange “forgetting” is a common part of the alcoholic mindset. It may also be due to the metabolic and physical changes of cirrhosis itself.
There are many signs of liver problems, but oddly, none seem to point to the liver at first. And in fact, many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body. Knowing these signs may help educate alcoholics and their families if they want to understand their risk of developing liver cirrhosis.
Liver damage has numerous multifaceted symptoms that are confusing and associated with many other illnesses. Unless a doctor knows that the patient is an alcoholic, they may not know how to interpret what’s happening until it’s too late.
Digestive signs
The liver plays a huge part in our digestive process. It filters out all toxins from food as well as helping to break down fats and glucose.
When a liver starts to slow down due to significant damage, it will reduce its digestive work. Instead, it will divert its energy toward vital functions like metabolizing medications and filtering toxins.
This means that symptoms like bloating, nausea, vomiting, gas, and diarrhea will start to increase. Over time, eating becomes more challenging. In the later stages of liver cirrhosis, toxins that can’t be filtered out begin to build in the bloodstream, which causes more nausea.
Cognitive signs
Although confusion and brain fog happen in end-stage liver cirrhosis, they can also be early signs.
The liver is responsible for filtering dangerous substances in the blood. It also helps regulate hormones, blood glucose, and vitamin absorption. In the early stages of liver damage, these processes can be interrupted. Inevitably, this affects our brain and nervous system.
This means that early liver problems can make you feel tired, confused, slow, and foggy. You may have some memory issues as well.
Neuromuscular signs
The liver stores vitamins required for the functioning of many organs and systems in the body — one of them is vitamin B1 or thiamine. A deficiency in this particular vitamin has been documented in many alcoholics with or without liver damage.
Unfortunately, alcohol inhibits the absorption of thiamine in the intestine. Over time, as the liver becomes damaged, it can no longer store thiamine in enough quantities. Thiamine deficiency is responsible for many neurological issues in people with alcoholism.
Symptoms of thiamine deficiency range from mild to severe and include things like: confusion, mental fog, lack of balance, pain and numbness in hands and feet, muscle weakness, rapid heart rate, digestive problems, flushing, and involuntary eye movements.
Thiamine deficiency happens in almost every alcoholic who consumes frequent and large amounts of alcohol. And if thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism is discovered, you can be sure the liver is suffering damage at the same time.
Many of the first signs of liver damage occur in other parts of the body.
Vascular signs
All alcohol consumption can lead to blood vessel dilation, causing flushing in the face and hands. Over time, this can cause damage leading to permanent redness in the face. Although many alcoholics have rosacea or spider-like veins on their faces, this is often benign.
However, spider angiomas are different from rosacea or spiderlike veins. They’re circular and have a central point called a spider nevus that is darker than the rest of the lesion. Spider angiomas are a sign of liver disease and can be present in the early stages. They often progress to more extensive and more numerous lesions.
Spider angiomas are caused by increased estrogen levels in the blood. When the liver becomes damaged, it can’t properly metabolize estrogens, which causes them to build up in the body.
Many women who are pregnant or taking birth control pills may have a few spider angiomas. However, in alcoholic liver disease, these lesions are often more frequent and accompanied by red palms and varicose veins in the esophagus.
These are a few of the main signs of alcoholic liver damage that happen outside of the liver. It’s important to know this because most of us have no idea how the liver functions and how it communicates distress.
The liver itself doesn’t show signs like pain or swelling in the early stages of liver damage. This contrasts with other organs like the heart or stomach, where any damage will emit pain or symptoms directly from these organs.
What happens with liver damage is that its many diverse functions become interrupted, causing symptoms in other parts of the body. This may explain why most people never think they have a problem with their liver.
Unfortunately, patients with alcoholism are rarely educated about these issues. This is because they often don’t reveal their drinking, to begin with. And even if they do, the symptoms are widespread and complex, which makes patient education challenging.
My goal in writing articles like this is to help educate regular people about alcoholic liver disease to understand their health and make better decisions.
It’s hard to say if my father would have changed his drinking habits if he knew more about his vague and complicated symptoms. But I think having proper education would have certainly helped him understand his risks and health problems better. | https://medium.com/@chrisgethard7877/the-first-signs-of-alcoholic-liver-damage-are-not-in-the-liver-f01685284dff | ['Chris Gethard'] | 2020-12-18 00:21:40.702000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Body', 'Alcohol', 'Mental Health', 'Health'] |
Reflections | Reflections
My Weekly Roundup
Photo by Matheus Bertelli from Pexels
I’m doing my weekly roundup again! All my posts for the previous week together for anyone who’s interested.
Here’s last week’s featuring poetry.
I appreciate all the kind feedback on these posts and I hope that if it’s your first time reading them that you’ll enjoy them too. | https://medium.com/echoes-of-the-soul/reflections-145690712674 | ['Heather Ann'] | 2019-06-30 23:24:39.731000+00:00 | ['Poems On Medium', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Writing'] |
Catalytic Converter Thefts Ongoing Issue in Jefferson Park | By John Williams and Xavier Redditt
Within the past several months, the 16th Police District of Jefferson Park in Chicago has released three community alerts regarding a spree of catalytic converter thefts.
But this is nothing new to Jefferson Park residents as the theft of catalytic converters has been an ongoing issue for years.
Jefferson Park resident Donald Faliszek had not one, but two catalytic converters stolen from under his vehicles. Parked in his driveway located on the 5300 block of West Leland Avenue, Faliszek’s 2000 Pontiac Sunfire and 2002 Pontiac Aztek both had their catalytic converters taken.
“I could not tell you the exact year, could have been 2013, but you know,” Faliszek said. “They were not stolen at the same time. They were like a couple of months apart, but I know it was during the summer months.”
Faliszek is just one of many Jefferson Park residents that have been affected by these thefts. Since June of this year, there have been over 30 converter thefts reported in community alerts released by the 16th District. 2018 saw a similar spree of thefts, also resulting in the release of multiple alerts.
At 5:30 a.m. in summer 2013, former Ald. John Arena (45th ward) was getting ready to go for a bike ride when he witnessed two people stealing a catalytic converter from a neighbor’s minivan.
“I could see clearly that he had something in his hand in one hand and in the other hand, I could make out the profile of a battery-powered Sawzall,” Arena said.
“And they just, one guy came from one side of the car. The other guy came, started walking right toward me. And it wasn’t like they couldn’t see me. I was standing right next to the sidewalk and they just walked by me with the tools in their hand and the cat and when he came by, I could see it was a catalytic converter, and I said ‘Did you just take that catalytic converter off?’”
Arena took down the license plate number of the van the suspects drove off in and called 911. Two months later, he received a call back from police notifying him that the suspects had been apprehended and charged in connection with a ring of catalytic converter thefts.
Former Ald. John Arena (45th ward) speaks about converter thefts.
Although Arena’s vigilance was successful, it is not recommended that anyone confront thieves in or after the act in case they are armed and dangerous.
Ongoing Thefts Nationwide
Catalytic converter thefts have been ongoing for a handful of years. A study conducted by the National Insurance Crime Bureau found that 108 converter thefts occurred in the U.S per month in 2018. This number has since skyrocketed to about 1,200 per month in 2020.
The study suggests that the state of affairs due to the coronavirus have largely contributed to these increasing numbers. Closed facilities, lack of public safety resources, and unemployment have all stemmed from the pandemic, increasing crime around the nation.
Additional evidence supports the claim that occurrences of these thefts are becoming more frequent. According to data analyzed by BeenVerified, Illinois saw 470 converter thefts in 2020. There have been 1,191 thefts so far this year to date, marking a drastic increase of 153.6%.
What is a Catalytic Converter?
A catalytic converter is an emissions device that alters a car’s exhaust gasses, including carbon monoxide, turning them into less harmful gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor before they are released into the atmosphere. Within a catalytic converter lies valuable substances such as palladium and platinum, which act as a catalyst creating the cleansing reaction that deals with the harmful exhaust chemicals. The catalytic converters are often found underneath the vehicle near the exhaust outlet, making them easily susceptible to theft.
A look inside of a catalytic converter. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
There are several kinds of catalytic converters. A ‘two-way’ oxidation converter converts carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons while a ‘three-way’ catalytic converter is used on more modern cars, expanding on the ‘two-way’ converter. These reduce nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions which are harmful to both humans and the environment. Diesel cars have different types of converters as well.
Why Are They Stolen?
Catalytic converters are most often stolen because of the precious metals they contain. Individuals can resell the converters to recycling scrap yards or on the internet for quick cash. These recyclers will pay anywhere from $50 to $250 for one converter.
Because there isn’t a tracking system on converters in many states or cities, people can continuously steal the component with little fear of facing punishment. Scrap yards in the state of Ohio have combatted this issue by incorporating criminal background checks of sellers. They also maintain a shared database with their local police department.
According to one National Insurance Crime Bureau study, larger vehicles like pick up trucks and delivery trucks are targeted more often. These vehicles have a higher ground clearance which makes the process of cutting a converter out much easier.
Tim Chrisobi, a Jefferson Park resident and technician at Pete’s Automotive Inc., said that vehicles with a higher suspension are frequent targets in the area.
Pete’s Automotive Inc. in Jefferson Park on Nov. 29. Photo by Xavier Redditt.
“Your CRVs, your Jeeps, cars that are a little bit more elevated,” Chisobi said. “Right underneath like the passenger side or, you know, right towards the center of the vehicle, they’re easy to get to.”
As someone who has replaced these converters often, including one stolen from his own Jeep, Chrisobi warns of potentially costly repairs.
“To replace a cat could be, you know, for original equipment, it could be seven, eight hundred, one thousand dollars,” he said. “Repairing a Toyota Prius could be $3,000.”
In 2013, Faliszek paid out-of-pocket for his converters to avoid increased insurance rates.
“Each car was like $250 to $275 and I know the OEM manufacturer one, I mean, maybe $700 to $800,” he said.
Theft Prevention
Due to the speed at which trained thieves can remove a converter and flee the scene, which in some cases takes two minutes or less, preventing these thefts remains a challenging task.
Police departments recommend parking in garages, using motion sensor security lighting, cameras, or installing anti theft devices on the converter itself. Some police departments have also worked closely with scrap yards, painting tag numbers on converters sold to them and filing them in a shared database to catch potential thieves.
Having a catalytic converter stolen will be expensive to replace so it is recommended that you report thefts to your local authorities as soon as possible. As for other solutions, it may take some time to come up with a plan.
“There’s very little ways that we could identify to preempt too much of this stuff because you just never know where they’re going to show up,” Arena said. | https://medium.com/@jwill228/catalytic-converter-thefts-ongoing-issue-in-jefferson-park-98a21770a826 | ['John Williams'] | 2021-12-02 15:59:39.388000+00:00 | ['Catalytic Converter', 'Jefferson Park', 'Converter Thefts', 'Chicago', 'Chicago Police Department'] |
If I was yours | If I was yours,
It would be obvious.
You’d wrap me up in your arms,
Kiss my forehead,
and tell you how much I mean to you.
You wouldn’t leave.
If I was yours,
It wouldn’t have stopped just like that.
Lovers to strangers
in just a brief moment
Things changed.
It’s different.
We are not the same anymore.
I still love you though,
Don’t get me wrong.
But maybe it’s a different feeling now.
A longing and a missing of what used to be.
Of what we used to be.
If it was meant to be,
Why do I feel a sore throat when I want to talk to you about it.
Again and again,
I excuse your behaviour.
Until it breaks me inside.
If I was yours. | https://medium.com/@jesswrites1/if-i-was-yours-314d348e3b62 | [] | 2020-12-13 21:19:59.918000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Deep', 'Poet', 'Romance', 'Emotional'] |
What is ERP? | ERP stands for “Enterprise Resource Planning” and refers to a type of software or system used by a company to plan and manage daily activities such as HR, supply chain, manufacturing, services, financials, and other processes. In simple words, ERP is the bunch of Modules or departments which are linked with a proper process.
Using good ERP software properly, a company can improve & optimize the majority of their business process, which are implemented in various aspects of the company’s work. The company can set it up according to their requirements & personal preferences. Mostly below given modules are covered in ERP.
Finance
Procurement
Manufacturing
Inventory
Purchase
Warehouse / Store
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Service
Sales
HR
Others
From ERP 1.0 to 2.0
Journey of ERP is improvising day by day. From starting, From the beginning, companies were doing manual process for all their routine activities. Later on they Improvised with technology. Nowadays, in the era of stiff competition all companies have to stay updated with on hand analytical data.
Key benefits of ERP implementation
There are certain benefits of ERP implementation.
Reduction in Operating Cost: By using good ERP Software, companies can reduce the operating costs for their daily activities.
Facilitation of day-to-day management: Getting data easily to manage all processes with ERP.
Strategic Planning Support: Company can do their strategic plan for their day-to-day processes.
Now Is the Right Time to Modernize Your ERP
In the digital era, now every human or every company have to move on so fast, faster & constant to retain their position. Every technological change have to apply in day to day process to make things easier & faster.
Characteristics of Today’s Modern ERP
Types of ERP by Implementation
Three ways to implement any ERP.
On-Premise ERP: On-Premise ERP means software installed within the working area. One big drawback of this kind of ERP is its limited accessibility. Cloud Base ERP: Any ERP Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which is available over a Cloud-hosting service rather than on-premise deployment. This option lets you access real-time data as long as you have Internet access and is suitable for large enterprises. Hybrid ERP: Enterprise resource planning systems that blend on-premise and Cloud-based deployment.
Advantages of ERP: Is it worth developing new software? | https://medium.com/@enlivendc/what-is-erp-c8af1c4edcfd | [] | 2021-11-22 06:09:40.912000+00:00 | ['Accounting', 'CRM', 'Supply Chain', 'Enterprise Erp', 'Cloud Erp'] |
How Frontend Intelligence Improves Development Efficiency | By Yeshu
On Alibaba Cloud’s official website and marketing mid-end team, we need to meet various requirements put forward by operation engineers as we work to build an online operation field and marketing capabilities and help drive growth in users and revenue. In the past, we often had to deal with the following requests:
“We need this done today. Can you give us a hand?”
“This page is very simple, but we don’t have our own frontend developers. Can you help us with it?”
“I submitted my requests a long time ago. When will you be able to take care of it?”
In the past, collaboration was entirely in the form of manual support, and everyone was exhausted. Due to the lack of frontend developers, we had no time for deep thinking or capacity building. In the long run, this turned into a vicious circle. With the gradual decline in outsourcing and piece-rate services, it was urgent to improve our development efficiency. It is easy to think about building components for common business scenarios and models. Now, we have successfully changed the way we collaborate with the design team and reached an agreement for building core marketing methods and common components. This enables operation engineers to build most daily scenarios independently.
However, we have found that component-based development cannot solve all problems and also entails high development costs. Therefore, we decided to draw on the existing capabilities and experience of the Alibaba Group for inspiration. We focused on the intelligent development efforts of the Alibaba Group. This offers us a way to further improve our development efficiency and lays a foundation for improving our intelligent capabilities.
Following the Trail Blazed by Alibaba Group
For me, intelligence is the most mysterious of the Alibaba Group’s four frontend orientations. After I read the information shared by the intelligence team and talked with its members, I considered the similarities and differences between our scenarios and the intelligent scenarios in the Alibaba Group.
The Taobao system intelligently improves development efficiency through standardized scenarios, data, and requirements. Without mature standards at all levels, we hope to reduce the investment necessary to meet daily requirements and improve development efficiency through technologies that empower operation engineers.
Currently, Alibaba Group’s core capability in the field of intelligent development is D2C. Models are built and trained for identifying and expressing UIs, data, and logic following the principle that intelligence is standardization. Finally, we launched imgcook as a product that provides these capabilities. Several business units in the Alibaba Group use imgcook with a visual orchestration engine to reduce the coding required during development and improve the development efficiency.
This proves that it is possible to improve development efficiency through intelligent capabilities. Therefore, we can consider more ways to use these capabilities in our scenarios. As we have a large number of routine and temporary requirements, it is expensive to only rely on manual work or outsourcing. This also results in poor business experience.
Ultimately, we decided to further optimize our D2C capabilities. We used tools to automatically extract data for tracing, convert the data into Domain Specific Language (DSL) modules, and directly output renderable modules from the visual draft. After this, people other than frontend developers can use the renderable modules independently. In addition, there are still no mature standards for our design (draft) specifications, data models, and business requirements. Therefore, we must work out and design corresponding technical solutions based on different needs.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Building Our Intelligent Capabilities
Finally, with the joint efforts of our team members, we launched two intelligent solutions that can improve development efficiency.
Design to Component: Achieving Zero Development Using a Component Designer
This solution can directly generate modules based on visual drafts and automatically extract data for tracing. When we need to develop pages for common display scenarios, we can configure and launch them within a few hours.
Design to Code: Improving the Efficiency of Secondary Development with imgcook
This solution relies on the standard development pipeline of imgcook to develop custom DSLs, which can reduce the cost of visual restoration by more than 70%.
Building General Technical Capabilities Based on Intelligence
First, we must be able to maintain and scale our DSL by assembling and outputting multiple DSL modules. Therefore, we developed a DSL conversion engine. To achieve zero development, we must implement automatic data extraction and binding for tracing. This requires us to obtain more information from visual drafts and identify module structures, which is basically performing reasonable grouping and identifying nodes. Therefore, we developed a structure engine.
Throughout this process, we compiled the intelligent capabilities required by the team and introduced more flexible technical designs to cope with future possibilities.
Ultimately, we were able to improve our development efficiency, though the scope of this improvement differed in different areas.
The following section details the technical solution we adopted to implement D2C capabilities.
DSL Conversion Engine: Configuring and Outputting an Executable DSL
This process converts the description data of the relative positioning module into code that frontend developers can directly use. We will not go into the principles of custom DSL here because we are focusing on DSL conversion capabilities available on multiple terminals, such as nodes and web servers. In the future, we will need to support multiple DSL specifications. Therefore, these specifications must be reusable and scalable.
We divide the capabilities into the core layer and the processor layer. Each processor is an independently functional unit that provides functions, such as template, style, data, and schema, which are required by the final code. The core layer standardizes the input and output, connects the processor flows, and provides additional scalability. Finally, we configured the output of the DSL conversion engine.
Structure Engine: Understanding Module Structures and Parsing Definition Elements
The basic thinking about structure is that imgcook must be able to perform simple planning for visual drafts. We hope to minimize the need for intervention in visual drafts and reduce the efforts required on the part of other personnel. Therefore, we must provide standard descriptions of modules. Visual secondary editing is especially important in imgcook’s official website recommendation process. Here, descriptive information that cannot be easily added to visual drafts can be added, such as data field binding, loop processing, event declaration, and other logic.
If we want to achieve a zero-development process, we must implement automatic supplementation of such information. To bind data fields, we must know the nodes that the current module contains and the configurations that each node needs to open. This means we must be able to identify and parse UI models. To identify component structures, we used the existing layout algorithm of the Alibaba Group and implemented a simple grouping algorithm based on our scenarios.
The following figure shows the final design of the structure engine. In this structure engine, the element model is used to identify and parse elements in modules. The abstract base class processes general logic, and different elements can output different capabilities to achieve fine-grained identification. The structure conversion is based on a standard grouping structure, which can support refined element models in the future to identify structures, such as loops, more intelligently.
The structure engine has many general designs at the underlying layer, which can be used to parse general module structures in the future, including modules not generated by D2C. Standard structure information covers all modules required to build a platform, allowing this engine to be used in more business scenarios.
Exploring New Directions in Intelligent Development
So far, we have implemented a minimum complete link of the D2C system, and it has been applied in some business scenarios. We hope it can improve our development efficiency and open up more possibilities in the future:
Improve development efficiency based on intelligence and focus on optimizing the structure engine to enhance identification capabilities. For example:
Improve the matching ratio for standard components to enhance configuration capabilities
Automatically identify loop structures to output data loop configurations
Promote the establishment of visual specifications to automatically complete HTML5 adaptation using PCs
Constantly integrate other intelligent capabilities, such as intelligent color blending and graph combination
2. Explore business empowerment approaches through intelligence. For example:
Change the business support mode to improve the business support efficiency
Connect data systems to provide recommendations for optimizing business results and assistance in decision-making
Integrate standard models to intelligently match content and reduce manual configuration
Analyze module structures to intelligently match existing components and improve building efficiency
Summary
Currently, there are still some problems. For example, visual drafts must be standardized, and zero intervention by frontend developers is not achievable in the short term. However, intelligence empowers us with unprecedented capabilities, which can reduce the workload on frontend developers so that they can focus on more valuable work.
Original Source:
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/do-alibabas-frontend-developers-slice-images-no-it-s-done-by-ai-ae865598ffad | ['Alibaba Cloud'] | 2020-12-27 04:54:22.154000+00:00 | ['Alibabacloud', 'Image Processing', 'Domain Specific Languages', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Frontend Development'] |
What Are The Love Languages Of A Narcissist? | Romance Doesn’t Start With Abuse
As far as I’m aware, a romantic relationship doesn’t begin with abuse, the silent treatment, and neglect. Who would stay and tolerate that kind of behavior with someone that you’ve just met? If you aren’t emotionally invested it’s easy to leave without a second thought.
But what about when you’ve been with someone for a long time, and they’ve been fantastic until now? Suddenly they’ve changed and their behavior isn’t even close to what it was when you first got together. This is usually what happens after the phase of being love-bombed. You’ve been in a bubble of bliss and suddenly things are changing in front of your eyes. In order to identify them, what are some signs you can be on the lookout for that your relationship has moved into these toxic and unhealthy patterns? | https://medium.com/we-are-warriors/what-are-the-love-languages-of-a-narcissist-7053ce62ac80 | ['Carrie Wynn'] | 2019-11-29 22:05:08.797000+00:00 | ['Abuse', 'Life Lessons', 'Narcissism', 'Self Improvement', 'Relationships'] |
How to Delegate Tezos With Magnum Wallet? | Hi Readers🧑💻,
In this tutorial, we will explain how to use a Magnum Wallet and how you can delegate your Tezos.
Create / Recover a Tezos wallet
In the first step, you need to create a wallet. In case you previously have a wallet, you can also restore it using a private key.
If you decide to create a new wallet, you will need to choose a password, please make sure you also register a backup in case something bad happens.
This is one of the main advantages of using Magnum wallets. You hold custody of your funds and you are the one in charge of keeping your account and backup secured.
You need to go to “Settings” and then click on “Download Backup” or just wait to create a wallet and then download the backup.
Keep this backup in a safe place and make sure you will be able to find it easily and securely in case you need it.
The other advantage of Magnum and what makes it so useful is the fact that you can manage several cryptos on it!
Dashboard
If you click on Tezos, then a wallet will open. Once again a warning message will pop up.
No backup, no funds
Once the file is downloaded you should be able to see your Tezos wallet.
Tezos Wallet
First, you need to top it up. You can find your wallet address in the top right end corner or directly by clicking on “Receive”. It should take a few seconds before the operation appears on your wallet.
Once you have received some Tezos on your wallet, you need to go on the “Delegate” tab and choose the baker you want.
You can choose Stakin by POSBakerz directly from the baker list. Just select Stakin, click on next and validate the transaction. Once again a small fee will be taken to do the operation.
You will see this transaction pending on the magnum wallet, including the operation hash where you will be able to check the transaction on the Tezos blockchain.
After a few minutes, the operation should show as being successful. Your Tezos will be delegated to the baker you chose.
Please note, the funds are not sent directly to the baker but delegated from a KT1 address that belongs to you. If you scroll down in your Tezos wallet, you will be able to see the baker and your KT1 address by clicking on it.
You can top up funds on your KT1 address, withdraw or redelegate to another baker whenever you want.
👉 It takes 7 cycles (~20 days) before you are able to receive rewards from a delegator, or more depending on the bakers — we pay automatically at the end of each cycle!
👉 Stakin only charges 2% in fees, so you keep 98% of the rewards!
👉 We advise you to use the Baking Bad service, to check if you’re receiving your rewards correctly. The platform also enables you to receive a message every time a payment is made to your address by the baker.
Related Articles
DISCLAIMER: This article is for information purposes only. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile investment assets. We suggest that you conduct your own research before deciding to purchase cryptocurrencies. | https://medium.com/@Stakin/how-to-delegate-your-tezos-xtz-using-magnum-wallet-6f96daf0014a | [] | 2020-04-16 14:43:07.496000+00:00 | ['Tezos', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Proof Of Stake', 'Blockchain'] |
Genaro Network (GNX) Monthly Technical Report — August | Summary: The public chain shadow account test runs smoothly, and the X-pool mining pool reward model has entered the internal test phase.
Overview:
This hot month not only the weather temperature degree has risen, but the activity of Genaro engineers here has also been significantly increased as well. Genaro’s technical team has tested the updated shadow account and mining bonus account of the public chain to confirm that the load is stable and running smoothly. Different modes of the alliance chain have also been built, tested and applied. The X-pool mining pool development work has been even more intensive: not only does the mine pool reward model enter internal testing, the team also started it’s integration with the test chain.
Please see the latest developments of this month.
Public chain part:
The design and development of the trading interface is 50% completed.
The test of the shadow account and the mining bonus account after the update of the public chain confirmed that the load is stable, and the operation is smooth.
Ensured that the shadow account has the same mining rights as the mining account, the synchronization block is stable, and the node assets are secure.
Checked account balance, public key, synchronized transaction data, transaction time, assets, transferor/recipient, handling fee and other information.
Universal service transfer of SDK chain code, load balancing is completed under high concurrency.
libgenaro version 2.0 design is completed by 70%
Alliance chain part
Construction and testing of Fabric etcd mode and kafka mode.
Comparison of the data consensus mechanism of the Fabric etcd mode and the kafka mode, and the performance comparison of the application scenario.
Quotum cost minimization and the setup and user test of the two-node binding run mode has been completed.
Fabric browser testing and application, as well as block query function, data pipeline function, data contract function.
Bridge V2.0 section
User upload of encrypted files, files with no encryption, and resume transmission function.
Upload file cases:
1. Upload is not encrypted. This option is used to upload non-sensitive data, or data that the user has already encrypted, so as to avoid unnecessary waste of resources and also enable fast upload.
2. Encryption, using symmetric encryption, the system automatically generates a key, encrypted by the user’s asymmetric key and saved to the server. Asymmetric encryption does not affect its file size.
Authorized upload:
Whether the authorization via the bridge allows accepting data into the network. Proactive authorization is used in consideration with user trustworthiness issues and limited resources to protect the network.
Authorization/pre-allocation
A. If the size of the uploaded file is less than or equal to the remaining space of the user (bucket), the bridge temporarily locks the space of the corresponding size and makes final confirmation after the upload is completed.
B. Otherwise, the pre-allocation fails, prompting the user has run out of space or compress the file and try again.
2. Hash check
If the user does not choose to encrypt, the hash is calculated first (after compression), and the file is checked according to the hash to see if the file already exists in the network. If it exists, the function is directly uploaded, that is, the quick upload.
Uploading
Client file uploading
1.Request a farmer list
The bridge returns the farmer list based on file size, fixed sharding strategy, and other conditions. The farmer in the list can be repeated to indicate the recipient of each fragment.
2. Request upload to the farmer
The farmer requests confirmation from the bridge.
3. Start uploading
Complete the breakpoint
4. After the upload is completed, the farmer returns the hash of the fragment. After the client confirms, it notifies the bridge.
Upload success
When all the shards have been uploaded successfully, the system automatically assumes that the file has been uploaded.
5 Download the file
As with the upload, the download also satisfies the function of resuming the breakpoint.
Scope of application includes
1. The user downloads the file from the farmer.
2. Farmer backup data from other farmers (ie mirror)
X-pool mine section
1 Modified the mining pool shutter of adding the margin, causing the transaction to be blocked.
2 Fixed the bug when after mining is finished, the mining pool ends the synchronization block according to the default trading block, so as to avoid the multiple mining caused by the synchronization information not being timely.
3 Mining pool reward model design, internal testing.
4 The mining pool is connected to the test chain, and the test transaction data is synchronized to ensure smooth transactions.
5 The mining pool margin extract test and optimizes the margin withdrawal process.
6 X-pool mining pool operation manual is completed.
In 2019, Genaro’s exploration and innovation in technology never stopped. The public chain, the alliance chain, the storage, the mining pool, and the broad product line awaiting excellent technical developers to start from the trial and join the community to exchange ideas with the Genaro team. More development progress will follow via official channels of Genaro Network.
We are committed to delivering advanced products and technologies in order to establish a blockchain ecosystem that meets market needs, please contact us if you are interested in cooperation or developing alliance chain: info@genaro.network. As for the developers interested in building DApps on the Genaro Network mainnet, please kindly stay tuned to the upcoming updates on Genaro official website and Github.
Breaking News: The first edition of the GSIOP protocol is officially released
On February 20, 2019, Singapore time, Genaro Network, the world’s first smart data ecosystem with a Dual-Strata Architecture, integrating a public blockchain with decentralized storage officially released the first version of the GSIOP protocol. This is not only the product of nearly a year hard work of the Genaro entire team of engineers, but it also marks Genaro’s new milestone in the practical application of cross-chain technology.
Breaking News: G.A.O. (Genaro Alpha One) is officially launched
Genaro Network, the future of Smart Data Ecosystem for DApps, invites you to witness the new era of smart data, empowered by the revolutionary serverless interactive system!
Recommended reading: Genaro public network mainnet officially launched | Community Guide
Download Technical Yellow Paper
Genaro’s latest versions, Genaro Eden and Genaro Eden Sharer, will allow you to store your files in a more secure way and share your unused storage to earn GNX.
Get your Genaro Eden/Sharer for Linux, Windows and MAC OS right now from the official website:
Git source repository is on GitHub>>
Important:
Warm reminder to our community members, please download Genaro Eden ONLY from our official website/GitHub and DO NOT trust any referral links and reposts from anyone, otherwise, we won’t be able to guarantee privacy and security of your data and protect you from scammers.
Genaro Eden — The first decentralized application on the Genaro Network, providing everyone with a trustworthy Internet and a sharing community:
Related Publications:
Genaro’s Core Product Concept
Genaro Eden: Five Core Features
How Does Genaro’s Technology Stand Out?
Genaro Eden Application Scenarios and User Experience
The Genaro Ecosystem
Matthew Roszak Comments on Release of Genaro Eden
About Genaro Network
The Genaro Network is the first smart data ecosystem with a Dual-Strata Architecture, integrating a public blockchain with decentralized storage. Genaro pioneered the combination of SPoR (Sentinel Proof of Retrievability) with PoS (Proof of Stake) to form a new consensus mechanism, ensuring stronger performance, better security and a more sustainable blockchain infrastructure. Genaro provides developers with a one-stop platform to deploy smart contracts and store the data needed by DAPPs simultaneously. Genaro Network’s mission is to ensure the secure migration of the core Internet infrastructure to the blockchain.
Official Telegram Community: https://t.me/GenaroNetworkOfficial
Telegram Community (Russian): https://t.me/GenaroNetworkOfficial_Rus | https://medium.com/genaro-network/2019-08-genaro-network-gnx-monthly-technical-report-august-ba64e1f2c6 | ['Genaro Network', 'Gnx'] | 2019-08-08 23:53:40.449000+00:00 | ['Dapps', 'Storage', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Innovation'] |
Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason | Photo Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Graph Credit: Nate Silver/NY Times
“In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person.” — Henry Louis Gates
The quote above comes from a fascinating article called “Hating Hillary”, written by Gates for the New Yorker in 1996. Even now, 20 years after it was first published, it’s a fascinating and impressive piece, and if you have a few spare moments I strongly recommend it to you.
And I’m reading pieces like this because now that Hillary has (essentially if not officially) won the Democratic Primary, I have become increasingly fascinated by the way so many people react to her. In truth, I sometimes think that I find that as interesting as Hillary herself. And I can’t help but notice that many of the reactions she receives seem to reflect what Gates referred to as “a cultural inventory of villainy” rather than any realistic assessment of who she really is and what she has really done.
To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.
And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.
Also instructive is Jill Abramson’s recent piece in the Guardian. Abramson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal as well as former Executive Editor of the New York Times, had this to say about Hillary’s honesty: “As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”
Notice how Abramson uses the word “surprising”? She’s obviously doing that for our benefit, because she knows that many readers will be astonished at the very thought of Hillary being “fundamentally honest”. But why? In my opinion we need to go back to the time of Whitewater in order to answer that question.
In January of 1996, while Whitewater investigations were underway but unfinished, conservative writer William Safire wrote a scathing and now-famous essay about Hillary Clinton entitled, “Blizzard of Lies”. In the piece he called her a “congenital liar”, and accused her of forcing her friends and subordinates into a “web of deceit”. He insisted (without any apparent evidence) that she took bribes, evaded taxes, forced her own attorneys to perjure themselves, “bamboozled” bank regulators, and was actively involved in criminal enterprises that defrauded the government of millions of dollars. He ended the piece by stating that, “She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
I am no political historian, but as far as I can tell this short essay was the birth of the “Hillary is a Liar” meme. Now to be clear, most conservatives already strongly disliked her. They had been upset with her for some time because she had refused to play the traditional First Lady role. And they were horrified by her attempt to champion Universal Health coverage. But if you look for the actual reasons people didn’t like her back at that time, you won’t see ongoing accusations of her being “crooked” or a “liar”. Instead, the most common opinion seemed to be that she was a self-righteous leftist who considered anyone with other views to be morally inferior. In short, the prevailing anti-Hillary accusation was not that she was unrelentingly dishonest, but that she was just intolerably smug.
After the Safire piece however, this all changed. Republicans, who learned from Nixon never to let a good propaganda opportunity pass if they could help it, repeated the accusations of mendacity non-stop to anyone who would broadcast or print them. And if you doubt the staying power of Safire’s piece, type the phrase “congenital liar” into a Google search along with “Hillary Clinton” and see what happens. To this day, that exact phrase is still proudly used by many on the right. This, even though Safire was eventually proven wrong about everything he had written. And despite the fact that he stated himself that he would have to “eat crow” if she were ever cleared, Safire never apologized or even acknowledged his many errors once that happened. Because as we all know, swift-boating means never having to say you’re sorry.
But while conservative propaganda and lies are a constant in “Hillaryland”, if we look at Hillary’s career, and the negative attacks so often aimed at her, it seems clear that more than just political machinations are at play. My current conviction is that the main fuel that powers the anti-Hillary crowd is sexism. And yes I’m serious. So go ahead and roll your eyes. Get it over with. But I think the evidence supports my view, and I’ve seen no other plausible explanation. And just to be clear, I don’t think it’s ONLY sexism. But I do think that this is the primary force that has generated and maintained most of the negative narratives about Hillary.
Of course accusations of sexism always bump up against several serious impediments:
1) Almost nobody will admit to it. Conservatives decided long ago that all such accusations (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) are standard liberal bullshit whose only real intent is to shut down debate, and liberals tend to possess a sense of moral entitlement which leads them to consider themselves automatically exempt from all such accusations. (Side note: if you did roll your eyes above, there’s a good chance I’m describing you here. Sorry.)
2) Overt sexism is significantly more likely to be tolerated in our society than overt racism. It is a low-risk form of bigotry and discrimination that rarely damages professional or political careers. Because of this, far fewer people worry about crossing that line.
3) We have formed a sort of collective blindness to sexism that allows us to pretend that we are on top of the issue while simultaneously ignoring the many ways in which it actually permeates our society. (Side note 2: There’s a reason it’s called a “glass” ceiling.)
4) Unlike men, women who make demands are still often seen as unfeminine and inappropriately aggressive, bordering on deviant. And if the people most aggressively pushing against the glass ceiling are “broken” or “deviant”, it’s easier to justify dismissing both them and their concerns.
So I’ve made a claim. Let’s look at some numbers. Take a look at the image above. On the right side you’ll see a chart. This is a chart of Hillary’s popularity over time. It was put together by Nate Silver, who based it on over 500 high-quality phone surveys dating back to the early 90’s. If we take a look at the polling data, very obvious patterns emerge.
In the early 90’s her polling was great, which was typical for an incoming First Lady. But Hillary had no interest in being a typical First Lady, and soon took charge of one of the most important policy initiatives of the Clinton Presidency: Universal Health Care. If you look at the first large red arrow I have on the graphic, you’ll see that as soon as she did that her negatives skyrocketed. And yes this was before Whitewater. In fact during the ongoing Whitewater investigations her polling improved dramatically, so she actually became significantly MORE popular during that period, not less.
Now take a look at the second arrow. This is where she declared that she was going to run for the Senate. See what happened? She was at one of the most popular periods of her life, but as soon as she declared a run for the Senate her favorables plummeted while her unfavorables rose sharply. Then once she was elected, her scores stabilized and even improved. Now look at the third arrow. Nearly exactly at the same time she withdrew from the Presidential race her favorables took off again, rising to levels that many considered remarkable. (Or are we pretending not to remember that until very recently Hillary was one of the most popular politicians in the country?) In fact the image on the left of the graph is part of the “bad-ass Hillary” meme that started during this time. And her polling stayed high right up until she decided to run for President again. Her numbers since then are not on this particular graph, but I think we all know what happened to them.
So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.
And in fact I started thinking more about this after reading an article that Sady Doyle wrote for Quartz back in February. The title of the piece was, “America loves women like Hillary Clinton — as long as they’re not asking for a promotion.” In the article Ms. Doyle asserted that, “The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power…”
And yes this is the kind of statement that many people will find reflexively annoying. But that doesn’t make it any less true, and the data certainly seems to support it. Even NBC news, looking back over decades of their own polls, stated that, “she’s struggled to stay popular when she’s on the campaign trail.” If this has nothing to do with gender, then wouldn’t the same thing happen to men when they campaign? But it doesn’t. Why not?
So let’s look at the issues people are currently using to disparage Clinton. Let’s consider the issues of dishonesty, scandals, money and Wall Street.
1) Honesty — In terms of honesty, I’ve already addressed that. Hillary is a politician, and like all politicians she is no stranger to “massaging” and/or exaggerating the truth. And yes on occasion she will let loose a whopper. But is she worse than other politicians? As I’ve already discussed, the evidence suggests that she is no worse, and actually better, than most other politicians. Internet videos like the “13 minutes of Hillary lying” appear to be mostly examples of Hillary changing her position over several decades, combined with annoying but typical political behavior. But similar videos of Donald Trump exist showing him doing an even more extreme version of the same thing. Why is he not being accused of this type of mendacity? In fact there is very little dispute that Trump has been SIGNIFICANTLY less honest on the campaign trail than Hillary. According to Politifact he is in fact the least honest candidate they’ve ever analyzed! So if the issue of honesty is really that important, why are so many people (on the right and left) holding Hillary to such an obviously different standard than Trump?
2) Scandals — Webster’s dictionary defines a scandal as, “an occurrence in which people are shocked and upset because of behavior that is morally or legally wrong.” But here’s a question: Are scandals still scandals if nobody actually did anything wrong? And I think that’s a fair question, because Hillary’s political foes love to point out all the times she has been implicated (directly or indirectly) in scandals. Not surprisingly, however, they fail to point out that she has always been cleared of any wrongdoing.
So if she’s always innocent, why then does she find herself caught up in so many scandals? For that answer, perhaps we should look at the Wikipedia definition of scandal, which states, “A scandal can be broadly defined as an accusation or accusations that receive wide exposure. Generally there is a negative effect on the credibility of the person or organization involved.” Notice the important difference? Perhaps the “negative effect on credibility” is not so much the RESULT of these scandals as it is the INTENT of those who create them.
Did you know that Republicans once spent 10 days and 140 hours investigating the Clintons’ use of the White House Christmas Card list? Because that is a real thing that actually happened. As the Atlantic recently pointed out, “No other American politicians — even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush — have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.” (And for an impressive presentation of this issue I highly recommend Hanna Rosin’s piece “Among the Hillary Haters”, also in the Atlantic.)
Compare for example the treatment Hillary is getting due to her private email “scandal” to that of General David Petraeus. Hillary has been accused of hosting a personal email server that “might” have made classified documents less secure, even though the documents in question were not classified as secret at the time she received and/or sent them. (Side note: some government documents receive secret classifications “at birth”, while other can be retroactively classified as secret.) In order for Clinton to have committed a criminal act, she would have had to knowingly and willfully mishandle material that was classified at the time she did so. After months of investigation no one has accused her of doing that, and it doesn’t appear as if anyone will.
General Petraeus on the other hand, while he was Director of the CIA, knowingly gave a writer, who was also his mistress, a series of black books which according to the Justice Department contained, “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions quotes and deliberative discussions from high level National Security Council meetings and [Petraeus’] discussions with the president of the United States of America.” Petraeus followed that up by lying to numerous government officials, including FBI agents, about what he had done. And lets not forget that according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is itself a court-martial offense. And I remind you that none of this is in dispute. Petraeus admitted to all of it.
Petraeus’ violations were significantly more egregious than anything Clinton is even remotely accused of. And yet Republicans and other Hillary foes are howling about her issue, wearing “Hillary for Prison 2016” t-shirts while insisting that this disqualifies her from public office. Meanwhile even after pleading guilty to his crimes Petraeus continued to be the recipient of fawning sentiments from conservatives. Senator John McCain stated that, “All of us in life make mistakes and the situation now, I hope, can be put behind him…” Politico quoted a former military officer who worked with Petraeus as calling the entire situation “silly”. Prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they would call him back to work in the highest levels of government if they win the Presidency. And some are still attempting to convince him to seek the Presidency himself.
Why is Hillary Clinton being held to such an obviously different standard than Petraeus? Is it really only politics?
3) Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.
And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200k really that unusual? In fact “All American Speakers”, the agency that represents Clinton, currently represents 135 people whose MINIMUM speaking fee is $200,000. Some of the luminaries that get paid this much include: Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Cara Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and “Larry the Cable Guy”. And no that last one is not a joke. And if you drop the speaking fee to $100k, the number of people they represent jumps to over 500. At $50,000 the number jumps to over 1,200. And All American Speakers are obviously not the only agency that represents speakers. So there are in fact thousands of people getting paid this kind of money to give a speech.
For millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, the very idea that someone can make $100,000 or more for just giving a speech or hanging out at a Vegas nightclub is obscene. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hillary didn’t invent the speaking engagement industry, and she isn’t anywhere near the first person to make a lot of money from it. And while her fees are in the upper range of what speakers make, neither they nor the total amount of money she has made are unusual. It’s just unusual FOR A WOMAN.
And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?
And speaking of corruption, after leaving the Florida governor’s office Jeb Bush made millions of dollars in paid speeches. This includes large sums he collected from a South Korean metals company that reaped over a BILLION dollars in contracts from his brother’s presidential administration. Speaking to an Indian newspaper about this type of thing Bush said, “This is the life of being the brother of the president.” Do you remember reading all about that while Jeb was running for President? I didn’t think so. Jeb got a pass too.
So if this discussion is really about money in politics that’s fine. But I’m going to need someone to explain to me why we only seem to focus on it when the person making the money has a vagina.
4) Wall Street — First things first. No, the majority of the money Clinton has made from speaking fees did not come from Wall Street. In fact it’s not even close. She has given nearly 100 paid speeches since leaving the State Dept., and only 8 were to “Wall Street” banks. Nearly all of her speeches were to organizations like American Camping Association, Ebay, Cisco, Xerox, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, United Fresh Produce Association, International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association, California Medical Association, A&E Television Networks, Massachusetts Conference for Women, U.S. Green Building Council, National Association of Realtors, American Society of Travel Agents, Gap, National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, etc.
Corporations and Associations pay large fees for important speakers all of the time. And Hillary got booked fairly often because she is interesting and popular, and because there’s a great deal of status attached to having her speak at an event. Ignoring all of this however, a large contingent of anti-Hillary people continue to insist that all speaker’s fees from Wall Street banks were bribes, and that because of this they “own” her. But by that logic shouldn’t we all be asking what the fuck the American Camping Association is up to?
Also, with the possible exception of one speech given to Deutsche Bank, all of Hillary’s 8 speeches to Wall Street were for a speaking fee of $225,000. That does not even break the top 20 of her highest paid speeches. For example she received over $275,000 each in three speeches she gave to The Vancouver Board of Trade, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, and Canada 2020. So apparently Canadians also “own” her. And I don’t know what those nefarious Canadians are up to, but it probably has something to do with goddamn poutine. Which would really piss me off except I just remembered that I kind of like poutine so never mind.
Listen, does Wall Street have influence with Hillary? Grow up, of course they do. Wall Street is one of the key engines of the American economy, and as such has enormous influence with everyone. EVERYONE. Don’t kid yourself on that point. And aside from anything else, she was a 2-term Senator of New York, and this made Wall Street an important corporate member of her constituency. The issue is not influence. The issue is whether or not paid speeches and campaign donations alone are proof of corruption. And they’re not. And the last time I checked there was an important difference between association and guilt, between proof and slander.
And again: why is Hillary being held to a standard that never appears to be applied to her male counterparts? Am I not supposed to notice that a media frenzy has been aimed at Hillary Clinton for accepting speaking fees of $225,000 while Donald Trump has been paid $1.5 MILLION on numerous occasions with hardly a word said about it? Am I supposed to not notice that we are now in an election season in which Donald Trump, a proud scam artist whose involvement in “Trump University” alone is being defined by the New York Attorney General as “straight-up fraud”, is regularly calling Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and getting away with it?
What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” — physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits however are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.
And actually, this only makes her victory all the more amazing. And maybe it’s OK if we pause for a moment from the accusations and paranoia and just acknowledge her enormous accomplishments. In the entire history of our nation, only 6 Presidents have also served as Secretary of State. Only 3 have served both as Secretary of State and in Congress. By any objective measure Hillary Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate this season, she’s one of the most qualified people to ever seek the office. The New York Times in endorsing her stated that, “voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in history.” Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg stated that, “she is probably the best qualified presidential candidate ever.” Even Marco Rubio, one-time choice of the GOP establishment (and tea-party love-child) stated in a Republican debate that, “If this is a resume contest, Hillary Clinton is going to be the new President of the United States.”
Hillary is nobody’s idea of perfect. Fine. But in my view if a man with her qualifications were running in the Democratic primary, Bernie would have been done before he even started. And if a man with her qualifications had been running for the Republicans, they’d be anointing him the next Reagan while trying to sneak his face onto Mount Rushmore.
Most of the people who hate Hillary when she’s running for office end up liking her just fine once she’s won. And I have every confidence that history will repeat itself again this November. As for myself, I have been watching Presidential elections since Nixon. And never in my life has there been an easier or more obvious choice than now. Trump is not merely a bad choice, he is (as many leading Republicans have already admitted) a catastrophic choice, unfit in every possible way for the office of the Presidency.
As such, I happily voted for Hillary in my primary. And I will proudly vote for her in November. Yes she will disappoint us all on occasion. Who doesn’t? But I think she’s also going to surprise a lot of people. She will fear neither consensus when possible nor ass-kicking when necessary. She will safeguard us from the damage a right-wing Supreme Court would inflict on the nation. She will stand for the rights of women, LGBT Americans, and minorities. She will maintain critical global relationships, and she will react to dangerous situations with the temperament of a seasoned and experienced professional. And in a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until 1920, she will make history by shattering the very highest glass ceiling, and in doing so forever change the way a generation of young women view their place in our Republic.
She’s going to be a fine President.
I’m with her. | https://thepolicy.us/thinking-about-hillary-a-plea-for-reason-308fce6d187c | ['Michael Arnovitz'] | 2016-06-24 20:06:45.266000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Politics'] |
How to Prevent Farting in Front of Your Boyfriend So He Doesn’t Think You’re Gross | Blame it on the dog
It moved on me like a bitch. I was lying there peacefully next to my boyfriend when it happened. The Air Tulip. The Cheek Squeak. The Ass Trumpet. Or as it is known more colloquially, the fart. I can’t believe I actually said that out loud. Or wrote it as the case may be. It wasn’t crazy loud or stinky or anything, like the kind you may expect from DJ Khaled or Zach Galifianakis. I don’t know why, but they both look like they have smelly farts. Sharts to be more specific.
We were in that in between phase of waking up but still half asleep, cuddling after a night of Japanese food and a rousing marathon of “Planet Earth”, when it happened. Right next to him. I froze. Did Pete notice? Was it the edamame? Why was God punishing me like this? Did I do something wrong? Was this part of my bad karma for stealing nail polish from CVS in middle school? I didn’t deserve this! WHY?!
I decided the best course of action was to pretend I was asleep. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice if I acted like nothing happened. He would figure the muffled rumble was just a figment of his imagination.
A pause. Then a laugh. Then “did you toot?” At least he used the word toot which seemed less offensive.
“What?” I pretended to still be groggy though my mind was racing with the kind of fear I normally reserve for eating my aunt’s cooking.
“I don’t think so,” I mumbled.
Pete continued to laugh. “I think you did.”
How dare he suggest something so foul and ludicrous! Just for that I wasn’t going to watch “Planet Earth” later. I wondered if Rihanna or Beyoncé ever encountered such issues. I couldn’t fathom such a thing. They must use some sort of special device only available to celebrities to get rid of extraneous air.
“That was you!” I shouted before rolling over and hiding underneath the comforter. I felt shamed that my body had let me down with such commonplace trivialities. She clearly was unaware that we had just started dating. It was way too early for this sort of nonsense! Here I am trying to appear effortlessly sexy in my post-coital haze and she was sabotaging me.
Ladies, I don’t want you to have to go through such tribulations. We shouldn’t have to suffer these indignities. We can’t let our significant others know we are human. Can you imagine? I am here to save you with a gas-proof plan.
1. Avoid eating
Yes, it’s hard. But you must avoid eating at all costs. At the very least do it earlier in the day, so you won’t have to deal with nocturnal wind storms. If he asks you if you want to eat, just tell him you had a late lunch and you’re not in the mood for dinner. Or tell him you had a late brunch.
2. Eat beano
If you must eat, make sure to carry Beano or Gas-X at all times. Just pop one in after you to eat to ensure you don’t toot toot later. Try to be slick and pop in before taking a sip of wine. Another alternative? Go to the bathroom and hide it under your tongue. Swallow it when you get back to the table.
3. Practice squeezing your butt when you’re by yourself
You can get better at holding them in if you keep practicing. Before you know it, you’ll be an expert at the squeeze.
4. Wear a butt plug
Nip it in the bud! A butt plug will keep a fart from ever erupting. At least in theory. I’ve never tried this.
5. Get a dog and blame it on him or her
Works every time. Unless you actually fart on someone. | https://medium.com/lady-pieces/how-to-prevent-farting-in-front-of-your-boyfriend-so-he-doesnt-think-you-re-gross-c881d9e59446 | ['Rachel Khona'] | 2018-07-05 04:51:46.150000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Humor', 'Dating', 'Life', 'Satire'] |
The Return of Gianni Falcone: Chapter 7 | Image from Pixabay
It was about five o’clock when I got to her place, out of breath and still drunk. I pounded on the door first with my palm, then the heel of my hand, then finally my fist, before I heard the deadlock switch and the lock turn. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and had curlers in her hair, and her brown eyes blinked dumbly at me from under smudged mascara. I put myself in front of the door jamb so she couldn’t close it and put my hand on her arm. That seemed to remind her who I was, and all of a sudden she went from sleepy to terrified.
“I have a gun,” she said. “Get out or I’ll shoot you, you…”
She searched her brain for a word bad enough to describe me but couldn’t find one.
“You don’t have a gun, Leigh. Trust me, I would have fucking found it.”
“There’s no need for language like that. What kind of person — ”
“Just listen, please. To paraphrase Carlyle, there’s nothin’ to say that ain’t better than shutting up.” I rested my head on the doorpost, suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that I hadn’t slept since I was last with Dolly, and then only for a few hours, which I didn’t want to think about anyway, because that way led thinking about Dolly’s fingers broken, her throat bruised, a bullet in her head.
Leigh was looking down, shaking as hard as an earthquake, but she let me stumble past her and collapse onto the couch where O’Brien had been. I hadn’t the stomach or strength to move, so I stayed where I was. She slid into the chair opposite and looked at me sort of as I had always imagined Cleopatra looked at…well, everyone except Antony when he was on her good side. All of a sudden I understood why women like that seem to be all over the place in literature. Nothing makes you so eager to be loved as a beautiful woman who holds so little love for you.
“So you have something important to tell me.” No question, just the gauntlet of the sentence landing between us. She didn’t even pay me the compliment of sarcasm.
I swallowed hard. My throat was dry, between the drinking and the weeping and the running. I coughed a couple times, then said, “I need some water.”
She made a sound between laughing and crying, then got up and ran the tap into the glass. I drank it down like my throat was a desert and asked for more. Three glasses it took before I could talk, and by then I found I was out of words. I handed her the newspaper.
Leigh read the front page in silence, while I drank down a fourth glass of water. I could feel the liquid seeping back into my muscles.
“Did you know her?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” She poured me another glass of water, but I let it sit.
“That’s not why I came. The last time I was here you said some things to me, asked me some questions, and I handled it badly.”
“No, don’t mention it now. You just lost someone, this isn’t the time to talk about it.”
“The last place I was at after I left you was Dolly’s. I spent the night there.”
“You…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re telling me.”
“Just listen. I slept there, left around dawn. When I left, I ran into Detective O’Brien.” She still didn’t seem to be understanding it, so I went on. “Leigh. He must have followed me from your apartment.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think I understand. I think you’re trying to tell me too much. I didn’t even want you to come back. God, I need a drink.” She sloshed scotch into a glass and gulped it down, then set the glass down shakily on the kitchen counter. “So, let me try to understand. Not a few hours after you left my apartment, Detective O’Brien followed you to a friend’s house…and that friend is now dead.”
“Yes.”
“In the same manner as Victor Blausch.”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane. That can’t be… Are you telling me that Daniel O’Brien — Detective Daniel O’Brien, of the New York Police — is Gianni Falcone? The mob killer? That can’t be. God, a week ago I didn’t even know who Gianni Falcone was. Now listen to me, talking like I’m some sort of expert. I don’t even know why that’s crazy. For all I know Gianni’s just some sort of police fall guy for people they don’t want to fill out incident reports for. My god, do you think that’s it? They’re just killing prostitutes now?”
“No.” I took the scotch from her and took a mouthful straight from the bottle. “Trust me, that ain’t it. At least — Gianni’s a person, all right?”
“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”
“Good, because I ain’t telling you.”
We stared each other down, she sitting straight up like a queen on a throne, me slouched belligerently on the couch.
“You going to drink all my scotch that way?”
I took another swig from the bottle.
“Right.” She sighed, her fingers wrapped in her hair, tugging gently at the roots under the curlers, which were a shade more brown than the rest of her hair. I hadn’t noticed before, which just went to show how distracted she had me. I sure as hell wasn’t going to keep making that mistake. “Look, I have something to tell you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking all day about what…about whatever that was last night. I haven’t heard from you in more than twenty-four hours.” It sounded accusing, and I sat up, as much as I could after two more drinks of scotch than I really needed.
“You told me I wasn’t welcome.”
“I…I know.”
“You threatened to shoot me not five minutes ago.”
“Look, I’ve been thinking, alright? About what you said after O’Brien left. So I decided to do a little bit of extra digging about the Falcone murders. It wasn’t easy. Someone’s done a lot of work to keep him out of the papers.”
She paused a moment, waiting for a response, but I wasn’t going to give her one without knowing where this led. After a moment, she went on.
“Still, there’s no way to keep everything out of the papers. There are a few leads. Some as old as maybe fifteen years. Wait, I’ll show you.”
She shuffled in her slippers over to her purse where it hung on the doorknob and pulled out a stack of mimeographed newspaper clippings. She sat on the far end of the couch and dropped them between us, and I began to sort through them. Giacomo Rossi, shot twice through the heart, throttled, ears slashed. Jacob Bergman, shot twice, throttled, tongue cut out. Federico Bonangelo, shot, throttled, fingers broken. Nero Volpe, tongue. Charlie Richards, fingers. And so on.
“So not an isolated incident. Is that what you’re telling me?” I reached for the scotch again, and she pulled it away, her eyes boring into me, waiting for me to see something I couldn’t find.
“Look harder,” she said. “Impress me.”
She was so beautiful I couldn’t breathe and look at her at the same time, her face hard and focused, all her mind centered on something other than me. I grasped the pile of clippings instead of her swinging dishwater-to-golden curls, stared at them instead of the swell of her breasts under her pink bathrobe. Each body a new thing to solve. I focused in on what the papers said. A stack of faces, each of them peaceful in death — like Blausch. None of them looked like a murder victim. None of them seemed even to have anticipated their deaths. And the tongues — the faces were bright and clean, the mouths pale and white. Maybe they had been cleaned after death? But no — no blood at the scenes. Ears were the same. Ears and tongues may not seem to have much in common, but they both bleed. A lot, if the heart is pumping like you’re about to get shot. If there’s no blood, that means either a clean-up job or no heartbeat. Which jived with what I knew about Blausch, but not Gianni. Once you were dead, Gianni was gone — or at least that’s how the stories went.
But then, that was the best way to control a legend, wasn’t it? No survivors. A conspiracy of whispers, meant to keep people in line. The private family boogeyman, Gianni Falcone, with as little proof as to what really happened to that string of dead bodies as any other boogeyman. And on the subject of those dead bodies…
“Bergman and Richards. Huh.”
Leigh was quite literally on the edge of her seat, smiling with her eyes, breathing slow for fear of missing the next thing. I smiled back.
“You remember what I said to you that first day.”
She nodded enthusiastically. “It’s exactly what I thought when I saw this list. Looks like we have a copycat on our hands. Maybe he doesn’t know Gianni’s been gone.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You make a hell of a Watson, you know that?”
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.” But she laughed anyway. “Alright, Sherlock, what’s the answer here?”
“Being honest with you, I’m not sure I know. But I do notice that these people ain’t all Italian.”
“Yes, I noticed that as well. I was surprised, since I had thought you were saying, or at least implying, that these were mob hits.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s what I thought at the time. This…doesn’t rule that out necessarily, but I’d like to know a little more about these two here. About all of them, I guess. We need to see what they have in common, if the answer isn’t the family.”
Leigh produced a notepad from a side table and started scribbling. Then she stopped.
“Maxine?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your real name?”
“Ah.” Right. “That would be Colazzo.”
“Maxine Colazzo?”
“Massima in Italian. But my friends call me Maxie.”
She sucked at her front teeth and nodded slowly. “Nice to meet you, Maxie,” she said at last. | https://medium.com/mfa-diy/the-return-of-gianni-falcone-chapter-7-50d31ec0c351 | ['Kirsten Porter'] | 2020-12-19 00:50:41.497000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Mystery', 'Mafia', 'Serial', 'Novel'] |
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) | It was not surprising that Gal Gadot will be donning her cape once more, and returning to our screens as the Amazonian princess. This is what we understand about Wonder Woman 1984 up to now.
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Latest Updates:
The movie’s release date was pushed back into Christmas Day, 25 Dec 2020 A brand new trailer has been shared as a member of this DC FanDome virtual occasion Another brand new teaser poster for the upcoming movie was shared Patty Jenkins says she believes any future movies on “pause” Gal Gadot clarifies Cirque Du Soleil’s influence on Wonder Woman 1984 New throw photographs series of Diana, Barbara Ann Minerva Cheetah and Maxwell Lord have looked on line
Can Be Wonder Woman 1984 an immediate sequel?
Wonder Woman opened in theaters two weeks ago and has been a huge hit ever since. It’s created a new generation of strong female heroes like Wonder Woman, and women around the world are inspired to be strong and stand up for what they believe in. If you have been following the trailers and movies then you know there is one major plotline that is developing in Wonder Woman 1984. That main storyline revolves around a mysterious Amazon woman and her relationship with a powerful warlord.
Wonder Woman 1984 Trailer
Wonder Woman’s relationship with The Lasso of Truth is an important part of the comic book story, but has never appeared in the film itself. First and foremost let me say why so many devoted Wonder Woman fans all over the world, as well as yourself, would not make any less than exciting for your anticipated release date of December 8th. For one thing, Gal Gadot is the perfect choice as the latest modern-day Wonder Woman. As I’ve personally known Gal Gadot for a long time now, I can honestly say she brings the most realistic and relatable qualities to the role of Wonder Woman that any actress has ever needed to take on.
The Lasso of Truth was made famous by the comic book hero Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman uses it to choke her opponents unconscious with a vine while using her lasso to tie up her enemies. In the book, the Goddess Diana commands that The Lasso be broken only after Wonder Woman gives up an arm or an eye. It is interesting that director Patty Jenkins decided to include this scene in Wonder Woman 1984 because it was one of the most requested by fans. The inclusion of the Lasso was later used in the Justice League movie.
After the destruction of the Justice League’s headquarters, Wonder Woman contacts the newly formed Anti-HC menace, Amazonian Amazoness Killer, and has her Justice League team join forces against her. During the battle, Wonder Woman manages to injure Amazoness, who in the end is temporarily paralyzed. Wonder Woman uses her magic wand to cure Amazoness of her paralysis, but at the cost of her life. She then uses the spirit of Amazonians Amazons to heal herself. The untimely death of Amazoness prompted Wonder Woman to rethink her membership in the Justice League and go into retirement.
Get free Gal Gadot Wonder Woman Costume NOW
During the sequel of Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot returns as the strongest woman of our time, Wonder Woman. Many viewers were skeptical when it was announced that Gadot would reprise the role of Wonder Woman again for the upcoming Wonder Woman movie. The producers had to tread carefully though, as they wanted to remain true to the spirit of the original Wonder Woman and give her as much depth as possible. Gal Gadot comes into the character completely changed from her appearance in the last Batman film, Dark Knight Rises. Instead of her signature golden bikini, she wears a stylish black and gray body suit in the film, which seems to be the most iconic accessory from her appearances in the .
One of the most exciting aspects of the sequel, is the involvement of the character of Wonder Woman’s love interest, Superman. There have been several instances where the two characters have worked together, such as in the Justice League comic book series. It has been teased that the scenes featuring the two superheroes will provide a unique experience for fans who are unfamiliar with their stories. Because of this, many fans are optimistic that the Wonder Woman film will receive a warm welcome by viewers, after the lackluster performance by the first Wonder Woman. One positive factor is that the film has already added another iconic super hero to the comic book world, giving it a Superman like feel.
No matter what happens in the Wonder Woman 1984 movie, it is certain that the character of Wonder Woman will continue to be a mainstay in the comic book world. Many people grow up reading about these wonderful super heroes, which is why the introduction of Wonder Woman will likely be one of the biggest factors for young girls growing up today. Their love of these characters, combined with the fact that Gal Gadot has been cast as the new Wonder Woman, makes this a very exciting project for DC Entertainment. They are also planning a future film, titled the Untitled Wonder Woman 2, which will take place after the events of the original Wonder Woman film. No matter what happens in either of these movies, one thing is for certain, these famous characters will continue to have a massive impact on our culture.
Here some Gal Gadot upcoming movies:
Source: Gal Gadot Instagram | https://medium.com/@ameliacalifornia/wonder-woman-1984-2020-1a7fd88d4535 | ['Amelia Official'] | 2021-10-21 19:07:35.527000+00:00 | ['Entertainment', 'Marvel', 'Marvel Cinematic Universe', 'Movies', 'Uber Gossip'] |
When do teeth come in for babies?।When do permanent teeth come in? | Where Do Teeth Come From?when do permanent teeth come in?
When to worry about baby teeth not coming in?
Two or three months back, our child got his absolute first tooth. And afterward for like 3 months, he still just had one tooth. He looked delightful. Yet also somewhat crazy.
Presently this made me figure… where do teeth at any point originate from? Like…how does that occur? How do bones begin becoming out of our countenances? Along these lines, I did some examination, and what I discovered… I’ll always be unable to unsee. What’s more,
you most likely won’t have the option to unsee it either. We should look at it! Teeth are unusual and magnificent, and they develop in strange and amazing manners. So where do they originate from? To get that, we need to go route back. Before you were even conceived. before you even had a mind… no. I mean when you looked generally like this.
Around three weeks into improvement, your body was only a level little circle. You were entirely two-dimensional. At that point, you folded yourself up into a cylinder. It’s one of the most significant things you’ve at any point done! So well done on that. The cylinder that structures from this early stage origami are encompassed by unfathomably significant undeveloped cells.
They move and manufacture a portion of your most significant parts — the spinal string, mind, the bones in your center ear to parts of your heart… and your teeth. Around 6 to 8 ___ weeks in, little gatherings of these phone structure knock under what will end up being your gums, and they experience a change! Some become odontoblasts — these cells make dentin, the intense, stringy center of the tooth. However, the cells on the head of those knocks change as well, into ameloblasts, the cells that construct polish, the hard outside layer of your teeth.
The way toward building finish is some magnificent cell nanotechnology, up in your face. Lacquer building cells discharge a blend of synthetic compounds that solidifies into mineral gems. The cell goes up and secretes more mineral on the head of the last layer. Inevitably the veneer building cell passes on-off, leaving a long translucent bar behind. A huge number of these poles stuffed together cosmetics the veneer layer of your teeth. This mineral is generally hydroxyapatite — extreme stuff that is wealthy in calcium and phosphate.
Fundamentally shakes, in your mouth. What’s more, similar to rocks, they can last an extremely long-term under the correct conditions. How long? Okay, accept thirty thousand years? I’m here with Matt Brown he’s the Director of the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collection. What is that colossal thing in that spot? This mammoth tooth directly here is the canine tooth of a saber-toothed feline from a creature called Smilodon. What’s frequently called a saber-toothed tiger.
We’re taking a gander at this individual tooth that is dropped out of the skull. At the point when we take a gander at a fossil like a standard bone other mineral shave replaced that bone and such a stone yet this is practically plated like the tooth the way that that feline developed it. No doubt, what I’m grasping here is essentially what was strolling around within the living Smilodon.
Got any longer old teeth for us to take a gander at? We sure do, we have most likely around a million of them. So these are teeth from mastodons and you can see that these teeth here they look quite recognizable as teeth they look fundamentally the same as to even a portion of our molars. This tooth here has a monster pit in it simply like my teeth we have you can see something very similar in the fossil record. It’s an update that these creatures were alive and strolling around.
What’s more, the mastodon didn’t brush their teeth. That is most likely the case. No doubt. I wager we can go considerably more established. We can. This is a piece of the left half of the essence of a Tyrannosaurus and we’re taking a gander at teeth here safeguarded in this skull that are around 70 million years of age that tooth isn’t playing yet clean much better dental well being and they may have been brushing or perhaps a meat diet is better for fewer depressions.
I wager we can go much more established. We sure can. We’re remaining before a bureau from the Jurassic time frame. This is around a hundred ninety multi-year-old dinosaurs called Dilophosaurus and we’re taking a gander at the finish once more. Good You got anything more established? We do. So our last stop is this bureau here in the Pennsylvanian probably the most seasoned teeth that we have in this structure with around 2 million fossils in it as we’re taking a gander at a 300 multi-year-old tooth with veneer that would be extremely like the lacquer that was swimming around in this creature’s mouth. That is some durable teeth 300 million years of age and that is unquestionably a shark tooth.
That’d make a stellar neckband. So assembling lacquer resembles making rocks in your mouth. At the point when this veneer nano-manufacture is complete, your infant teeth at long last break out. Also, they each abandon an unfilled space. Also, it’s here, gratitude to foundational microorganisms, that a similar tooth-developing procedure rehashes to shape your changeless teeth. In this way, your infant’s teeth began becoming even before you were conceived. Also, when your infant’s teeth came in, your lasting teeth were at that point developing in behind them.
That implies at one point your skull resembled this! Better believe it… it’s unadulterated bad dream fuel. Revealed to you wouldn’t have the option to unsee it. As your infant’s teeth feel those grown-up teeth developing in behind them, their root disintegrates and they drop out. In the end, you get somewhere in the range of 28 and 32 teeth in your grown-up mouth. Yet, after those grown-up teeth develop in, all the foundational microorganisms that set out the gem nano poles fall to pieces, with the goal that’s the main arrangement of substitution teeth you get. In any case, for what reason don’t we keep our teeth-developing undifferentiated organisms?
Researchers aren’t absolutely certain yet. Be that as it may, possibly one day they could make sense of away to develop new teeth and transform us into human sharks. Well actually, perhaps not. Brushing and flossing are considerably less terrifying. With the goal that’s the means by which teeth develop. Prior to you even had a cerebrum, an extraordinary armed force of cells crept to your head and set up nano-precious stone manufacturing plants to essentially fabricate rocks inside your skull. I figure somebody should tell the Tooth Fairy that THAT story is worth in excess of a dollar. Remain inquisitive. | https://medium.com/@ifask300/when-do-teeth-come-in-for-babies-when-do-permanent-teeth-come-in-c37d5658f0a1 | ['If Ask You'] | 2020-08-26 04:26:02.519000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Teeth', 'Baby'] |
Suicide Is an Answer, But Not the Right One | I was scared. I could feel the effects of the pills. I couldn’t control my legs. I knew I was slipping. I no longer wanted to die, but it was too late. I wanted to be upstairs in bed with Flora and Zoey, not fading fast in a beanbag on the kitchen floor.
My whole body went numb.
Help me. I’m scared. I don’t want to go!
The last thing I remember is wiping away the tears. Then everything went black.
Every time I remember those last moments, I start to cry. As I write this on May 29, 2019, at 10:57 a.m., five years from the day, my shoulders are heaving with sobs I can’t stop.
No one tells you that before you die, you realize you wish it weren’t over. If I had jumped from a tall building, I bet I would have spent my last seconds wishing I was in the arms of the people I love. The people who weren’t as lucky as I can’t look back with regret. They are gone.
I think of how close I was to missing out on the joy and pain of the past five years. These have been the best years of my life, and I almost missed them.
What got me to the point that I thought killing myself was the only way to stop my pain?
The darkness of life
When you suffer from a mental illness, the constant battle can become too much. I don’t think of myself as a strong person, and I could not take the bombardment of negative emotion.
I tried to kill myself four times. The first three were nothing more than cries for help. I was never in danger of dying from my injuries. But I attempted. I messed myself up to the extent that I still carry the scars. I can trace the pain of those first three attempts with my finger. My arms are a roadmap through the worst parts of my life.
But five years ago it was different. I had come halfway across the world to the Philippines to change my life. I thought I could leave everything behind and start fresh.
But it was the same. I was still depressed all the time. I was asleep more than I was awake. When I was awake, I was anxious and close to panic.
I couldn’t focus. The voices were so loud that they drowned out everything else. I couldn’t get the medication I needed. When I needed help most, nothing was available.
If I had tried harder and asked more people, maybe someone would have helped me. But I had given up.
Flora and I always fought. She couldn’t understand why I was always in bed. She couldn’t understand what was happening. She was angry. She lashed out. She didn’t know I was dying inside.
Nobody could understand. Not Flora, not the doctors. If I had tried harder and asked more people, maybe someone would have helped me. But I had given up. I gave in to the voices and the suicidal self-talk.
I no longer wanted anyone to help. I was tired. I wanted it all to end.
At first I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I was scared. I didn’t know if I had the courage to actually take my own life.
I spent a few days planning my exit. I searched Google for the least painful ways to kill yourself. I read blogs about suicide, brushing past the trigger warnings like they were nothing. If I was trying to convince myself suicide was the only way out, I was doing a very good job.
I never did anything halfway.
May 29, 2014
I woke that morning feeling good; so good I forgot about my plans for a time. I sat on the porch and smoked, drinking my coffee and closing my eyes against the bright sunlight.
Flora came downstairs, raging about my smoking habit. Maybe I made the mistake of letting the smoke float into the house. But it was just the beginning. When she got started, she didn’t quit for hours.
I let her yell until I couldn’t stand it, then went upstairs and put a pillow over my head. The plan to kill myself would go forward.
Nobody loved me. Nobody wanted me. I couldn’t be a good father to Zoey. I knew my death would be hard for her, but in the long run it would be better than having a crazy father.
Thinking about Zoey almost changed my mind, but I had already passed the point of no return.
I went through the day in a dreamlike state. I would look at something and think it was the last time I’d ever see it. I sent notes to family overseas to check in and hopefully cushion the blow of my death.
I was sad, but also relieved it would soon be over.
Later that night, after more fighting with Flora, I kissed Zoey and put her to bed. I was crying, but I didn’t let Flora see because I didn’t want her to know I was feeling anything more than anger.
I didn’t want her to help because I wanted to punish her.
If Flora knew what I was thinking, she would have tried to help me. Even though she was angry, she loved me. She had learned to love me despite my illness and the hell I put her through. She was angry, but she also couldn’t imagine life without me.
I went downstairs and wrote a 14-page suicide note. It took me until 1 a.m., but I finished. When I had written all I wanted to say, I knew it was time.
May 30, 2014
I set up everything so I only had to press a button for my note to be published on all my social media accounts.
I was ready.
I went outside and had one last cigarette, savoring the smoke filling my lungs. I was scared, but I’d made up my mind, and there was no turning back.
I grabbed every pill bottle I could find and emptied them on the table. These were pain pills and medication left over from unsuccessful drug trials. I don’t know why I kept them, but they were about to come in handy. Some of the pills were time-release, so I crushed them into powder.
I got a big jug of water, took one last look around the house, and swallowed everything. I gagged repeatedly but kept it all down.
I was numb.
I sat in my beanbag and pressed the button that would publish my suicide note. I closed my computer and turned off my phone.
About 15 minutes later, my stomach got very upset. I knew I’d have an accident if I didn’t do something, and the thought of them finding me covered with shit horrified me.
I somehow got to my feet and started up the stairs to the bathroom. I was very dizzy and weak, but I made it to the toilet and did my business. The way down was much harder, but I sat down and took one step at a time.
I made it back to my beanbag, willing myself not to throw up.
I couldn’t move my legs. Fear crept up from the pit of my stomach and froze me in place.
I started to cry. All I wanted was to be safe, tucked in next to Flora and Zoey. I wanted to take it back. The reasons I had for killing myself no longer made sense.
I wanted to live!
But it was too late. I was dying.
Knowing I was dying made me cry even more. I wiped away the tears and knew no more.
Afterthoughts
I woke the next morning, and Flora managed to get the right kind of help. An ambulance took me to emergency. They put a tube in my nose and pumped charcoal into my stomach. I still have a scar on my nose from the tape holding the tube in place.
I survived.
In the hospital, I was allowed to realize what a wonderful life I had. So many people loved me, and they only needed to hear me asking for help. I wanted to punish everybody because I thought they didn’t care, but I was the one pushing them away.
If you read this whole experience, I hope you understand everything can get better if you just ask for help.
I know your mind is telling you no one loves you, but they do.
Your mind is lying when it tells you the only thing you can do is end your life.
Take it from someone who lived to tell: You will regret it if you try to kill yourself. Why would you take the last resort when all you have to do is ask someone, anyone, to help you?
True courage is asking for help. It doesn’t take courage to kill yourself. It takes courage to live.
Ask someone. Ask me if you have no one.
Ask for help.
We are waiting. | https://humanparts.medium.com/suicide-is-an-answer-but-not-the-right-one-f0062530aa1a | ['Jason Weiland'] | 2019-07-11 18:07:54.306000+00:00 | ['Mental Health Awareness', 'Suicide', 'Death', 'Mental Health', 'Mind'] |
Are You Open to Reality? Let’s Check the Facts. | When you read the title of this article, what was your immediate answer? Mine was, YES! I’m not someone with my head in the sand — I live in reality! Don’t I?
We all filter information in our own way. We filter it based on our memories, past experiences, current moods, and our preferred method of taking in information. Because we all filter things differently, chances are whatever you are hearing and seeing is being heard and seen differently by someone else. It’s a lot for the mind to handle — even though two people take in the exact same information, those two people walk away receiving a different message.
A good way to make sure you are staying in reality is to check the facts. When someone is talking to you and you feel like they are accusing you of something, your best next step is to check the facts before you react. Did they actually tell you that you did something wrong, or do you just feel like they did? If you are unsure, check the facts. If you are having a conversation with someone, repeat back what you just heard. If you do this, you can make sure you are experiencing the reality of the conversation. Once you have the other person’s confirmation that you heard correctly, you have just verified that you didn’t put that conversation through your own filter and hear something that wasn’t actually said.
Another thing we all do is believe that things should work better, be easier, go faster, etc. The fact of the matter is that they don’t. When we choose to believe things should be different than they are, we again are not living in reality. What happens when we accept things (and people) as they are? It shifts the brain from wishing mode to acting mode. The brain now understands if there is something in our reality that we dislike, we either need to work on trying to improve it, or if possible, we remove it from our lives if improvement is not possible. If neither of those things can be done, the brain decides that this thing we don’t like must be accepted as part of our reality. Once that reality is accepted, the brain loses interest, and wants to focus on something else that it can work at. The brain does not enjoy being idle, and wants to do things. Accepting reality for what it is helps us avoid getting sucked into that endless rabbit hole of negativity because as we all know, if we tell our brain that is where we want to go, our brain is more than happy to take us there!
If there is some grievance that you believe is happening that actually isn’t, don’t waste your time and energy getting caught up in it. If there is something in your life you aren’t thrilled with and you can’t change it, once you accept it as the reality that it is, you can then change your focus onto areas of your life where you can make a positive impact. Reality is the best possible place to live, and it takes all of us being very aware of what is going on within us and around us to stay grounded in it. Today is a great day to start checking the facts in your life! | https://medium.com/@amierak/are-you-open-to-reality-lets-check-the-facts-4b72a0ad0d12 | ['Amie At Mastermind Personal Coaching'] | 2021-02-04 21:39:28.627000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'Confidence'] |
Why you’ll never crave a carrot. (but you could always eat a pizza). | How your taste buds have been hijacked to want shit food.
Once upon a time, we humans ate food to sustain ourselves. You see, we are pretty amazing. We have sophisticated systems to enable us to perform our most essential task; find food for fuel. Our taste abilities have been shaped by the ecological niches our evolutionary ancestors occupied and by the nutrients they sought. They helped us to identify nutrients to survive.
These days we still need those nutrients (more than ever before), but our eating patterns have changed. We now eat mindlessly in pursuit of calories and not nutrients. But what if I was to tell you that your pursuit of high calorie and often nutrient devoid food is not your fault, and that food has been manipulated so that you crave the shit stuff.
What do I mean ‘manipulated’?
When I say manipulated, I’m talking about the flavour. To understand the western world’s constant desire to overindulge in shit food, we need to talk about flavour. The food we eat today tastes very different from the food your granny used to eat and this is all thanks to two main factors:
1. Food technology innovation — (flavour engineering in particular).
2. Food production — supply and demand.
Sydney Trox
Spoiler…. Flavour engineering is the reason you’ll never crave a carrot, but you could always eat a pizza.
Flavour engineering is a multi-billion pound industry and the clever people who create the flavours are called flavour chemists. These guys know how to manipulate foods to stimulate your taste buds and keep you coming back for more. Now, you may be wondering why flavour chemists are even a thing? Surely our food is full of flavour already, so why would we want to create a flavour?
Simple…. It’s cheaper! A synthetic flavour adds stability and consistency to a product. You know that strawberry yoghurt you pick up with your lunchtime meal deal? It shouldn’t come as any surprise that there’s nothing strawberry about it.
Where are the strawberries at?
It’s much more cost-effective to blend chemicals, oils, extracts, and essences than it is to use actual berries to flavour that yoghurt. The challenge for flavour chemists is to create the perfect mixture of compounds that hit all the right spots and make that strawberry yoghurt taste like strawberry without using strawberries.
The food industry is full of fake flavours that keep us addicted to their products. I’d go as far as saying that most of what we consider food is not food. It’s fake food. We’re eating food-like products.
Flavour is everything. We eat for flavour.
It’s important to understand that so many of the things we eat would not be palatable without synthetic flavour. We gorge on them because they taste like something they’re not. But it’s not just the processed foods that are to blame for our lack of desire to chow down a few chunky carrots. Our fresh produce has lost its ‘traditional’ taste due to modern farming techniques. The demand for all year round produce means it’s selected to grow bigger and quicker to keep up with that demand. This leaves crops with much lower concentrations of major vitamins and minerals, high water content, and therefore often tasteless. This is known as genetic dilution. And guess what? When food tastes bland, we are less inclined to eat it.
Kale from the 1950s tasted nothing like it does today. Tomatoes are now so selectively bred that we’ve kicked out their ‘flavour gene’. There’s only one thing that’s going to make that tomato taste good — a nice synthetically flavoured salad dressing.
It’s crazy to think that for all the gains we’ve made in the quantity of food, there’s been a corresponding loss in quality. Nothing tastes as it should anymore, it tastes how the big food corporations want it to taste.
By the early 1960s flavour technology science was so good that you could eat a packet of crisps that tasted like a grilled BBQ steak! Today we can eat almost any food that tastes like something it’s not. We’ve got all sorts of shit on the shelves. Isolated protein powder tasting like bananas, lemon cheesecake that contains no lemons, sugar water with added vitamins. Our brains have been tricked. We no longer crave nutrients, we crave flavour chemicals.
It’s really difficult for the human body to determine or estimate nutrient levels in food without directly sensing what is ingested. If unfamiliar foods are constantly ingested, this affects metabolic responses. We’re constantly confusing the body by eating synthetically flavoured foods.
Our problem isn’t that we’re addicted to calories. We’re addicted to flavours and those flavours drive us towards the calories. We’re guided by taste to over-consume poor quality food with very few nutrients. This is a huge problem because we need nutrients to help us metabolise those calories. Without a good supply of vitamins and minerals your body becomes inefficient, contributing to poor energy and poor weight control. And what’s the last thing you want to eat when you’re feeling sluggish with no energy? A carrot. But you could always eat a pizza. The irony is, it’s the carrot (and lots of other nutritious foods) you need, not the pizza. Your taste buds have been hijacked my friend. | https://medium.com/@zoealice/why-youll-never-crave-a-carrot-but-you-could-always-eat-a-pizza-d9519f4187b9 | ['Zoe', 'With A Zed'] | 2020-12-27 16:40:21.593000+00:00 | ['Nutrition', 'Food', 'Foodtech', 'Health Foods', 'Healthy Lifestyle'] |
Reactive WebClient | Spring WebFlux provides the reactive WebClient to make asynchronous api calls. It is fully non-blocking. Things I like about WebClient is it integrates well with reactor api providing very readable code and it is configurable in every way, which we will see in a minute.
Let’s start with creating an instance of the WebClient. There are two ways to do so:
Using WebCient.create() or WebClient.builder() functions Autowiring the WebClient.Builder Bean which spring provides
Once created, the WebClient is immutable which makes it thread safe. You can use webClient.mutate() to reconfigure it and get a new instance.
As we have created our WebClient, now let’s make an api call.
That’s all. Only with four lines of code we are able to make a GET api call. Let’s break down the code and look at individual parts
get() method specifies that it’s a GET api call uri() takes the uri string. You can also use another flavour of uri() which takes a function allowing you to configure the uri using UriBuilder retrieve() method is used to retrieve the response body. bodyToMono(Customer::class.java) is really interesting. It uses the Spring Codecs to deserialize the data into required domain class. More on Codecs; later in this blog
Similar way, we can make the following post api call.
The only difference here is bodyValue() method, which we use to send the request body | https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/reactive-webclient-2c402f99584e | ['Aftab Shaikh'] | 2021-03-14 03:06:09.824000+00:00 | ['Spring Boot', 'Reactor', 'Spring Webflux', 'Spring'] |
Covid: Most of California under strict new lockdown as cases surge | The stay-at-home order affects around 85% of the state’s 40 million people. It will be in place for at least three weeks and cover the Christmas holiday. Many businesses will be closed, and people will be banned from meeting anyone outside their household. On Sunday, the US had a record number of people in hospital with Covid-19. The country has seen a sharp rise in cases and Covid-related deaths in recent weeks, a surge that could be partly down to last month’s Thanksgiving holiday, when millions of Americans travelled around the US.
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The new restrictions in California — the country’s most populous state — were triggered by intensive care capacity in hospitals shrinking. The measures apply to the southern part of the state and its central valley, while other areas could follow within days. San Francisco has also gone into lockdown, with the mayor imposing a separate set of orders. California’s lockdown in March, in which all non-essential businesses were closed, was seen as an early model for the US at the beginning of the pandemic. | https://medium.com/@asdass/covid-most-of-california-under-strict-new-lockdown-as-cases-surge-fe30f8c3fca7 | [] | 2020-12-07 15:47:48.373000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'Update'] |
Finger me and put me on your naughty list | Things to get you on the naughty list
He unsnapped the button closest to my bottom right cheek, slowly exposing my bare skin to the chill of the air. Small pebbled goosebumps formed across my entire buttocks and lower back waiting with anticipation.
Sliding his finger upwards and in one swift movement two, three, four, buttons were undone. The fabric of my butt flapped pajamas folder over, exposing my entire right cheek and rounded skin.
Kneeling down, his own pajamas tugged against his knees and his growing member. He cupped my bare ass in his hands and shifted his hand just under the fabric, not able to get much reach but pushed his hand along my thigh and towards the front of my legs.
Gently he placed kisses against my bare skin and my goosebumps grew, his warm breath tickling me as he moved. Playfully nipping at my meat he pulled away admiring my now spotted red rump.
He pulled again at the fabric and buttons, slowly, exposing the rest of me, leaving just one button unsnapped. Warmth began to take over my entire body, an unusual amount focused around my vagina.
He stood again, grabbing, tugging, kissing, and massaging his way slowly around my bare skin, each curve as if he was really concentrating on a thing of beauty.
His fingers ran down the left side of my bare bottom, and down lower to where his hand and wrist were pushing the fabric open more exposing more of my underside.
As his fingers reached the place they had been searching this whole time the last snap of the button could be heard. And just like that his one fingertip, glided against my fresh pussy lips. As a small moan escaped my lips.
I bit my lip, trying to keep quiet. His other arm now wrapped around my center and his hand laid against the fabric on my breast. He slid his finger around and towards my swollen clitoris. Rubbing clockwise, I began to lean my whole body forward and moved in a small circular pattern to meet his rhythm.
More teasing moans came from deep within me as his fingers pressed harder on my clit, rubbing me into ecstasy. My nipples pressed against the red cloth of my outfit and the friction of all the movement sent me into overdrive.
As he continued to massage my swollen nub, he ran another finger into my wet slit, slowly reaching to touch the entrance to my wet hole. The feelings of his finger entering cautiously were driving me absolutely crazy.
His fingers continued to massage my dripping wet lips and I rode his fingers all the way through to my first orgasm of the night. Throwing my head back, biting at my own lips, releasing a controlled moan so as not to be caught.
As I reached the peak, my throbbing pussy in for the ride, his lips pressed against the back of my neck. His breath warm and comforting. He let off my swollen clit and dove his two fingers deep into my pussy, pushing my entire body forward.
He began to pick up his pace, thrusting his whole hand and body against me. I was almost in a full bending position and I could feel now my whole lower side exposed to the nip of the cold. But I didn’t care, the warmth from my throbbing pussy was all I needed.
Plunging deeper, using his thumb now to work my entire engorged clit and wet lips, I could feel another wave coming over me. I began to bounce my entire body against his rhythm. He would push I would pull, pull and I would push hard against his hand.
The pattern continued and I could feel my pussy begin to contract around his fingers, the wetness of my pussy began dripping down my thighs and I screamed out in pleasure.
“Enough, enough, stop, stop” I exclaimed. My pussy throbbing, his fingers pressed hard against all my swollen bits. He was not stopping. I twisted and contorted my body as I came. My juicy cum running down his fingers and hands, and my thighs.
Slowly letting off, the pressure I felt for minutes slowly faded, my legs now weak. He returned me to my full standing position.
My red ass still exposed to the cold air, my pajamas shifted and me breathless.
“Merry Christmas, baby” he whispered in my ear. | https://medium.com/the-quick-dirty/naughty-list-c57296b70878 | ['Quick Dirty.Club'] | 2020-12-26 13:01:58.437000+00:00 | ['The Couple', 'Sex', 'Erotica', 'Sexography', 'Adult'] |
“Karena pahitnya kopi tak sepahit kehidupanmu” by Coffee Talism | Final Project Alterra Academy Batch 2 | Alterra Academy is a tech talent incubator that gives everyone (even non-IT background) a chance to be a professional Tech Talent.
Follow | https://medium.com/alterra-academy/karena-pahitnya-kopi-tak-sepahit-kehidupanmu-by-coffee-talism-final-project-alterra-academy-6a4c6fddd136 | ['Alterra Academy Writer'] | 2020-08-13 16:37:01.110000+00:00 | ['Final Project', 'Alterra Academy', 'Software Development', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Coffee Talism'] |
Self-Taught Developer In Finding Mentors | The power of having mentors will take you further than you thought.
Photo credit to Unsplash
“You become who you spend time with” – Tony Robbins
The idea of Mentorship can be of many things to different people, we kind of interpret the idea depending on how we need them to be, and on how we want them to be, in our case, in our world, in Web Development, our mentors are our teachers or at least in this topic, specifically our virtual teachers.
We needed them more than we know, whenever we want to learn something new or pursue something that is out of our comfort zone, it’s really hard to dive into something without tasting the water or not having an idea what is it about, right?
Photo credit to Unsplash
It would take us a lot of time to build the puzzle without really knowing what we are trying to build, same as diving into Web Development or diving into a certain area in technology without having someone who will serve as our guide, our go-to whenever we encounter problems, our 24-hr go to whenever we are solving some technical issues while debugging.
Mentors, sometimes are our go-to whenever we feel down, lost, uninspired, or simply just tired, they will serve as our star, we don’t actually stare on the night sky if we aren’t looking for a shooting star, and we don’t look for shooting star if we don’t have a wish or if we aren’t looking for a sign, right? It wouldn’t make any sense, our mentor sometimes feeds our needs of validation or someone who will remind us whenever we forgot why we do what we do.
Photo credit to Unsplash
Choosing a mentor can be one of life’s most important decisions, in our case, it would be slightly different, I am referring to mentors who don’t know us but we follow them, we chose them, we listen to them, and we admire them because they help us, they mold us, they teach us the technical knowledge we needed to start, and they share to us their techniques, they push us to become better and change our life like no other.
“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself. A mentor is someone who allows you to know that no matter how dark the night, in the morning joy will come. A mentor is someone who allows you to see the higher part of yourself when sometimes it becomes hidden to your own view.”
When I started Web Development 4 years ago I don’t have any idea how I can carve my way from a noob to someone who can actually code, it was a colleague of mine who told me about Web Development because, to be honest, we hated our job at that time, the management sucks, at that time he was planning to leave our previous job and pursue Web Development through a 6-month 8hr/day course, web development wasn’t that popular at that time in our country, so we didn’t have much of a choice, it was a study now pay later program, he was so interested and so he left and pursue his dream.
Photo credit to Unsplash
In my case, I really couldn’t afford not working for 6 months, so I need to think of a better way to make it happen, I’m not gonna spend that much for school, I already finished my degree and my parents will kill me if I told them, so I came up with an idea, I don’t have money to invest at that time, I don’t have a spare money to keep me afloat, and after thinking it thoroughly all I had was an extra 16hrs after work.
So as ambitious as I am, I created a plan, I called it my timeline of freedom. I promised myself that I will work as hard as I can, as smart as I can, no party, no vacation, all work, all study on weekends and holidays, study and learn 14hrs/day for the next 10months, that was the goal.
My main reason at that time is to be able to leave that job within the year and find a better opportunity where I can have more freedom, more space to do all other things I wanted to do, other than just working, I thought that if I’d be lucky enough one day and find a remote-based job, I would be really happy, who would have thought, fast forward 6 months, I got my dream job.
I started the journey by asking questions, not just questions but the right questions to get me from where I was to where I want to be.
“How can I get there?” was the million-dollar question.
Photo credit to Unsplash
You really have to ask the right questions to get the right answers, thanks to google I met Brad Traversy and some young dude who teaches database MySQL. I learned a lot from them, learning from them every single day made me feel like I am on the right path, whenever I needed to learn something it’s all there in there YouTube Channel and website tutorials, they even have Udemy courses now, day by day I am beginning to be like them, months after months I’m beginning to feel like I belong.
So basically for the entire 6 months, I worked and study like crazy, and all because of them I land my first job, however as I told before getting the job was only just the beginning, working with other Computer Science developers made me realized that I was the weakest link in the group, it was so intimidating and it scares the hell out of me day by day but who cares, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain, more and more I was becoming just like them, best feeling ever.
Eventually, I met several other mentors, the more you seek, the more you follow other senior developers the more you can see the difference between those who are claiming to be one vs the underrated and talented ones, you literally can see that they know what they are doing, they are incredible.
Photo credit to Unsplash
Personal Recommendations
Here are my recommendations, I don’t just admire them, I owe them big time, they helped me become who I am today, especially in my professional career.
I am being biased but this list I am sharing you are my favorites, they have their own strength that I admire, and you can see even when they are really good in programming, you can see that they have their own expertise, they are a master of their craft and not some dude who learn everything and claim everything without really knowing something.
Brad Traversy
Brad Traversy has been my mentor since Day 1, he doesn’t know me but I admire him so much and I am very thankful, he is one of the few who helped me achieved my dream, without him even knowing, he had helped thousands of other students just like me, and not just on learning the technical skills but he help me changed my life, and I couldn’t be more thankful.
I’ve recommended him over and over even to my other colleagues who are Software Developers, they don’t have much experience with the new technologies especially Javascript Frameworks, now my Software Developer colleagues love him very much.
He is very practical, he knows what he is doing, LITERALLY! and he is very humble.
YouTube Channel:
Website: https://www.traversymedia.com/
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/brad-traversy/
Tutorial Videos Sample:
Web Development 2020 A Practical Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pThnRneDjw
Angela Yu
Another favorite! She is a star! She has become one of my inspiration, she was my go-to when I was transitioning from Web Development to Native Mobile IOS, she is good at teaching, she’s Asian, she’s a woman, a woman in tech is admirable, I’ve experienced some gender preferences issues before especially when I was looking for jobs years ago, I’ve been beaten several times (I got a close fight though! :)) I was as close as a final interview and in the end, they hired the dude.
She is really good in teaching, you will never get bored, she knows what she is doing, she always knows how to prepare the dessert with toppings on her tutorials, I highly recommend her tutorial with learning Web Development 2020, I wish I had that course when I was starting.
YouTube Channel:
Website: https://www.londonappbrewery.com/
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/4b4368a3-b5c8-4529-aa65-2056ec31f37e/
Colt Steele
Have you ever experienced that heavy feeling to someone or something just because you had some bad experience with that person or with that place or thing? I’m not sure if I made any sense, but Colt Steele was my go-to with Javascript, and Javascript is really hard to learn in the beginning.
Javascript is not easy, I’ve enrolled to Colt Steele’s courses about Javascript and Javascript Framework, and had several bad experiences, it’s not about the course, he is really good at teaching, it’s just that I had a hard time understanding its advanced concept, but Colt Steele did a really good job, I’ve learned a lot from him.
Watch this HTML/CSS/Javascript Crash Course of his:
Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/coltsteele/
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrqAGUPPMOdo0jfQ6grikZw
Mosh Hamedani
Programming with Mosh is my favorite teacher in Javascript Frameworks, and now he is teaching several new courses like Data Science, Python, Databases. He is a good teacher, he explains every difficult topic into smaller parts to understand it better, basically, he tries to make all the difficult languages or frameworks into an easy one, more English and more understandable.
I am planning to study python in the next few months so I’d probably be active with Mosh’s courses soon.
Javascript in 1 Hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6NZfCO5SIk&t=2s
So, that’s it for our Part 2, I hope you learn some golden nuggets, and I would be really happy if you can click as many claps as possible, you can give up to 50 or probably more, I would be very happy and inspired knowing that I am providing something of value and I can help, follow me too! :)
Complete Series Content: Part 3 and 4 Coming Soon.
Self-Taught Developer: Let’s Get That Developer Job 1/4 — Creating My Own Path
Self-Taught Developer: Let’s Get That Developer Job 2/4 — Finding Mentors
Self-Taught Developer: Let’s Get That Developer Job 3/4 — Designing The Portfolio
Self-Taught Developer: Let’s Get That Developer Job 4/4 — Job Hunts and Interviews | https://medium.com/for-self-taught-developers/self-taught-developer-lets-get-that-developer-job-2-4-finding-mentors-7f716dcb1e86 | ['Ann Adaya'] | 2020-10-13 13:22:04.945000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Software Development', 'Web Design', 'Web Development', 'Freelance'] |
What you learn when someone in sick! | So someone close to me was recently sick.
This made me think that if all of your revenue and money making relies on you and your personal efforts when your sick that comes to a hard stop. And each day that passes you lose money.
This is totally true for all of you who are performers, in bands or are singer songwriters, if you can’t play you don’t get paid right!
So what is the solution, well back it the day it was called “mailbox money”, meaning a pay check that arrived in the mail for stuff done in the past such as song royalties, licensing fees and other residual incomes.
Now, I know all of you that are brand new are going to say but I have not got any of that, its ok cause I ‘m working on a way for you all to be able to have revenue all the time even when you don’t or can’t play.
Let me explain…
So you’re a brand new music artist, you record a track and make a video what now — in the old way you would would seek to play a ton of gigs to promote the track and try to sell merch and hope the clubs paid you at least enough for food and gas to the next gig.
But suppose I told you there was a way to invest in yourself and make residual income from this track and video and have it build up so that you got paid every month and then had enough for the next track and video and so on. Even getting to the point where you with be able to produce an album and still continue receiving revenue.
How does it work and how much does it cost to get started — well lets assume you have a track and a video which are both strong and well produced after all no matter what you have to have good music. Then we work with you to set up a marketing campaign that seeks to use paid ads to drive video views and audio plays so that you earn streaming revenue which also enables you to make back end sales of music, merch and even tickets to shows all while making money even if your not playing a ton of shows.
Bottom line, with a good track and a video and about $3,000 to launch the campaign, I can set up it up so that you will make around $6,000 a month in streaming revenue and if you recycle some of the money it will continue every month without additional investment by you.
Are you interested to know more…
Until we talk again… | https://medium.com/new-music-lives/what-you-learn-when-someone-in-sick-d98c27cf5404 | ['Paul K Saunders'] | 2018-12-10 15:42:17.711000+00:00 | ['Singer Songwriter', 'Music', 'Indie Music', 'Music Production', 'Music Marketing'] |
No More Website Rescues, Please | No one wants to be the person who invested hundreds of thousands of their company’s dollars into a new website, app or digital asset, and then have it fail to do what it was built to do.
Even fewer people want to be the ones to then tell their management team that the project needs even more investment — sometimes as much as the initial expenditure — to fix the problems or worse, start over.
In the web industry, we call this a rescue. They are every bit as horrible as they sound, but there’s good news. They can be prevented.
Sure, we all strive to get it right the first time. When it comes to web projects, it’s easy to be swayed by beautiful design, or set aspirations for your project that the CMS you are using could never achieve. Rescues are not just about fixing a mistake; they are also vital in identifying missed opportunities.
Getting it right is a simple process. Before starting a project, especially one of such significance, answer two questions:
What’s your business strategy?
What do you need your users to do?
A straightforward discovery session helps reveal these intertwined goals. More importantly, it opens a discussion about business strategy.
To avoid a rescue:
Define goals, user types and target audience
Understand if consumption is happening on mobile vs. desktop
Determine where referrals come from and know what actions users should take.
What do you want to achieve as a business and what do you want your users to do when they get to your site?
Organizations that are purposeful about their digital business tools understand the mix of business strategy with web strategy. They create intention.
Would you invest with a financial advisor without establishing retirement goals? Hire a public relations agency without communicating your marketing strategy? The discovery phase is critically important. It’s also easy to ignore.
Why?
Building a web asset is much easier than ever before. You don’t need deep skills or experience to build a website. There are templates for all sorts of web properties. You can launch an attractive site at a low cost.
Look and feel is cheap. Purpose is not. On the surface, a site can do what the project asks. But without strategy and goals, how do you ever know if your project is successful?
Think the above happens only to the small business with a $20,000 website? No. Rescues happen to businesses of all sizes and budgets from small to large.
Key tips to avoid a website rescue:
Work with a firm or internal team with strong development chops — the right coding helps avoid a lot of potential issues.
If your team are Joomla or WordPress experts, don’t expect them to understand how to successfully create a new site or complementary digital assets in Drupal. If your project specs call for Drupal or another CMS that can support complex, enterprise-level web projects, use an expert in that CMS.
We all like to stretch ourselves, developers included. Your half-a-million-dollar database is not the place to experiment.
Get all stakeholders involved in discovery. The day before launch is not the time to get the founder’s opinion on the project.
A key tenet of the purposeful web is objectivity. Every component of your website spec should serve a purpose. It’s like having a family based on the number of bedrooms in your house — you don’t need to fill every room. With your web project, just use what you need to meet your goals. Don’t be frustrated by the discovery phase. It can take a while but helps make the rest of the process flow smoothly.
Projects that rush toward creating site pages just to have a tangible result are inviting failure. Objectivity helps justify the investment of time and money that discovery requires. When objectivity is applied and goals are defined, every action happens because it helps meets those goals and helps solve your business challenges and needs.
For enterprise-level projects, we rely on Drupal; the more complex the data model behind a project and the more moving parts involved, the more that can go wrong. Drupal’s value allows you to build complicated back-end models AND beautiful and functional front-end designs. Drupal done well guides your users, automating processes and diminishing the likelihood that a user gets lost or performs the wrong action.
For large-scale web projects, the answer to one more question may help determine if you are investing the right funds, establishing clear goals and using the most relevant CMS: Do you need your site to DO something or just say something?
The burden of working toward the purposeful web does not reside solely with the client. Developers must share the burden. We believe the web development industry must:
Insist on a discovery phase to start a project.
Work with a CMS that aligns with your expertise, and pass on a project when it does not.
For every element your clients believe they need, ask why. You’ll be amazed at how strategic that one little question can be.
Test exhaustively — find the flaws before your client (or your client’s customer) and fix them.
If a complex app or website is an integral part of your business, follow the counsel above. And if you still need a rescue, have the courage to make the appropriate fixes. Invest appropriately to create an asset that meets your business goals. The web is a powerful tool for complex businesses, and the purposeful web exists for those companies that must have engaged users.
Don’t settle for getting what you want. Get what you need. | https://medium.com/the-purposeful-web/no-more-website-rescues-please-9ff7c52d1f32 | [] | 2017-06-09 14:12:58.167000+00:00 | ['Rescue', 'CMS', 'Drupal', 'Digital Marketing', 'Web Development'] |
Swift advanced charts from scratch | Simple chart
I will skip the part this creating and setting up the project — we all know how to do that.
Create a subclass of UIView and name it BarChart.
Inside the class we create 2 enums:
PeriodType: We going to use this to manage different types of input data. This enum has spacing value, this will be used to space our bars from each other so it looks good. ChartType: This one I created because my class handles different chart types with different UI, in this article we gonna focus only on multiColor. But anyway it’s always good to have some place for customization and extension.
Also we add setup function, we will use this function to create out chart, and change it if needed. And again, you can see that there is to different options for the chart, but forget about doubleColor for now.
Then we extend our class with some more futures:
Color: This enum will be used to paint our chart, I use here my custom colors. You can use yours, or take this ones from github project. DataPoint: That’s a model that will contain needed data and values
DataPoint:
Label: X value label that you want to show under the bar Value: actual value of the bar Color: contains color for the bar, so each bar can actually be different color ComplexValues: this is important one. It’s a variable for our future, advanced chart. It contains additional values for the bar, those which we will be showing on top of main bar. It’s a array of tuple (CGFloat, Color). I picked this types, so I can easily customize each single bar how I want. And it’s also sorted by colors, so no matter each values are passed in — color ordered always the same.
Okay, finally our main function
In first 4 lines we simply get values and calculate spacing and width for our bars. Then let’s take a look a some lines in the loop:
Get the percent from maximum value from the array. This is done, so biggest value always will have highest bar. Here we calculate line height for the current bar. There is tricky condition: (percent > 0 ? percent : 2 ). I did this, so if value is 0, bar will still be visible, otherwise it will look like a gap. Calculate X for the value depending on it’s index. And finally create rect for our bar with values we’ve calculated earlier. Then create Path from this rect with rounded corners. I called variable endPath and not just path for a reason, will get back to it latter. At the end we just create layer and set path to it. And add our new bar layer to main layer of our view.
Now, let’s setup our view controller to check out we achieved so far. I add BarChart in storyboard and Segmented control as well. You can do it programmatically with you want, doesn’t matter. Here is how my VC looks:
So few things about ViewController:
Take a look at segmentAction function: depending on selected segment, it calls setup function of barChart with needed count of DataPoints. This function uses randomDataPoints function, I created it to simply get needed amount of dataPoints for my chart.
And here is what we got so far:
Not bad! Let’s add some more colors now!
But before we jump back to code again, let’ me explain the idea behind my implementation. This is actually quite important!
Let’s take for example a bar that holds value of 100. Now we don’t care about it’s height inside a view bound! We just have a bar with value of 100, and height X. Now we want to add one more color on top of it and we want it to represent 25% of total value. Then we have to pass value of 25 to it. Makes sense right? All idea of this chart, is that main bar(blue) — is 100 % of all values inside the bar. Additional colors just represent some percent of total value. So all values of additional colors combined can not be more then value of main(blue) bar. I hope is more less clear with my amazing English :)
Now let’s continue
Bar with multiple colors
Now we add this peace of code inside for loop in scheduleMultiColor function:
Create variable that will hold Y axes offset, so we don’t lay our new layers on top of each other. Calculate line height. As I sad, values for extra layer are just a percent of total value. So we calculate it’s height with this idea. There is also min() function, just to make sure there is no way our extra layer will be higher then main one. Calculate Y position. Since we want our sublayers to lay from top of the bar, we need to subtract it’s value from height of main bar. And then we add the Y offset.
Then we do the same we did before. Create path, add to layer and add this layer as sublayer to our bar layer. Don’t forget to increase Y position offset.
Now let’s add this functionality to ViewController:
We need to change randomDataPoints function a little bit, so it provides additional values to the chart. This is how function looks now:
Just in case you need some clearance, here is what we do:
Now we generate and store total value for the bar inside randomValue variable. Then we fill complexValues with array of 3 tuples. First one will represent 1/4 of the total value, second — 1/6 and third — 1/8. So together they suppose to be half of total value.
Let’s see what we got:
Nice! Now let’s add animations that we all love !
Animation
Before we start to add animations right to our chart, let’ create some helpers for it.
Here is a helping struct for animations. It also contains some functions we are not going to use. But I decided maybe it will be useful to you anyway.
And extension for CALayer:
This extension uses previously created Animation struct.
Now we just need to add couple lines of code to make our chart alive.
Remember that I was naming our rects and paths with prefix End ? Here is why! To animate path, first we need to create bar with path which has height equal to 0. And then change this path to final one with animation.
So after little refactoring of function for this purpose it looks like this:
Now you see, firstly we create 0 height bar, and then we animate it just with one line of code ! Also, take a look at how we animate extra layer, to make our multiple layers animate one after another, we need to add this peace of code: delay: 0.5 + (0.3 * Double(index)). Like this each layer will start to animate right after previous one.
And here is the result:
Full code you can find in my gitHub repo here: https://github.com/Kolch/Charts
I hope your really enjoined it and found it useful for yourself!
Today I just showed you one of many charts I did from scratch! If you liked it and if you want me to show some more, let me know in the comments.
And if you leave with some claps I’ll really appreciate it! :) | https://blog.devgenius.io/swift-advanced-charts-from-scratch-c784971eacb8 | ['Alexey Kolchedantsev'] | 2021-03-21 21:10:56.994000+00:00 | ['From Scratch', 'Bar Chart', 'Swift', 'Charts', 'Animation'] |
Entry #4 | Entry #4
12/23/20
3:49 pm
Welp I have a covid scare. Was out with some friends, dad calls a friend and says he has covid, dad and son have contact, yada-yada-yada. So there goes christmas. It’s alright, I’m not much of a family man anyway. I don’t imagine myself having one in the future, maybe a girlfriend, but not a wife. I like the solo life.
I am kinda going broke. It’s crazy how fast that happens. One week you have hundreds of dollars to spend, the next you can’t afford a DoorDash.
I hate how soft people have been getting these days. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate for harassment or bullying (unless its on a younger sibling), but people have been crazy these days. I guess times are changing, but you really have to be careful with what you say.
I will be bored for the next weeks from covid and winter break, so I have chosen to skip all important things and to just be lazy and play Minecraft. It’s a simple life I live.
Feeling: Bored, Unmotivated, Calmed | https://medium.com/@spencersinclaire28/entry-4-8d16a63906 | [] | 2020-12-23 23:55:47.295000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Lifestyle', 'Teen'] |
Is it Possible to Become Happier? | While studying at UC Berkeley, I came across a list of “top courses to take” and made it a priority to add at least one to my schedule per semester. The one I was looking forward to the most was “Human Happiness” offered by Professor Dacher Keltner, the founder of the Greater Good Science Center and a world-renowned expert on human emotion. Even though it took 3 weeks of being on the waitlist, I was happy to finally be admitted to the class.
One of the first pieces of literature we focused on was “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky. Sonja started the book by asking a simple question: “Is it possible for human beings to become happier?” She goes on to explain that several factors determine our happiness; you start with a set point of happiness that determines approximately 50% of your happiness level. This setpoint is the genetically determined baseline for our happiness that we are bound to return to. What this means is that not only are some people predisposed to being happier than others in life, these same individuals will also revert to their baseline happiness even after major setbacks or tragedies in life.
What’s surprising is that Sonja correlates only 10% of our happiness to life’s circumstances. Indeed, components such as income and marital status that a lot of people think are tied very intimately to our overall happiness level have very limited bearing on it.
The most important takeaway from the book for me was that the remaining 40% of our happiness is tied to intentional activity. That means that we have control over how happy we feel depending on how we think about situations and what we choose to do in our daily lives. The way I like to think about these findings is that while it has predetermined components attached to it, at the end of the day, happiness is a choice. We can choose to be happier. We can choose the job that satisfies us to our core rather than the higher-paying job that we will dread commuting to every day. We can choose to add daily workouts or meditation breaks to our schedule to feel more refreshed before or after our workdays. When evaluating a stressful situation, we can choose to approach it from a more positive perspective or shift our focus. We can choose to surround ourselves with people who give us good vibes rather than drain our energy.
We need to choose to be happier, and not just because being happy feels good. Happier people are not only more sociable, cooperative, and productive, they are also more resilient in the face of hardship and even have stronger immune systems. Having this in mind, why don’t you set yourself a brand new challenge: create a list of things that give you joy and happiness and find ways to integrate them into your schedule in a concrete manner. A great way to do this is through productivity and habit-tracking apps like Insumo! We just launched our app, so go ahead and download it now! | https://medium.com/insumo/is-it-possible-to-become-happier-93f7ac81b7f6 | ['Ceylan Ersoy'] | 2021-09-09 13:23:10.957000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Happiness', 'Happiness In Life', 'Habits', 'Happy'] |
The White Man’s Cruelty | Denied the right to basic necessities — Equiano watches as the white crew throw food into the ocean in jest of the starving slaves
Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash
Equiano’s journey to America is about to begin. It’s a journey fraught with peril. But he must first be introduced to the slave ship’s ‘hospitality.’
“I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation(stench) in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything.”
All hope of being treated kindly was gone. Death was a better option than what he had to endure…
“I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely.”
He decided he would rather die than face this cruelty…
“I had never experienced anything of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side,..
Whipping and constant watching by the white crew became his new lifestyle…
“But I could not, the crew watched us closely, lest we leaped into the water: I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating.”
Equiano wished he could sink into the ocean and end his misery…The fish had freedom to roam wherever they wished. His freedom had been violently taken away.
He was not allowed the comfort of sharing food leftovers with his new masters…They would rather throw the food into the ocean than give it to the slaves…
“Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much happier than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs. Every circumstance I met with served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions and my opinion of the cruelty of the white people.
One day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on the deck, rather than give any of them to us to eat as we expected, they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again. We begged and prayed for some as well as we could, but in vain, some of my countrymen, being pressed by hunger, took an opportunity, when they thought no one saw them, of trying to get a little privately (stealing the food); but they were discovered, and the attempt procured them some very severe floggings. -
They got thrashed for wanting to stay alive….
Read on tomorrow as Equiano experiences the perils of the sea… | https://medium.com/@augustinehabenga/the-white-mans-cruelty-ca65076a73da | ['Augustine Habenga'] | 2021-09-16 14:12:18.535000+00:00 | ['Black History', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism', 'African American', 'Race'] |
China: The Greatest Enemy To Our Liberties | Why Is China Dangerous
The list of crimes against humanity committed by China in the 21st century is growing. More than ever, it’s becoming evident that its culture is incompatible with the ideals of the Western world, namely individual freedom. The violations of human rights in China are indicative of a culture that is lagging behind the well-established norms of equality and social justice, privileges that we, Westerns, too often take for granted. While we indulge in our liberties to speak and act freely, express ourselves, support minorities and deprivileged groups of people through inclusion, and have a fundamental right to influence our political system through the democratic process, communist systems like China flip things around and prioritize the common good over individual’s life.
Communist systems, like the one in China, or the former Soviet Union, even former Yugoslavia, feed on the idea that people want to be taken care of. Here comes the idea of the state guarantees: the government will take care of you in exchange for your freedom. You become a (modern-era) slave to a system that feeds off of your hard labor.
In theory, socialism is a lovely idea. Collective work will produce enough resources that can be equally distributed among people, to each according to their needs. In practice, this transforms into communism, which depletes hardworking citizens of their personal achievements, which now become achievements of the state. Competition, in communism, is impossible, as those who are better and more valuable in the job market will ultimately fall short in gaining recognition for their skills, talent, and hard work.
It doesn’t take much for people to realize they are being exploited, and revolt against a tyrannical government is imminent. The only way the government can prevent that is by selectively exposing the information to people, limiting the external influence, and punishing dissidents. We see all of this happening right now, as we speak, in China. And this is what the communist system in this country is guilty of.
Western Consumerism Fuels Communist Machine
I had a Huawei phone before the brand expanded to a ubiquitous provider of smartphones and network devices. There was a site called PandaWill (unfortunately it seems like their e-commerce business no longer exists), which provided us with cheap smartphones and other electronics from Chinese manufacturers.
And it was perfect for us, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, in one of the second world countries in the EU, as we looked at smartphones as “simple commodities”, buying cheaper alternatives to Samsung and Nexus Android devices, or especially overpriced Apple hardware, seemed like a great idea at the time. After all, you were paying for the same hardware.
Today, I see this as the beginnings of China’s success in the global market, especially in emerging economies and second/third world countries, Chinese smartphones brought exactly the same products for fraction of the price. China mastered the art of stealing intellectual property, modifying it, and with the help of cheap (exploited) labor, they managed to massively manufacture their devices.
In the case of US or EU companies, you did pay a higher price, but you paid the price of innovation. Look at the technological advances that the American big tech companies brought us with IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle, …
Now, look at China. Formally Huawei, nowadays Xiaomi, you have a surge of highly performant mobile devices for a fraction of a price you would otherwise pay, same hardware, same software, only different brand. You’re buying a Xiaomi device because it’s cheaper than a Pixel. And this is how western consumerism fuels the communist machine.
Am I blaming China for that? Of course not, that’s how we, consumers, were lured into their ecosystem of cheaper, equally performant hardware and software, which is known to expose our information to the Chinese government. If Huawei runs our internet infrastructure, you can be positive that the information is not kept private from the prying eyes of their country. This has been proved multiple times.
On the other hand of the aisle, you have American big tech companies, like Google and Facebook, paying enormous fines for their malpractices. Personally, I condone their behavior and believe the fines were largely justified. But the same, if not even worse, should happen to China as well. In 2019, President Donald Trump has opened up the conversation about that by placing Huawei on something called an Entity List. This government action prohibits all US companies, including Google, from collaborating with Huawei. This forced Huawei to develop their own operating system, application store, and they had to invest large amounts of money into marketing campaigns that attempted to mitigate the effects of a negative image painted about them. This cost the company, and consequently China, lots of resources. It temporarily pushed them back, but the question is for how long.
Information Control Is Warfare At Its Finest
“The Great Firewall” is the finest example of information control in modern human history. Chinese attempts to censor information containing “anti-government propaganda” are becoming meticulous and technically sophisticated. As per Wikipedia, the firewall is technically operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which is the entity in charge of translating the Communist Party of China’s will into technical specifications.
Many young people in China have little idea about the existence of American and European tech companies. Because they cannot access their services without tools such as VPN, which is by the way prohibited in China, their notion of the “internet” is much different than ours.
Reading through an article published in The Independent in 2018 was truly mind-blowing. Here’s a little excerpt from it:
Two economists from Peking University and Stanford University concluded this year, after an 18-month survey, that Chinese college students were indifferent about having access to uncensored, politically sensitive information. They had given nearly 1,000 students at two Beijing universities free tools to bypass censorship but found that nearly half the students did not use them. Among those who did, almost none spent time browsing foreign news websites that were blocked.
“Our findings suggest that censorship in China is effective, not only because the regime makes it difficult to access sensitive information, but also because it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place,” the scholars wrote.
Indeed, the Chinese misinformation project is working. By counting on people’s gullibility, one can brainwash them into the illusion that the filtered information is enough. Consequently, people do not object or be inquisitive enough to explore the world outside of the boundaries.
Conclusions
A much more sinister outcome is a society that does not question the regime, does not object to it, and isn’t aware of the same concept of freedom as we are. For them, freedom is fulfilling duties to the communist party and being taken care of by the second-largest economy in the world. This is why communism is so appealing to the Chinese people.
It’s exploitation under the slogan of “working for the common good”, stripping people of their individual freedom and brainwashing them into believing no such freedom is necessary for a comfortable and sustainable life. Of course, China can allow themselves to do so when their machine is powered by Western consumerism and their omnipresent appearance in the world economy. | https://medium.com/@joebrotha/china-the-greatest-enemy-to-our-liberties-427a4aa91c9 | ['Joe Brown'] | 2020-12-26 09:32:39.912000+00:00 | ['Threat', 'Europe', 'Human Rights', 'USA', 'China'] |
How to Keep Boundaries While Working From Home | Now that we’re well into working from home, some of us may find ourselves working more as compared to when we went into the office everyday. The physical act of actually leaving the office, paired with the commute home, created the separation needed to feel like our workdays were ending and our personal time was beginning. With nothing to break up our work-to-home life flow, it feels like we’re taking less time for ourselves, even though our work environments may be more comfortable than they’ve ever been. (Shout out to jogging suits). In this edition of Office Hours, we share a few tips that will help you break up work and personal time — whether it’s just finding a way to end the day, taking a staycation, or even actually getting away.
Set timers and alarms
A lot of us would never get out of bed without the extra push of an alarm. Work has a way of consuming us often to the point where we lose track of time. Setting timers and alarms for our tasks and breaks while at home can help us feel more productive with small goals to work toward. And for those who place their alarm across the room to ensure they get out of bed, you can do the same to make sure you get off your couch and stretch in order to continue your day.
In addition to the occasional stretch and keeping tasks on track, alarms are important indicators that help us reclaim time. They can signal when it’s time to eat lunch, give mom that call back you’ve been promising, or send along the email about the missing online order that was on your mind. If only for a split second, alarms and timers help arrest our attention to give us a moment of reprieve from the grind of a work day.
Schedule or block off time
Whenever an important meeting comes up we schedule the time to give it our undivided attention. We add vacations and out of the office reminders to our calendars so our coworkers know we’re unavailable. So why wouldn’t you do the same for important tasks or errands that need to be completed while working from home?
Much like setting alarms, calendar blocks provide clear parameters around your availability. If it’s on your calendar, it’ll make your colleague think twice before scheduling that meeting or give you much needed time to complete work when you’re on a tight deadline.You could even schedule a fake commute to help you create boundaries. Doing this is also good practice in creating intentional habits about how our time is used or shared with others.
Turn off notifications
Technology is a wonderful thing, especially during these unprecedented times! We’ve been able to stay connected like never before, but that also means we’re a little too available sometimes. However, we can use that same technology to unplug. Dig into your settings on your apps to set timers for your notifications. Set up parameters for your email with away messages. Let technology help you disconnect and block out things that take away from personal time.
Set yourself as “away” on Slack, hold off on answering emails after hours, put your phone on do not disturb — use all the tools (and technology) at your disposal to help you step away. Urgent requests are just that, but if it doesn’t need immediate attention you can get to that notification in the morning. This is also an exercise in restraint. Many of us have the urge of clearing notifications, but if we don’t check those instincts, it makes creating clear boundaries more difficult — especially with our work devices in arms reach around the clock.
Create an off-time itinerary
While we don’t recommend planning out every minute of every day (unless that’s helpful to you, no judgement here), it can be beneficial to create an itinerary for your personal time. Maybe you want to catch up on a favorite show, exercise, or take a much needed nap. Allowing yourself to physically write out the activities you want to partake in in your off-time will give you something to look forward to.
It also gives you the chance to continue to foster your interests that extend beyond work. With many of us working remotely, taking time to ourselves can, oddly enough, help us grow relationships with our coworkers. Whether it’s talking about the most recent episode of The Walking Dead, another virtual award show, or a new dish you tried to make, sharing our personal interests can help us connect with colleagues on a deeper level. And as we strive to create boundaries around how we spend time on work, this can play a huge part in using relationship building to alleviate that.
Communicate with your boss and team
Lastly, we need to make sure that we communicate. Communication is key when it comes to establishing boundaries between work time and personal time. We get that things can come up last-minute and sometimes those have to be dealt with immediately, but don’t be afraid to ask “can this wait until tomorrow?” Having open communication with your team and supervisors can help you establish your work-from-home boundaries in order to respect each other’s time. If you lead a team, you want team members to feel empowered to make decisions when you’re unavailable, and it’s also a helpful exercise in time management. So don’t be afraid to let your team and superiors know what your time boundaries are, and that you respect theirs as well. | https://medium.com/office-hours/how-to-keep-boundaries-while-working-from-home-6e5c6cddda89 | ['Venture For America'] | 2020-12-10 21:23:30.529000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Time Management', 'Work From Home', 'Work Life Balance', 'Remote Work'] |
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