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Submissions invited for PATA Face of the Future 2021	Submissions invited for PATA Face of the Future 2021 The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) is now accepting submissions for PATA Face of the Future 2021 PATA is a not-for-profit membership association that acts as a catalyst for the responsible development of travel & tourism to, from & within the Asia Pacific region. As part of its activities, the Association is dedicated to human capital development (HCD) across the broad spectrum of the travel & tourism industry. The primary focus of the Association’s HCD programme is the development of the ‘Young Tourism Professional’ (YTP) To highlight PATA’s commitment to HCD, the Association annually presents a special award & prize to an exceptional ‘rising star’ in the industry. All recipients of this prestigious award have exhibited initiative & leadership in the advancement of tourism as well as demonstrating commitment to the sustainable development of the Asia Pacific travel industry in line with PATA’s mission The PATA Face of the Future 2021 will be provided a speaking opportunity at the PATA Annual Summit 2021 & the PATA Youth Symposium, held in conjunction with the event Other benefits include: Recognition as the PATA Face of the Future 2021 including the use of a corresponding brand identity logo Opportunities to speak at other PATA events or partner events on behalf of PATA Global media exposure via PATA’s far-reaching communication channels Quarterly one-hour mentorship sessions with the PATA CEO Build your profile as a mentor for the PATA Youth Mentorship Programme to develop young tourism professional students in the region One blog post on the PATA Blog about your passion & journey to success “As the PATA youth network continues to growth & strengthen year after year, the Face of the Future award provides us with the perfect opportunity to showcase a young tourism professional who is making a meaningful & effective contribution to the responsible development of the travel & tourism industry,” said PATA CEO Dr. Mario Hardy “The PATA Face of the Future winner lends an important voice to young tourism professionals everywhere which will be extremely important as we look towards the responsible recovery of travel & tourism post-COVID-19.” Deadline for submissions is 15 Feb, 2021 For information about how to enter, eligibility & judging criteria, please visit https://www.pata.org/pata-face-of-the-future or email PATA Youth Ambassador, Ms Aletheia Tan at fof@PATA.org	https://medium.com/@siennylovesdrawing/submissions-invited-for-pata-face-of-the-future-2021-2b449113335b	[]	2020-12-01 08:17:58.469000+00:00	['Travel', 'Travel Tips', 'Travel Writing', 'Tourism', 'Traveling']
My Spyvio Bonuses	Good day fellas, Spyvio, is a software which will help internet marketers, affiliate marketers and product owners to scale up by spying and getting and insight on top competitors ads, sales funnels and emails. I’ll be doing a full review on youtube shortly and I’ll update you with a link to watch the review. Also, these are bonuses you will get when you purchase Spyvio from these custom link https://jvz4.com/c/1667539/362047 . Everything here is worth more than $1500 and you’re getting them today for free if your use that link to get spyvio. The launch webinar is today 10AM Eastern time. Attendees will be winning free copies of Spyvio. Email Survey Funnel Video training that teaches you how to successfully run an email survey funnel to collect valuable feedback from your leads or customers. It also helps you segment your email list to send relevant, targeted emails for higher ROI. Email List Building Strategy Email List Building is the key to your success. This training will provide you the best strategies to build your list and create a long-term income source. Never have to worry about sales conversions and earnings ever again! 15 DFY Facebook Ads Get 15 of our best Facebook Ads and use it for your campaign, complete with editable PSDs. My Ad Rotator Software that rotates custom text ads on an unlimited number of web pages.Simply pop in your ads to the tool and you instantly get the code for you to insert exactly where you want your ads to appear on your web pages. You then get ads that are likely to generate you far more revenue than you earn with random network ads. Fly-In Ads Creator A Simple, Beautiful, Effective, Sales Magnet That Grabs Your Visitors’ Pleasant Attention and Demands ACTION And Makes Them BUY! Create Your Own Fly-In Ads in Seconds With Fly-In Ads Creator! Everyone knows that fly-ins are over 5 times more effective than pop ups. Pop up ads are no longer effective. Why? 223 High Demand PLR Niche E-BOOKS Over 223 high demand PLR e-books in several niches that you could use as your own bonuses for affiliate marketing, You could also rebrand and sell these e-books as yours since they is a PLR License on them. Remember, everyone wins with PLR. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!	https://medium.com/@abasmanking/my-spyvio-bonuses-acffb3e878b3	['Abasiama Udoeyop']	2020-12-27 04:34:42.942000+00:00	['Affiliate Marketing', 'Product Development', 'Sales Funnels', 'Sales', 'Internet Marketing']
The Compounding Interest of Good Habits	The Quick Version Compounding Interest of Habits = The improvements in process and results that come from doing the same activity repeatedly over an extended period of time. Compounding interest of habits seems to work best for activities that are: Durable (they can be recorded in some way and thus shared) Field independent (the habit can be generalized to help in many areas of life) The Long Version Before we dive into the “story” part of this article, I’d like to define compounding interest in the realm of habits, as I think it’s not a 1 to 1 transfer from the world of finance. Compounding Interest of Habits = The improvements in process and results that come from doing the same activity repeatedly over an extended period of time. The Inspiration \| My Compounding Habit After a few blog posts, I started realizing that instead of explaining my ideas over and over again to different friends, I could send them all my article. Not only that, as I began roaming the forums of the internet, I found that as I gave out advice I could attach my articles for a more in depth look at the topic I was covering. What really caught my eye about this compounding interest, in numeric form, was my view count. A few months ago, after little attention to my Medium, my monthly view count dwindled to below 100 per month. When I started writing an idea a day, my reads shot up. Unlike before, where I’d have to promote like crazy to get any reads at all, the sheer volume of my writing meant that every story resonated with someone. The cumulative totals, 4 reads here, 5 reads there, started to add up. When you’ve put out 40 stories, that makes for nice numbers (for me at least), even if none of them goes “big”. Even better, the compound value of my previous stories grew as I wrote more and more. My past writing, forgotten out of neglect, started to get reads as well. These new stories I was writing were acting as entry points for new readers, driving them to old content as well as new. The result? My views per month has quadrupled, up to 400 a month and my “reads” are higher than ever before. In the past, when I’d tried to promote the small number of stories I wrote, I’d see a temporary spike in numbers. While the numbers spiked, few people read what I wrote. So while I was reaching lots of people, little of what I said resonated. Relying on organic reach now, I’m finding that more people are reading my stuff, even as a similar amount are viewing my posts. All this is due to the compounding interest of the daily writing habit. Aside from the sheer results, the compound interest has also shown up in improvements in my process. Since I can now use old articles as references, I am starting to develop templates and guidelines which speed up my writing and reduce my cognitive load. Further, I am starting to create different categories (Book Club, Shark Stank, General) that further focus my lens and help me to write better, faster. All these improvements have come from compound interest, or as I defined earlier, the power of doing the same thing repeatedly for an extended period of time.	https://medium.com/jimmys-ten-cents/the-compounding-interest-of-good-habits-8ac098f5d641	['Jimmy Cerone']	2020-12-25 13:42:16.370000+00:00	['Tim Ferriss', 'Ideas', 'Compounding Interest', 'Habits', 'Productivity']
What are On-Demand Feature Environments?	On-Demand feature environments In this current world, when people are moving towards trunk-based development patterns and using feature flags to have frequent deployments to reduce the time to market, Is it worth to think about having feature environments? Short Answer: YES!!!! Continuous Delivery has always been a hot topic where we endlessly discuss and continuously improve to reach our products to the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way. This article brings continuous delivery to the next level by introducing a concept of “feature environments”. A feature environment is an on-demand environment to test your “short-lived” features independently and without any dependencies before being deployed to production. In this approach, you can run a dedicated test on your features before being merged into the master w/o blocking any of your team members’ ongoing works. These feature environments will be spun up on-demand when you create a feature branch from the master in your GitHub repository and the environment will be destroyed once the feature development is completed. Thus you will always have a clean production-ready master branch that can be deployed anytime to production. Why Feature Environment? Mostly, you see a setup with a shared staging environment, where a lot of features are mashed together, often motivated by an ineffective release process, making the team bulking features for every release. Feature environments enable you to have a staging environment for every single short-lived feature branch you create. This means that QA for a feature can access and test that feature separately without hindering other development works. Faster Delivery — Chunks Using the concept of Feature environments, you won’t have the hassle of cherry-picking or worrying about untested features deployed to production, because all the features (or feature branches) that are merged to master branch are been tested in feature environments. Once these feature branches are merged to master, it kicks starts the automated regression test suite to run against the master branch to make sure the existing features are also working as intended. Thus features are not pilled up in the master or staging environment for 2 weeks until all the features are ready to be released to the production. We have feature flags, isn’t it? Why do we need both feature flags & feature environments? Lets first understand what is Feature Flags! Feature flags allow you to decouple features rollout from code deployment. Or in other words, it is the ability to decouple deployment from release and achieve fine-grained control of when new code gets exposed and to who allows teams to move faster with less risk. At the same time, the Feature Environment is a feature branch hosted on as a separate environment enabling QA to test that feature separately before merging into master or deploying it to production. Thus if you have to release several enhancements of an exiting feature in a sprint or if you have some hotfixes to be tested and deployed, you can best utilize the feature environments. Feature flags will be best suited for bigger initiatives with target release dates, where you can turn off the features are continue deployments to production w/o holding the code changes. Again to make it clear, feature flags are important or useful for having frequent deployments and feature environments will be more contributing to have quality releases. Do we need feature environments for all the features developed? Emm..not really! It doesn’t mean that each and every feature that is built needs to have a feature environment. A new initiative that is developed in phases probably doesn’t need to have a dedicated feature environment but it could be just behind feature flags. Having said that at the time of releasing this initiative, you can still utilize the feature environments. Below are the scenarios, you can best utilize feature environments. When you have to release several enhancements of an exiting feature in a sprint. To release bug and defect fixes in the application. Hotfix releases to production w/o hindering on-going developments of the team. Current Situation Below is the high-level pictorial representation of the current development process Big staging environment Highlights Team members develop features in their feature branches. Merges the feature branches to master branch and deploy to staging/non-production environment for QA. After QA’ing in staging, deploy to production. What are our pain points? Big staging environments. Untested codes in staging environments or master branch Testing or releasing a feature could be blocked by another buggy feature in the staging environment. Ideal Solution Below is the high-level pictorial representation of the ideal development process On-Demand Feature Environment Highlights Team members develop features in their feature branches. Each “git push” to a feature branch will deploy the latest code changes to dedicated isolated feature environments. Dynamically generated feature environments URLs are given to the team for testing. After QA’ing the feature, the Pull Request of that feature branch is merged to the master branch. What are the required changes from our current way of working? Below are the areas to change in order to achieve the feature environment concepts. Changes in Development Practices. Delivery Pipeline changes. Infrastructure Changes Below are the detailed explanations for each section. Changes in Development Practices In order to effectively start utilizing the feature environments, we need to have some amendments to the current development practices. 1.Naming convention of GIT branches — The important catch here is that the GIT branching name is the first decision point to have a feature environment associated with a feature branch. The feature branches with the prefix “feature-” can only have a feature environment associated with it; which gives you an option that if you don’t really want to have a feature environment you can use your existing naming convention. Samples:- Branch Name — feature-ACO-23 Feature Environment — https://feature-ACO-23.staging.xxx.com Branch Name — hotfix-ACO-24 Feature Environment — https://hotfix-ACO-24.staging.xxx.com 2.Complete Feature Testing before PR Merge — With this approach, we want to complete the testing of a feature developed in its respective feature environment before the Pull Request(PR) is merged to the master branch. Below are the action or steps for the PR process. - Once you create a “feature-” prefixed feature branch, a feature environment is dynamically spun up for you. - Each push you do to the feature branch will be deployed to the feature environment. - After the feature development, the PR should be raised for code review. - Once the code review is completed, leave a message in PR that it’s ready for Automation/Manual feature testing. - Now the feature testing will be carried out in the dedicated feature environments and the feedback is captured in the PR. - If all good, the PR should be approved(min of 2 approvals — code review & testing outcomes) and the feature branch is merged to master. 3.Merging & Deleting the GIT branch will shut down the Feature Environments — This will be the final step from the side of Continuous Integration point of view. Once the PR is merged and the branch is deleted, this will automatically remove or shut down the feature environment created from the respective feature branch. Again this is more into stressing the best practices and moreover housekeeping of your feature branches and environments. Delivery Pipeline changes As a reflection of the changes in the Continuous Integration part, below are the changes in the pipeline side. 1.New Delivery pipeline for Feature Environments — You will have a new pipeline in your CI tool dedicated to managing the build & deployment to your feature environments. 2.Stages in Feature-Based Delivery Pipeline — Below is the pictorial representation of the feature delivery pipeline and the stages involved in each feature pipeline. stages in feature pipeline 3. New serverless (Lambda) function to shutdown the Feature Environment — As mentioned before, the feature branches are merged back to `master` after the development, and testing is completed for that feature. After the merge, once the feature branch is deleted, the corresponding feature environment is also destroyed. Sample:- Merge branch to master -> Delete feature branch -> Auto trigger Lambda function to clean up the feature environment. Infrastructure Changes Certainly, we have to modify the current infrastructure and add new services to achieve the said functionalities. Below are the key areas involved in the infrastructure side. 1.Routing of feature Environments — The feature environment URL will be registered into the Route 53 and ALB, thus whenever developers hit the feature environment URL, then it will forward it to the corresponding ECS service. 2.Automate Deployment to Feature Environments — As mentioned previously, for each ‘git push’, the code is been deployed to the feature environment. Below are the configuration settings that are done in Buildkite for the same. 3.Removal of Obsolete Feature Environments — The logic behind the removal of the feature environments is invoking the GitHub webbook on the deletion of the feature branch which will invoke the Lambda function in AWS to delete the specific ECS service that is related to that branch. Remove obsolete feature environments Advantages Below are the benefits we are entertaining with this feature environment concept. Faster time to market Ensure the features released are tested and verified. No dependency to release features. Increasing product quality. Run experiments and spikes in isolated environments Hotfix’s doesn’t need to override the builds in the staging environment or block any other development works. No single Integration Testing Environment. Happier Teams Hope this helps you guys and wishing you all the success in your works! Cheers!	https://medium.com/techbeatly/what-are-on-demand-feature-environments-982eaa96fdd5	['Arun Surendran']	2020-09-22 15:15:15.712000+00:00	['Feature Flags', 'Feature Environments', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Ci Cd Pipeline', 'Continuous Integration']
How to Make Inexpensive Decor For Fall	Fall is the favorite time of year for many DIY-ers. It can be discouraging if you love to decorate but don’t have a ton of money to spend at the craft store. Here are some inexpensive projects you can make this fall that are also quick and easy. Mason Jar “Candles” Do you love the look of candles but don’t want to deal with the fire risk? Try putting some fake tea lights inside a mason jar. Before you do this, however, glue some fake leaves inside the jar. The result is an inexpensive, seasonal decoration that you’ll be able to use year after year. Apple Candles If you prefer to use real candles but don’t want to dish out the money, you can put tea light on top of apples. Simply scoop the top of the apple out to create a holder for your candle. If you want the apple to stay fresh, wash it with a mixture of water and apple cider vinegar. This decoration is (obviously) not one that will last until next year, but it’s a great way to decorate a table to a Fall party. Fall Garland Another project that you can create with minimal funds is a fall garland. Many dollar stores sell lights that you can wrap down staircases or place on mantels. To make these more festive, add some fake leaves — the more, the better. Chalk Painted Pumpkins If you want to decorate your home with pumpkins, but you’re sick of orange, try painting some plastic pumpkins. Chalk painted works the best. If you want to create a fun, “natural” effect, paint the pumpkin with a second coat that highlights it. The second coat isn’t meant to cover but, instead, to highlight the pumpkin. You can also do this with gourds. Burlap Wreath Fall is unofficially burlap season. You can create an entire wreath from burlap or tie a simple burlap ribbon on a grapevine wreath. If you want to spice it up, add some leaves or pinecones. You can also add some fake berries or anything else that reminds you of autumn. There you have — simple, quick, and inexpensive ways to decorate this fall. Happy crafting! This article was originally published on AlcidesSegui.net.	https://medium.com/@alcidessegui/how-to-make-inexpensive-decor-for-fall-c53035e351fd	['Alcides Segui']	2019-09-24 12:46:15.573000+00:00	['Fall', 'DIY', 'DIY Projects']
Automatically Generate Chart Colors with Chart.js & D3’s Color Scales	In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to use Chart.js and D3’s color scales to create a series of pie charts whose colors are computed automatically. Generating colors automatically can be tremendously useful for the following cases: You might have A ton of data points — Manually selecting colors for this data can be an absolute pain. (Think of a pie chart with 12 colors) — Manually selecting colors for this data can be an absolute pain. (Think of a pie chart with 12 colors) Data that is subject to change — Imagine hardcoding 6 color values because your dataset has 6 data points. Now an additional data point is introduced, and you have 7 data points. You’ll have to manually add a color for the new data point. — Imagine hardcoding 6 color values because your dataset has 6 data points. Now an additional data point is introduced, and you have 7 data points. You’ll have to manually add a color for the new data point. A desire to distribute your colors in a “visually equidistant” manner — This palette generator site explains that “visually equidistant” values tend to have different base hues. Often times, you’ll find yourself using a completely different set of colors depending on the number of data points you have. If you don’t know how to create those values, you typically go on a generator site like the one mentioned and copy the values into your code. Or, like me, you just suck at color theory (what, red, green, and purple don’t go together?) So I ended up being affected by all the cases above. I made the mistake of hardcoding 6 different color code sets depending on the length of the data (from 1–8 data points). My chart obviously broke down when there was more data. What’s worse was that I had so much config and conditional code just for this color data! Don’t make the mistakes I made! You might be thinking, well, what about gradients? There is this wonderful tutorial on setting up gradients with Chart.js, but you still need to choose some colors. What if you never needed to manually pick another hex code for your charts? Let’s dive in. 1. Set Up Your Workspace Open up your favorite text editor, and set up your workspace to follow a similar format: Here’s an explanation of the important directories and files: index.html (Where we will write HTML and JS code to create our chart) (Where we will write HTML and JS code to create our chart) utils (For helper functions, like color generating functions) (For helper functions, like color generating functions) styles (For CSS files) index.html Because we are writing everything in vanilla, client-side Javascript, we will import the relevant packages via a content delivery network. First, we will be importing the Chart.js library. Chart.js is an open-source Javascript charting library that uses HTML5 Canvas. <!-- Import Chart.js via CDN --> <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/chart.js@2.8.0/dist/Chart.min.js"></script> If you’re using NPM, you can install it via npm install chart.js Next, we will import D3’s Scale Chromatic Library. This library features a wonderful, diverse set of color scales. !-- Import D3 Scale Chromatic via CDN --> <script src="https://d3js.org/d3-color.v1.min.js"></script> <script src="https://d3js.org/d3-interpolate.v1.min.js"></script> <script src="https://d3js.org/d3-scale-chromatic.v1.min.js"></script> If you’re using NPM, you can install it via npm install d3-scale-chromatic Next, we set up our HTML and import a file called color-generator.js which lives in our utils directory. Lastly, we set up another <script></script> tag. This is where we'll place our chart configuration code. styles/app.css Here we place all of our styling code. You’ll see how certain elements, like .chart-container and #pie-chart are styled once we add them to our index.html file later. 2. Create Color Generating Functions First, we’ll need to introduce the concept of interpolation. D3’s Interpolate library is a good reference to learn more if you’re interested. Interpolation is essentially when you map a value in the domain [0, 1] to a value in a specific range. In this case, our range will be a set of color codes: Some D3 Color Scales While D3’s Scale Chromatic library provides many color scales, we will only be using their interpolate color scales (they’re the ones that start with “d3.interpolate…”). All of the interpolate color scales have a domain of [0, 1]. So what happens if you choose a number in this domain? If you choose 0.2, you will receive a color that falls at the 0.2 mark on the scale. Here’s an image to clarify: Interpolation using D3’s “d3.interpolateWarm” scale To interpolate a color based on our data set, we’ll need to first map our data set to the color scale range, [0, 1]. We do this by breaking down our dataset into intervals of length 1. EXAMPLE #1 Say we had a dataset of length 4. We’d need to map our dataset range, [0, 4], to the color scale’s range, [0, 1]. Data related information dataLength = 4; Color related information colorStart = 0; colorEnd = 1; colorRange = 1; We need to find the size of the color scale’s interval. Our dataset intervals look like: (0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (3, 4) The corresponding color intervals will look like: (0, 1/4), (1/4, 2/4), (2/4, 3/4), (3/4, 1) or (0, 0.25), (0.25, 0.5), (0.5, 0.75), (0.75, 1) We’re dividing the color scale’s range length, 1, by the dataset’s range length. 4 datapoints with color range [0, 1] (using “d3.interpolateWarm” scale) Now let’s try a more complicated example. EXAMPLE #2 Data related information dataLength = 4; Color related information colorStart: 0.25; colorEnd: 0.75; colorRange = 0.5; We want to map our dataset range, [0, 4], to the color scale’s range, [0.25, 0.75]. Dataset intervals: (0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (3, 4) -> Color Intervals: ? First we find the colorRange, which is 0.75 - 0.25 = 0.5. Notice that the intervalSize is colorRange / dataLength , so it is 0.5/4, or 0.125. Our scale starts at 0.25, so that’s our starting number (colorStart). Taking these two concepts into account, let’s build our color intervals: (0.25, (0.25 + (0 * 0.125))), (0.25, (0.25 + (1 * 0.125))), (0.25, (0.25 + (2 * 0.125))), (0.25, (0.25 + (3 * 0.125))) or (0.25, 0.375), (0.375, 0.5), (0.5, 0.625), (0.625, 0.75) 4 datapoints with color range [0.25, 0.75] (using “d3.interpolateWarm” scale) Our equation, as we move up the scale, becomes colorStart + (i * intervalSize) …where i represents the index of the data point. Note that we use the beginning of the interval as our color value. If you wanted to use the end of each interval, your equation would be colorStart + ((i + 1) * intervalSize) If we want to use the end of the scale as the start, we would move down the scale: colorEnd - (i * intervalSize) Taking these ideas into account, we can create a function to calculate a point in the range [0, 1] based on our dataset’s length. Remember intervalSize = colorRange / dataLength utils/color-generator.js Now that we understand how the colors are calculated, we can create an array of colors based on our data’s length (the number of data points). 3. Create Your Chart Now that we’ve got our color functions, we’ll focus on creating our chart. We’ll be creating a pie (or “doughnut” to be more accurate) chart for this tutorial. However, you can still apply these concepts across other charts (bar charts, etc.) We’ll create the chart in the “index.html” file because the necessary libraries will be imported there. I could place the libraries on the window (window.Chart = Chart), but I don’t want to go down that route. Just know that in a non-demo case, you’d likely want to place the following code snippets in a separate Javascript file. HTML Section — index.html In the body of the HTML portion of index.html, we’ll add a container for styling. Note that we’ll be mounting our pie chart to a “canvas” element. So let’s create that element and give an “id” attribute so we can later easily reference it. Javascript Section — index.html First, we’ll set up our createChart function that take in an id, the chart data, the requested D3 interpolate color scale, and our color range information. function createChart(chartId, chartData, colorScale, colorRangeInfo) chartId : String : String chartData : { data : Array, labels : Array } : { : Array, : Array } colorScale : Function (D3 interpolate color scale) : Function (D3 interpolate color scale) colorRangeInfo: { colorStart: Number, colorEnd: Number, useEndAsStart: Boolean } We’ll then grab our canvas element by using the inputted id. Then we’ll calculate the data’s length and pass it to our interpolateColors function. (Remember that we have access to these functions because we imported the color-generator.js file). We configure our charts according to Chart.js’ documentation. We specify the type of the chart, pass in the labels, pass in colors for the pie chart segments and segments on hover, and the chart data. Then we choose to make the chart responsive, specify that we don’t want a legend, and set the cursor to have the “pointer” style on hover. Next, we create a random number generator with min and max values to act as the range. We use this function to create dummy data. Now it’s time for us to set up our example parameters and pass them into our createChart function. I create an array of length 10, and for each data point, I generate a random number within the range [20, 110]. I generate labels that take the form “Label i”, where i is the index. I set the colorScale as d3.interpolateInferno . Lastly I specify the colorRangeInfo where I set the start and end of the interval (both values must be within 0 and 1) and choose if I want to use the end of the color scale as my starting point. Lastly, call your createChart function with the example parameters. If you open your index.html in your browser, you should see the following: 4. Mess Around With the Parameters (colorStart, colorEnd, useEndAsStart) We can mess around with the parameters mentioned above to produce various charts. Changing the Color Range In the previous example, I think the starting color is too dark. Let’s change the start value so that the colorRangeInfo object looks like const colorRangeInfo = { colorStart: 0.2, colorEnd: 1, useEndAsStart: false, } Changing the “colorStart” parameter Using the End of the Scale as the Start Change the colorRangeInfo object to look like const colorRangeInfo = { colorStart: 0.2, colorEnd: 1, useEndAsStart: true, } Setting the “useEndAsStart” parameter to true Various Combinations Feel free to check out more interpolate scales from D3 Scale Chromatic’s github page. Thanks for reading!	https://medium.com/code-nebula/automatically-generate-chart-colors-with-chart-js-d3s-color-scales-f62e282b2b41	['Amy Sitwala']	2019-11-20 03:18:06.324000+00:00	['Front End Development', 'Data Visualization', 'JavaScript', 'D3js', 'Charts']
Healthy sleep for your baby and child	baby sleep credit : todaysparent.com Sleep is very important to your child’s health and well-being. In fact, good sleep habits start from birth. Children who do not get enough sleep may have trouble functioning during the day. At night, they may find it hard to settle. How much sleep does my child need? Every child is different. Some sleep a lot and others much less. This chart is a general guide to the amount of sleep children need over a 24-hour period, including nighttime sleep and daytime naps. Infants (4 to 12 months old) 12–16 hours Toddlers (1 to 2 years old)11–14 hours Children (3 to 5 years old)10–13 hours Children (6–12 years) 9–12 hoursTeenagers (13–18 years old)8–10 hours Source: Recommended Amount of Sleep for Pediatric Populations: A Consensus Statement (American Academy of Sleep Medicine) Sleep Training Secrets: Babies (birth to 4 months) Newborns may sleep as much as 18 hours a day, for 3 to 4 hours at a time. It’s normal and healthy for babies to wake up during the night to feed. As your baby gets older, she will stay awake longer during the day and sleep for longer stretches at night. Babies, just like adults, need the right cues to learn when it is time to sleep. For example, if you always put your baby in her crib to sleep, she will learn that this is the place where she sleeps. This may not work right away, but over time, your baby will come to understand. baby sleep credit : ameliahunter.com Sometime after 3 months, your baby’s sleep habits will become more predictable and you can expect a more regular nap schedule. Trust your baby’s cues — she will let you know when she is tired. A sleep diary might help you to recognize her regular sleeping pattern. A naptime routine is a good idea. It could include a quiet cuddle and short story in a darkened room before it’s time to nap. Healthy sleep habits for your baby: An overtired baby has more trouble sleeping. Napping actually helps a baby to sleep better at night, so keeping your baby awake during the day will not help your baby sleep longer at night. Put your baby in bed when he is drowsy, but awake. Remember to put him to sleep on his back in his crib, on a firm, flat surface. Keep soft items like pillows and stuffed animals out of the crib. It’s okay to cuddle and rock your baby. You cannot spoil a young baby by holding them. A pacifier may comfort and help your baby to settle. However, it’s best not to start using a pacifier until breastfeeding is going well. Your baby will stir during the night. Give him a few minutes to try and settle on his own before going to him. Avoid stimulation during nighttime feedings and diaper changes. Keep the lights dim. Infants (4 to 12 months) At this age, babies sleep an average of 14 hours a day, but anything less or more can be normal for your baby. By 4 months, most babies need three naps a day; one in the morning, afternoon and early evening. Between 6 and 12 months, your baby will probably go from having 3 naps a day to 2 longer naps, in the morning and afternoon. Every baby’s napping needs are different. Some nap for as little as 20 minutes at a time, while others sleep for 3 or more hours. Healthy sleep habits for your infant: Maintain a regular daytime and bedtime sleep schedule as much as possible. A consistent bedtime routine is important. Many parents like to use the “3 Bs”: bath, book, bed. Don’t put your baby to bed with a bottle. This can lead to tooth decay. At around 6 months, if your baby wakes at night and cries, go check to see if there is anything wrong, such as being too cold or too warm, but don’t take him out of the crib. You can comfort him by stroking the forehead or talking softly to let them know you’re there. This helps your baby learn how to self-soothe, important steps toward falling back to sleep on their own. Toddlers (1 to 2 years) Most toddlers sleep between 11 and 14 hours in a 24-hour period. Healthy sleep habits for your toddler: It’s still important to keep a sleep schedule your child is familiar with. The routine you established during the first year is even more important for your toddler. Avoid naps that are too late in the day, because at this age, they can affect nighttime sleeping. Help your child wind down about half an hour before bedtime with stories and quiet activities. Be gentle but firm if your child protests. Keep the bedroom quiet, cozy, and good for sleeping, such as keeping the lights dim. Soft, soothing music might be comforting. Security items (such as a blanket or stuffed animal) are often important at this age. Children (3 to 5 years) Preschoolers typically sleep about 10 to 13 hours a day. As your child approaches 3 years old, she will probably drop to one nap a day, but many will still have a second nap at some point in the day. Some days she may need a nap, while other days she may not. Some children give up daytime naps altogether during this period. You can use that time — often after lunch — for quiet time for your child to read and relax. At this age, it’s common for children to have some sleep problems and to resist going to bed. They may also wake up during the night from nighttime fears or nightmares. Healthy sleep habits for your preschooler: Don’t give your child drinks with caffeine. Avoid screens before bedtime. Don’t allow tablets, televisions, computer or video games in the bedroom. Some children will try to delay bedtime. Set limits, such as how many books you will read together, and be sure your child knows what they are. Tuck your child into bed snugly for a feeling of security. Don’t ignore bedtime fears. If your child has nightmares, reassure and comfort her. What are some common sleep problems? Sleep deprivation : Some children don’t get enough sleep. If your child is fussy, cranky or has difficulty staying asleep at night it might be because he isn’t getting enough naptime or isn’t getting to bed early enough. : Some children don’t get enough sleep. If your child is fussy, cranky or has difficulty staying asleep at night it might be because he isn’t getting enough naptime or isn’t getting to bed early enough. Separation issues : Your child may have difficulty relaxing and going to sleep if he feels upset that you are not there. Try an extra long cuddle before bedtime, a security object such as a blanket or stuffed animal, or leaving her door open when you put her to bed. : Your child may have difficulty relaxing and going to sleep if he feels upset that you are not there. Try an extra long cuddle before bedtime, a security object such as a blanket or stuffed animal, or leaving her door open when you put her to bed. Nightmares: Most children will experience nightmares at one time or another. Nightmares can happen after a stressful physical or emotional event or can be caused by fever. Your child may call out to you for comfort. Talk calmly, cuddle and reassure your child. When should I talk to my doctor? Loud snoring : If your child regularly snores loudly, this can be a sign of a problem. : If your child regularly snores loudly, this can be a sign of a problem. Sleepwalking : Sleepwalking is a disorder where a child is partly awake, but not completely, during the night. Your child may sit up in bed and repeat certain movements, such as rubbing her eyes. She may get out of bed and walk around the room. When you talk to your child, she usually won’t answer you. If your child sleepwalks it is important that you ensure the area is safe. Gently guide your child back to bed without waking her. If the problem continues, contact your doctor. : Sleepwalking is a disorder where a child is partly awake, but not completely, during the night. Your child may sit up in bed and repeat certain movements, such as rubbing her eyes. She may get out of bed and walk around the room. When you talk to your child, she usually won’t answer you. If your child sleepwalks it is important that you ensure the area is safe. Gently guide your child back to bed without waking her. If the problem continues, contact your doctor. Night terrors: These are different from nightmares. Children with night terrors scream uncontrollably, may breathe quickly, and seem to be awake. If you wake your child, he’s likely to be confused, and may take longer to settle down and go back to sleep. Night terrors usually happen between the ages of 4 and 12, but can happen to children as young as 18 months old. Most children will outgrow them, but talk to your doctor if they persist. What if my child regularly has trouble falling asleep? Some children have trouble falling asleep on their own and can lay awake for long periods of time. This can be caused by too much screen time before bed, or caffeine from soda and energy drinks. If your child is watching TV or playing video games for long periods of time, try limiting screen time or cutting it out of the bedtime routine. Don’t allow your child to drink or eat anything with caffeine. Try doing relaxing activities before bed such as reading, listening to calming music, or laying in bed with your child talking quietly about her day. If these reasons aren’t the cause, talk to your doctor about other ways to help your child learn to fall asleep on her own.	https://medium.com/@vikasingle/healthy-sleep-for-your-baby-and-child-6e76dbc446fa	['Vikas Ingle']	2020-11-06 05:52:25.066000+00:00	['Baby Sleeping', 'New Born Baby', 'Baby Care', 'New Mom', 'Baby Sleep']
How Nate Convinced Me of the Importance of Warnock and Ossoff	Paint my dismay at Black entertainers like K__nye, excuse me, Kanye willing to throw in league with a racist and fascist that spent the entirety of his presidency vilifying and making the lives of people of color more difficult? Check. Paint my umbrage over Mitch McConnell and Republican Senators who thought installing a new conservative Supreme Court Judge over passing much needed stimulus in a pandemic? And in what universe does a single payment of $1200 mitigate a year’s worth of economic misery? Well… check to THAT too. So fast-forward to two weeks ago, with the loss of Donald Trump’s reelection bid already in my rear view mirror. With the pile of dead bodies steadily rising and an incredibly depressed economy, especially for Black people, things weren’t exactly looking UP, but with at least one dragon slain, things hadn’t gotten any worse. That’s when I got the text. It was from my friend Nate! He was familiar with my political paintings and asked if I intended to do something to promote Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. To be clear, I knew the importance of the runoff senatorial races in Georgia happening on January 5th 2021. After the presidential election, these two races were becoming the most important for Democrats. Winning the seats meant controlling the Senate. Here’s the thing, I appreciated the text from Nate, but I was ready to move on. In all honesty I was tired of the social/political works. They were emotionally draining. The pieces never came from a place of me WANTING to do them. But rather a NEED to do them. Say what you will about the year 2020, but history was unfolding… Not incrementally, but with lightning speed. I kinda felt duty bound to bear witness. To hope that the work would meet the moment. I Politely texted Nate back, and said no, I don’t think I would. I told him I missed him and to stay safe in New York City. But the races REALLY are important. Important on so many levels. I know Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff would be good for Georgia, certainly better than the woman trying to capitalize off a pandemic and trade off stocks to enrich her portfolio while simultaneously trying to restrict people’s healthcare. In a “whole” pandemic, as my friends would say. Certainly better than the dude who’s too scared to show up for a debate. Apparently he’s too scared to show for much of anything. And Black people in Georgia need their Senators to SHOW UP FOR THEM. As important as all that was, I was looking past the state of Georgia. I was embracing what the ramifications of a Democrat controlled Senate really meant. As much as I wished I were still living in New York City, for the moment I am a Virginian. As a result, I’ve had a front row seat as to what can be accomplished without major Republican obstruction. The recent signing of the No-Knock Breonna’s Law is just the latest example of what can be done. I can see the potential of what lies beyond. Beyond Republicans not having the ability to obstruct Biden at every turn for the next two years. Beyond them not being able to campaign in the midterms in 2022 on why nothing was done, all the while embracing austerity. Sorry, I know the damn playbook by now. With no Republicans to contend with, the real battles would be between centrists and my fellow left leaning progressives. One battle remains on the forefront of my mind. Court expansion. There is a path to honor, at least in spirit, the wishes of RBG. But to do that Warnock and Ossoff must win both their Senate races. To be frank, I feel that Mitch McConnell thinks the Democrats are bluffing. They don’t have the intestinal fortitude to make good on their threat. I think he’s right. I also think, progressives have the power to push the narrative. I think they have the ability to channel the anger of the people. The anger at Republican hypocrisy that culminated with the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Again, speaking only for myself, I want Democrats to find at least four of the most progressive, Blackest, Brownest, Gayest, differently abled lawyers they can find to ascend to the mantle of Supreme Court judge and sit their asses right next to the Handmaiden. Once I was honest with myself, that on a primal level this is what I wanted, not matter how unlikely that reality might be… that’s when I knew. I knew I had to text Nate, and inform him I had reversed my position. They say, you must visualize what you want, and in my own small way I intended to do just that. All year I drew and painted thought provoking albeit uncomfortable and triggering imagery. I pissed a lot of people off, and I was proud of that. The work was designed to invoke a visceral response, no matter whether you were in agreement with the subject matter… or against it. But for this new piece I wanted to create something forward thinking. Something that would invoke optimism and would embrace a brighter future. So of course I had nothing. Zilch. Nada. It wasn’t like me to have creator’s block, and of late I’ve had zero problems with bringing concepts to fruition, so this felt weird. Again, optimism. Looking towards the future. Star Trek. Let’s face it, I can’t think of another IP that exemplifies those traits better than Trek. So for inspiration I Googled Star Trek movie posters, and from there it wasn’t long before I had my idea. Let’s channel the Star Trek’s original movie poster design, in combination with elements of the Next Generation’s First Contact poster, which clearly took its cues from the original. So following the formula of both the posters I needed three individuals front and center. The first two were obvious. The whole point of the exercise was to promote Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. But who would be the third? I briefly thought of Biden, which really didn’t sit well with me. Following through with the source material, the third needed to be a woman. This is all about Georgia, and you can’t talk about Biden’s win of the state without giving Stacey Abram’s her damn flowers. I mean, if there was ever person to put Mike Bloomberg’s money to good use, it was Abrams. My husband wasn’t big on the idea. He felt inserting her gave the impression that she was a “King Maker”. But. For all intent and purposes… she IS a king maker. I was ambivalent to either option, so I decided to text the man who led me down this path in the first place. As I was waiting for a response from Nate, I told my dilemma to my Mother-in-law. I conveyed that the origins of the piece started with Ruth Bader Ginsberg. “Then why don’t you use her?” Why not indeed. Nate came back with the expected answer. But for my part there would be a fourth person on the poster. Every movie poster needs a tag line. ‘Fight For the Future’ seems apropos. As of this writing 17 traitorous, seditious attorney generals representing 17 red states are suing to overturn an election where the candidate won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. In spite of what should be perceived as a federal crime by Louis DeJoy, the mail slow down by the USPS at his direction. In spite of limiting official ballot drop off boxes. In spite of denying ex-felons the right to vote. In spite of growing evidence that the very accusations of voter fraud by the Democrats, might be in truth, actions committed by the Republicans themselves. How DOES Mitch McConnell, who had an approval rating of 18%, managed to win reelection by 57%? ‘Fight For the Future’ seems apropos. As of this writing in Georgia, Republicans are planning to close over HALF of the polling sites in Cobb County for early voting. When all else fails, suppress the vote in Black and LatinX communities. It’s the same ploy that Republicans played both in the primaries last spring and again in the presidential election. But while traitorous and seditious Republicans fall over themselves trying to prove their loyalty to someone who’s about to have some serious problems come January 21st at the hands of New York Attorney General Letitia James; Democrats, both centrists and progressives alike need to remain focused on the only fight that matters: Fight for the election of Reverend Raphael Warnock.	https://medium.com/@alphacmt/how-nate-convinced-me-of-the-importance-of-warnock-and-ossoff-20cbd9fc3592	['Christopher Taylor']	2020-12-11 07:04:51.213000+00:00	['Voting', 'Illustrator', 'Democrats', 'Illustration', 'Politics']
Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’	An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs. The solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism. The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling. Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence”, the U.S. now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority”. Danger comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China, both portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but also from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events. These will erupt not just in the Middle East, but all over the world, potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future. The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and U.S. Army, calls for the U.S. government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military. The report was published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the DoD’s approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development; and the Army Study Program Management Office. Collapse “While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments. “In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.” The study describes the essentially imperial nature of this order as being underpinned by American dominance, with the U.S. and its allies literally “dictating” its terms to further their own interests: “The order and its constituent parts, first emerged from World War II, were transformed to a unipolar system with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies since. Status quo forces collectively are comfortable with their dominant role in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the emergence of rival centers of power and authority.” But this era when the U.S. and its allies could simply get their way is over. Observing that U.S. officials “naturally feel an obligation to preserve the U.S. global position within a favorable international order,” the report concludes that this “rules-based global order that the United States built and sustained for 7 decades is under enormous stress.” The report provides a detailed breakdown of how the DoD perceives this order to be rapidly unravelling, with the Pentagon being increasingly outpaced by world events. Warning that “global events will happen faster than DoD is currently equipped to handle”, the study concludes that the U.S. “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union.” So weakened is U.S. power, that it can no longer even “automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” It’s not just U.S. power that is in decline. The U.S. Army War College study concludes that: “[A]ll states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces… The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the internal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states.” But, the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a “wakeup call”. If nothing is done to adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment conventions and biases.” Defending the “status quo” Top on the list of forces that have knocked the U.S. off its position of global “pre-eminence”, says the report, are the role of competing powers — major rivals like Russia and China, as well as smaller players like Iran and North Korea. The document is particularly candid in setting out why the U.S. sees these countries as threats — not so much because of tangible military or security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance. Russia and China are described as “revisionist forces” who benefit from the U.S.-dominated international order, but who dare to “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance.” Russia and China, the analysts say, “are engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.” The premise of this conclusion is that the U.S.-backed “status quo” international order is fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Any effort to make global order also work “favorably” for anyone else is automatically seen as a threat to U.S. power and interests. Thus, Russia and China “seek to reorder their position in the existing status quo in ways that — at a minimum — create more favorable circumstances for pursuit of their core objectives.” At first glance there seems nothing particularly wrong about this. So the analysts emphasize that “a more maximalist perspective sees them pursuing advantage at the direct expense of the United States and its principal Western and Asian allies.” Most conspicuous of all, there is little substantiation in the document of how Russia and China pose a meaningful threat to American national security. The chief challenge is that they “are bent on revising the contemporary status quo” through the use of “gray zone” techniques, involving “means and methods falling far short of unambiguous or open provocation and conflict”. Such “murkier, less obvious forms of state-based aggression”, despite falling short of actual violence, are condemned — but then, losing any sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that the U.S. itself should “go gray or go home” to ensure U.S. influence. The document also sets out the real reasons that the U.S. is hostile to “revolutionary forces” like Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental obstacles to U.S. imperial influence in those regions. They are: “… neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.” Far from insisting, as the U.S. government does officially, that Iran and North Korea pose as nuclear threats, the document instead insists they are considered problematic for the expansion of the “U.S.-led order.” Losing the propaganda war Amidst the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study emphasizes the threat from non-state forces undermining the “U.S.-led order” in different ways, primarily through information. The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and disaffection”, the study team observes, is leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot is that the Pentagon faces the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational security”. “Wide uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions, actions, or operations… In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.” This information revolution, in turn, is leading to the “generalized disintegration of traditional authority structures… fueled, and/or accelerated by hyperconnectivity and the obvious decay and potential failure of the post-Cold War status quo.” Civil unrest Highlighting the threat posed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the study also points to “leaderless instability (e.g., Arab Spring)” as a major driver of “a generalized erosion or dissolution of traditional authority structures.” The document hints that such populist civil unrest is likely to become prominent in Western homelands, including inside the United States. “To date, U.S. strategists have been fixated on this trend in the greater Middle East. However, the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and authority of governments worldwide… it would be unwise not to recognize that they will mutate, metastasize, and manifest differently over time.” The U.S. homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of “traditional authority structures”: “The United States and its population are increasingly exposed to substantial harm and an erosion of security from individuals and small groups of motivated actors, leveraging the confluence of hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulnerability to sow disorder and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating form of resistance to authority arrives via physical, virtual, and psychological violence and can create effects that appear substantially out of proportion to the origin and physical size or scale of the proximate hazard or threat.” There is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies. Bad facts Among the most dangerous drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass destabilization, the document asserts, are different categories of fact. Apart from the obvious “fact-free”, defined as information that undermines “objective truth”, the other categories include actual truths that, however, are damaging to America’s global reputation. “Fact-inconvenient” information consists of the exposure of “details that, by implication, undermine legitimate authority and erode the relationships between governments and the governed” — facts, for instance, that reveal how government policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic. “Fact-perilous” information refers basically to national security leaks from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, “exposing highly classified, sensitive, or proprietary information that can be used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational, or strategic advantage.” “Fact-toxic” information pertains to actual truths which, the document complains, are “exposed in the absence of context”, and therefore poison “important political discourse.” Such information is seen as being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil unrest, because it: “… fatally weakens foundational security at an international, regional, national, or personal level. Indeed, fact-toxic exposures are those likeliest to trigger viral or contagious insecurity across or within borders and between or among peoples.” In short, the U.S. Army War College study team believe that the spread of ‘facts’ challenging the legitimacy of American empire is a major driver of its decline: not the actual behavior of the empire which such facts point to. Mass surveillance and psychological warfare The Pentagon study therefore comes up with two solutions to the information threat. The first is to make better use of U.S. mass surveillance capabilities, which are described as “the largest and most sophisticated and integrated intelligence complex in world.” The U.S. can “generate insight faster and more reliably than its competitors can, if it chooses to do so”. Combined with its “military forward presence and power projection”, the U.S. is in “an enviable position of strength.” Supposedly, though, the problem is that the U.S. does not make full use of this potential strength: “That strength, however, is only as durable as the United States’ willingness to see and employ it to its advantage. To the extent that the United States and its defense enterprise are seen to lead, others will follow…” The document also criticizes U.S. strategies for focusing too much on trying to defend against foreign efforts to penetrate or disrupt U.S. intelligence, at the expense of “the purposeful exploitation of the same architecture for the strategic manipulation of perceptions and its attendant influence on political and security outcomes.” Pentagon officials need to simply accept, therefore, that: “… the U.S. homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.” Military supremacy Having mourned the loss of U.S. primacy, the Pentagon report sees expanding the U.S. military as the only option. The bipartisan consensus on military supremacism, however, is not enough. The document demands a military force so powerful it can preserve “maximum freedom of action”, and allow the U.S. to “dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes.” One would be hard-pressed to find a clearer statement of imperial intent in any U.S. Army document: “While as a rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate advantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action… Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.” Once again, military power is essentially depicted as a tool for the U.S. to force, threaten and cajole other countries into submission to U.S. demands. The very concept of ‘defence’ is thus re-framed as the capacity to use overwhelming military might to get one’s way — anything which undermines this capacity ends up automatically appearing as a threat that deserves to be attacked. Empire of capital Accordingly, a core goal of this military expansionism is ensuring that the United States and its international partners have “unimpeded access to air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity”. This also means that the U.S. must retain the ability to physically access any region it wants, whenever it wants: “Failure of or limitations on the ability of the United States to enter and operate within key regions of the world, for example, undermine both U.S. and partner security.” The U.S. thus must try to minimize any “purposeful, malevolent, or incidental interruption of access to the commons, as well as critical regions, resources, and markets.” Without ever referring directly to ‘capitalism’, the document eliminates any ambiguity about how the Pentagon sees this new era of “Persistent Conflict 2.0”: “… some are fighting globalization and globalization is also actively fighting back. Combined, all of these forces are rending at the fabric of security and stable governance that all states aspire to and rely on for survival.” This is a war, then, between US-led capitalist globalization, and anyone who resists it. And to win it, the document puts forward a combination of strategies: consolidating the U.S. intelligence complex and using it more ruthlessly; intensifying mass surveillance and propaganda to manipulate popular opinion; expanding U.S. military clout to ensure access to “strategic regions, markets, and resources”. Even so, the overarching goal is somewhat more modest — to prevent the U.S.-led order from collapsing further: “…. while the favorable U.S.-dominated status quo is under significant internal and external pressure, adapted American power can help to forestall or even reverse outright failure in the most critical regions”. The hope is that the U.S. will be able to fashion “a remodeled but nonetheless still favorable post-primacy international order.” Narcissism Like all U.S. Army War College publications, the document states that it does not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Army or DoD. While this caveat means that its findings cannot be taken to formally represent the U.S. government, the document does also admit that it represents “the collective wisdom” of the numerous officials consulted. In that sense, the document is a uniquely insightful window into the mind of the Pentagon, and how embarrassingly limited its cognitive scope really is. And this in turn reveals not only why the Pentagon’s approach is bound to make things worse, but also what an alternative more productive approach might look like. Launched in June 2016 and completed in April 2017, the U.S. Army War College research project involved extensive consultation with officials across the Pentagon, including representatives of the joint and service staffs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); U.S. Forces, Japan (USFJ), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Intelligence Council, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and U.S. Army Pacific [USARPAC] and Pacific Fleet [PACFLT]). The study team also consulted with a handful of American think-tanks of a somewhat neoconservative persuasion: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War. No wonder, then, that its findings are so myopic. But what else would you expect from a research process so deeply narcissistic, that it involves little more than talking to yourself? Is it any wonder that the solutions offered represent an echo chamber calling to amplify precisely the same policies that have contributed to the destabilization of U.S. power? The research methodology manages to systematically ignore the most critical evidence surrounding the drivers undermining U.S. primacy: such as, the biophysical processes of climate, energy and food disruption behind the Arab Spring; the confluence of military violence, fossil fuel interests and geopolitical alliances behind the rise of ISIS; or the fundamental grievances that have driven a breakdown in trust with governments since the 2008 financial collapse and the ensuing ongoing period of neoliberal economic failure. A large body of data demonstrates that the escalating risks to U.S. power have come not from outside U.S. power, but from the very manner in which U.S. power has operated. The breakdown of the U.S.-led international order, from this perspective, is happening as a direct consequence of deep-seated flaws in the structure, values and vision of that order. In this context, the study’s conclusions are less a reflection of the actual state of the world, than of the way the Pentagon sees itself and the world. Indeed, most telling of all is the document’s utter inability to recognize the role of the Pentagon itself in systematically pursuing a wide range of policies over the last several decades which have contributed directly to the very instability it now wants to defend against. The Pentagon frames itself as existing outside the Hobbesian turmoil that it conveniently projects onto the world — the result is a monumental and convenient rejection of any sense of responsibility for what happens in the world. In this sense, the document is a powerful illustration of the self-limiting failure of conventional risk-assessment approaches. What is needed instead is a systems-oriented approach based on evaluating not just the Pentagon’s internal beliefs about the drivers of risk — but engaging with independent scientific evidence about those drivers to test the extent to which those beliefs withstand rigorous scrutiny. Such an approach could open the door to a very different scenario to the one recommended by this document — one based on a willingness to actually look in the mirror. And that in turn might open up the opportunity for Pentagon officials to imagine alternative policies with a real chance of actually working, rather than reinforcing the same stale failed strategies of the past. It is no surprise then that even the Pentagon’s apparent conviction in the inexorable decline of U.S. power could well be overblown. According to Dr Sean Starrs of MIT’s Center for International Studies, a true picture of U.S. power cannot be determined solely from national accounts. We have to look at the accounts of transnational corporations. Starrs shows that American transnational corporations are vastly more powerful than their competitors. His data suggests that American economic supremacism remains at an all-time high, and still unchallenged even by an economic powerhouse like China. This does not necessarily discredit the Pentagon’s emerging recognition that U.S. imperial power faces a new era of decline and unprecedented volatility. But it does suggest that the Pentagon’s sense of U.S. global pre-eminence is very much bound up with its capacity to project American capitalism globally. As geopolitical rivals agitate against U.S. economic reach, and as new movements emerge hoping to undermine American “unimpeded access” to global resources and markets, what’s clear is that DoD officials see anything which competes with or undermines American capitalism as a clear and present danger. But nothing put forward in this document will actually contribute to slowing the decline of U.S. power. On the contrary, the Pentagon study’s recommendations call for an intensification of the very imperial policies that futurist Professor Johan Galtung, who accurately forecasted the demise of the USSR, predicts will accelerate the “collapse of the U.S. empire” by around 2020. As we move deeper into the “post-primacy” era, the more meaningful question for people, governments, civil society and industry is this: as the empire falls, lashing out in its death throes, what comes after?	https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing-746754cdaebf	['Nafeez Ahmed']	2017-07-19 13:25:40+00:00	['Military', 'USA', 'Government', 'Foreign Policy', 'War']
Lose weight effectively, maintain fitness and good health	Low body temperature promotes slow metabolism at the cellular level, which results in overweight and difficulty losing weight despite dieting and effort. On this, it is therefore necessary to opt for an efficient action that boosts the metabolism of the cells. The ideal solution to lose weight and maintain your shape is to use Meticore, whose action consists of targeting a low body temperature, triggering and boosting the metabolism (and avoiding chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity-related diseases). Meticore is the world’s first natural solution to correct slow metabolism. It contains six nutrients and plants. Much better than restrictive diets and long strenuous sessions at the gym, Meticore, in addition to guaranteeing you a beautiful silhouette, balances your body temperature and does better than your daily multivitamins because of the high quality natural ingredients that fortify you and that are certified by the FDA among others.	https://medium.com/@yelorick/lose-weight-effectively-maintain-fitness-and-good-health-e1dafa034113	['G. L. Yélognissè']	2020-12-22 22:42:08.006000+00:00	['Health', 'Weight Loss', 'Nutrition', 'Fitness', 'Heartbreak']
Line Chart Animation with Plotly on Jupyter	Data preparation You can download the dataset from Our World in Data or this repo. import plotly.express as px df = pd.read_csv(' import pandas as pdimport plotly.express as pxdf = pd.read_csv(' https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shinokada/covid-19-stats/master/data/daily-new-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-tests-per-case.csv ') display(df.head()) display(df.shape) Original dataset. It has 26123 rows x 5 columns. Image by the author import pandas as pd import plotly.express as px df = pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shinokada/covid-19-stats/master/data/daily-new-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-tests-per-case.csv') excludes = ["World", "Africa", "North America", "South America", "Asia", "Europe", "European Union", "High income", "Low income", "Lower middle income", "Oceania", "Upper middle income", "World excl. China", "World excl. China and South Korea", "International", "World excl. China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore","Asia excl. China"] df=df[~df['Entity'].isin(excludes)] df.columns = ['Country','Code','Date','Confirmed','Days since confirmed'] df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') df_all=df[(df['Date']>'2020-03-01') & (df['Date'] <'2020-06-14')] Import necessary libraries, Pandas, and Plotly.express. Read a comma-separated values(csv) file into DataFrame. file into DataFrame. excludes is a list of names in the Entity column that we want to exclude. is a list of names in the column that we want to exclude. isin method finds excludes values in Entity column and we use ~ to exclude these rows. method finds values in column and we use to exclude these rows. We rename the column names to Country, Code, Date, Confirmed, Days since confirmed. We change the data type of Date column from object to datetime . We also format it to Year-Month-Day. column from to . We also format it to Year-Month-Day. We select rows from 2020-03-01 to 2020-06-14 in the Date column. display(df.head()) display(df.shape) Prepared dataset. It has 23414 rows x 5 columns. Image by the author All countries line chart Let’s create a line chart using df_all . We set Date for the x-axis, Confirmed for the y-axis and use Country for line colors. fig = px.line(df_all, x="Date", y="Confirmed", color="Country") fig.show() Line chart. Image by the author The chart has the ability to reveal more information about a data point by moving a mouse cursor over the point. We can hide or show lines by clicking country names on the right side. Adding LOG and LINEAR buttons We are going to add two buttons that change the y-axis scale. fig = px.line(df_all, x="Date", y="Confirmed", color="Country") fig.update_layout( updatemenus=[ dict( type = "buttons", direction = "left", buttons=list([ dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "linear"}], label="LINEAR", method="relayout" ), dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "log"}], label="LOG", method="relayout" ) ]), ), ] ) fig.show() Using the update_layout method to update the properties of the figure’s layout. Adding two buttons, LINEAR and LOG and changing the yaxis.type to linear and log accordingly. LINEAR and LOG buttons. Image by the author Changing hovermode Plotly has three different hovermode . The default setting is hovermode='closest' , as we can see in the previous image, a single hover label appears for the point directly underneath the cursor. For this chart, we are going to use a unified hovermode='x unified' . It shows a single hover label with all the data information. For clarity, we select four countries. import numpy as np import pandas as pd import plotly.graph_objects as go #plotly 4.0.0rc1 df = pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shinokada/covid-19-stats/master/data/daily-new-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-tests-per-case.csv') df.columns = ['Country','Code','Date','Confirmed','Days since confirmed'] df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') df=df[(df['Date']>'2020-03-15') & (df['Date'] <'2020-06-14')] includes=['United States','Russia', 'India','Brazil']df_selected=df[df['Country'].isin(includes)] fig = px.line(df_selected, x="Date", y="Confirmed", color="Country") fig.update_layout( hovermode='x unified', updatemenus=[ dict( type = "buttons", direction = "left", buttons=list([ dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "linear"}], label="LINEAR", method="relayout" ), dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "log"}], label="LOG", method="relayout" ) ]), ), ] ) fig.show() hovermode='x unified' in a line chart. Image by the author Line chart animation Plotly animations have some limitations and the line chart is not supported. Line chart animation can be done but it is not as neat as other animations such as those for bar and scatter charts. import numpy as np import pandas as pd import plotly.graph_objects as go df.columns = ['Country','Code','Date','Confirmed','Days since confirmed'] df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') df=df[(df['Date']>'2020-03-15') & (df['Date'] <'2020-06-14')] df = pd.read_csv(' https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shinokada/covid-19-stats/master/data/daily-new-confirmed-cases-of-covid-19-tests-per-case.csv' df.columns = ['Country','Code','Date','Confirmed','Days since confirmed']df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')df=df[(df['Date']>'2020-03-15') & (df['Date'] usa=df[df['Country'].isin(['United States'])] brazil=df[df['Country'].isin(['Brazil'])] india=df[df['Country'].isin(['India'])] russia=df[df['Country'].isin(['Russia'])] trace1 = go.Scatter(x=usa['Date'][:2], y=usa['Confirmed'][:2], mode='lines', line=dict(width=1.5)) trace2 = go.Scatter(x = brazil['Date'][:2], y = brazil['Confirmed'][:2], mode='lines', line=dict(width=1.5)) trace3 = go.Scatter(x = india['Date'][:2], y = india['Confirmed'][:2], mode='lines', line=dict(width=1.5)) trace4 = go.Scatter(x = russia['Date'][:2], y = russia['Confirmed'][:2], mode='lines', line=dict(width=1.5)) frames = [dict(data= [dict(type='scatter', x=usa['Date'][:k+1], y=usa['Confirmed'][:k+1]), dict(type='scatter', x=brazil['Date'][:k+1], y=brazil['Confirmed'][:k+1]), dict(type='scatter', x=india['Date'][:k+1], y=india['Confirmed'][:k+1]), dict(type='scatter', x=russia['Date'][:k+1], y=russia['Confirmed'][:k+1]), ], traces= [0, 1, 2, 3], )for k in range(1, len(usa)-1)] layout = go.Layout(width=700, height=600, showlegend=False, hovermode='x unified', updatemenus=[ dict( type='buttons', showactive=False, y=1.05, x=1.15, xanchor='right', yanchor='top', pad=dict(t=0, r=10), buttons=[dict(label='Play', method='animate', args=[None, dict(frame=dict(duration=3, redraw=False), transition=dict(duration=0), fromcurrent=True, mode='immediate')] )] ), dict( type = "buttons", direction = "left", buttons=list([ dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "linear"}], label="LINEAR", method="relayout" ), dict( args=[{"yaxis.type": "log"}], label="LOG", method="relayout" ) ]), ), ] ) layout.update(xaxis =dict(range=['2020-03-16', '2020-06-13'], autorange=False), yaxis =dict(range=[0, 35000], autorange=False)); fig = go.Figure(data=[trace1, trace2, trace3, trace4], frames=frames, layout=layout) fig.show() We can add more countries if we want. We create four separate DataFrame. You can increase or decrease the number of countries. We create four traces with own x , y , mode , and line values. If you change the number of countries, you need to adjust here as well. , , , and values. If you change the number of countries, you need to adjust here as well. We create frames with data list values. traces=[0,1,2,3] is used to iterate frame[k]['data'][0] , frame[k]['data'][1] , etc. If you change the number of countries, again, you need to adjust the code here. e.g. traces=[0,1,2,3,4,5] . list values. is used to iterate , , etc. If you change the number of countries, again, you need to adjust the code here. e.g. . We set width , height , hovermode , and updatemenus . We set two kinds of buttons, one for play and others for LINEAR and LOG . , , , and . We set two kinds of buttons, one for play and others for and . update updates the properties of the figure with a dict with keyword arguments. We create a new Figure instance and add all the traces we created in line 15–33. If you change the number of countries, you need to update this line. Plotly line chart animation. Image by the author. Scatter and bar chart animations Plotly supports the scatter and bar chart animations. You can find the code here. Scatter chart animation. Image by the author. You can drop the animation buttons by adding fig["layout"].pop("updatemenus") , and use it as a slider. Code pop(“updatemenus”) drop the animation button. Image by the author. In a bar chart animation, we can hover to see more detailed information and we can hide/show items by clicking on the right menu. Code Bar chart animation. Image by the author. Conclusion It was not exactly the same as Our World in Data Website, but we learned how to create line charts, line chart animations, add unified hover mode, and add buttons. Currently, Plotly requires more code to make a line chart animation. Also, it would be great if the scatter chart could draw trace lines and a speed control parameter for the animation. Newsletter Get full access to every story on Medium by becoming a member.	https://towardsdatascience.com/line-chart-animation-with-plotly-on-jupyter-e19c738dc882	['Shinichi Okada']	2021-08-12 07:38:08.035000+00:00	['Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Plotly', 'Programming', 'Python']
LINE TECHPULSE 2020 年度開發者大會重點整理	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/oakmega-%E5%A4%A7%E6%A9%A1%E7%A7%91%E6%8A%80/line-techpulse-2020-%E5%B9%B4%E5%BA%A6%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BC%E8%80%85%E5%A4%A7%E6%9C%83%E9%87%8D%E9%BB%9E%E6%95%B4%E7%90%86-ad2b14fe4e97	['Iling Wu']	2020-12-24 06:24:27.765000+00:00	['Line', 'Ekyc', 'Chatbots', 'Ocr', 'Line Techpulse']
As I downsized for my move from apartment to 188 SF Airstream I digitized everything…25 years of…	As I downsized for my move from apartment to 188 SF Airstream I digitized everything…25 years of Coast Guard awards, diplomas etc. I kept a hard copy of my social security card, trailer and truck title and birth certificate. That (aside from books which I recycle) comprises the only paper in my possession. My file cabinet is a single folder.	https://medium.com/@stephenchamberlin/as-i-downsized-for-my-move-from-apartment-to-188-sf-airstream-i-digitized-everything-25-years-of-3d9179f50589	['Stephen Chamberlin']	2020-12-07 04:01:59.514000+00:00	['Minimalism', 'Minimalist', 'Life Lessons', 'Nomad', 'Life']
Yemen war challenges Saudi moral authority	By James M. Dorsey Saudi conduct of its ill-fated war in Yemen coupled with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s alignment with the Trump administration and Israel, and his often coercive approach to diplomatic relations, has opened the door to challenges of the kingdom’s moral leadership of the Sunni Muslim world, a legitimizing pillar of the ruling Al Saud family’s grip on power. The cracks in Saudi legitimacy are being fuelled by the escalating humanitarian crisis in Yemen, described by the United Nations and aid organizations as the world’s worst since World War Two; shocking civilian deaths as the result of attacks by the Saudi-led coalition; electoral successes by populist leaders in countries like Malaysia, Turkey and Pakistan; and the kingdom’s inability to impose its will on countries like Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait and Oman. An attack this week on a bus in the heartland of Iranian-backed Houthi rebels that killed at least 43 people, including 29 children returning from a summer camp, dealt a significant body blow to Saudi moral authority. The coalition said it would investigate the attack that has sparked international outrage. The attack was but the latest of multiple incidents in which weddings, funerals and hospitals have been hit by coalition forces in a war that has gone badly wrong and demonstrates Saudi military ineptitude despite the fact that the kingdom’s armed forces operate some of the world’s most sophisticated weaponry, according to military sources. Mr. Trump reversed a decision by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to halt the sale of air-dropped and precision-guided munitions until it had better trained Saudi forces in their targeting and use of the weapons. An Obama official said at the time that there were “systemic, endemic” problems in Saudi targeting. “Malaysia and other Muslim nations can no longer look up to the Saudis like we used to. They can no longer command our respect and provide leadership. The Saudis have abandoned the Palestinians, just like the Egyptians. The Saudis have moved much closer to Israel who are suppressing and killing the Palestinians,” said Raja Kamarul Bahrin Shah Raja Ahmad, a member of Malaysia’s upper house of parliament and the head of the ruling Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) coalition in the Malaysian state of Terengganu. “Perhaps Malaysia under the leadership of Dr Mahathir Mohamad should take the lead again in speaking up for the oppressed Muslims of the world. It is about time Malaysia again show the leadership that was once so much admired and respected worldwide,” Mr. Bahrin added. Malaysia has sought to distance itself from Saudi Arabia since the return to power in May of Mr. Mahathir, whose past Islamist rhetoric and stark anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish statements propelled him to prominence in the Islamic world. Malaysia has in recent weeks withdrawn troops from the 41-nation, Saudi-sponsored Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition (IMCTC) and closed the Saudi-backed King Salman Centre for International Peace (KSCIP) in Kuala Lumpur. Mr. Mahathir’s defense minister, Mohamad Sabu, long before taking office this year, was already highly critical of Saudi Arabia. In anticipation of investigations into allegations of corruption against former prime minister Najib Razak and his recent indictment, Seri Mohd Shukri Abdull, Mr. Mahathir’s newly appointed anti-corruption czar, noted barely a week after the May election that “we have had difficulties dealing with Arab countries (such as) Qatar, Saudi Arabia, (and the) UAE.” Speaking to Al Jazeera last month, Mr. Mahathir said that “we are disappointed that Saudi Arabia has not denied that the money was given by Saudi,” referring to $681 million in Saudi funds that were allegedly gifted to Mr. Razak. Malaysia is but the latest Sunni Muslim nation to either challenge Saudi Arabia or at least refuse to kowtow to the kingdom’s foreign policy as it relates to its bitter rivalry with Iran; Prince Mohammed’s tacit backing of US President Donald J. Trump’s staunch support of Israel and pressure on Palestinians; its 14-month old economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar; and the war in Yemen. Like Mr. Mahathir in the past, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, despite his evolving autocracy, has emerged as an Islamist populist counter pole, his credibility enhanced by his escalating disputes with the United States, his often emotional support for the Palestinians, and opposition to moves by Mr. Trump like his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey this week became the latest target of Mr. Trump’s wielding of trade and economic sanctions as a means of bullying countries into submitting to his demands. Mr. Trump doubled metals tariffs on Turkey after earlier sanctioning two senior Turkish ministers in an effort to force Mr. Erdogan to release American evangelist Andrew Brunson. Mr. Brunson has been detained in Turkey for the past two years on charges of having been involved in the failed 2016 military coup against Mr. Erdogan and seeking to convert Turkish Kurds to Christianity. Mr. Erdogan has in recent years consistently thought to thwart Saudi policy in the region by positioning himself as the leader of a Muslim world opposed to Mr. Trump’s Israel-Palestine approach and a de facto Arab alliance with Israel, maintaining close ties to Iran and defying US sanctions against the Islamic republic, supporting Qatar, and expanding Turkish influence in the Horn of Africa in competition with the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s closest regional ally. Mr. Erdogan has portrayed Prince Mohammed’s vow to return Saudi Arabia to an unidentified form of ‘moderate Islam’ as adopting a Western concept. “Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate.’ Islam can only be one thing. Recently the concept of ‘moderate Islam’ has received attention. But the patent of this concept originated in the West. Perhaps, the person voicing this concept thinks it belongs to him. No, it does not belong to you. They are now trying to pump up this idea again. What they really want to do is weaken Islam … We don’t want people to learn about religion from foreign facts,” Mr. Erdogan said. Echoing former US president George W. Bush’s assertion of an axis of evil, Prince Mohammed charged in March that Turkey was part of a triangle of evil that included Iran and Islamist groups. The crown prince accused Turkey of trying to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate, abolished nearly a century ago when the Ottoman empire collapsed. Similarly, Pakistan’s prime minister-in-waiting appeared to be charting his own course by saying that he wants to improve relations with Iran and mediate an end to the debilitating Saudi-Iranian rivalry despite the fact that the kingdom has so far ruled out a negotiated resolution and backs US efforts to isolate the Islamic republic. In a bow to Saudi Arabia, Jordan has backed the kingdom in its row with Canada over criticism of Riyadh’s human rights record and refrained from appointing a new ambassador to Iran, but has stood its ground in supporting Palestinian rejection of US peace efforts. Similarly, Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri has reversed his resignation initially announced in Riyadh last year under alleged duress while Oman and Kuwait, alarmed by the Saudi-UAE campaign against Qatar, have sought to chart a middle course that keeps them out of the firing line of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. For the time being, Saudi Arabia is likely to successfully fend off challenges to its leadership of the Muslim world. However, responding viscerally to criticism like in the case of non-Muslim Canada or, more importantly, two years ago to Muslim leaders who excluded Wahhabism and Salafism, the religious worldview that underpins the Al Sauds’ rule, from their definition of Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamaah or the Sunni people, is unlikely to cut ice in the longer term. Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom	https://mideastsoccer.medium.com/yemen-war-challenges-saudi-moral-authority-a62f16f05192	['James M. Dorsey']	2018-08-12 05:39:27.249000+00:00	['Middle East', 'Yemen', 'Malaysia', 'Trump', 'Saudi Arabia']
Why You Should Always Listen to Feedback	Why You Should Always Listen to Feedback It may be unsolicited, but it still could be invaluable advice Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash What do we write for? If you make a living opening up in print about universal human truths yet act all offended when readers dare make comments or suggestions, what do you write for? Is it because you enjoy the sound of your own voice and seeing your name in print? Articulating our shared humanity is how we engage with and relate to one another. When someone offers their perspective on my work, I want to hear what they have to say. There’s always the possibility that someone who isn’t me may see things more clearly than I do; experience also counts for something. To a large extent, my writing is a counterintuitive way of crowdsourcing the therapy I haven’t yet been able to afford. Documenting how major depressive disorder can wreck every single aspect of a person’s life and psyche is how I’m rebuilding a life that works, word by word. To me, writing means reaching out to others and building bridges. If you don’t welcome feedback then why don’t you write a journal? Otherwise, why be so quick to dismiss readers’ comments, especially when your income is based on an audience engagement model?	https://asingularstory.medium.com/always-listen-to-feedback-34660b61ef95	['A Singular Story']	2020-07-14 13:22:41.640000+00:00	['Life Lessons', 'Communication', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Writing']
The Fight for the Environment Needs Better Slogans	The Fight for the Environment Needs Better Slogans Why better rallying cries are needed by environmentalists worldwide Photo by Callum Shaw on Unsplash Activism thrives on slogans. “Black Lives Matter”, “Women’s rights are human rights” and “Love Wins” are just some of the slogans that have sparked off large movements. Similarly, the fight for our environment is peppered with different slogans. From “There is no planet B” to “Save our Forests”, environmental activists have been trying to encourage action through the spread of these messages. And these messages have been working. Students have taken up sign boards in climate strikes in order to push for political change. Coal power is slowly being phased out by countries. And many countries are doing more for the environment as citizens push for greener actions. However, in order to truly help the environment, the old slogans that sparked change wouldn’t be enough alone. We need new and fresh rallying cries that can effect changes quickly and efficiently. Not every slogan is equally effective While slogans are the backbone of any movement, not every slogan gets the message across well. In America, the call to “defund the police” swept across the country. And while many of the activists using this rallying cry had good intentions (reduce the police spending on militarised weapons and spending the money on training professionals that can help with different situations), the slogan could be very easily misunderstood (opposers took it as a call to dismantle police forces). In fact, instead of encouraging change, the “defund the police” messaging furthered the divide between the two sides, reducing any chances of a proper conversation between the both sides (and conversation is key to making progress when trying to instill change). To quote President Obama: “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘defund the police.’ But, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. Similarly, when we are fighting for the environment, we often find ourselves claiming that “fossil fuel has to go”, “stop eating meat to save the rainforests”, and “renewable energy is the only way forward”. While all of these are undeniably good for our environment, these slogans might actually work to distance the very people environmental activists are trying to reach. Instead of simply pointing out one side as the enemy, activism has to be more inclusive. We have to stop portraying the other side as “the dark side” and work to create slogans that can bring them over. Talk about how renewables can create new jobs (maybe “solar power, creating a bright future for you”?), find out how shutting down that coal power plant can benefit the area, make some compromises and point out how everyone benefits so that there is an incentive for people to sit down and be willing to discuss our future together. And most importantly, the slogan should be effective in delivering the message. If we have to stop and explain our rallying cries, it’s probably not a very good one. Times are changing. Slogans should change too In our climate fight, “climate change” and “global warming” are terms that have been around for a very long time (“global warming” was used in a scientific paper in 1975, introducing the public to this term). And while they do a good job of introducing the issue to the mass public, these terms fail to elicit any form of urgency or emotions that we need to solve the issues at hand. Furthermore, these terms have been thrown around so much that many individuals are no longer effective in encouraging change. In fact, when the emotional responses to different climate terms were studied, “climate crisis” was able to elicit a 60% increase in a Democrat’s emotional response when compared to “climate change”. For a Republican, the emotional response was actually tripled. Additionally, the study also found that using “global warming” evoked a similar lukewarm response in the individuals they studied. On the other hand, “environmental destruction” managed to evoke the strongest emotional response. And because the ultimate aim of environmental activism is to encourage people to care, changing the terms we use should be a key step as we move onto the next phase of environmental activism. However, positivity is still the best With the results of the previous study, it might seem that changing our phrasing from “climate change” to “environmental disaster” might be the best choice. After all, it was the term that managed to elicit the strongest emotional response. However, using a term bursting with negativity might not be the best way forward. In fact, as I have written before, the negativity associated with climate change could actually discourage individuals to take action. Research done by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication also reflected a similar conclusion. While it is true that there is a general increase of individuals worried about climate change, these individuals showed signs of losing hope. And based on research done by Dr. Nicholas Smith, worry and hope were among the strongest factors that increased public support in Green policies. That’s why as we work on rewording our rallying cries, it is imperative for them to instill hope. As much as they have to invoke urgency and worry amongst individuals, they have to give the listeners hope as well. The slogans also have to encourage actions And it’s not enough to simply instill hope. We have to encourage actions. In order to fulfill that, we have to focus on the solutions instead of the problems. By including simple actions into the slogans, we can empower the audience to take charge and do their small part. Solutions can come from a large range. We can work towards including companies to avoid (i.e. avoiding consuming products from companies that pollute the environment without a care), sharing reputable businesses (e.g. Ecosia), sharing ways that can maximise their time and effort, and highlighting government policies that one should support/fight against. Additionally, it would become even better if the solutions are localised. Communicate with local businesses and help them become sustainable. Choose and fight for causes that could affect your neighbourhood directly. Only by encouraging people to first care about their backyard can we eventually bring the fight to bigger stages. And yes, creating slogans that can fulfil all of these requirements is extremely difficult. In fact, even as I write this piece, I’m struggling to fit all of these into a catchy one that can be used. However, that doesn’t mean that we should all just give up. Even when used alone, a slogan created with any of these lessons can go a long way in helping further the climate fight. And when we begin to make slogans that can fulfill these requirements, we’ll definitely be able to take the fight for a healthier Earth to the next stage. Let’s all work together to create slogans so that protecting the environment becomes the norm.	https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-fight-for-the-environment-needs-better-slogans-6c5ec157e170	['Jerren Gan']	2020-12-09 22:14:20.617000+00:00	['Politics', 'Sustainability', 'Activism', 'Climate Change', 'Environment']
heuristics & software development	Photo by Ben Pattinson on Unsplash There are various heuristics we use to drive towards the north star of clean code. In this short essay I touch on a few heuristics, while trying to answer the question — why do these heuristics exist in the first place? Some classic examples of clean code heuristics are : Writing files with no more than n LOC LOC One File per Class Don’t Repeat Yourself Build components that are self contained & independent I recently had a debate with a friend who disagreed with these principles. It made me question the nature of these heuristics, and why they even exist in the first place. After working in the industry for a while now, I have a feel for why these conventions exist. Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash Reason 1: It is much more efficient to tell someone what to do, than to have them go figure it out It’s virtually useless to tell someone to “go and write clean code”. A sensible response to such a demand would be “What exactly do you mean by that?”. To aim for clean code is to aim for an abstract concept. These heuristics ground that aim in actionable tasks. Take this for example — How can a file be cleaned? We can start by checking a couple of things: is it a large file? are these methods too alike? is the language being used idiomatically? Addressing these concerns will slowly chip away at complexity, and in their sum can tend to result in clean enough code. By following these simple rules of thumb, your code will on average be considered “clean” by some! Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash Reason 2: Reading complex code is mentally tolling Complexity is reviled. Ask any developer, “ Would you rather work on a legacy spaghetti monolith, or a well oiled project? “. None will opt for the spaghetti monolith, because the well oiled project is easier to work with. I’ve spent my fair share of time treading through the muck of legacy spaghetti code. Many of the issues I’ve come across can be addressed by a couple of these heuristics. DRY and Separations of Concerns alone would have saved me well over half of the headaches I’ve endured.	https://medium.com/@smessier1/heuristics-software-development-12daa46280c1	['Sebastian Messier']	2020-12-28 22:59:19.752000+00:00	['Clean Code', 'Software Development', 'Software Architecture']
My Life Changing Decision	This is Snehil Gupta a commerce student and an average student with 6 years education gap and 2 times State Level Tables Tennis player,born in Jaunpur(Uttar Pradesh) and bought up in Renukoot(Uttar Pradesh). I traveled in different states for studies like Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh. From childhood I was very much interested in computer when I was 12 years old my mom purchased me a computer. Due to that interest several times I destroyed my computer parts(RAM, Motherboard, Power Circuit Board). After completing my Higher Secondary School I was decided to go for Engineering. Luckily I cleared Maharashtra Common Entrance Test and Madhya Pradesh Common Entrance Test. In Nasik(Maharashtra) I was allotted Computer Science and in Bhopal(Madhya Pradesh) I was allotted Mechanical Branch. After discussing with some peoples and close relatives me and my family decided to go for Mechanical as it is an Evergreen branch. Even after selecting Mechanical branch my craze on computer didn’t died. During college time I always keep myself updated with technology specially in computer field. Even my friends ask me for a suggestion before purchasing any new laptops and mobile phones. During my college time I joined as a Table Tennis Coach in St. George School Bhopal for 1 month after that I joined BPO as a part time for personal expenditure. Everything was going good but unfortunately in 3rd year I met with an accident I was fall from local train in Mumbai. After accident I was on complete bed rest as my left knee got severe injuries and got plastered. I was unable to walk for 2 months during that time I used to crawl on my hip after that I used walker for walking. In the 4th month I need to go for physiotherapy daily because the movement of left leg was almost end. Due to this I had to drop my Engineering because backlogs and current semester paper was getting too much burden on me and I was unable to clear the papers. After dropping my Engineering I was in dilemma what to do next then my parents decided to send me Surat(Gujarat) for learning business. After spending one month I felt sick(Stone in Kidney) due to this I left Surat and came back to my home for proper treatment. After recovering my parents decided I should complete my Graduation from B.com. I joined B.com course and decided to start preparing for Government jobs simultaneously. I went Delhi and took admission in an Institute for proper guidance. That was a tough time for me to manage 2 courses at a same time one my graduation and another government preparation. But anyhow I managed both and completed my Graduation in 2019, after that I decide to start giving complete focus on Government job. In 2019 I was given my 1st attempt but not got cleared, after that in 2020 Covid-19 came lock-down happens. Again bad luck happens just before one month of my exam I was tested Covid-19 positive which destroyed my all preparation and again I was unable to clear exam, and in December my father had a second Cardiac Attack. After that I decided to go back to my hometown and do preparation from there and do job also to support my family. After returning home one more time I was tested Covid-19 positive. After recovering from Covid-19, I joined Byju’s as a Business Development Associate for 6 months during job I got sick(Accident, Cervical, Typhoid) back to back all in one month. So, I had to left my job. After recovering I decided to joined Masai School because I was keeping an eye on Masai from 2019. Then I discussed about Masai School with my parents, they supported me for my decision. I given MSAT-1 and MSAT-2 on same day. Luckily I got cleared MSAT exams in one attempt and got selected for upcoming batch and on 15-Nov-2021 I joined Masai School as a Full Stack Web Developer. Part 2: Journey in Masai School (first 5 weeks) (Click to Redirect)	https://medium.com/@snehilrock/my-life-changing-decision-e0033a797bee	['Snehil Gupta']	2021-12-14 11:43:46.758000+00:00	['Motivational', 'Masai School', 'Encouragement', 'Never Give Up', 'Struggling Students']
UX Writers Learn	Introduction & Publication outline Hi! Welcome to the first post of this weekly publication dedicated to help you become a badass UX Writer. I’m currently learning UX writing, and for the past few months I’ve collated amazing UX resources which have been helpful in my journey and I want to share them with you. Being a self-learner myself, I know what it’s like to feel like I’m missing out on some important info user experience writers are supposed to know, or to face a brick wall where you know a lot about UX writing but still don’t have anything to show for it that can go into your portfolio. Yeah, the feeling sucks. Which is why I’ve designed this publication to run with a structure modeled after industry-recognized courses to ensure that every necessary topic is covered and that we’re able to learn step-by-step from point A to Z. But that’s not even the best part yet! At the end of every topic, there will be practice assignments to help us get the hang of user experience writing and build up our portfolios. Amazing right? Fun fact: The publication is being written and updated in real-time as I’ll be going through the learning process myself and like you, become a badass UX Writer when the publication is completed :) Super fun fact: I don’t know it all and I’m open to collaborations. If you have anything to share about any of the topics, any ideas for practice assignments or you just want to help out in your own way, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn here or within UX Writers Learn slack workspace. Let’s grow together! Publication Outline 1. UX writing and the roles of the UX Writer This phase will introduce you to the basics of UX writing, the roles of the UX Writer, the tools UX writers work with, and how they work with teams in the design process. 2. Empathy and Design This phase will help you understand the psychology behind UX writing, the importance of users, and how to apply empathy in UX writing. 3. User Research This phase will explain the why and how of user research in UX writing, when to do user research, importance of research-backed copy, tools to use for the research, and how to create user personas. 4. Defining Voice and Tone In this phase you will learn how to create and follow brand voice for your copy, how to apply the right tone for user pain points, and how to map the brand voice and tone across the user journey. 5. Microcopy Here, we’ll learn the best UX writing practices and craft copy for UI components such as CTAs, error messages, and so on. We’ll also learn the tools to use for this. 6. User journey and Information architecture In this phase, we’ll get into the context of use, and user flow in the journey. How one copy on each screen links to the other. 7. Test your copy We’ll find out why you should test your copy, the ways to test your copy, and how to test your copy. We’ll also learn the tools needed, and the iteration process. 8. Complete the project and create a portfolio With the now completed project and mini tasks, we’ll examine some of the best UX Writers’ portfolios and discover the best sites to build a portfolio on. Let’s get started! Week 1	https://medium.com/ux-writers-learn/ux-writers-learn-9ba2fecefc50	['Uzoma Ibekwe']	2021-04-26 01:26:07.586000+00:00	['UX', 'Ux Writer', 'Ux Writing']
7 Things New Data Science Grads Look for in a Job	7 Things New Data Science Grads Look for in a Job by Gabriella Runnels Data scientists are in high demand these days. According to Bloomberg, job postings for data scientists increased by 75 percent in the last three years, and a report by McKinsey & Company warns that the United States alone might face a shortage of 1.5 million data scientists in 2018. In fact, your company probably wants to hire data scientists right now — but what do data scientists want? More and more students graduate from programs in data science or related fields each year, and these grads have a lot to think about when choosing which companies to apply for and which positions ultimately to accept. If you want to attract top data science talent to your organization, you need to figure out what these candidates really care about. So what do recent data science grads consider before taking a job? Here are their seven major considerations: Continuing Education & Skill Development Recent grads know they still have a lot to learn. Many new data scientists prioritize job opportunities that will allow them to hone their analytical abilities, practice their public speaking and communication skills, and continue to learn and grow as technical professionals. Jayson, a recent graduate of LSU’s MS Analytics program who currently works at Hitachi Vantara, understands the importance of continued professional development. “Being able to learn and grow in your skills is vitally important in this field,” Jayson said. “Keep your skills sharp, or you can fall behind the times super quick.” Companies can support employee education in several ways. An important asset for a new data scientist is access to supportive mentors. Having a more experienced colleague or manager who has the skill and patience to act as a mentor can be crucial in a new data scientist’s professional development. In addition, financial and cultural support from the company for conference attendance, online courses, and educational materials shows potential hires that management is serious about helping employees continue to develop their skills. Ability to Make an Impact Many data science grads want to find a role where they will be able to make a difference. While recent grads know they can expect to start out in an entry-level role, many new data scientists will opt to work for a company that gives them greater responsibilities early on. Desired responsibilities may be different for different candidates — some may prefer to get right into advanced modeling, while others might be eager to get facetime with clients, or be involved in project management. Jung-Hee, who completed her Master’s in Analytics from Northwestern University in 2015 and now works as a data scientist here at Opex Analytics, said that what ultimately drew her to Opex was the opportunity to make an impact. “Since the project teams are small,you have a lot of ownership of your work and have a lot of smart people to bounce ideas off of,” said Jung-Hee. Culture & Environment There’s no single culture that will work well for everyone, but a positive, supportive, and fun workplace community can go a long way in drawing candidates. “One of the biggest things to me is whether or not I like the feel of company when I go to interview,” said Jayson. “If I do not like the atmosphere or the people seem disingenuous, it is an automatic ‘no’ for me.” For most candidates, the people you deal with at a company — including coworkers, managers, and even clients — are a large factor in determining if the environment will be a good fit. Sanjeevni, who graduated from Northwestern’s MS in Analytics in 2015 and currently works as a data scientist at Opex, agrees, saying that “colleagues who have a good sense of humor and don’t take themselves too seriously are great.” Companies that are people-focused and make an effort to create a positive and enjoyable work environment are also very attractive to new data science grads. Tools & Techniques For many candidates, flexibility to solve problems using the tools they see fit is an important criterion when evaluating a position. A company that affords data scientists free reign to use the right tool for the job is often seen as highly appealing and appreciative of the technical expertise data scientists bring to the table. Other prospective employees strongly value the ability to use cutting-edge tech and view firms that embrace such advanced techniques as forward-thinking. Becca, a 2017 graduate of Georgia Tech’s MS Analytics degree and a data scientist at Ernst & Young, looked for jobs that would allow her to directly apply the specialized knowledge she gained in her master’s program. “I knew I wanted to work at a company that employs cutting-edge tools, and it was important to me that I would be able to utilize advanced machine learning techniques to solve business problems,”said Becca. Industry & Domain Knowledge While some data science grads might prefer to work in a particular industry, most grads are open to a variety of different domains. However, most would agree that project variety is still important. Candidates with less experience often want to gain exposure to a diverse set of problems early in their career, especially if they want to specialize in a particular kind of field later on in their career. Even if they accept a position that primarily focuses on one domain (e.g., retail or manufacturing), new data science graduates benefit from working on different kinds of data science problems within that domain. Companies that offer a variety of projects and problems for data scientists to work on will be more attractive to new grads. Opportunities for Career Growth Some new data scientists hope to remain in a highly technical role throughout their careers, while others would prefer to transition into a management or leadership position. Regardless of the type of role they aim for, it’s important to many new data science grads to have opportunities for advancement and professional growth. The role of “data scientist” is new in many companies, and the career trajectory of a data scientist may not have been thoroughly mapped out by leaders in the organization. “The field [of data science] is still new and sprawling,” said Jung-Hee. “And when companies say they want a ‘data scientist,’ it may not match up to your career goals as a data scientist.” For many data scientists starting out in their careers, it is frustrating when they don’t see a clear larger goal to pursue within the company. While some data science grads might not be aware of how vital the potential for career growth is when choosing their first jobs, the importance usually becomes clearer with the passage of time. In order to ensure their data science positions are highly attractive to recent grads, companies should make an effort to map out a typical data scientist’s career trajectory and clearly define opportunities for growth and promotion within the organization. Compensation Last but not least, candidates care about salary and benefits. Talented data scientists are in high demand, and skilled applicants can generally expect to receive several impressive offers. Like most prospective employees, data science grads consider all aspects of an offer, including base salary, signing bonus, relocation assistance, yearly bonus structure, options, health insurance, paid time off, and transportation and cell phone benefits. However, non-financial benefits, including a flexible work schedule, training opportunities, and other improvements to quality of life, loom particularly large for data science candidates. Companies should be aware of what perks are common in the marketplace in order to make competitive offers that suit their organizational needs. New grads evaluate many different aspects of a potential company during the job-hunting process. While it may sound like a tall order for any one company to offer all of these things, putting in an effort in a few of these key areas could make you a top choice for talented data science graduates on the job market. _________________________________________________________________ If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars.	https://medium.com/opex-analytics/7-things-new-data-science-grads-look-for-in-a-job-7e119dbd65d9	['Opex Analytics']	2019-07-25 14:26:20.702000+00:00	['Data Science', 'Growth Strategy', 'Career Advice', 'Data Scientist', 'Hiring']
Introduction BABI Finance — be an attitudinal Blockchain Top Media	BABI Finance is a first-line blockchain media, having connections with big shots in the business in China and abroad. It cooperates with BCC, an international mainstream media, and conducts in-depth cooperation with more than 100 industry medium.Operating centers have been eatablished in China, Japan and France. The others,located in South Korea, Dubai and the United States, are coming soon. It has video programs such as “Block Chain 100 People”and “BABI Fantastic BlockChain”.There are diversified layouts including news flashes, in-depth articles, video programs, countrywide landing activities, and blockchain trainings. The global tour , global blockchain summit, international TV show “BABI Fantastic BlockChain” and other new media programs are in preparation. BABI Finance Awards in the end of 2017 in China: Outstanding Block Chain Media of the Year Block Chain Project of Excellence of the Year The most influential Media Awards Looking forward to cooperating with you ！ The details of Programs are as follows:	https://medium.com/babifinance/introduction-babi-finance-ac9ccf7a4357	['Babi Finance']	2018-05-22 18:34:52.527000+00:00	['Blockchain', 'Articles']
Power in Hand: How Trade, the Temple, and War Gave the First States Control	Photo by Pavel Nekoranec on Unsplash Last time, we imagined what life was like for humans before the invention of the state. Using historical-archaeological evidence, combined with observations of modern hunter-gatherers from around the world, we showed that the state was perhaps not the inevitable remedy to a meager and fear-filled prehistoric life. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that hunter-gatherers and nomads actively avoided integration into the urban, civilized polity. But if ancient humans had so many reasons to avoid incorporation into the state, how did it consolidate its power? How did the first governments build a permanent, coercive authority over their citizenry, eventually becoming kingdoms and empires? First Things First: Defining the State Before we go any further, I’d like to briefly examine what we mean when we talk about “the state”. For the purposes of this article, I provide Michael Mann’s definition (in turn based on the writings of sociologist Max Weber) — since his work will be our primary source here (1): “The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality, in the sense that political relations radiate outward to cover a territorially demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making, backed up by physical violence. In prehistory, the introduction of the state converts temporary political authority and a permanent ceremonial center into permanent political power, institutionalized and routinized in its ability to use coercion over recalcitrant social members as necessary.” In Volume 1 of his four-volume work The Sources of Social Power, Mann makes a solid case against the traditional, evolutionary view of the origins of the state. Contrary to popular narrative, he argues that civilization was not simply the “next step” of human evolution’s inevitable progression. Instead, it was an abnormal phenomenon that emerged on its own in only a few, specific cases — where the ecology encouraged it by “caging” people into fixed relationships.¹ While authority structures were common in prehistoric cities, they were typically based on kinship and did not embody permanent, coercive authority. The reason for this is that the people could always leave or depose them. They were not “caged” into fixed, interdependent relationships. As Mann explains: “The nub of these issues is the distinction between authority and power. The evolutionary theories offer plausible theories of the growth of authority. But they cannot explain satisfactorily how authority was converted into power that could be used either coercively against the people who granted authority in the first place or to deprive people of the rights of material subsistence. Indeed, we shall see that these conversions did not happen in prehistory. There were no general origins of the state and stratification. It is a false issue.” Mann examines four different types of evolutionary theory that, in his view, all fall short. They are: liberal theories, functionalist theories, Marxist theories, and militarist theories. Here’s a quick summary of each. Liberalism: Liberal theory explains the state’s origins from the perspective of individuals with interest in their own, personal private property; to protect that property, they form a rational “social contract”, agreeing to forfeit some rights in order to preserve others. This argument falls apart because private property likely did not exist before the state to the extent and significance that would inspire protective institutions; actually, you probably need the state in order to institutionalize private property to the extent liberal theorists imagine. Functionalism: Mann describes functionalist theories as “varied”, but concentrates on the “redistributive chiefdom” theories of economic anthropologists. While the early state resembled a redistributive chiefdom in some ways, Mann emphasizes that redistributive chiefdoms actually represent collective power.² This power is typically egalitarian, based on kinship, and recoverable: the question then becomes, what led to the permanent forfeiture of authority that created the first states? This theory can explain some aspects of the state once formed, but it cannot explain origins, because redistributive chiefdoms did not naturally “evolve” to become the state. Marxism: Like liberalism, Marxist theories of state origins rely on a concept of “private property” that probably didn’t exist before the state. Contrary to liberalism, Marxism sees the state as a way for the first “propertied classes” to cement exploitation of the lower classes. In reality, these classes were probably created within the context of the state, and not the other way around. Militarism: Militarist theory argues that the earliest states emerged as a byproduct of warfare, when mobilized armies refused to step down from power — taking control of the city by force. The problem with this theory is that, before the state’s existence, mobilization of armies on a significant scale was not possible. The state was required to organize and coordinate armed forces in a structured and permanent way. Mann gives a thorough and convincing account as to why these theories are inadequate to explain the initial rise of the state. As lacking as they are to explain its origins, however, he believes they can shed light on the later processes that helped the state to consolidate its coercive power. “All the theories are wrong,” he writes, “because they presuppose a general social evolution that had, in fact, stopped. Local history now took over. We will see, however, that, after a pause that moves us into the realm of history, all those theories began to have local and specific applicability.” “What we have puzzled over is how the people were constrained to submit to coercive state power. They would freely give collective, representative authority, to chiefs, elders, and bigmen for purposes ranging from judicial regulation to warfare to feast organization. Chiefs could thence derive considerable rank prestige. But they could not convert that into permanent, coercive power. Archaeology enables us to see that this was, indeed, the case. There was no swift or steady evolution from rank authority to state power. Such a transition was rare, confined to a very few, unusual cases. The crucial archaeological evidence is time.” So how did it happen? Below I’ll discuss Mann’s theory, which can be divided into three chronological “stages”. In each stage, a different type of power rises up to take the spotlight. It turns out they map well onto David Priestland’s theory of caste power (which we discussed in this article) — so I’m going to discuss them using his caste theory as a lens. Merchant, Soldier, Sage: How Trade, the Temple, and the Military Solidified State Power In his book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, David Priestland lays out a history of world power from the perspective of these three social “castes” — who have struggled for dominance pretty much since history began. Roughly speaking, the merchant represents economic power, the sage ideological power, and the soldier military power. (2) In essence, Mann describes these exact same power types, emerging one by one to give impetus to the state’s institutional control. Priestland’s “merchant” category was ultimately based, in part, on the “economic” power that both Mann and Weber view as a fundamental power source. As the first social caging processes took hold amidst the alluvial social space, it was this economic power that Mann argues took center stage. Recall that the initial social caging process, in Mann’s view, resulted from the gradual development of fixed social relationships radiating from an alluvial core. People closest to the floodplains, or located in strategic positions along a river, had the most desirable land — either in terms of production yields, or in terms of access to and control over terrain. This is where Mann brings in liberal and Marxist theories as relevant again. He writes: “Liberalism located the original stimulus [for the state] in interpersonal differences of ability, hard work, and luck. As a general theory, it is absurd. But it has great relevance where adjacent occupied plots of land vary considerably in their productivity. In ancient irrigation accidental proximity to fertilized soil produced large differences in productivity (emphasized by Flannery 1974 as the heart of subsequent stratification). But we must also abandon the individual, so beloved of liberalism. This was family, village, and small-clan property. From revisionist Marxian theory we draw the notion of effective possession of such property by village and lineage elites. For irrigation also reinforces the cooperation of units larger than individual households.” Land productivity was not the only driver of inequality. Land varied not just in fertility but in the usefulness of its location, in terms of the ability it granted to control trade, communication or resources: “One further basis for permanent inequalities, arising out of lucky or schemed possession of land, was possession of a strategic position at the point of contact with more diffuse networks. River junctions, water-channel fords, plus crossroads and wells, offered the chance of controls exercised through marketplace and storage organization, as well as ‘protection rent,’ to adjacent settlers. Some scholars attribute much Sumerian social organization to strategic factors (e.g., Gibson 1976). As the rivers were so important to communications, most strategic positions were located on the core irrigated land.” In other words, fixed private property in the alluvial river valley gave some people significant advantages over others — advantages that would not have been so marked in other locations. These factors did not create the state. But they did encourage a gradual increase in inequality, with most of the desirable land owned by local elites and worked by a peasantry. Elites within the core of the emerging city-state therefore had an economic advantage, with increased access to land, stockpiles of grain and animals, control over communication routes, and the ability to trade with outsiders for foreign goods. But economic relationships also became fixed between the core and the periphery — not just in the center. Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists on the outside of the city-state complex, eyeing an increasingly-centralized store of food and goods near the core, found ways to raid and trade with the civilized people within. Thus, fixed relationships began to develop between the people at the core and the people on the outside. The line between “barbarian” and “civilized” began to blur as the gravity of civilization started to pull in people from the edges. People within the irrigated center became dependent on each other, and nomads and pastoralists on the outside became interdependent with the city-dwellers — who led more routine and scheduled lives. As wealth inequality increased, leaving more and more of the city’s arable land in the hands of a growing elite, the propertied class began to withdraw from production. It was this class that became merchants, craftsmen, and the state’s first officials and priests. This brings us to the second phase of power consolidation — what Mann believes to be the most pivotal. In the second phase, the power of the temples — Mann’s “ideological” power, or Priestland’s “sages” — began to take the wheel. The “sage” performed two key roles where the consolidation of state power was concerned. The first was clerical: the invention of writing, and with it, accounting — the ability to manage and keep track of stores, and thus also to tax citizens. The second was to provide social cohesion, through the management of social norms, and narrative. Both of these abilities together allowed central bureaucrats to organize people on a scale previously unheard of. “The importance of the temple was fairly general among the earliest civilizations […] Steward (1963: 201–2) notes that extensive social cooperation in irrigation agriculture was virtually everywhere associated with a strong priesthood in the New World cases as well as the Old World ones. He argues that a relatively egalitarian group engaged in cooperation had unusually strong needs for normative solidarity. Modern scholars resist the religious connotations of the word ‘priesthood’ in Mesopotamia. They regard priests as more secular, more administrative and political, as a diplomatic corps, irrigation managers, and redistributors. Through a process whose details are not known to us, the temple emerges as the first state of history. As irrigation proceeded, more extensive labor cooperation was required.” In other words, the early priesthood performed the administrative functions of coordinating labor and managing the irrigation process. They were also accountants. Their job was to keep track of supplies, organize agricultural endeavors, and dole out centrally-stored resources in times of famine. This is where redistributive functional theories become applicable; the temples did perform something of a redistributive function in the early state, taxing people, feeding the priesthood, and providing for families in need. “The temples budgeted and organized production and redistribution in a detailed, sophisticated way — so much for the costs of production, so much in temple consumption, so much in tax, so much as reinvestment in seed, and so forth,” Mann tells us. But the priesthood was more than simply a redistributive chiefdom. Particularly remarkable is the claim quoted above: that the temple emerges as the first state in history. Though their first job was accounting, storage and redistribution, those elements alone existed before the state. Before writing, people used sticks and clay tokens to keep count of their livestock and grain. (3) Writing allowed them to be organized on a much more massive and precise scale; and this was crucial. But writing was also crucial to the state’s power for another reason: it allowed for the codification of social norms. “Writing is technically useful,” says Mann. “ It can further the goals and stabilize the meaning system of any dominant group — priests, warriors, merchants, rulers.” Even though most people in early Mesopotamia were not literate, priest-scribes at centralized ceremonial centers could still use their archives to disseminate ideas to a wider group, affecting religion, morality, and social perspectives, and harmonizing people to the same yearly rituals of cooperative agriculture. As discussed earlier, greater social cooperation in early states was tied to a strong priesthood — a centralized ceremonial center that could build a narrative around a common undertaking. And while the first literary archives overwhelmingly represent lists, mythology and religion were not far behind.³ “Artistic forms and ideologies diffused quickly among [Sumerians] because, broadly, they sought solutions to the same problems. The cycle of the seasons; the importance of silt; the unpredictable beneficence of the river; relations with herders, gatherer-hunters, and foreign merchants; emerging social and territorial fixity — all led to broad similarity of culture, science, morality, and metaphysics.” The other set of social norms that writing helped to codify was that of property relations. This was another huge driver of state power, and probably more important than myth and religion — at least in the beginning. Mann speaks of the importance of central stores and accounting for cementing private property norms: “The stores appear to have been at the center of Sumerian power organization. Perhaps the gods were fundamentally guardians of the stores. In the stores private-property rights and central political authority merged into one, expressed as a set of seals and eventually as writing and civilization itself. Writing was later turned to the telling of myth and religion. But its first and always its major purpose was to stabilize and institutionalize the two emerging, merging sets of authority relations, private property and the state.” The temple-state, however, probably remained largely democratic at this stage. Writing and the ritual center made it possible to institutionalize government; however, a third phase was necessary in order for coercive power to become real. Priestland’s “soldier” — what Mann calls “military” power ⁴— lent the final hand to the state’s emergent arm of control. As the priesthood emerged to keep track of resources and administer mass organization, storehouses became more centralized — as we discussed above. But centralized stores, convenient for local organization, are also convenient targets for barbarians or nearby cities to raid. It became necessary to defend these stores. During this period, fortified walls began to emerge, and with them, the military and its kings gathered strength. “ Personages appear who are named lugal and reside in large building complexes called é-gal — translated as ‘king’ and ‘palace.’ They appear in texts alongside new terms for military activities. If we engage in the risky business of giving dates to the first rulers mentioned in the king list (written down in about 1800 B.C.), we get to about the twenty-seventh century for the first great kings, Enmerkar of Uruk and Gilgamesh, his famous successor.” Mann argues that the innovations of the temple-state were necessary in order for the military to gain access to organized power. Writing and social management techniques could easily translate from the priesthood to war, but the coordinated army was an invention of the state (rather than its creator). “ We can reintroduce militarist theories of the origins of the state […] not to explain origins but to assist in the explanation of further state development,” Mann writes. “Managerial techniques that had been applied already to irrigation, to redistribution and exchange, and to patron-client relations between core and periphery could develop military offshoots. High-investment defense at first predominated, both in fortifications and in the dense, slow-moving phalanxes of infantry and animal carts that constituted the early armies. Such formations boost centralized command, coordination, and supply.” At some point the democratic, sagely state assembly was replaced by the despotic warrior-king. We can speculate about precisely how; but the evidence is ambiguous. Some scholars believe the state’s internal military took over, gaining power in an arms race to protect their storehouses from foreign raiders. Others believe military forces came from outside the city-state, as contracted barbarian mercenaries and nomadic marcher lords turned to conquest. It’s likely that it was a two-part process, beginning with the former and ending with the latter: “The irrigation successes of the city-states made them more attractive as prey to poorer upland neighbors. The records also document many boundary disputes between the city-states themselves. The two types of conflict made defense more critical and led to the construction of massive city walls in the mid-third millennium. Simultaneously, we deduce that war leaders consolidated their rule into kingship.” As Sumer became more militarized, they partnered with barbarian mercenaries in their hinterlands to protect trade routes and defend their core. Mann believes that, perhaps, evolving barbarian military technology contributed to the city-state’s eventual conquest. In any case, it was Sargon of Akkad — a marcher lord — who ultimately took control of Sumer, establishing what scholars believe to be history’s first true “empire of domination”. We see painted here a gradual progression towards coercive authority, in phases that lend the spotlight to each of Priestland’s power types in succession. In the first place, alluvial ecology created a social caging process that fixed people and territory into certain relationships. This allowed for economic power relations to ossify. Writing and the priesthood further cemented these economic relationships. Above all, this development was an innovation in management and mass social organization. As accounting became institutionalized, labor coordinated on a mass scale, and a “priestly” caste liberated from agricultural labor to preside over it all, resources grew in number and centralization. Thus, they had to be defended from raiding barbarians and other city-states. The social management techniques developed by the priesthood could also be used to manage a cohesive military force, which ultimately took over —at first, likely, from within, before it was seized by outsiders. Some Caveats and Limitations It’s important to note that, even under an empire of domination, early states still did not exercise cohesive control over their citizens. This picture paints the rise of the coercive state, but it does not describe the same “coercive state” we’re familiar with today. Beyond the city-state’s core, even a militant king had little control over his subjects. There were many networks of intersecting power throughout the early state system. Also important to note is that, in this analysis, Mann concentrates specifically on the case of Sumer. He generalizes this theory to his overall model of civilization, going over each unique case in detail, and discussing deviations;⁵ but in the end, we have to keep in mind that “Sumer” and “all pristine developing civilizations” are not the same thing. This is a general model that is based on the rise of the first pristine civilization, which is the most well-documented example. It applies to other examples with more or less variation. Conclusion: Why it Matters for Us A key takeaway is that no one power source led, by itself, to the consolidation of social control in the hands of the state. Rather, several distinct types of power actors each took the limelight at different points, contributing to the rising mechanics of a caged system. But it’s noteworthy that Mann considers the role of the priesthood — or, as I would say, the ideological phase — to be the most pivotal in building those mechanics. This is a publication about narrative, where it intersects with power, now and throughout history. We are not isolating narrative from other power sources as the sole cause of world events; that’s why I think it is important to discuss Priestland’s “merchant, soldier, sage” alongside Mann’s work on the four sources of social power. But narrative is of particular interest to us here. The idea that ideology — through writing, accounting, and the unity of social norms — gave the state the tools it needed to exist is enormous. Without these things, according to Mann, the state simply could not organize itself on a large enough scale to become institutionalized. As we move forward, we’re going to remain a while longer in the realm of ancient history. But our focus is going to gradually shift towards the role of narrative in creating society, in mobilizing production and resources, and in creating relationships between those at the center…and those who chose to remain outside. Notes According to Mann, alluvial river valleys provided the perfect ecology for what he calls the “social cage”. Ultra-fertilized soil on the alluvial floodplain lured people to settle permanently, giving up their nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles. Meanwhile, mountains, swamps, and arid deserts on the outskirts made it difficult to leave the fertile urban core, once established. Within these permanent floodplain settlements, relationships became fixed, people became increasingly interdependent, and differences in land arability led to institutionalized socioeconomic inequality. This is discussed here. A redistributive chiefdom is a social group in which members owe tribute or labor to a “bigman” or “chief”. This chief hoards the wealth of the community, with the expectation that he will redistibute it as needed. In reality, most chiefs and bigmen are expected to throw lavish feasts for their tribes, give generously to those who need it, and rarely assume the wealth of the tribe for themselves. It is a huge responsibility. If such leaders abuse their power they are quickly deposed, or deserted by their followers. This is why Mann talks about the “collective” nature of their power, and delineates it from the coercive power of the state. The period Mann examines when he talks about early Mesopotamian writing is between 3500 BC to about 2000 BC. As discussed before, Weber and others tend to combine “military” power and “political” power under the single banner of “political” power. Mann differs from this view, asserting that guerillas, rebels and others can exert military power without having official political power. Therefore, he divides his power sources into four, including “economic”, “ideological”, “military” and “political”. Priestland ultimately uses three categories (“economic”, “ideological”, and Mann’s “military”), acknowledging that political power can be wielded at different times by different castes of people. My view is based on theirs, though closer to Priestland’s, and ultimately slightly different. I would assert that “political” power, rather than being wholesale “wielded at different times [by different people]” (as Priestland suggests), is actually always a combination of the other three types of power. I believe political power is made up of these other power types, by its very nature, and is not a separate “power source” on its own. I can discuss this later in detail if my readers wish. And there are deviations. Sources	https://medium.com/power-lines/power-in-hand-how-trade-the-temple-and-war-gave-the-first-states-control-cb87e496ded6	['Haley Kynefin']	2019-05-23 06:51:31.484000+00:00	['Power', 'Politics', 'Sociology', 'Culture', 'History']
6 Ways That COVID-19 Has Affected Me As A Transgender Woman	6 Ways That COVID-19 Has Affected Me As A Transgender Woman The playing field actually seems a little bit more level. Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash So how is the pandemic treating you? Has this coronavirus forced you and those in your life to change how you go about your daily lives? I have read and heard a lot about how lots of people are modifying their habits and routines to adjust for the additional stress of the pandemic, and the extra time needed to properly protect themselves, while interacting in a higher than normal risk environment. Honestly, this is scary for everyone. We’ve all likely witnessed other pandemics in our lifetimes like MERS or SARS, or even caught the annual flu and maybe took a long time to recover. But we do not know everything about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can lead to fear. Additionally, not everyone reacts to widely issued health guidelines in the same way. We see groups of people continuing their lives as if the pandemic does not exist. They party and congregate with no apparent care for the recommended distancing and protection measures. On the other hand, we see people stocking up on essentials and squirrelling themselves away in the protection of their homes, trying to avoid any possible contact with anyone who may be carrying the virus. Dealing with all of this is definitely not easy for most people. Mainly because of all the unknowns and all the changes. For many, what makes it even harder is seeing those who aren’t even trying to be serious about the potential risks of a global pandemic. For those of us who happen to be transgender, these times can present even more challenges… or, these times can potentially make the playing field seem just a little bit more level. “The truth is, as transgender people, this is what we have been forced into being prepared for our whole lives.” Honestly, it’s not all that bad of a situation… well, not really. The whole virus thing — with its health impacts, risk of death — none of that is good for anyone. But the day-to-day impacts on how we navigate things are not that bad. The truth is, as transgender people, this is what we have been forced into being prepared for our whole lives. In some ways, you could say we’ve been trained for this. Many of the aspects of daily life during this pandemic which cause disruption for the greater populations are, in fact, regular annoyances for transgender people. Annoyances we’ve learned to either live with or cope with. I’ll explain so you don’t think I’ve gone insane with all my squirrel friends… 1. Masks and ambiguity There has been a lot of discussion and pushback regarding the imposition of mandatory face masks. Some people have fears of masks, some have health issues which are exacerbated by wearing a mask. Others simply do not want to be told what to do. Face coverings place a barrier between people, making it difficult to read the other person’s expressions. There’s also concern over whether it’s possible to ascertain another person’s intentions or trustworthiness if their face is not fully visible. In many ways, transgender people have been used to these issues their whole lives. We have learned to neither rely on, nor trust the outward appearance of others. Social norms and discrimination have forced us to hide our own true selves, while maintaining an outward public expression of happiness living as our sex assigned at birth. We know that what one sees on the surface is not always the internal reality. Similarly, we experience others acting as if they are supportive and accepting, yet beneath the surface, despise our very existence. So in that way, face masks are the perfect equalizer; they place each and every person at the same level of disadvantage in trying to determine one another’s true intentions. We should, in fact, rely on action to assess trustworthiness; repetitive and consistent action demonstrates behavior far better than any facial expression, and trans people seem to know this lesson innately. 2. Being avoided There’s also something scary about putting on a face mask, as it seems there’s a connotation of medical care, or something toxic that we need protection from. Putting one on yourself might stir up feelings of fear or harm, and seeing others with masks on may reinforce how fearful you are (or “should” be). Before the pandemic, if I saw someone on the street wearing a mask, I would give them a wide berth. I would subconsciously think there was a reason I needed to stay away from that person. But nowadays, just about everyone gives everyone else a wide berth automatically. The thing is, as a transgender person I have been given these “wide berth” distances over and over again. It happened throughout my transition, and it happens throughout my daily life as a trans woman. Of course, this is only my interpretation of other people’s actions, but I have felt that these distances given to me are a direct result of others being unsure of who, or what I am… And I feel that, somehow, the further away I am from that person, the less unease they will feel in determining how to interact with me. Time will tell as to how this plays out post-pandemic. Will societies continue to maintain these distances as a way to protect against the unknowns carried by those physically intersecting our existence? Or will we return to the crowded pathways and establishments where “personal space” has no place? Will our future bring trans people like me into the norm, or will it return to a place where we continue to feel like outsiders — primarily because others push us away or avoid us? 3. Vocal issues I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has put some pressure on my throat, not from any kind of sickness, but simply from communicating with others. I would hazard a guess that the distances we’re keeping from each other have a contributing factor; we can’t simply whisper in a friend’s ear anymore. Even during this pandemic I have found myself a regular customer at my local coffee shop. For convenience and safety, I typically use the drive-through. But so do a lot of others seeking the same. I do end up ordering ahead and then go inside to pick up my cup of delicious caffeine-based heaven, but that causes its own problems. The staff end up asking customer names so as to see if their drinks are ready, but these questions (and their inevitable muffled responses) drum up a mix of potential outcomes for customers like me… that is, those of us who rely on some level of stealth to survive a life of relative normalcy. As I stand on one of the institutional floor dots demarking proper social distancing, staff members scan the waiting clientele and query those waiting in order to play a game of retail “match-em.” As they ask my name, I meekly respond, “Kat… erm, Kathryn,” to which the guaranteed, “sorry, I didn't get that” requires me to dig deeper and say, “KATHRYN.” Digging deeper is counter to the quiet, meek and hidden person I try to be, mirroring what I view as the norm of womanhood and femininity. However, I am unable to achieve this norm. Because simply stating my name for the barista with a mask across my face draws out a garbled — but distinctly masculine — voice, betraying my identity and my expression. Who knew that simply picking up my coffee would crush the hope and optimism I work with each day? 4. Fear of healthcare It’s interesting to consider that one of the greatest tools we have in overcoming this pandemic is our healthcare system. The better prepared and equipped they are, the better the chance we have of surviving any infection. The better prepared and equipped they are, the better the chance we have of gaining cures for this sickness. Our healthcare systems and their workers have truly been the unsung heroes of this pandemic. But what of those needing healthcare for issues other than the Coronavirus? I know a number people who avoided going to the hospital for fear of putting themselves at risk of getting infected. It seems it’s becoming a regular occurrence now to just “work through” something which previously would’ve necessitated an ER visit. For transgender people, this is common even when not in the middle of a pandemic. Many of us are fearful of healthcare. And many of us unfortunately have too many experiences reminding us that there can actually be more harm done by seeking help. Even though the type of harm I’m referring to isn’t like that of a disease or virus, it is no less potentially lethal. Being transgender within a healthcare system can result in a lack of treatment (or inappropriate treatments), irrelevant linkages to gender transitioning, harassment, discrimination, and so on. Even the basic fundamental right of having one’s gender identity respected is not guaranteed. Each of these outcomes are just as likely to lead to harm, or even loss of life, as becoming infected with COVID-19 would. It is no wonder that people in general avoid hospitals and doctors during a pandemic, as it’s easier to live with some pain and discomfort rather than face the potential of even greater harm. 5. Practicing patience It sounds like a broken record by now, but how many of you have heard someone ask, “when is this pandemic going to end? I want things to go back to normal.” I can understand why people ask this question; many fear the unknown, finding it difficult to cope or manage their lives without firm answers or any view of the future. While I can’t speak for all trans people, many of us do suffer from some mental health condition, which is only further exacerbated by also having gender dysphoria. Personally, I’ve had issues with anxiety — and a lack of information making it difficult to cope with unknowns only feeds the cycle. When it comes to learning patience, and an ability to simply accept that there will always be life-altering events, or decisions to make based on those events (such as pandemic response), transgender people have already been dealing with this reality for a long, long time. For those of you who don’t know, transition is typically the best way to address gender dysphoria, but transitioning is a long process (some would argue life-long), and it is subject to extensive gatekeeping by outsiders with their own agendas and biases. Most people who transition get frustrated at the beginning because of the slow nature of approvals, and the lack of understanding by decision makers. As time passes though, many of us accept that the only way to get through our transition is to just be patient, do what’s required, and acknowledge that we are not in control. This sounds a lot like what humanity must do in the middle of a global pandemic. Many people question why we must follow government directions, why rights are being restricted to improve safety, and even, who has the right to be making decisions. Perhaps it time for everyone to just sit down and be patient, like us trans people have been doing forever. 6. Isolation and guilt Ironically, isolation is both a required tool for combatting the pandemic as well as one of its worst side effects. While there are some people who enjoy personal time and solitude, many struggle with a long term lack of social interaction. The pandemic has robbed many people of these basic fundamental needs. I, for one, did not have a big social life beforehand, as most of my social needs were met through work-related activities. But a couple of months before the pandemic happened, I retired. With the resulting disappearance of face-to-face contact and social spontaneity, I felt a great sense of loneliness. And I very much internalized that feeling, which drove a sense of responsibility and guilt… that it was my fault that I was alone. Some of this comes simply from being transgender. Many put off coming out and transitioning for fear of losing family, friends, work, etc. The act of living authentically can, unfortunately, become the catalyst for a life lived alone and sad. When we’re at our lowest points, it’s often hard for trans people to not link their transition with their loneliness, and therefore, feel a sense of guilt… even though we’re decidedly not continuing to live a lie. While I don’t want anyone to feel lonely, the fact that the pandemic has forced so many people into isolation — and subsequently, longing for a chance to interact with friends and family — has actually helped me a lot. I didn’t secretly start seeing friends to fulfill my needs, but rather, I felt some consolation that others were experiencing what I have been feeling for a while. What has been helpful is that it became easier for me to accept that this fear of loneliness is not my fault, just like the isolation caused by the pandemic is not the fault of anyone else feeling lonely. So where does this leave us? I know I feel better right now than I did before the pandemic. Which is funny, since the pandemic is not over yet. Perhaps it’s more a sense of sharing this pain with my fellow human beings. Or that this pain we’re all sensing at present is unrelated to any individual personal characteristic… like being transgender. I feel like some of what I’ve experienced as a trans woman — transitioning at this point in my life — has prepared me better for this pandemic. I believe that the impacts have been softer on me than on many others simply because I have experienced similar impacts as a trans woman. At this point I actually feel that being transgender during a pandemic has left me in a better position than most cisgender people. I even feel a bit lucky to be transgender right now, with the other 99.5% of the species getting a small sense of the struggles and hurdles that we live with constantly. Right now, I have the advantage! It will end though, at one point, this feeling of “superiority.” The pandemic will end, humanity will return to some sense of normalcy, and I will return to the normalcy of not being “normal.” And when it ends, like many others, I will rejoice that we have beaten this disease, even though that means I’ll lose this temporary advantage. But until then, I’m living in the moment!	https://medium.com/gender-from-the-trenches/6-ways-that-covid-19-has-affected-me-as-a-trans-woman-ad00167e0944	['Kathryn Foss']	2020-11-06 19:38:29.721000+00:00	['Mental Health', 'LGBTQ', 'Culture', 'Transgender', 'Covid 19']
China Is Normalizing Authoritarianism	China Is Normalizing Authoritarianism Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash China — one of the most repressive regimes on the planet — is normalizing its authoritarian behavior. Examples of China’s oppression are numerous: China, claiming centuries-old sovereignty over Tibet, invaded the Himalayan region in 1950. In the decades since then, China has destroyed Buddhist temples, tortured and killed Buddhist monks and nuns, and suppressed Tibetan culture At least one million Uighur Muslims have been interned in more than 85 identified camps (which the Chinese government refers to as “re-education centers”) in Xinjiang. Overseas Uighurs have alleged torture, forced sterilization, and mass surveillance against Muslims in China China has brutally suppressed the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong In the summer of 2020, the Hong Kong government imposed a national security law that is widely accepted as a method to stifle the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. The law defines criminal behavior — separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries — in broad terms. Prominent pro-democracy figures such as Agnes Chow and Jimmy Lai have been arrested since the law was passed. The law also states that criminal behavior need not be committed in Hong Kong; anyone, anywhere can violate this law. Just ask Samuel Chu, an American activist whose arrest warrant states that Chu is wanted for, “inciting secession and collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security.” The “collusion with foreign forces” presumably refers to the fact that Chu lobbies his own government — the United States government — to confront China over the erosion of political freedoms in Hong Kong. Why has there not been more international outcry to these flagrant anti-democratic moves? One main reason is that China has leveraged its large economy to stifle objection. Approximately 1.4 billion people live in China, making the country an economic juggernaut. The entertainment industry — film and sports in particular — have taken note to pander to this market. Daryl Morey was one of the first people to recognize the consequences of speaking out about Hong Kong. In October 2019, while Hong Kong protestors demonstrated against a Chinese extradition law, Morey — the general manager of the Houston Rockets — tweeted an image that stated “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” The backlash against Morey and his team was swift. Chinese businesses pulled their sponsorships from the NBA. The Chinese Basketball Association suspended connections with the Houston Rockets. (The association’s chairman — Yao Ming — was a former player on the team.) Houston Rockets games were no longer scheduled to be aired on Chinese television statements. Morey was eventually pushed to retract his previous statement. Profit, it seems, mattered more to the NBA than human rights. This trend can be found outside of basketball. The film industry also caters to China’s worst impulses. China limits the number of foreign films that can be shown in their cinemas. Competition for one of those slots can be fierce, as blockbuster movies can make more money in China than in the United States. As a result, movie studios crave access to the Chinese market. Take the 2020 remake of Mulan as an example — Disney specifically tailored details of the remake for a Chinese audience. That fact, by itself, is harmless. However, portions of the film were shot in Xinjiang, a location where millions of Uighur Muslims are actively being repressed. The credits of the movie included a statement of gratitude to the Xinjiang authorities, thereby contributing to the normalization of oppression in China. China can censor American movies in seemingly silly ways, such as removing a Taiwan flag from Tom Cruise’s jacket in Top Gun or changing the nationality of the paratroopers from Chinese to North Korean in a 2012 remake of Red Dawn. Censorship can also be insidious. As James Tager of PEN America has noted, Chinese censorship is not only what is removed from movies; it can also mean that certain types of movies are never made at all. Would a Hollywood studio risk making a movie that celebrates rule-breakers or resisting a tyrant if that movie would jeopardize the studio’s other projects as well? Tibet was a cause célèbre in Hollywood in the 1990s. Human rights abuses do not get the same attention today. Even in the United States government, taking on China over human rights is a difficult issue. Prominent Republican senators, from Ted Cruz to Rick Scott to Ben Sasse, have been wary over Chinese influence on the American entertainment industry. However, any president — Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and a future Joe Biden administration — needs Chinese cooperation on a wide array of issues, such North Korea, trade disputes, and climate change. Human rights often take a back seat. Will anything change in the future? It is unlikely in the short term. The 2022 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place in China, where Chinese officials will likely restrict any mere mention of human rights abuses in exchange for sports footage.	https://medium.com/discourse/china-is-normalizing-authoritarianism-26b0ef4a6c52	['Jacquie Rose']	2020-12-21 04:55:49.008000+00:00	['Human Rights', 'Film', 'USA', 'China', 'Politics']
[Newsletter] How regular exercise is a journey to discovering your active, healthy self	[Newsletter] How regular exercise is a journey to discovering your active, healthy self Plus, more headaches? Neck muscle strength will reduce them … Photo by Pan Yunbo on Unsplash My weekly three best insights from me, Medium and the web to help you live longer better. Working from home has led to more headaches— strengthening your neck helps reduce them, here’s how — item #3. Are you a logical person? How’s it serving you, or are you serving it? Could intuition, not logic, be the highest form of understanding?— item #2. Exercise isn’t just for our body, it also helps our mind. When we feel better we eat better and it becomes a virtuous circle of self-discovery — keep reading — From around Medium… 1. Better mood, less stress — leads to better food choices One of my most popular posts ever is “Want To Discover The Active, Healthy Person Inside You?” The secret to discovering your active healthy self is to exercise. Whatever you can, consistently. Exercising regularly is linked to better eating habits. Exercise helps your body burn fat and fuel more effectively and makes you feel in a better mood and decreases your stress levels. It makes you look better, and feel better — mentally and physically. When you look better and feel better you also make better food choices, and thus set yourself up in a virtuous circle of continuing to feel better, look better, and wanting to exercise more. This releases the active, healthy person inside you — no matter what your age. You don’t need to run 5km or lift heavy weights, just to get started. My post: Want To Discover The Active, Healthy Person Inside You? 👉 Here is my collection of posts about exercise which will help you. 2. Logic can be immobilising — here’s how intuition helps This week Alvin Ang caught my attention with his post on intuition — How The Japanese Concept of “Mushin” Can Help You Become a Top-Performer. Mushin states that intuition, not logic, is the highest form of understanding. We often use emotions and logic to reach decisions. We believe this to be rational — missing the insight that it is more often they who are using us. Paradoxically, it is only when we make the leap from using analytical logic to intuitive understanding that we become thinkers of the highest order. Mushin is a universal concept that if applied, will help you stop overanalyzing things and become the executor of your dreams. — Alvin Ang. Applying Mushin in our lives means knowing our “path to victory”. We will have many — relationships, money, personal growth, resilience etc. Having a path to victory means that when we get lost in the chaos of life, we don’t have to stress and start question-solving rather than acting. We can simply adapt our goals according to the current situation. We apply our intuition to move from the circumstances to the next step on our known path. What this means for us: You can silence your inner-critique, and your procrastination, by having a known path to your goal, and by applying your intuition to move your circumstances along this path. Mushin is recognising how to transform your reality into a step on your known path. The article: How The Japanese Concept of “Mushin” Can Help You Become a Top-Performer Related: Woody Allen Was Wrong — Consistency And Success Aren’t Just About Showing Up From the web … 3. More headaches during work-from-home? Here’s a fix One of the most popular articles clicked-through to from one of my posts is by The Prehab Guys — Strengthen Your Neck Out of Pain. Lack of neck muscle strength, endurance and control is linked with neck pain disorders. I’ve noticed a lot more conversations about neck pain and headaches during the pandemic and working from home. Perhaps that’s why so many people clicked through to the article when I previously referenced it. What this means for us: Neck strength can reduce headaches. The first video in the article has chin tucks, followed by two other exercises that we don’t commonly see. I try to do each of these daily — during my regular breaks. These exercises don't just reduce pain. They also tune up the sensors in our neck and their neural pathways to our brain. This helps us balance better. The Article: Strengthen Your Neck Out Of Pain Related: When Your Head Feels Disconnected From Your Foot Do These Two Exercises To Reconnect Them Questions, just HIT REPLY, love to hear from you. Wishing you a safe and active week, Walter ⭑Keep Moving⭑ Adamson ⭑Top Food Writer⭑ Never miss a chance to live longer better — sign up for 👉 my weekly four best tips from a week’s reading — newsletter.walteradamson.com	https://medium.com/body-age-buster/how-regular-exercise-is-a-journey-to-discovering-your-active-healthy-self-f77805566178	['Walter Adamson']	2020-11-29 07:37:27.185000+00:00	['Mushin', 'Work From Home', 'Intuition', 'Newsletter']
How to Set Up End-to-End Encryption in an iOS App Using Apple’s CryptoKit	Step 2. Encrypting Data To encrypt data for a user (recipient) you need to first fetch their public key from the trusted service. The initializer Curve25519.KeyAgreement.PublicKey(rawRepresentation: Data) can be used to deserialize the public key coming from the trusted service. Step 2.1 Deriving a symmetric key Public keys can’t be used to encrypt data directly. They’re used by the two parties communicating to agree on a symmetric key for encryption, via a Diffie-Hellmann key agreement. To do this, we will use the sender’s private key and the recipient’s public key to generate a shared secret from which we can derive the symmetric key using the HKDF key derivation function. The protocol salt is a value that alters the outcome of the symmetric key derivation. Choose one that will remain constant for your use case, for example: "My Key Agreement Salt".data(using: .utf8)! . If you wish, you can store this symmetric key for later using the same strategy Apple recommends for the private key; however, it should be discarded if any of the communicating users' key pairs change. Step 2.2 Encrypting the data with the symmetric key Now we can finally use that symmetric key to perform the encryption. This job can be done by one of the ciphers CryptoKit supports. In this guide, we’ll use ChaChaPoly, which can be three times faster than AES in mobile devices, according to Adam Langley and other researchers.	https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-set-up-end-to-end-encryption-in-an-ios-app-using-apples-cryptokit-e94815652e9c	['Matheus Cardoso']	2020-05-15 16:43:15.929000+00:00	['Programming', 'Mobile', 'Cryptography', 'iOS', 'Security']
Introduction to Deep Learning for Self Driving Cars (Part — 1)	Measuring Performance After we have trained our first model, there is something very important to discuss. We have a training set, as well as a validation set, and a test set. What is that all about? Don’t skip that part. It has to do with measuring how well we’re doing without accidentally shooting ourself in the foot, and it is a lot more subtle then we might initially think. It’s also very important because as we will discover later, once we know how to measure our performance on a problem, we’ve already solved half of it. Let me explain why measuring performance is subtle. Let’s go back to our classification task. We’ve got a whole lot of images with labels. We could say, okay, I’m going to run my classifier on those images, and see how many I got right. That’s my error measure. And then we go out and use your classifier on new images, images that we’ve never seen in the past, and we measure how many we get right, and our performance gets worse. The classifier doesn’t do as well. So what happened? Well, imagine I construct a classifier that simply compares the new image to any of the other images that I’ve already seen in my training set, and just returns the label. By the measure we defined earlier, it’s a great classifier. It would get 100% accuracy on the training set. But as soon as it sees a new image, it’s lost. It has no idea what to do. It’s not a great classifier. The problem is that our classifier has memorized the training set, and it fails to generalize to new examples. It’s not just a theoretical problem. Every classifier that we will build will tend to try and memorize the training set. And it will usually do that very, very well. Our job though, is to help it generalize to new data instead. So, how do we measure generalization instead of measuring how well the classifier memorized the data? The simplest way is to take a small subset of the training set, not use it in training, and measure the error on that test data. Problem solved, now our classifier cannot cheat because it never sees the test data, so it can’t memorize it. But there is still a problem, because training a classifier is usually a process of trial and error. We try a classifier, we measure its performance and then we try another one and we measure again. And another, and another, we tweak the model, we explore the parameters, we measure, and finally, we have what we think is the perfect classifier. And then after all this care we’ve taken to separate our test data from our training data and only measuring our performance on the test data, now we deploy our system in a real production environment. Image by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash And we get more data and we score our performance on that new data and it doesn’t do nearly as well. What can possibly have happened? What happened is that our classifier has seen our test data, indirectly, through our own eyes. Every time we made a decision about which classifier to use, which parameter to tune, we actually give information to our classifier about the test set. Just a tiny bit, but it adds up. So over time, as we run many, and many experiments, our test data bleeds into our training data. So what can you do?	https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-deep-learning-for-self-driving-cars-f70b5f04aa16	['Prateek Sawhney']	2020-11-10 07:23:10.549000+00:00	['Machine Learning', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science']
“My Fair Lady” is not community theatre	Every single actor goes beyond convincing, whether it’s the lead roles with Eliza and Henry Higgins (John Girdlestone) or less prominent but important characters like Eliza’s good-for-nothing drunk of a father Alfred P Doolittle (Charles Hutchins) and Henry’s mother Mrs. Higgins (Leigh Levine). Strong acting runs through the cast, not least of which in the ensemble characters. Which brings us back to that shockingly good costume scene that got its own round of applause, with the ensemble blowing us away in the Ascot Opening Race song. The costumes, designed by Robert A. Fowle (I just want to recognize him once again, if you will indulge me), follow the black and white color scheme lead of the costume designer for the movie, Cecil Beaton. Fowle’s version is a work of genius, as he puts his own dramatic visual touch with his rendition. What will stick with us, as much as the costumes, is the sheer mastery of the acting in this scene in particular. The music, staging, lighting, and everything else that is necessary to fully support a storyline is put firmly in place. Saturday night, we saw the actors leaning into the stage set for them and making it all shine. There’s something breathtaking about watching anyone take delight in their own mastery of their work—no matter what it is they do, from acting to singing to cooking to engineering. These actors were having fun. They were completely in control of the huge presence behind their restrained movements. They knew they were knocking it out of the park. It’s a gift to watch a person enjoy their own mastery, to revel in it, to be in that moment, fully aware, fully in control, fully sharing their talent with their community. “This is not community theatre,” Cirivello insisted at intermission. And she’s right. It must be noted: that term “community theatre” merely means the actors aren’t paid. This community theatre—our Grand Rapids theatre community—once again has upped the ante and shown us that budgets are no barrier to mastery. Eliza Doolittle (center, Alyssa Bauer) with ensemble cast. Photo credit Ashley Wierenga, courtesy Grand Rapids Civic Theatre. “My Fair Lady” Grand Rapids Civic Theatre 30 North Division Avenue Through March 18 Tickets available here. Get ready for next season with two kinds of season pass options here. Join the culturedGR members for future art adventures for as little as $5/month. Details here.	https://medium.com/cultured-gr/my-fair-lady-is-not-community-theatre-f9ed8453fe2d	['Holly Bechiri']	2018-02-27 18:00:35.780000+00:00	['Art Criticism', 'Culturedgr', 'Arts', 'Theatre']
Week 12 NFL Picks	A look at some of my positions for today’s slate of games Tampa Bay -3 We joked a bit about how Indianapolis is an outdoor team playing in a dome on the Deep Dive this week. They play tough D and grind it out with a great run scheme behind a very good offensive line. Tampa Bay doesn’t have any issues playing out in the elements but, I wouldn’t want to give this offense the advantage of playing in a controlled environment on turf either. Vita Vea looks like he may play and despite the Indy run vs the Tampa run D being a strength on strength matchup, I have to give Tampa the edge in most of the other positional group matchups today. Laying some road chalk here. Minnesota +3 49ers are coming in a bit over rated by the market after a nice win against the Jags and Shanny’s annual spanking of McVay and Minnesota somehow still not getting respect after another nice performance by their offense. One of the (many) things I was wrong about in the preseason previews was that Kirk Cousins was destined to maintain the seemingly career-long plateau he was on. The Vikings QB has somehow taken a step forward this year and led a top 10 NFL offense through 11 weeks. Minnesota’s defensive line injuries is concerning for the ATS pick, a Vikes Team Total over may be an alternate way to back them versus a bad SF secondary here. Carolina -2.5 I wasn’t sure there was ever going to be a spot where the market would be high on Miami, but after winning three straight, here we are. Obviously, it was a nice performance against the Ravens, but the wins over the Texans and Jets can likely just be attributed to them being the Texans and Jets. This Dolphins team still has massive holes in multiple positional groups that can be exploited. I don’t think Cam’s shoulder will magically heal by Sunday, but this Dolphins pass defense is bottom of the league and he should be able to pick his spots underneath while getting CMC plenty of work as well. Miami blitzes well, but if I can say anything about Cam since his return, it’s that he does look pretty mobile and has dealt well with pressure.	https://blog.fantasylifeapp.com/week-12-nfl-picks-5fe6f2fd19e0	['Andy Molitor']	2021-11-28 14:08:56.473000+00:00	['Picks', 'Betting', 'NFL', 'Gambling', 'Sports Betting']
[ANN] Partnership with Stellar Lumens	Hi everyone, We are happy to announce that Stellar Lumens and Pundi X will be formulating a collaboration between both parties. Stellar Lumens is an open-sourced, distributed payment infrastructures, built on the premise that the international community needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone”. Stellar Lumens is connecting individuals, institutions, and payment system through its platform. In this collaboration, Pundi X will work with Stellar Lumens for the settlement in Indonesian local currency (IDR) in the future and together we want to build a better crypto-world.	https://medium.com/pundix/announcement-partnership-with-stellar-lumens-89195891b885	['Pundi X', 'Writers']	2017-12-19 03:37:38.670000+00:00	['Pundix', 'Stellar Lumens', 'ICO', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin']
The Bazaar of Regrets	The Bazaar of Regrets A scene Photo by Ben Mater on Unsplash The curtain rises and two people are seen outside a pub on a balmy summer evening; the dying rays of the setting sun rests over their shoulders. “There are two types of people in the world. Those who live with regrets, and those who live without regrets.” “Ok…so which one are you?” “Which one do you think?” “I don’t have a clue. How would I know? “ “Have a guess. Go on.” “You’re someone with regrets?! I imagine that’s most people?” “With regrets? Are you serious?” “Yeah…why? You almost…almost look insulted.” “Is that the impression I give you? That I live with tonnes of regrets?” “Well I don’t know about tonnes of regrets, but you must…you must have some regrets?” “I have no regrets. None whatsoever. I don’t believe in it.” “Well…you don’t have to believe in having regrets. It’s not a question of belief. You either have regrets or you don’t.” “And I don’t. It’s a complete waste of time thinking about what could have been.” “It is. I’m not denying it but…but it’s not really within our control, is it? It’s not something we consciously choose to either have or avoid. Don’t you think?” “It’s a matter of attitude. Have your regrets ever brought you anything but misery?” “That’s not the point -” “Why not?” “I will tell you why -” “I’m keen to hear this.” “I will tell you why. It’s not what they bring you. It’s what they…it’s what they say about you. If you don’t have any regrets, then have you really been torn about anything, ever?” “Yes. But I leave that in the past. That period of being torn about something is over, so why think over it again and again?” “Because your life could have gone down a different route, perhaps a better route. And it’s quite natural to think about what could have been.” “What could have been, could have been. I want nothing to do with what could have been today. It is what it is.” “Fair enough. But anyway, one last point from me — you’re young, you’ll come to have regrets one day. This world is a bazaar of regrets.” “Well, well, well…I know I certainly will regret it if we don’t have another drink tonight.” “Hah — that’s true. I’ll get it.” Curtain	https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/the-bazaar-of-regrets-7368b209997	['Maitreya Thakur']	2020-01-27 14:46:17.298000+00:00	['Fiction', 'Thoughts', 'Fiction Writing', 'Play']
How advantageous PPC Marketing is for your Online Business?	PPC advertising is anything but another standard in the present quick fast computerized showcasing world. In the event that Information Technology have online business, without a spec of uncertainty, you will be acquainted with this term. Right? After SEO, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is something which adds brilliance to online business. Indeed, that is valid. According to shopping patterns, over half of Americans decide to shop on the web. PPC promoting As of now, PPC promoting is the most favored choice for private companies. In addition to the fact that you drive colossal traffic to your site, yet additionally make extraordinary presence of your image around the world. In all honesty, PPC is significant for your business and in this article, I will walk you through some amazing advantages of PPC advertising. So we should delve in underneath. Top advantages of PPC promoting at a Glance The advantages of PPC promoting include: ✮ Cost-powerful strategy First advantage, which individuals worry about the most, is cost that is applied on running a PPC promotion crusade. With PPC promoting, you have full authority over your spending plans. Truth be told, continuous PPC crusade advancement, you’re ready to control the spending plan and outcome. Since you just compensation for click on promotions, you have full authority over your spending plans. ✮ Get designated traffic The best thing about PPC showcasing is that you get designated traffic and not simply irregular traffic. What truly happens is that with natural promoting endeavors zeroed in on getting your substance on first page of Google. However Current Affairs are now there, the more pleasant thought would be in the event that you exploit this and begin creating traffic to site. There is no question that natural development is important in building a drawn out brand presence. Nonetheless, now and then moment result is needed for that too which is just done through PPC. ✮ Generate high potential customers As of now, individuals search items on the web, read audits, check star rating, and a short time later make a buy. Is it true that you are one of them? We as a whole fall in a similar class. That is the place where PPC promotions center exclusively around designated crowd expanding the odds of settling the negotiation. On the off chance that internet based customers are charmed with your items, they will more probable become your rehashing clients. With PPC, you can draw in more clients. ✮ Get more certain ROI Since you’re dealing with PPC publicizing which is a paid advertising stage. That probably implies your prospective customers will bring you sure ROI without a doubt. Allow me to let you know that PPC crusades are effectively quantifiable through which you can improve your advertisements until they produce a positive ROI for you. ✮ PPC is shrewd for retargeting It happens when individuals visit your site however don’t change over into likely clients’ right. That is the place where PPC crusade works best in retargeting those clients to make them your likely clients. On the off chance that a client clicked in your advertisement, however didn’t change over into potential clients then you should re-target them. For what reason does retargeting works? Indeed, retargeting works since you that client are as of now keen on your items and administrations, might be they need more opportunity to choose. So by keeping your item before their eye, you improve the odds of changing over clients. ✮ PPC further develops your SEO execution Next significant advantage of PPC promotions is that they further develop SEO execution of your site. Indeed, PPC mission and SEO go together as the two of them work on focusing on the very catchphrase that too on same stage, and for same crowd.	https://medium.com/@blogsfry/how-advantageous-ppc-marketing-is-for-your-online-business-e6df86cf1b19	[]	2021-10-24 15:31:52.687000+00:00	['Latest Blog Entries', 'PPC Marketing', 'Online Marketing', 'Trending Topic']
Data Preprocessing in Python	Handling of Missing Data I talk in detail about handling of missing data in the following post. Well the first idea is to remove the lines in the observations where there is some missing data. But that can be quite dangerous because imagine this data set contains crucial information. It would be quite dangerous to remove an observation. So we need to figure out a better idea to handle this problem. And another idea that’s actually the most common idea to handle missing data is to take the mean of the columns. If you noticed in our dataset, we have two values missing, one for age column in 7th data row and for Income column in 5th data row. Missing values should be handled during the data analysis. So, we do that as follows. # handling the missing data and replace missing values with nan from numpy and replace with mean of all the other values imputer = SimpleImputer(missing_values=np.nan, strategy='mean') imputer = imputer.fit(X[:, 1:]) X[:, 1:] = imputer.transform(X[:, 1:]) After execution of this code, the independent variable X will transform into the following.	https://towardsdatascience.com/data-preprocessing-in-python-b52b652e37d5	['Tarun Gupta']	2020-12-25 14:48:35.042000+00:00	['Machine Learning', 'Data Mining', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Programming']
Blockchain Now and in the Future	What is Blockchain? A system that records information in such a way that makes changing, hacking, or cheating difficult to impossible is called Blockchain. Essentially it is a digital ledger of transactions that get duplicated and distributed across the globe on thousands of servers. Anyone on the network has access to everyone else’s entries in near real-time. Bitcoin was one of the first applications of Blockchain followed by other cryptocurrencies. The financial industry initiated exploring Blockchain however it is a quickly-growing area of growth for companies across industries. Blockchain remains as one of the most promising technologies today. Let us take a closer look at upcoming Blockchain innovations and the way it is shaping different industries. 1. Plethora of applications Blockchain is successfully being used in industries outside of cryptocurrency like shipping, voting, and food safety. IBM, Walmart, and Amazon are some of the brands that are heavily investing in ways to better use this technology. The gemstone industry is employing Blockchain technology to track a stone’s origin as well as to ensure transparency and value. Advancements are being made in medical data, supply chain, and administration processes by industries of all sizes. 2. BaaS BaaS which stands for Blockchain As A Service is a trend to watch out for. BaaS is a unique cloud-based solution that allows consumers to develop their own digital products using blockchain. Amazon and Microsoft offer BaaS services; several businesses choose Blockchain app development services. Digital products like application-driven applications, cross-border payments, smart contracts or other services can operate without actually needing the complete blockchain-based infrastructure. 3. Social Networking Blockchain integration in social media is just a matter of time. Issues such as privacy violations, scandals, and data control can be resolved with Blockchain applications. The data exchanged on social media can remain undetected and non-duplicate, even after a deletion with a Blockchain application. It will ensure data is more secure and stays with the owner and not the platform. It would be interesting to watch if any social media platform is ready to do so. 4. Adjacent technologies Adjacent technologies combined with Blockchain will assist in exploring possibilities that have not been thought of yet. With data that is secured Blockchain will better inform and strengthen underlying algorithms. As Blockchain can audit and enable enhanced insights derived from data that network participants trust. 5. Government Agencies The government officials who have to manage large amounts of data find the idea behind distributed ledger very motivating. At present, all the agencies have their own database; however, with Blockchain technology, the agents can improve their functionality with efficient data administration. 6. Validation Tools There are billions of devices connected to the internet. This makes device networks prone to hackers. With an urgent need for data protection, validation tools along with crypto-anchors, IoT beacons and oracles, mechanisms that link digital assets to the physical world by infusing outside data into networks. This not only eliminates reliance on humans for data entry but also improves trust. 7. Usage of Stablecoins Stablecoins were introduced to avoid the volatility of cryptocurrencies with a stable value linked with each coin. Stablecoins witnessed explosive growth in the year 2020. We are very excited about where it goes from here. 8. Finance and Economy With more countries experimenting with digital currencies, Blockchain has already gained momentum opening doors to more opportunities. Unlike other businesses, the financial sector does not need to alter their operations to accept Blockchain technology. Not only will Blockchain permit banks to reduce redundant bureaucracy but it will enable them to carry out quicker and safer transactions at lower costs. Blockchain seems to be on the threshold of an exceptionally broad set of potential applications. An array of businesses are looking to develop their own Blockchain app in order to apply it in their operations. If you think your day-to-day can use enhanced security with additional benefits, get in touch with us and our Blockchain developer would be more than happy to discuss your project.	https://medium.com/@fintelics/blockchain-now-and-in-the-future-67f3cbab49f4	[]	2020-11-03 19:57:12.987000+00:00	['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchain Application', 'Blockchain Adoption']
My Blockchain Journey	I’ve recently updated my introduction to Metabase please read and share it to your friends. It will be especially relevant to founders, or anyone who is interested on blockchain technology. here’s why Over the course of the last 5 years, as one of the leaders at Intrepid Ventures, I have embarked on the process of moving from a crypto-lamen to arguably someone knowledgeable and well versed in the technology. Writing here on medium was a part of that process. For me, when I learn something, I want to share it. Mostly because it helps me reinforce my own learning, but also because it might help someone else on their journey. Over the last few years you have probably come across some of my intellectual waxings on blockchain technology, Intellectual as defined as a second hand peddler of first rate ideas, and hopefully it helped you, or you found enjoyment from it at least. Writing my pieces takes alot of time and effort, so i’m thankful that you take the time out of your day to read what I write, as whatever I have learned, did not come without hard work, confusion, skepticism, and alot of research. As part of my learning, which is deeply imbedded in the DNA of our company for all the previously mentioned reasons, I have tried to make blockchain technology accessible to all who want to learn. I’m not saying that i’m the definitive or most accurate resource for this learning, but I am authentic, earnest, and have a deep passion for the topic. So much so, that I have made it my life, and if you have come to know me over the years, you will know that as a designer. I’m definitely and outsider to the space and take a very different approach when it comes to technology than most people in the blockchain space. so this is why you should read the introduction to Metabase and hopefully you will continue reading and participating in the journey.	https://medium.com/blockchain-review/my-blockchain-journey-50159e84d028	['Collin Thompson']	2018-04-26 01:17:51.679000+00:00	['Founder Stories', 'Ethereum', 'ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain']
A Definitive Guide on Employee Monitoring in 2021	This pandemic has done one great job to make organizations realize the worth of employee monitoring software. Well, yes. Before the outbreak of the pandemic, the demand for automatic software like employee monitoring was 43% as the companies thought not to invest money in such softwares, as the team leads can handle their team. However, during this WFH module, the companies got to know the package of benefits. But, still, many of the startups and small businesses are lagging behind and still struggling to handle their employees in this remote work module. This guide will help them to understand what staff monitoring is and how does it work. Let’s swoop! What is Employee Monitoring? Employee monitoring is a practice to supervise the employee’s activity and the productivity for the projects they are working on. However, there are softwares available to supervise the employee’s activities with great precision and are known as employee monitoring software. It helps to precisely check the behavior patterns of employees working: are they sincerely working on the project or are surfing other contents and providing evidence of any misconduct directly to an administrator. Different Employee Monitoring Solutions Below are 5 ways you can track and monitor employees during work hours: Video Surveillance The companies set up CCTV cameras to have an on the employee’s activities, and if any unusual activity is caught in the camera, you can take action against the employee. Make sure the cameras should be set on a commonplace, not directly on their desktop’s screen. Network and Email monitoring Networking and monitoring are the direct ways to monitor. Look how: Network monitoring involves monitoring the infected workstations, malicious programs, and activity on the internet. involves monitoring the infected workstations, malicious programs, and activity on the internet. Email monitoring: tracking if employees are accessing official mail to send personal emails. Biometric Machine or Keycards Keycards: The keycards help in restricting the employees from entering unauthorized areas. Also, it helps in tracking the employee’s attendance. Biometric: The biometric is used to mark log-in and log-out via fingerprint. GPS Tracking GPS tracking helps the employees who are on fieldwork. It tracks the employees to track that they reach the assigned location for the client meeting. Employee Monitoring Software Assistance from most employee monitoring software is widely used nowadays. This demand increased when the Covid-19 existence was witnessed, and the remote work started. The employee monitoring tool is the least invasive method for both the office and remote teams. Most tracking tools include features like project monitoring and employee time tracking. But, there are different other reasons for using employee monitoring tools. Let’s find out the various aspects of using the software. Employee Monitoring Application Different aspects are majorly concerned with better productivity. Here are those: Managing Remote employees became a must need after the breakout of covid-19 in 2020. All the companies started working from home. Thus, the software helps in tracking their activity, their productivity on a daily basis. Customer Support Quality The companies which have customer care records call with customers. This helps in providing training to the new joiners and also to improvise their skills. It is also kept as a legal record for future instances like any dispute. The tracking tool also helps in monitoring the emails and chats of employees with the clients. Financial Services The financial departments use the employee tracker to monitor the sales and the operations. It is mainly used for stringent or confidential action by ISO to monitor employees to prevent data leaks or data theft. Billing Agencies The agencies like digital marketing, designing, software vendors bill their clients per hour. Using a tool like WorkStatus helps to track the hours dedicated per project easily. There is no chance of error, and we can calculate the accurate pricing. Software Projects Companies require the employee tracking tool to monitor productivity and the worktime each employee invests. It pushes employees to invest their time sincerely in their assigned projects. Sales Time Organizations use the employee tracking tool to track the number of sales, the process of their working process, and how much active the employees are in completing their targets. Let’s know why a productivity tracker is the best way for employee monitoring. Benefits of Employee monitoring Here are the benefits of employee monitoring software: Minimize wasting time at Work Time is very precious, and thus, wasting time just to supervise the employee’s activity will not help in the future. Therefore, with employee monitoring software, there will be no need for you to supervise the employee’s work, and you will be able to focus on real tasks. Automates HR and Payroll With employee monitoring software like Workstatus, the attendance can be recorded automatically, and the payroll can be designed accordingly. Increased Employee Productivity Regular monitoring of employees can help the employees to work upon their projects sincerely. Thus, as a result, there is high productivity, and the working hours are utilized properly. Increased employee engagement With the platform, all employees get the notice at the same time and employees find it easy to raise their query directly. Thus, it makes it easier for employee engagement. Also, this software gives equal chances for employees to interact with the head and keep their viewpoint on any project. Final Thoughts Employee monitoring gives great relief to the organization and by monitoring and managing the employees. From tracking their time, productivity to managing their attendance and payroll, software gets a big fat thumbs up from the different organizations. Be it remote employee management or in the offices themselves, this software can help you focus on major tasks and goals rather than spending time monitoring and marking the attendances. This guide explains the functions and advantages that bring the full idea of employee monitoring software. Thus, if you still haven’t switched to employee monitoring then you should definitely think about it.	https://medium.com/@marketing-invoicera/a-definitive-guide-on-employee-monitoring-in-2021-7810bf4c69b9	[]	2021-06-04 08:44:45.964000+00:00	['Time Tracking', 'Monitoring', 'Employees', 'Employee Monitoring', 'Time Management']
Hello, God. It’s me, dumbass	existential humor Hello, God. It’s me, dumbass Wait for it DA: I have so many questions! G: Typical. DA: Thank you for seeing me. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. G: Let me stop you right there. There is no such thing as time. There is no such thing as “things,” either, but I don’t want to totally blow your “mind.” DA: Wha? G: Time. There isn’t any. It was a construct I, uh, constructed, for you while you were on the big wet rock. DA: So, I’m dead? G: Hoo boy. We’re a little farther behind the curve than I thought. Yes, you’re dead. Time ran out for you. It no longer is a factor in your existence, such as it was/is. DA: Time doesn’t … G: Time isn’t. Wasn’t. Doesn’t. There is none. DA: So how …? G: Oh my self. Don’t start with the “how” questions. We don’t have enough time for that. Yeah, I know. I said it. I was here when I did it. I can do that. Anyway, on the subject of “time,” which I made to help you along and — if we’re being honest — to totally entertain us up here, is no longer relevant to your understanding. DA: Now I have more questions than ever. G: That’s usually the way this conversation goes. DA: So we are “up” here? In Heaven? G: Whoa, Nellie. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. “Heaven,” although it is one of my favorites, is just a fable. And you’re not there. You’re not anywhere, but I digress. What you think of as “Heaven” is probably better thought of by you as “Phase 2.” Try not to put so much hope into it. And also, there is no such thing as “up,” but you probably could have guessed that was coming, right? DA: I feel sick. G: No, you don’t. DA: You’re right. I don’t. G: You’re welcome. DA: So, where …? G: Where are you? Right where you’ve always been. Quick poll: Is that comforting to know? I’ve got a bet with Gabe about this. Be honest. I’ll know if you’re not. DA: I’ve always been here? G: Sure. Yeah. Just not “completely,” let’s say. DA: OK, yeah. I guess that’s comforting to know. G: Knew it! I just told Gabe, by the way. He’s totally stewing, but isn’t going to say anything. I mean, what can he do? I’m God. Anyway … you have questions, thoughts? DA: So this is Phase 2? My life was Phase 1, but I’ve always been here? G: Yeah, mostly. Actually, no. But you’re starting to almost, kinda, nearly sort of get it. DA: I don’t get it. G: No, you don’t. But that’s what makes it fun for me. I’m here to help, you know? I’m a people person. Literally: I’m the people person. DA: So you’re a person? G: Hey now. I can call myself that, but not you. DA: Not even going to touch that. G: Smart. DA: It feels like I just got here. But you’re saying I’ve always been here? What was my time on Earth all about? G: Biting into the perfect sandwich. DA: What? G: Yeah. It’s true. It’s both literal and metaphorical. And a few other things, but you wouldn’t get that. DA: That’s it? G: Of course not. DA: So what happens in Phase 2? G: Nothing actually “happ …” You know what? I’m going to just skip that part. What we’re doing right now is orientation. You’re going to want to be a lot more oriented before the next phase. DA: Phase 3? G. You’re adorable. DA: You’re saying I’m adorable? G: I was being condescending. It’s kinda my thing. It’s my trump card. DA: Am I going to Phase 3? G: Seriously. You’re killing me. If that were possible, I mean. DA: What happens in Phase 3? G: There is no Phase 3, Einstein. Do you really think it’s all linear? DA: I don’t even know if I think what I think I think, I think. G: We have arrived at the leading edge of the beginning to the onramp of understanding, folks. DA: Is there or isn’t there a next phase? G: Sure. Yeah. DA: What is it?????? G: I’ve got a word for you. DA: And that would be …? G: “Sanguine.” DA: That explains nothing! G: Clear as a bell for me. But for you, no. But when you get there, you’ll get it. In fact, you’ll love it. If you were looking back on it, which you cannot because there is no time, thus there is no history, you would understand that you were struggling to get to someplace you were already at. Which you should have. DA: Holy mother of G- G: Let’s keep her out of it. She’s at her group and is not to be disturbed. DA: How did I get here? G: You died. DA: I don’t remember any of it. G: Recent policy update. Our little gift to you. We blot it out. DA: You … why? G: All the shrieking. Took a lot of effort to get every new dead arrival to calm down enough for a reasonable conversation. So many questions — it got very annoying. DA: Sounds like it was a gift for you, not us. G: It can be both. DA: Why didn’t I know I was already here? G: You did. DA: When? G: When you realized your special someone felt the same way as you. Any time you stuck with something worthwhile. Every time you hear your new favorite song. When you felt the warmth of a campfire lit by someone else. When your mom hugged you gently. When your dad squeezed you tight. When you made the shot and you heard your grandparents cheering in the stands. When you nailed the move you practiced so many times. When you aced the test and got your grade. When your mom made your favorite dish. When you share memories with your siblings. When you unwrapped that perfect gift your mom knew you wanted more than anything else in that moment. When your team won against impossible odds. When you climbed the peak and took in how vast the big wet rock is. When you made it that last tenth of a mile on empty and found an open gas station. Any time you actually, truly helped someone or a just cause. When you prepared your grandma’s recipe. When you landed the jump. When you first met your baby brother. When you first met your own baby. When your daughter proved she could squeeze you hard enough to hurt. When you said goodbye to someone you love. When you realized your wife was supposed to be your wife. When you did that thing with your wife. Not the first time, but when you finally got good at it. When you stepped off the airplane after you thought it would crash. When you were sick and delirious and a nurse was kind to you. When the doctor cured you. When you first rode the rickety rollercoaster. When you breathed the salty sea air. When you realized you could ride your bike. When you got your first motorcycle. When you flew down that trail and climbed that big hill. When you stripped off your cold, wet clothes and got in a hot shower. Every time you first sink into a hot tub (almost). When you picked the right friends. When you got picked by the right friends. Any time you walked away from something that wasn’t worthy of you. When you realized you could sing. All the times you made someone laugh. All the times you laughed at yourself. When your grandmother smiled because you arrived. When your child felt a sense of accomplishment. When your dad told you you had a good work ethic. When your boss complimented your work. When your friend called for no reason. When you had the answer to anything. When it hurt and you knew who to see to make it better. When you survived doing something dumb. When you were handed a breakfast menu. When you felt the wave throw you around. When you made friends with a dog. When you willingly shared anything good. When you knew what you wanted to eat. When you were needed. When you belonged. DA: So I was already here then all along. During all those times. G: Here-ish. DA: I’ll take it. G: You should. DA: You didn’t mention cats. G: Fuck them.	https://medium.com/the-hit-job/hello-god-its-me-dumbass-d03694a60c2e	['Julian Rogers']	2021-01-02 17:20:15.710000+00:00	['Death', 'Conversations With God', 'Humor', 'Life']
BABY GEAR ⚙️ for traveling long distances with a baby under one!	As many of you have seen via social media posts we are on a one month adventure all across Spain with our nine-month-old baby boy. We are mid-way through our trip and have already changed locations four times with five more locations to go. When doing a trip like this, planning and pre-planning is key. A lot of you have asked me what car seat, stroller or crib we took on this trip and why, below you’ll find our favorite brands, gear, and tips to help make your travel, day to day outings, and babies sleep time much easier. Before I dive into baby gear talk, I’d just like to mention that I am not getting paid to share any of these baby products, I am sharing because I’d like to help other traveling parents get the most out of their adventure! Here are the favs! #1 absolute best and most needed gear on this trip has and will continue to be the ErgoBaby Carrier. We have the Omni 360 Baby Carrier All-In-One Cool Air mesh, but I’ve heard the other ErgoBaby ones are just as good. a couple of friend of ours went to Japan with their six-month-old last year and they swore by their carrier and even went as far as saying you don’t need to travel with a stroller. We totally agree! Kamran has been in that thing for 90% of our outings and it really takes a lot for him to get tired of it. The idea of being close to mom and dad, but still be able to see everything and everyone from a higher level ( than the stroller ) really helps him enjoy his outings. We also love it during restaurant outings because some places don’t have high chairs or he just gets bored of sitting and dining so we can take turns going for mini walks with him while the other basques in 15 min of sipping wine and actually tasting the food, dare I say, uninterrupted! A few things to keep in mind when you use the carrier: during peak hours in the sun make sure to use an SPF proof sun hat apply baby-friendly sunscreen, because baby skin is sensitive and burns easily! I’m kinda a freak when it comes to sun protection so during our time in Sevilla, especially since he’s exposed to more sun in the carrier, and because it’s been the absolute hottest here so far we switch up our daily routine to minimize sun exposure. I’ll share more about that later! #2 Nuna pipa car seat with traveler backpack because it’s super light, voted safest car seat and can be strapped into any car using the seatbelt. It’s so light that I was able to carry him in the carrier, wear this backpack and pull my luggage/ purse with ease through train stations and airports. We brought it from home because it can be unreliable to rent a car seat out here and you’ll need one from the airport to your Airbnb/hotel. It’s so light that I was able to carry him in the carrier, wear this backpack and pull my luggage/ purse with ease through train stations and airports. We brought it from home because it can be unreliable to rent a car seat out here and you’ll need one from the airport to your Airbnb/hotel. #3 Uppa baby minu traveling stroller . This is also very light and can be assembled and disassembled with one hand. I open and close it while holding Kamran all the time. It doesn’t have the biggest wheels because it’s a traveling stroller so sometimes it’s a little hard to steer especially on these Spanish cobblestone streets, but unless you are in a hurry, that shouldn’t be an issue for you. I love the Minu’s SPF 50 shade cover and easy to wipe material. If you do go the minu route, I would highly recommend you pay extra to get their travel bag, which is also a padded backpack. We almost got a cheapo travel bag off amazon instead and I’m glad we didn’t because this fits perfectly in its own bag which makes lugging it around much easier and lighter. I open and close it while holding Kamran all the time. It doesn’t have the biggest wheels because it’s a traveling stroller so sometimes it’s a little hard to steer especially on these Spanish cobblestone streets, but unless you are in a hurry, that shouldn’t be an issue for you. I love the Minu’s SPF 50 shade cover and easy to wipe material. If you do go the minu route, I would highly recommend you pay extra to get their travel bag, which is also a padded backpack. We almost got a cheapo travel bag off amazon instead and I’m glad we didn’t because this fits perfectly in its own bag which makes lugging it around much easier and lighter. #4 Lotus travel crib. This crib is also light (catch the theme?), and sleek looking. It sits super low to the ground so if you have a bad lower back, like me and basically every single other mom out there, then you will love the side zipper option. You can zip it open, pop the baby in, and zip it back closed without waking them up. This crib packs up really nicely and hardly takes any room when it’s packed up. It’s easy to set up but takes the average person at least 10 minutes to pack up. Some smart hacks that we found to be helpful when it comes to adjusting to sleep in new environments and new time zones are instilling a sense of familiarity! Full disclaimer the hacks I’m about to share have only worked half the time for us because he’s discovered the comforts of our cushiony Airbnb beds and the warmth of sleeping between mom and dad with full access to moms buffet eye roll, but if you are stricter than us then hopefully these work better for you! Buy the lotus fitted sheet off amazon because it’s the only fitted sheet that works with this crib and snaps into the crib so you don’t have to worry about taking it on and off anytime you pack to go to your new location Set up the lotus crib with the same fitted sheet you will be using on your trip several days before you travel and get your baby used to sleep in it during naps and during the night. Move the crib to a few different rooms to help them adjust with change before you leave your house! ( we didn’t do this one but if I had thought of it before I probably would have ) Do not forget their usual sleep sack and favorite lovey if they have one. Kamran's elephant lovey, sleep sack, and fitted sheet that already smells like him, as well as ocean sounds, have helped him get into familiar sleep mode regardless of location or time change. Admittedly, I’m kinda into the ocean sounds to help with my jetlag as well. One last thing on sleep is to make sure all your Airbnb’s are infant or kid friendly and look for places that say they have blackout shades included. I’ll definitely share my Airbnb tips soon! So overall we had three baby items that we checked in. Across Europe and according to ( most airlines ) baby items are free to check in and we haven’t had any problems yet. Iberia airlines during our flight from Mallorca to Madrid questioned our reason for having three baby items but we simply said it’s his stroller, crib, and car seat and the baby needs it to get into cars, to sleep, and because he can’t walk yet!! They couldn’t really argue with that and let us check them without charge. I’ll write another post soon on what we did when it came to baby food, snacks, toys, and overall packing! Here we are with his carrier and sun hat at Alcazar in Sevilla. Please let me know what you think and if this is helpful! Go travel with that baby!! You will be happy you did more of it!	https://medium.com/@hediehrandolph/baby-gear-%EF%B8%8F-for-traveling-long-distances-with-a-baby-under-one-b0c627a3100f	['Hedieh Randolph']	2019-05-24 17:23:31.735000+00:00	['Traveling', 'Parenting', 'Travel', 'Traveling With Kids', 'Baby Products']
The Most Effective Way To Network: Building Business Relationships 101	There is an art to building strong relationships in business. Unfortunately, most people never learn the art. Instead, they wear Hello, My Name Is name tags and attend big, fancy networking events. They get hundreds of business cards printed and hand them out whenever possible. They approach relationship building with the mentality that “more is better.” In reality, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. As a result, these seven lessons are learned far too late in life. 1. One great connection is worth more than 100 forgotten acquaintances. Having a Rolodex of names upon names of people you haven’t spoken to in years (or spoken to ever) isn’t valuable. At all. What’s valuable is having someone in your life you can count on for advice, for insight, for referrals, for introductions. Someone you believe is a good representation of who you are and what you do, and hopefully, someone to whom you embody those same characteristics. 2. Business relationships are built on actions, not promises. Nobody trusts the person who says they can do something that never happens. Tried-and-true business relationships manifest solely through action. When two parties agree to work together, and both deliver on their promises, trust is inherently solidified. Unfortunately, most people try to build relationships on the basis of promises. They measure their value through the things they say they can do, as opposed to what they actively and consistently deliver. 3. Positive relationships require nurturing. You can’t ignore someone for months and then reach out and ask them for a favor. Building business relationships that last means taking the time to check in with people, to see how they’re doing, to show an interest in their own goals and aspirations — and to understand what would help them the most in exchange. Business relationships are still relationships. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being taken advantage of. They want to know that it’s a mutual exchange. 4. You should always give more than you take. In business especially, giving goes a long way. Every time you ask someone for a favor, you should be offering to help them with something twice as often. Most of the time, people won’t even need what it is you’re offering, or will decline, but it’s the gesture that shows how much you care. And in the moments when they do take you up on your offer to help, make sure you deliver. That’s what they are going to remember most the next time you ask for something in return. 5. Talk numbers second. Talk value first. Too many hungry people in business want the very first conversation to be all about the numbers. They want to know how much they’re going to make before they even think about the project. They want to sign contracts before they’ve taken a step into the work. And as a result, the message they’re sending is they care more about their own self-interests than they do about creating something meaningful and delivering value to the project. The best business developers and networkers do the opposite. They show and prove how valuable they would be by taking a few steps into the work, almost always causing the team members to willingly make an offer in return. 6. Your energy introduces you. Just because you’re “doing business,” it doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t be personable. In fact, the more likable of a person you are, the easier it will be for people to welcome you into their inner circles — and the more willing they’ll be to help you out. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how well-connected or wealthy you are. Positive energy attracts positive energy. And if you want the doors of opportunity to stay open, then what’s most important is that you always remain humble, grounded, and willing to learn and connect with those around you. 7. Business takes time. Some of the best opportunities take months, or even years, to nurture. Some of the best connections require a lot of giving in order to turn into a mutually beneficial relationship. Part of maturing in the business development world is understanding that patience is as crucial as anything else. To build sound relationships, you can’t expect bonds to be formed overnight.	https://nicolascole77.medium.com/the-most-effective-way-to-network-building-business-relationships-101-c44cb2c98135	['Nicolas Cole']	2020-03-29 15:54:58.030000+00:00	['Relationships', 'Personal Growth', 'Business', 'Networking', 'Personal Development']
I Am So Over Vagina Shame	Nowadays, my vagina and I have a good relationship. She and my uterus have seen me through two pregnancies resulting in three children. I know what she likes and she has always been responsive when it’s time to get down and dirty. I take good care of her and she cooperates by keeping the yeast infections to a minimum. But this healthy relationship with my vagina is a nominally new development. Not so long ago, we weren’t on as great of terms. I’ll be fair and say this was definitely me, not her. She didn’t misbehave or function poorly. No, the blame for our dysfunction lay with me. I was ashamed of her. This isn’t to say I was ashamed of or unsure of my identity, sex, or gender. I’ve always been clear on these fronts. No, my shame came not because I had her but because I’d grown up thinking she was dirty and her natural responses made me slutty. My vagina getting moist when aroused, her insistence on bleeding every month, her gross flaps of skin, and easily stimulated nerve endings was supposed to be a source of shame. No one ever actually told me in so many words to be ashamed of her. But I was nonetheless. I grew up in conservative Okahoma. Our sex ed was written by Southern Baptists. It wasn’t just abstinence-only education. It was “Even thinking about sex makes you no better than the Devil.” Pregnancy was not prevented by condoms or the pill. Instead, when and where I grew up, the best birth control was supposedly the threat of eternal damnation. It didn’t work, by the way, the abstinence by way of Jesus. At least not for most people. While in middle and high school, Oklahoma was on a top ten list of “Most teen pregnancies” and “Highest drop out rate of teen mothers.” Turns out that for most hormone-drenched teens, hell could be risked if it meant seven minutes in sexual heaven. I took those God-fearing, hell-wielding lessons to heart but many didn’t. In public, I was the picture of chastity and “saving myself.” Left alone to my own devices, I succumbed to baser instincts. I’d discovered masturbation while a preteen and spent years humping pillows, couch arms, and balled up duvet covers. But don’t worry, I was ashamed the whole time. I wouldn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen. Not for lack of opportunity, partners, or even desire, but for shame.	https://medium.com/sexography/i-am-so-over-vagina-shame-2a9ceccbc456	['Gwenna Laithland']	2020-03-03 20:15:01.545000+00:00	['Womens Health', 'Body Positive', 'Women', 'Body Image', 'Sexuality']
Angular: Avoid the Subscribe() Method for Observables	Subscribe Function We pass the Observable around, combining it and saving it to different variables with different combinations of operators, but at the end, an Observable<T> is useless on its own. We need a way to “terminate” the Observable and extract the type T out of it. That is what .subscribe is used for: to subscribe to the resulting stream and terminate the observable. TK (https://kimsereyblog.blogspot.com/2018/05/async-pipe-versus-subscribe-in-angular.html) We all recognize this pattern where I dispose of a subscription with the unsubscribe() method: With this pattern, I can be sure that my subscription will always be ended and I am safe from a memory leak! Note that we absolutely have to create the subscription during the initialization ( ngOnInit ) of a component, and later when it’s being destroyed, we need to check if the subscription is still live, cancel it, and clear all references to it. TK (https://medium.com/angular-in-depth/why-you-have-to-unsubscribe-from-observable-92502d5639d0) But for most regular situations where I am just doing a simple subscription to get the value of a variable and passing it to the template, this pattern becomes tedious very fast with an increasing number of subscriptions. For example, see the code below: So here is how I can avoid the subscription completely. But first, let’s look at the code where it’s a simple consumption of an Observable returned by a service function and how to handle this with the .subscribe() method Let’s assume I have a serviceFunctionReturningObservable() function that returns me an observable of the following signature. And in the parent component.ts file, I want to subscribe to that Observable and pass that subscribed data down to Children to be consumed. serviceFunctionReturningObservable( flag: Flag ): Observable<boolean> {} The suboptimal version of my code (without using an async pipe) with regular .subscribe() And then in the corresponding .html template file, I access the data as follows: [isSomeBooleanVarToPassDownToChildComp]="isSomeBooleanVarToPassDownToChildComp" Now to understand what’s happening above, we need to note that normally to render the result of a Promise or an Observable , we have to: Wait for a callback. Store the result of the callback in a variable. Bind to that variable in the template. TK (https://codecraft.tv/courses/angular/pipes/async-pipe/) So going by that flow, what we are doing above is:	https://paulrohan.medium.com/angular-avoiding-subscribe-method-by-replacing-it-with-an-asynpipe-when-possible-a92c20793357	['Rohan Paul']	2020-10-19 21:32:33.012000+00:00	['Observables', 'Angular', 'Programming', 'JavaScript', 'Rxjs']
Data visualization using Pandas	Data visualization using Pandas This article will help you to use in-built Pandas methods for visualizing data and drawing insights. How to import the packages? Numpy and Pandas package is imported. Along with this the magic function ‘%matplotlib inline’ is mentioned to make sure that the plots are displayed in the notebook. >>> import numpy as np >>> import pandas as pd >>> %matplotlib inline For the purpose of understanding, a dataset is taken which has random values. >>> df1 = pd.read_csv('dataset2.csv') >>> df1.head() How to create a histogram plot? A histogram plot can be generated by using the method ‘hist’ on a column of a dataframe. The number of bins can also be specified. >>> df1['b'].hist(bins=15) In case you want to view the plots in the seaborn style then import the package of seaborn, set the style and run the code again. >>> import seaborn as sns >>> sns.set_style('whitegrid') >>> df1['b'].hist(bins=15) How to deal with general plot kinds? You can also call the ‘plot’ method off the dataframe and mention the kind of plot needed. >>> df1['c'].plot(kind='hist',bins=10) You can also call the hist method directly through the plot method. >>> df1['c'].plot.hist() How to create area plots? It plots the area of the dataframe columns. The alpha keyword can be specified to tweak the transparency. >>> df1.plot.area(alpha=0.7) How to create bar plots? The ‘bar’ method plots the bar plot. >>> df1.plot.bar() In case you do not want the bars to be plotted separately and instead be stack on each other, pass the value True to the stacked keyword. >>> df1.plot.bar(stacked=True) How to create line plots? A line plot can be drawn by calling the line method and pass the x and y values. >>> df1.plot.line(y='d') The figure size and line style can also be changed like linewidth. >>> df1.plot.line(y='a',figsize=(5,3),lw=2) How to create scatter plots? The scatter method is called and the x and y values are passed. >>> df1.plot.scatter(x='b',y='d') If you want to compare with another column then mention the column name to the ‘c’ value. You can also change the color of the plot using the cmap keyword. >>> df1.plot.scatter(x='b',y='d',c='a',cmap='rainbow') How to create box plots? The box method can be called to create box plots. >>> df1.plot.box() How o create hex plots? This is just like the scatter plot but the data points are represented as hex cells. >>> df1.plot.hexbin(x='b',y='d',gridsize=15) How to create KDE plot? KDE stands for kernel density estimation. The kde method can be called to plot it. >>> df1['d'].plot.kde() >>> df1.plot.kde() For more detailed information on Pandas data visualization, check the official documentation here. Refer to the notebook for code here.	https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/data-visualization-using-pandas-cfcde72807b1	['Jayashree Domala']	2020-12-27 02:51:56.204000+00:00	['Pandas', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Exploratory Data Analysis']
Review: Supernatural Season 9, Episode 5: Dog Dean Afternoon	Okay. As a cat lover, I found this episode pretty hard to watch. Did that guy really need to eat the cat? Surely, the writers could have spared us that. I’m okay with all the blood, guts, and gore that Supernatural can throw at me, but I draw a line at causing harm to animals, and that scene in the shelter was pretty gruesome. To be fair, I wasn’t happy with the outcome for any animal in this episode. I guess we just have to hope that someone bothered to let those mice go free and that all the dogs that attacked the monster guy found good homes afterwards. I was a little miffed at Dean for letting all the dogs out. No matter how much they complain, those dogs were definitely better off in the shelter than on the streets. Especially the blind one! I guess I should be grateful that no one killed a dog in this episode. I’m almost 100% sure that a dog has never survived an episode of Supernatural (except for the one that Sam ran over, but that was a close call). That being said, I really wanted Sam and Dean to keep that nice German shepherd, but given what happened in the bunker in the last episode, he’s probably safer with that vegan couple. Although, I hope they plan to feed that dog some meat! All in all, however, I really enjoyed this episode. The whole Dr. Dolittle thing was really cute. I loved the talking animals, and I loved watching Dean getting in touch with his inner dog. The way he was hanging his head out of the window was too funny. It would have been cool if he could have kept his ability to communicate with animals; I feel like that would be a handy skill to have! The “monster” in this episode was truly terrifying. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to see a man with a snake tongue. I don’t know if it was right to use the dogs to kill him, but I am certainly glad he’s dead and he won’t be killing any more animals for their organs. Also, what’s with all the allusions to Game of Thrones in this season? Rating: 7.5/10	https://medium.com/@maria-cristina/review-supernatural-season-9-episode-5-dog-dean-afternoon-e6b50b81b51b	['Maria Cristina']	2020-12-27 22:58:03.002000+00:00	['Supernatural', 'Winchester', 'Supernatural The Series', 'Review', 'Horror']
I help run a shelter for homeless youth in Detroit. I’ve seen firsthand how homelessness and poverty can happen to anyone, especially during a crisis.	As told to Ashley Zlatopolsky We pray before we leave every day for our outreach program at Covenant House Michigan, a faith-based nonprofit organization in Detroit that provides a home for homeless youth ages 18 to 24. We don’t carry any weapons and we can’t touch anyone, so we ask God to keep us covered. Some of these youth don’t like rules, and they’ve been banned from other shelters for violence, but as outreach workers, it’s our job to service them. When we go out on the streets in Detroit to encourage youth to come to our shelter, it can take time to build a relationship. If they do trust us and come with us, we’re able to provide some of our services right away, whether it’s taking them to a hospital for medical care or taking them to our shelter if they need food and clothing. If they want to go back to school, we’ll help them get registered. We’ll also help them find permanent housing. The shelter allows for a 90-day stay, but because of COVID-19, we’ve been letting people stay longer. If they need somebody to talk to, we’ll try to do whatever we can to make sure we can give them a support system. We always ask them, “What’s your one goal? What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to do?” Then, we’ll work to help them achieve that. As outreach manager at Covenant House, I do a bit of everything. Taylor starts her days early when she work the outreach morning shift beginning at 7:30 a.m. Photo: Stephanie Taylor My work can sometimes feel like case management. Our days run from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with two shifts, morning and afternoon. There is a staff of four on the outreach team that alternate shifts. We travel in groups of two, always one female and one male. This is for safety and liability for both parties. Now with COVID-19, we take temperatures and ask safety questions as well. We make sure anyone we pick up gets a shower and clean clothes. Every day we begin by checking our voicemail to see if we’ve received any calls for help. We’ll immediately make arrangements to get people connected to our services. For example, we took in a young lady who was homeless and had been staying in an abandoned mobile home for six months. We took care of her medical needs, made sure she had a physical and had her dental work done. We helped her get housing, and got her registered in school. We take our outreach van to “hotspot” areas where homeless youth hang out. We show our presence to make sure they know that when they’re ready, they have a place to go for help. We hand out our business cards with our phone numbers. My phone is on 24 hours a day, so youth can reach me anytime. I’ve learned to find balance with my work duties by meditating and praying in my free time. We always make sure the shelter is a safe place for each person who comes our way. Taylor during an outreach shift with the van. Photo: Stephanie Taylor Some people need more intensive mental health or medical care, so we might take them to the hospital instead. When youth come to the shelter, there are special measures that keep everyone safe, including checking for weapons with a metal detector. It can be dangerous sometimes. In fiscal year 2020, our outreach program served nearly 700 individuals. The program has an annual funding of $100,000. To keep a youth member fully off the streets for one day, it costs $81.96. To provide food and shelter only for a week, it costs about $204, while a month will cost $819, and a year will cost $9,828. When I started here in 1998, I was only 25 years old myself, close to the age of the young people we service. I’m originally from Inkster, which is in metro Detroit. I was always interested in outreach and initially worked for another nonprofit organization that provided support for youth waiting on court dates and facing jail time. We would sit down and listen to them, and they would tell us why they committed crimes. A lot of them would say things like “I was hungry” or “I needed to get food for my family.” I realized that these young people were babies, often whose backs were up against the wall and thought these were the only options they had. When Covenant House came to Michigan to start their program, it gave me an opportunity to try to prevent these situations from happening to more young people who were struggling and needed support. It inspired me to join their mission and go further into this field. We always say to people, “Don’t forget about these youth.” A lot of them tend to have mental health concerns or substance abuse struggles because they try to erase what they’ve been through. So many of them have been in the foster care system that once they turn 18, we hear them say something like, “I just wish I had a family.” For most of us, we don’t realize how blessed we are to go home to our families every night, and know they’re going to be there. For these young people we serve at Covenant House, we workers become their aunts or uncles or families. We don’t judge them. Especially now during COVID-19, I think more people realize that homelessness or poverty can happen to anyone. Taylor during outreach in an area of Detroit frequented by homeless youth. Photo: Stephanie Taylor Even if you have a comfortable income, a disaster or unavoidable circumstance could cause you to go from having a safety net to being unable to pay for housing or bills in an instant. A lot is different now because of the pandemic. Places like coffee shops and the dining areas in McDonald’s have shut down, so youth have fewer places to go for temporary shelter from the outdoors. Social distancing is also hard for us because we need to be able to approach youth in order to help them. It’s tough because we try to keep everyone safe, and because of the pandemic we might not be able to reach out to as many youth as we previously could. I don’t want any young person out there to suffer, so it means a lot to me to be able to come in and do whatever I can to help these young people. I want to help them become safe, successful, and get connected to the resources they need. I tell people all day long that even though this is a job, it’s a ministry. It’s a blessing. If you want to go into this field, please have a lot of patience and don’t ever give up. Some of these young people are going to be in charge one day, and we have a chance to plant that seed to help them flourish. Ashley Zlatopolsky is a Detroit-based writer and editor. Her work can be found in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, the Guardian, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter at @ashley_detroit and learn more on her website. For more great stories, visit Business Insider’s homepage.	https://medium.com/business-insider/i-help-run-a-homeless-youth-shelter-in-detroit-despite-covid-19-i-still-have-hope-743ca7051975	['Business Insider']	2020-12-03 23:03:07.909000+00:00	['Jobs', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', 'Poverty', 'Homeless']
NA, OPENNESS, AND INCLUSIVITY	Remember that when you’re free others still suffer! I’ve never quite been one for surrender. Being an independent person, I despise surrendering. I think it must have something to do with my personality (INTP-A) or something. So anyway I was about to sleep last night when the shelter security said there was going to be NA. Several questions came into my mind. What is NA? I’ve heard of CA but what is NA. I looked it up and it said it was a 12 step program. Oh brother I thought. Another question came into my mind: Does NA have the same dreariness and cultiness that CA seemed to have? I started linking them together in my mind but soon I realized that I wasn’t being fair towards them. I knew that I had to wake up Journey and go. After we smoked a cigarette, we went to the meeting. Due to the enforced Anonymity that NA has, I can’t talk about what anyone said or describe the people. But I can describe how it felt. As I walked in the door I realized I was at home with like minded people. we all got coffee and sat down. I felt like all the people there wanted to know more about me so they could help me on my way to recovery. I got complimented on the onesie that I was wearing. everyone told me that I was ok because I was me with or without drugs. That makes me feel a little bit better about who I am. I must figure out why this approach is so welcoming. A Culture of Openness — A Culture of openness is where an organization or a person makes an expansive effort to be totally and utterly honest and open even if it gets us out of our comfort zone. A Culture of openness knows what’s important to the people they serve; openness requires us to sacrifice and surrender our need to control everything. A Culture of openness respects all different viewpoints even if the viewpoints are counterproductive to each other. This type of living mandates that we be honest as well as open. There is a serious relationship between openness and honesty. Openness demands honesty, because you’re never open when you lie. Honest people are open people Culture of Inclusivity — Inclusivity is doing what’s right, which is learning to let people live their lives no matter the consequences. That is the goal of a true democracy. Inclusivity means being accepting of everyone even if that might make you uncomfortable. An open society recognizes that each person comes to the table as they are and should be welcomed for who they are. An inclusive society recognizes and respects the right of all people to practice their own religion and have their own cultural viewpoints valued. We can’t run away from the fact that we are going more and more towards and open and inclusive society. Only ever discussing one religion or viewpoint makes people that don’t share that faith or viewpoint feel excluded and less than others in the group. Instead, we should learn to value people as they are regardless of their flaws. We will never have a fully inclusive society unless we move away from the conversation of discussing equality to equity. As a juggalo I value openness and acceptance above all things. There is nothing more important to me than being accepting. The fight for equity has been a long road for many marginalized groups. That is why America is fed up with being taken advantage of: homelessness, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights and women’s rights. These marginalized groups refuse to take the shit that the American government and it’s people have imposed on them. N.A. teaches us the valuable lesson of surrendering for a reason. That reason is to show us the value of getting outside yourself and being a better person by default because you will embrace the different life experiences that each person was born to bring to the conversation. We must remember who we are, why we exist, and how TrashPandaz can become a more inclusive and dynamic space. What is the point? We here at TrashPandaz think it’s about time for us to join together to fight for all injustice as a collective. To long have some marginalized groups gained equality on the backs of other people’s misery. Marginalized people as a whole makes up a community that numbers in the millions; if a million people marched on Washington D.C. they would have to hear our pleas and demands for equity not equality for all. We believe it’s time for all people to stand up and fight for the marginalized communities instead of ignoring or trying to fix them. Just support and accept them. That is all we need. We will never achieve our goal of an open and accepting society if we ignore the needs, the triumphs, and the suffering of those around us. We at TrashPandaz strive to help ease the suffering in the world by getting people inspired to make a change and donate to local trusted charities. We believe that all people are valuable, useful, and worthy of a life prosperous life filled with their own joy so they can get through their own trials in a safe environment. It makes no sense why the richest country in the world can’t have housing, healthcare/death care, and a job for every American. Too long have doctors and nurses ignored my conditions because it wouldn’t be covered under Medicaid. Take Away Please try and help one person with a meal. Please take a picture and share it on Instagram and Pinterest. Please use the hashtag #WeareTrashPandaz. Also, please follow us on social media and sign up for our email subscription. Keep an eye out for more blog posts either from me, Rosie, or from my partner Journeyanne.	https://medium.com/@rosenbaum-chavez/na-openness-and-inclusivity-b14068ad47da	['Journey Rosenbaum-Chavez Singh']	2020-12-15 16:41:56.648000+00:00	['Transgender', 'Nonbinary', 'Intersex', 'Homeless', 'Drug Addiction']
The Galaxy Watch 4/44mm+Bluetooth:	The Galaxy Watch 4/44mm+Bluetooth: I went to Best Buy to pick up the Watch 4, my first pre-order ever. I’ve only ever owned the Watch Active 2 almost 2 years ago, but then I stopped using it. I felt a little restricted with Samsung’s Tizen OS because it felt like I could “do” more with it, but the limitations of the OS didn’t allow me. However, Samsung’s recent adoption of Google’s Wear OS piqued my interest and I needed to try it out for myself. After a week of playing around with it with my Galaxy S21 Ultra and treating it as a digital watch with smart features, I have a lot to say about this wearable. My wrist is 7 inches around, strap is on the 2nd to last hole. Fits well. Day 1 — August 27th This was the evening after picking the watch up. I was waiting for the screen protector to be ready so I can jumpstart my review that same day, but Best Buy messed that order up and I had to order a pack of some on Amazon. The only things I did that day with the watch was 10 minutes worth of exploring and updating the watch. It came with 57% battery, and charged it after I was done with it. Then, I turned it off for until I received my screen protector for it. Day 2 — August 28th Resisting my temptations to touch the watch, I finally succumbed towards the evening. I just needed to see what the Watch 4 could offer me that the Watch Active 2 couldn’t. My first impressions were: Being able to use the Play Store Smoother interface compared to what I remember from the Watch Active 2 Flat screen compared to curved on the Watch Active 2 In addition to the last bullet point, my own research led me to the conclusion that the Watch Active 2 screen protectors work just as well on the Watch 4 because of the flat screen. I used Samsung’s Notes app to record the Watch and my usage with it. Only 3 things you need to take note of: Time, Battery Percentage, and Watch Activity. I started the time recording late for this day. But starting the day after, I became more consistent. Day 3 — August 30th Took a day off to wait for the screen protector. But here’s what I did for this day. This day was me really using it how I would expect to use it from that day forward. I permanently turned on location mainly for weather services and NFC for GPay. Media controller will be the main part of your watch if you’re constantly listening to music or watching something on YouTube on your phone. Day 4 — August 31st This was a slow day for activity. Mainly just let the watch operate on standby, seeing how the battery life is. Forgot to add “turned off”, but almost 6 hours and only 4% lost? Not bad. Day 5 — September 1st This day, I was stuck on deciding between raise and tap to wake. Day 6 — September 2nd Slow day again. Day 7 — September 3rd Another slow day. Day 8 — September 4th Finally found a watchface that fits my style, permanently enabled Always On Display for now/to test how much it really drains battery. Might turn off in the future depending on how I’m feeling. Day 9/10 — September 5-6th September 5th After using the watch more productively on the 5th and using it on standby for the rest of the day, I let it drain to 15% before I turned it off, to fully charge it the next day on the 6th. I conveniently saved the best parts for last, which I noted on the 6th. September 6th I waited for the right moment to fully charge the watch. A good hour will give the watch some juice for the rest of the day, especially if you use power saving mode. In total, it took almost 2 hours to charge from 16% to 100%. Bigger battery, longer charge time. Last, but not least, all the options I have turned on and the apps I downloaded from the Play Store. September 8th discovery: turning off Wi-Fi in the watch settings, turns to “Auto Wi-Fi”, which turns it back on if Bluetooth is unavailable or if the watch needs it. The weather app only needs location on for refreshing. This watch is works well. GPay was one of the things people were worried about not working, so I’m surprised to see that it works as it should. Another thing people were worried about was the Always On Display feature, draining the battery. I haven’t seen any significant drain. I still see myself charging up almost every other day. However, there’s a weird bug/feature? where if you have AOD on and you’re doing something on the watch and let it go idle, a regular digital watch shows up and the background blurs, when it should just go straight to the AOD. It stays there for a while before turning off and entering “Always On Display”. Doesn’t really bother me, but hope an update fixes it. User Interface Google Play Store Looking forward to the lifetime of this device!	https://medium.com/@joeljerez98/the-galaxy-watch-4-44mm-bluetooth-c2cc75fb2b5a	['Joel Jerez']	2021-09-08 15:30:57.158000+00:00	['Galaxy Watch 4', 'Google', 'Technology', 'Samsung', 'Smartphones']
Downer trials blockchain technology to improve customer experience	Image source：Statecraft 【 Published by Mining Technology\| Editor: Mining Technology 】 Engineering and construction company Downer Group has announced that it is trialling new blockchain technology ‘to manage complex shutdown’ as well as ‘turnaround maintenance work’. The company claims trialling this technology is the first-of-its-kind in Australia for the asset services industry. Downer’s ‘Asset Services’ business performs over 130 shutdowns and turnarounds every year for customers across the industrial sectors. It is currently trialling the use of blockchain technology. Blockchain can enhance efficiency and security, as well as create transparency in contract management. The technology benefits both delivery partners and customers. Downer is trialling the blockchain technology to manage complex shutdowns. / Source: Downer Group Downer’s Asset Services business executive general manager Pat Burke noted that the trial is one of the ways that the engineering firm is looking to improve its customer experience. Burke added: “A key factor in the successful management of large maintenance outages is having real-time information regarding asset condition, time, cost and schedule that allows fully informed decision making during the actual execution of major and minor works.	https://medium.com/ktrade/downer-trials-blockchain-technology-to-improve-customer-experience-d35ce012219b	['Statecraft Tech']	2020-12-17 04:01:08.060000+00:00	['Blockchain', 'Construction', 'Management', 'Customer Experience', 'News']
Hope. Hold on to it or Leave it?	What a life we have here. Events passes by us each day or nothing passes by. Moments occur where we try and try.. nothing. No response. Or we get a response and it’s not exactly what we are looking for. OR We get to the point where we are almost at our finish line, half way there, just starting and something hits. I faced many moments like this. Personally with having to come back from my Peace Corps Volunteer service, applying for jobs.. who even knows what else. Applications after applications. Submissions. Rejections. Interviews. Positions being retracted and I was at a point where I felt mentally and physically exhausted. I told myself. Keep going. That’s all we can tell ourselves. Keep going. Or as Dory in Finding Nemo like to say “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming”. As we tell ourselves, “Just keep going. Just keep going”, WE WILL REACH OUR GOAL. It may take longer than others or even shorter. Regardless, another day working on our goals, what we want to accomplish is a step in the right direction for ourselves. No matter how small the action we continue doing, it adds up. Some days will appear as a gaze. Other days, as a haze. Keep that effort, effort in ourselves. Put the time in. It’s no sin. It’s what we deserve. Remember. Schedule in self care in between these events and efforts. A little yoga, a mini work out, a walk, take a moment and just stare at the clouds or the moon. Just breathe. Every little bit makes a big difference. Super random but related. The biggest strategy we can do for ourselves is turn whatever rage, anger, sadness or moments of fury we may be feeling and turn it into a strength by aknowledging that for a moment and then picking ourselves back up. Right away. Grind even more on that job search, that life goal, that learning a new language. Whatever it may be, get at it. I know it’s not a switch we can turn off and on but let’s have this mentality and make the most of our time. Hope is something we shall hold on to followed by action. No matter how small, cling on to the little hope we may have. We deserve so much more than we think. The world may not see it but I see it. Yes. I don’t know you or maybe I do. Regardless, I’m another person, believing in you.	https://medium.com/@itsmalin/hope-hold-on-to-it-or-leave-it-1ddf1dea228b	['Malin Ouk']	2021-04-01 22:43:27.297000+00:00	['Hope', 'Goals', 'Inspiration', 'Positivity', 'Life']
Understanding Concurrency and Grand Central Dispatch	When anything is being referred to as being “concurrent,” it is being compared with something else that is being done at the same time. When a task has been coded to execute, it can be programmed to happen at the same time as another task. This is concurrency or concurrent programming. What physically allows us to do this is multicore processors. Specifically in iOS Development, with today's technology at the time of writing this, we are currently at a six-core CPU with the latest iPhone 11 and 12 Pros. The more cores there are, the more tasks we can perform. Within these cores, these tasks are done on what are called threads. Certain threads perform different tasks, and in iOS Development, we want to keep certain threads clear and not as busy as others. For the example I learned this week in the Academy, we want the UI part of the app to be on a different thread than the network requests. We want the UI thread(which is the main thread) to have less traffic so that it can be responsive and quick. While the other threads(background threads), handles the heavy lifting of making HTTP requests and handling data or errors. Doing this on the main thread could cause the users to think the app is slow while the UI is waiting for the network request. Grand Central Station Clock Thankfully, Apple has given us tools to manage these threads, this is what is known as Grand Central Dispatch(GCD). We as developers just make the queues for Dispatch and it handles the management of those queues. But what is a queue? The first thing that pops into my mind was how they’re used in Netflix. When there is something you want to watch but not right now, you would add it to your queue. This is a list of movies or shows waiting to be watched in the order they were added. Once one is done, then the next in queue is up. So, much like how Grand Central Station in Manhattan manages all the traffic on different tracks, the GCD manages all the different queues on different threads. Some on the main thread, some on others. The first task in a queue is executed first, then the second, then so on, and so forth. This order is called FIFO or First In First Out. Much like a Netflix queue. Now there are two types of queues we can program in our code, Serial(Sequential) and Concurrent. Image captured from video ( bit.ly/36SZde7 ) In serial queues, task 2 doesn't start until task 1 is complete. Just like a movie in a Netflix queue. Image captured from video ( bit.ly/36SZde7 ) In concurrent queues, each task is started in order but they don't wait for the task before it to be completed, they are all concurrent performing tasks at the same time. And with some tasks being easier than others, some tasks might be done before others that started before it, as you see in the image above. So with concurrent queues, you can imagine that all the tasks would be done sooner, but the outcome may vary as to which task gets done first depending upon how easy it is to perform. The most common implementation of GCD that I have used in App Development is moving things from the background queue to the main queue. Especially when making HTTP requests with URLSession and having a completion handler that is run once the request is finished. Somewhere in the code, I would update the UI on the main thread. Since the collection view is part of the UI on the main thread, I would dispatch the background queue, put it on the main thread, and reload the collection view like the image above. You could move queues from the main to the background thread, but I haven't needed to yet. This was what I learned in this last week of iOS Development, asynchronous code, Grand Central Dispatch, and Threading. Rick Martinez	https://goodground1611.medium.com/understanding-concurrency-and-grand-central-dispatch-1c31ad0e3024	[]	2020-12-07 23:51:46.451000+00:00	['Devslopes', 'Software Engineering', 'Application Development', 'Grand Central Dispatch', 'iOS App Development']
Is Career oriented education what really the present generation requires?	Career oriented education is the kind of education that helps individuals to find out a better career and help them in preparing for the same. A better career is something everyone wish and will help them to grow as an individual. Also, the monetary benefits from the employment makes them self reliant. But, the primary purpose of any kind of education system should not be a better career. The number of suicides in our prestigious institutions like IITs, the raising number of divorces, the health condition of our young and old generation, social negligence rather than social feeling and social commitment, corruption in our country, crime rates against women, children and the underprivileged - all point towards the failure of our education system. Also, a look into the unemployment rate in India will further question the fact whether the career oriented education, as itself is called, is any way successful. The happiness and satisfaction of the people in their job is another fact that needs consideration, because it is said that Underemployment is the real problem of India rather than unemployment. The career oriented education provided in our country primarily lacks the concept of developing an healthy mind in an individual. This points to the fact that India has moved towards the western culture / education system. Because, our ancient texts of Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita had given prime importance to the human mind and its healthy use. The prevailing education system also has developed an unhealthy competition in the minds of students rather than a healthy competition, which is the need of the time. The fact cannot be ignored that India has moved forward a lot compared to the immediate past in its overall development and the development of its each individual. It has found out its place in this global world, and its voice is getting due attention internationally. At this point of time, it is equally important to look back and make the required changes to bring forward the underprivileged and uphold our rich past and our valuable culture in order to realise an India as envisaged by the founding fathers of our republic. Our education system has to ensure that students in our nation will imbibe the values and morals of this nation's culture by the time they complete their school education. The education should help the student to think rationally, critically and rightly without any bias. For this the kind of education that is provided should be capable of helping students to develop their thinking. How to think and understand things better - it should be the primary mandate of the education. Right thinking will help the person to develop rightly, and a right person will develop a better society. A better society in turn will build a better nation. Right education is the key remedy for any societal change. This will be a process that takes time. So the earliest the process is started, the earliest the result is achieved.	https://medium.com/@thejask/is-career-oriented-education-what-really-the-present-generation-requires-2656b566257d	['Thejas K']	2020-12-25 11:18:28.210000+00:00	['Education Reform']
Do psychiatrists do more harm than good? Some reflections after a twenty-year relationship.	“Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut”, as Warren Buffett famously quips. The barber, of course, is economically incentivised to cut hair, and the answer he gives will never be entirely objective. Is it perhaps also the case that you should “never ask a psychiatrist whether you need help with your mental health”? Is it possible that the same underlying economic incentives may sway his response? Is it possible that you may find yourself washed and cut, labelled and drugged, for the rest of your life simply because the psychiatrist is economically incentivised to do that, whether or not this is merited? This blog is a reflection on twenty years of working with psychiatrists as a patient. I have also had a fair amount of experience working with psychiatrists as a carer. That is a story for another day. I remember meeting a psychiatrist for the first time when I was in my early twenties, during a depression which followed on from my father’s suicide. I do not remember his name, or much about the session. I remember that he told me that the low mood I was suffering would be temporary, that I had always been successful in the past and would soon overcome my difficulties and become successful again in the present. He seemed caring, kind and supportive. He did not give me a diagnosis or prescribe any psychiatric drugs. He did not suggest any action, nor did he ask to see me again. Looking back, after close to thirty years, I can see that I was stuck in grief, anger, sadness, denial and guilt at that point in my life. I did not have the language to describe what was occurring and I was so disassociated from myself, so numb, and still in so much shock and denial that I struggled to access my feelings, let alone communicate them. I can see that I presented as high functioning and stable; a carefully curated shell. The trauma that I carried was hidden deep inside of me. However much I needed to share it with someone, there just was not enough trust for me to even start to contemplate doing that. This first doctor was not willing to engage with me in a way that would help me uncover these issues, to help me process my grief. I can see now how much support I was going to need to come to terms with my father’s suicide; with all of the related psychological, existential and emotional trauma, and the even deeper and more complex inter-personal and inter-generational issues. It makes me sad to think that I was not even given a referral to a therapist at that stage of my life, which could have helped. Still, this first psychiatrist at least complied with the advice attributed to Hippocrates, to do no harm. He did none, and as such the experience was at least not a negative one. The second psychiatrist to enter my life was at the Priory in Roehampton in 2000, about six or seven years later. He labelled me with a diagnosis of “bipolar affective disorder” and treated me with lithium and the standard package of individual and group therapy provided at the time. After discharge I would meet with him on an ad hoc basis, whenever my mood was affected. He was meticulous about describing the side effects of lithium and ensuring that I did regular blood tests. We got on well and I considered him a support, and a father figure of sorts. He treated me for eleven years. I was stable during the whole period, although going sideways in my life, and operating within a reduced range of experience as a result of being so heavily drugged. This doctor was disbarred in 2011, and I was no longer able to see him. This occurred as my marriage was souring, at a time when I needed a lot of support. I felt let down. There were echoes of the shocking way in which my father’s suicide removed him abruptly from my life, at a time when I needed him and in a manner that I had no say over. I was introduced to my third psychiatrist by my GP in the wake of this disbarment and was initially suspicious. I remember not knowing whether to refer to him as ‘doctor’, or by his first name. ‘Doctor’ conferred some degree of respect for his knowledge and experience. Bruised by the experience with the last doctor I was acutely sensitive as to whether that respect was merited. Calling him by his first name, on the other hand, felt too informal. We discussed this, and he said that I could call decide what I wanted to call him. I remember clearly the first session we had together. I interviewed him carefully, going over his academic and professional qualifications. I liked the fact that he was both a consultant psychiatrist and also a cognitive behavioural therapist. He appeared to have integrity and a spiritual side, and said he had experience of dealing with issues relating to complex families. I liked the way that he paraphrased points that I made, and how he seemed to have a better understanding than me of the power and control issues in the family that I was exiting. This doctor explained in our first session that his style of working is to listen, write, consider and interject as needed. Over the subsequent ten years I had appointments once a quarter, and he did just that. He made occasional book recommendations, made suggestions and gave advice that he believed to be in my best interests. When he spoke, it was with authority and palpable integrity. He noticed things. He would invariably comment on my attire, whether I had had a shave, or a haircut as I entered his room, or my posture as I sat and waited in his waiting room. It was my sense that these comments or questions were intended to catch me off guard, and to give him material to work with. He was remarkably bright and articulate, as well as deep and wise. There was a moment a few years back, after he had some press from working with celebrity clients, when he changed his attire from shirts and jackets to waistcoats and handkerchiefs. I worried at the time that the attention may have been going to his head. However, in our subsequent sessions he seemed every bit as integrous and supportive, and I relaxed back into the relationship, albeit with him wearing a new costume. It took me some years to become comfortable with calling him “doctor”, and to feeling a sense of authentic trust and respect in the relationship. I do believe that he had my best interests at heart. He listened carefully, and challenged me at appropriate times. He was cautious about de-prescribing me from lithium, but respected my wish to come off it, and was prepared to work with me on that. He was also supportive of my recovery in twelve step groups. The dynamics of the relationship changed over time. When I first started working with him I considered him a higher power of sorts, with the power to save me, and hung on his every word as if it was scripture. There followed a period, after I discovered twelve step recovery and survivor groups, when I realised that I had to do my own work, and so started to run my own recovery, in partnership with him. I have now reached a level of confidence and wellbeing whereby I am taking over the process. The partnership with him continues to the extent that he still prescribes me lithium which I need while I de-prescribe. Beyond that I run my own recovery. In a recent appointment he suggested that I write a book about recovery from bipolar disorder, saying that it could give hope to others who still struggle. I thought about this for a little while, and then later asked him if he would make his notes on our sessions available to me as the foundation of such a project. He agreed, subject to a £50 fee for scanning. A few weeks later I received 200 pages of scanned notes from over forty sessions. These notes form the basis for a book, which is currently work in progress. Over the years that we worked together I developed a much greater sense of agency for my own life. I respected his knowledge and experience, and I trusted him, while also wanting to verify what he said, and not take anything at face value. I also became more realistic around the limitations of his support and his own vested interests. I can see that he is risking his own professional standing and emotional wellbeing in supporting me to reduce the dose of psychiatric drugs that I take. I can see that it is a risk for him to depart from the language and structures of his professional, however wide the discrepancies between this and reality may be. I can see that it is safer to keep me on lithium, living a comfortable half-life, than to risk a relapse by coming off it. These are not the only points of difference. He believes bipolar is a disease with a chemical, biological or genetic constitution. I believe it is a label. He believes it is a chronic condition. I believe that the symptoms ameliorate over time and are curable. He believes drugs are necessary in perpetuity. I do not agree. In short, he is determined that I am mentally defective and need to be medicated for life. I am determined to make a full recovery. I cannot be certain that my beliefs are true. I have asked on numerous occasions how he can be so certain of his and have yet to receive a satisfactory response. The points of difference cause a tension in the relationship which is unhelpful. With other holistic and functional medicine providers available who are supportive of my point of view it is only a matter of time before I change doctor. It is a notable quirk of the world of mental health that the psychotherapists that I have seen over the years also disagree with the doctor, and agree with me. Ironically, the next stage of my recovery is from the harms caused by the cure. After twenty years of taking lithium I experience issues with my memory and cognitive function, as well as my kidneys. Who knows what further damage has been caused. It is only as I reduce the dosage that I come to terms with the adverse affects of so many years of usage. I do believe that a good doctor, at the right time, can be an effective partner in the recovery process. I have appreciated the therapeutic support that I have received from my current psychiatrist, who has been a supporter, an observer and a trusted confident. When I was first given a diagnosis twenty years ago it seemed like a relief. The continuing insistence that I have an incurable brain disease, however, has seemed less and less realistic as my recovery has progressed. I have, in fact, come to see the diagnosis as unnecessary, perhaps even abusive. The lifetime prescription of lithium that goes hand in hand with the diagnosis of this chronic condition also seems to have caused more harm than good. And then, I remember “don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut”.	https://medium.com/@jimbom/do-psychiatrists-do-more-harm-than-good-some-reflections-after-a-twenty-year-relationship-9cd0ad2cae42	['Jim Miller']	2021-07-07 04:15:31.392000+00:00	['Mental Health', 'Bipolar', 'Psychiatry', 'Recovery', 'Pharmaceutical']
The FCC says AT&T is harming consumers	Have you heard of AT&T’s “DIRECTV Now” service? The Federal Communications Commission certainly has, and it isn’t happy. If you aren’t familiar with the service, it allows subscribers to stream live TV and On Demand shows from a mobile device. The cheapest bundle is 100 channels for $35/month (this is a limited time offer and will jump to $60/month unless you sign up now), and users can add-on channels like HBO for as little as $5. DIRECTV Now was initially hailed as a cord-cutter’s dream, especially considering that AT&T announced that AT&T customers will not be billed for any data used while streaming Now on their mobile devices. If you use even a bit of data on your phone, you understand how expensive that data can be. Even if you have an unlimited data plan, that costs $100/month! So for AT&T customers that don’t have unlimited data plans, DIRECTV Now’s new data-free plan sounds pretty sweet, right? Not for the FCC. Here’s the problem The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sent AT&T a letter this Thursday reprimanding the company for this policy. What AT&T is doing is called “zero-rating,” and is not always a problem. T-Mobile has recently announced their own zero-rating plans with music streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube, and this has not raised any issues. The problem with zero-rating comes when it presents an unfair advantage for a certain provider. By only zero-rating its own service, AT&T is making their own service much more attractive than competitors like Netflix and Sling TV. In the official letter (here), The FCC estimates that …an unaffiliated mobile video service provider would have to pay AT&T $16 a month to offer zero-rated service to a customer who uses just 10 minutes of LTE video per day, increasing to $47 for a customer using 30 minutes per day. These costs alone would represent 46 percent to 134 percent of DIRECTV Now’s $35 retail price… For a streaming company such as Hulu to provide data-free streaming for just half an hour each month, it would cost them about $47/month, in addition to their regular costs and fees. The average American watches over four hours of television per day (source). If Hulu or Netflix wanted to provide four hours of zero-rated streaming per day, the cost would come to $9,000/month! It’s pretty obvious, with those metrics in mind, why the FCC believes that AT&T’s zero-rating policy for DIRECTV Now violates net neutrality rules. The meaning of Net Neutrality The term “Net Neutrality” is tossed around a lot, and it is important that you know what it means. Net Neutrality refers to equal access to websites, content, and applications on the internet. Net Neutrality is protected by the FCC’s Open Internet rules. According to the Open Internet rules, internet service providers (ISPs)(including Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T) are not allowed to block any legal content in favor of their own. In addition, the rule “also bans [service providers] from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates” (Source: FCC). AT&T’s zero-rating policy flies directly in that last restriction. Basically, the FCC mandates that AT&T either has to zero-rate more services, or end its zero-rating policy for DIRECTV Now. If you’re wondering why T-Mobile hasn’t received any criticism for letting customers stream certain services without being billed for the data, it is because they are not zero-rating their own service. T-Mobile’s current policy zero-rates apps like Spotify and YouTube, neither of which are owned by T-Mobile. What this means for AT&T The FCC has already done its part to make life difficult for the service provider, issuing a $100 million fine in June of 2015. With this new ruling, AT&T’s offering will be weakened, resulting in a lagging stock price, right? Wrong. Even though the FCC has warned AT&T about their policies, nothing is likely to change. This is because Donald Trump is headed to the White House. Donald Trump has already stated that he is against Net Neutrality rules, as he believes they target conservative media unfairly. Trump has announced that Jeffery Eisenach and Mark Jamison will head his FCC transition team. The two men are telecom lobbyists who are most likely anti-Net Neutrality. In addition, one of the few dissenters to the FCC’s 2015 decision regarding AT&T’s unlimited data was a Republican FCC commissioner. All of this points to the likelihood that the FCC will be upended, with its Net Neutrality rules dismantled. While many free speech and net neutrality advocates are appalled by this possibility, the future looks bright for AT&T as well as all other ISPs. It is very likely that AT&T will not receive a fine or ruling regarding its zero-rating policy, meaning that it will be able to keep its marketplace advantage and increase Now’s popularity, boosting AT&T revenues. This also comes as a boon to Verizon, who offers a zero-rating policy for its streaming service Go90, as well as any other ISPs that decide to implement their own streaming services. This may be the dawn of a new golden era for ISPs.	https://medium.com/french-toast-finance/the-fcc-says-at-t-is-harming-consumers-7903a233661d	['Parker Nolan']	2016-12-04 16:30:36.044000+00:00	['Investing', 'Business', 'Donald Trump', 'Net Neutrality', 'Tech']
Diana Is Taking Blockchain To the Moon — Literally	An A-Z Introductory Guide to Diana, a Blockchain Lunar Registry As night falls, you look up to the sky, and there you find that steady gleaming rock, bright with white light — the moon. Days pass, our lives change, yet the moon is always there, smiling down at both our victories and our travails. The question of who owns the moon may seem strange to consider, but it’s a question that has been considered many times throughout the ages. However, as human civilization advances technologically while exponentially increasing in population, the time for revisiting the question of lunar ownership is becoming relevant again. In 1967, the United Nations established an Outer Space Treaty which, amongst other things, forbade any nation from claiming sovereign ownership over the moon. As of today, every nation with space-faring capabilities has signed it, bringing the total number of countries adhering to the treaty to 102. So, while most nations appear to be in accord over keeping the moon a place free from nation-state ownership, it doesn’t account for private and/or corporate claims to ownership. The rise of private spaceflight companies such as Blue Origin, Scaled Composites, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic means private claims to the lunar surface and resources found therein are more close at hand than ever before. When private companies and individuals lay claim to the valuable resources (such as helium–3, an important energy source) found on the moon, it’s the public who will lose. But wait why does the public lose if private entities or nations begin exploiting the moon? Diana Is Decentralizing Moon Ownership The moon, along with places like the deep ocean, is a location of common heritage for all of humanity. This means that the moon is not a place that can (or should be) exploited for the gains of any one private interest. Instead, a location of common heritage should be owned by one and all, and if there is any gain to be made from it, that gain should be distributed evenly and equally. As such, we’ve introduced Diana, a project for decentralizing the ownership of the moon away from privatizing forces and back toward people everywhere. Diana is a blockchain-based public registration system for asserting humanity’s common ownership over the moon. By asserting our right of ownership over the moon as a publicly-held common good, we the people ensure that private interests can’t push aside the power of the people in the near future. Just as private individuals like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are preparing the ground for moon exploration and exploitation (he spends $100 million annually on space industry efforts), we the people also prepare to resist. Diana is the beginning of that resistance, and is the way we will keep an immutable record of who has an inalienable stake in lunar ownership. How Diana’s Lunar Registration Blockchain Works The notion of registering for your very own piece of the moon may seem far-fetched, but the tools for doing are very down to Earth. 1. Diana is partitioning the moon and creating unique blockchain-based addresses for each cell. Cells are formed on the basis of the Goldberg polyhedron algorithm, resulting in 3.8742 billion cells in total. However, because Diana is only offering registration for the visible side of the moon, cells available for registration amount to 2 billion. For each moon cell, there is 1 DIA token. DIA tokens represent ownership of the cell and correspondingly number 3.8742 billion (total supply). 2. Using cadastral mapping and an intuitively simple user-interface, you can choose a parcel and lay claim to it. The registration fee shifts dynamically according to the section for which you are registering. Section 1 through 7 have the lowest registration fees, whereas section 8 to 17 are higher and are reserved for those trading moon claims. 3. Diana has a dual token system. DIA tokens are used for creating registration claims and representing lunar land ownership, whereas MOND tokens are used for internal network transacting and are pegged 1:1 with the USD. In this way, MOND tokens remain stable and make a perfect Diana network-based digital currency. The Diana blockchain records each registration and can never be repealed, edited, or otherwise modified in any way. Because Diana is issued on the Ethereum network, and Ethereum is, along with Bitcoin, the most widely decentralized network in existence, it is immutably secure and will stand the test of time. Therefore, you can rest assured that you can pass your lunar claims onto your children and grandchildren. Join the Diana movement now and become one of the first moon citizens in history. Register today at Diana.io, or visit us on Twitter, Facebook, or Medium.	https://medium.com/dianaios/diana-is-taking-blockchain-to-the-moon-literally-487d69682720	['Diana', "The World'S First Blockchain Moon Registry"]	2019-06-21 07:53:17.091000+00:00	['Diana', 'Registry', 'Lunar Land', 'Moon', 'Blockchain']
14 Black Inventors You Probably Didn’t Know About	Many people have read the story of how George Washington Carver invented over 300 products made from peanuts: flour, paste, insulation, paper, wall board, wood stains, soap, shaving cream and skin lotion. Others are familiar with the story of Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C. J. Walker, the inventor of beauty products and the first woman to become a self-made millionaire in America. And thanks to the Academy Award nominated film, Hidden Figures, we’re now all familiar with the amazing contributions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. But, did you know that many of the products we use every day were created by black people? Here’s a list of 14 of them that, until now, you probably didn’t know about. Dr. Shirley Jackson Dr. Shirley Jackson is an American physicist who received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973. She was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in nuclear physics at MIT. In addition to her lengthy list of academic achievements, she also has an impressive number of inventions under her belt. Her experiments with theoretical physics paved the way for numerous developments in the telecommunication space including the touch-tone telephone, the portable fax, caller ID, call waiting, and the fiber-optic cable. Today, Dr. Shirley Jackson is the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Lewis Latimer Inventor and engineer Lewis Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1848. He collaborated with science greats Hiram Maxim and Thomas Edison. One of Latimer’s greatest inventions was the carbon filament, a vital component of the light bulb. His inventions didn’t stop there, working with Alexander Graham Bell, Latimer helped draft the patent for Bell’s design of the telephone. This genius also designed an improved railroad car bathroom and an early air conditioning unit. So the next time you’re escaping a hot day inside your cool house, don’t forget to thank Lewis Latimer. Marie Van Brittan Brown Did you know that the first home security system was invented by a Black nurse? Meet Marie Van Brittan Brown. Although she was a full-time nurse, she recognized the security threats to her home and devised a system that would alert her of strangers at her door and contact relevant authorities as quickly as possible. Her original invention consisted of peepholes, a camera, monitors, and a two-way microphone. The finishing touch was an alarm button that, when pressed, would immediately contact the police. Her patent laid the groundwork for the modern closed-circuit television system that is widely used for surveillance, home security systems, push-button alarm triggers, crime prevention, and traffic monitoring. Otis Boykin Otis Boykin’s most notable contribution to science was likely the circuit improvements he made to pacemakers after losing his mother to heart failure — a contribution that has saved countless lives since. But this single improvement was among a long list of achievements. Boykin had 26 patents in his name and is famed for the development of IBM computers, burglar-proof cash register, chemical air filters, and an electronic resistor used in controlled missiles and other devices. Lonnie G. Johnson Did you ever enjoy water gun fights as a kid? Well, meet Lonnie Johnson, the man that gave us the most famous water gun — the Super Soaker. Lonnie wasn’t a toymaker, he was actually an Aerospace Engineer for NASA with a resume boasting a stint with the US Air Force, work on the Galileo Jupiter probe and Mars Observer project, and more than 40 patents. Yes, he is also working on the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC) which converts heat directly into electricity — but it’s the squirt gun he created that has given us all the most joy. Charles Drew Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood. Thanks to Charles Drew, that blood is available. Drew was a physician, surgeon, and medical researcher who worked with a team at Red Cross on groundbreaking discoveries around blood transfusions. In World War II, he played a major role in developing the first large-scale blood banks and blood plasma programs. He also invented the, and get ready because this name is pretty charming — bloodmobiles. These are the refrigerated trucks that, to this day, safely transport stored blood to the location where it is needed most. Drew was one of the most prominent doctors working in his field, and one of the only African-Americans, during a time when blood donation was still separated along lines of race. Drew eventually resigned from his position with the American Red Cross over their insistence on adhering to this policy. It was 1950 before the Red Cross finally recognized all blood as being equal. Marian R. Croak In 2013, Marian Croak was inducted into Women in Technology International’s hall of fame, a move that recognizes her remarkable achievements in tech. Croak holds over 135 patents, primarily in voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP), some in other areas. She has another 100 patents currently under review. Today, Marian is an SVP at AT&T, serves as a mentor for women in AT&T labs, and sits on the board for the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Center. Lisa Gelobter If you ever enjoyed an animated Gif on the web, like this one amazing clip of a kitten being scared by an iguana, then you have Lisa Gelobter to thank. Gelobter was integrally involved with the advent of Shockwave, a technology that formed the beginning of web animation. She also played a major role in the emergency of online video, later serving on the senior management team at Hulu. Previously, Lisa was the Interim Head of Digital for BET Networks and ran Technology, Product and Business Operations. Today, you can catch Lisa at the White House, in the United States Digital Service. She is currently serving as the Chief Digital Service Officer with the US Department of Education. Philip Emeagwali Due to cost, Philip Emeagwali was forced to drop out of school at age 14. But this didn’t stop him from becoming one of the greatest computer pioneers of our time. In fact, he’s often called “The Bill Gates of Africa.” As an adult, Emeagwali began studying nature, specifically bees. The construction of the honeycombed inspired him to rethink computer processing. In 1989, he put this idea to work, using 65,000 processes to invent the world’s first massively parallel processing supercomputer — able to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second. That same year, Emeagwali received the Gordon Bell Prize for his application of the CM-2 massively-parallel computer. Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. is one of America’s most important contemporary mathematicians. At 13, he became the University of Chicago’s youngest student. Wilkins continued his studies there, earning bachelor, master, and eventually earning his doctorate degree in mathematics at the age of 19. He’s published papers in mathematics, optics, and nuclear engineering. As a mathematician for the American Optical Company in Buffalo, N.Y., he perfected lens design for microscopes and ophthalmologic uses. His greatest contribution to scholarship was the development of mathematical models to explain gamma radiation and his work on developing a shielding against gamma radiation. His other claim to fame came from working on the Manhattan Project. At the Manhattan Project, Wilkins worked with future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and made significant contributions to nuclear-reactor physics, now known as the Wilkins effect and the Wigner-Wilkins spectrum. Elijah McCoy Often regarded as one of the most famous black inventors ever, McCoy was credited for 50 inventions over the span of his career. In an effort to improve efficiency and eliminate the frequent stopping necessary for lubrication of trains, McCoy devised a method of automating the task. In 1872 he developed a “lubricating cup” that could automatically drip oil when and where needed — vital in avoiding sticking to the track. The lubricating cup met with enormous success and orders for it came in from railroad companies all over the country. It was so popular that when other inventors attempted to steal his idea and sell their own versions of the device, companies were not fooled. They insisted on the authentic device, calling it “the Real McCoy.” Garrett Morgan Those who survived either of the World Wars thanks to a gas mask have Garrett Morgan to thank. Morgan first created the “safety hood” to help firefighters navigate smokey buildings, later modifying it to carry its own air supply— making it the world’s first effective gas masks. He also had the good sense to add a third position to the traffic signal — yes, there was a time when traffic signals just said indicated “stop” or “go” — an addition that further reduced automobile accidents. Mary and Mildred Davidson Mary and her sister Mildred patented many practical inventions. They didn’t have technical education, but they were both exceptional at spotting ways to make peoples’ lives better. Together, they invented the sanitary belt. Later, Mary invented the moisture-resistant pocket for the belt. While disabled from multiple sclerosis, Mary went on to invent the walker and the toilet-tissue holder.	https://thinkgrowth.org/14-black-inventors-you-probably-didnt-know-about-3c0702cc63d2	['Pamela Rosario Pérez']	2021-02-05 17:15:58.905000+00:00	['History', 'Tech', 'Innovation', 'STEM', 'Science']
Optimizing Flipkart’s Serviceability Data from 300 GB to 150 MB in-memory	What is Serviceability? Serviceability defines the logistics capability to move an item from Location A to Location B. In Flipkart, before displaying the items to a customer, we identify the sources in which the item is available and check for serviceability between the source and destination locations. We require various levels of serviceability information on different pages. In use cases such as Search/Browse pages, we need to check only the boolean (the item is serviceable or not) serviceability. Search page The product and cart pages display the delivery date information. Cart page While providing an SLA (delivery date) to the customer, we identify the sources in which the required item is available, the lanes connecting each source to the customer’s destination, the vendor servicing those lanes, and the applicable policies around them. We choose one option from the list of applicable combinations (fastest, cheapest, etc) to optimize for customer experience. Product page On a broad level, there are multiple ways of moving the item from Location A to Location B which we refer to as Services (different delivery options possible over surface or Air), and each Service is provided by multiple Vendors (Ekart, BlueDart, FedEx, etc.). Each Service provided by a Vendor may have restrictions around it being applicable only to certain categories of items (Books, Mobiles, everything large such as Furniture, treadmill, etc.). There may be other additional restrictions such as the Cash-On-Delivery Limit is Rs. 5000. We refer to these governing restrictions as policies. For every Service, provided by a Vendor on a Lane (Source, Destination combination, for example, Bangalore warehouse Pincode to Mumbai customer Pincode), there is an SLA, Cost, and handover time. The policy or SLA applicable varies from time to time, making the information temporal in nature. How is it modeled? All the serviceability ingestions are stored in a Document store that acts as a system of record. The computation pipelines fetch the records from this store, do the transformations, and store them in 2 key-value store clusters in a denormalized way to serve the user path queries. One store keeps the detailed information, and the other keeps only lane-level boolean information. Detailed serviceability store In the detailed store, for every combination of [Source (Pincode), Destination (Pincode), Day], all the vendors with the services offered, along with their SLA, cost, and policies, are stored. We have thousands of sources, and the destinations are all India pincodes (~25000), and we store data for 30 days. This amounts to around 760 million keys. The data is kept in an encoded format to optimize size. Detailed serviceability store data model This store has 80 shards with each shard’s master memory being ~4 GB and the entire cluster’s master’s memory footprint of about 300 GB. Boolean serviceability store The boolean information store holds the boolean serviceability at source + destination + product attributes granularity. { Source + Product Attributes --> Set of serviceable pincodes } Product attributes are Product Type (FA/NONFA), Size (Small, medium, large), Supply chain category (Books, Mobiles…), etc. This cluster comprises 20 shards, with each shards’ master memory being 7 GB, so 140 GB is the entire cluster’s master’s memory footprint. Both the clusters support a few million queries per second with lower double-digit millisecond latencies. Existing Architecture Query patterns We classify the query patterns to serviceability in the user path as follows: Is this product serviceable to this destination? If the answer to (1) is yes, how soon can it be delivered? What are the different services available? (COD, open-box delivery, return, installation, etc.) What are the different services along with their respective varying SLAs and costs available? The first query is served by the Boolean serviceability store. And the remaining three queries are served using the Detailed serviceability store. Characteristics of Serviceability data Ingestion rate: Serviceability data ingestions are done manually by the planning team a few times a day. They are bulky and some delay in reflecting the data is fine. Read/Write ratio: The read:write ratio is upwards of 99 to 1, which requires data model optimization for heavy reads. Rethinking Serviceability As our supply chain network expands and we add new capabilities to it, the serviceability gets complex. In addition, there is an increase in the available choices and the number of use cases needing more accurate serviceability. Example use cases are the display of SLA (and possibly filter) on the search page, show 90 mins delivery option on the landing page, etc. While the accuracy levels required for each of these use-cases are different and mostly are inversely proportional to scale, the accuracy level expectations as well the scaling requirements are also continually increasing. This, coupled with organic traffic growth to Flipkart further demands a higher scale on serviceability. We will need to rethink various strategies to represent and compute serviceability, to serve these requirements. Modeling Our goal was to represent the serviceability data in a compact form to fit into the App memory with less overhead. We studied the following data models to address the first query pattern. Bloom filters Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure that says if an element is present in the set. With Blooms false positives are possible, but false negatives are not possible. The false-positive percentage is configured while creating a Bloom filter. Though the data structure is probabilistic, it can store boolean data in a low memory footprint. To answer the yes or no question on serviceability, we will need to keep the data at the following granularity. { Source, Destination, Product Attributes } --> Yes/No Here the false positives would mean a lane + product combination is shown as serviceable even though in reality it is not serviceable. There are over a billion key combinations. Storing a boolean value at this granularity took about 1.75GB at a false positive percentage of 0.1%. When we increased the false positive percentage to 1%, the size reduced to 1.1GB, still large for app memory. We have seen similar sizes with the Cuckoo filter too. Custom Bit encoding The idea is to maintain a map of source_hash to list of destination pincodes. A combination of Source, Product Attributes is a Source Hash. There are 52000 source hashes currently. { source_hash1 --> {100001, 100003, 100004, 100005}, source_hash2 --> {100001, 100002, 100008, 100009}, source_hash3 --> {100001, 100003, 100004, 100005} } We can maintain a mapping of Pincode to a number (ordinal mapping) to optimize the storage. There are 25 thousand pincodes in India, so we need 25K (1 to 25K) numbers to represent all pincodes. If we keep a byte array in which each bit represents serviceability to a particular destination Pincode, we would need 25000 bits i.e., 3125 bytes. 100001 --> 1 100002 --> 2 100003 --> 3 100004 --> 4 ... ... 560001 --> 8212 560002 --> 8213 ... ... 620010 --> 20000 ... This mapping implies that the source hashes would maintain: { source_hash1 --> [10111000 000...], source_hash2 --> [11000001 100...], source_hash3 --> [10111000 000...] } If a destination is serviceable, the corresponding ordinal number’s index would be set (used 1-indexed array notation in the example). To store data for 52K source hashes, we would need 52K byte arrays of size 3125 bytes each. This amounts to 155 MB. This approach’s advantage is it is very lightweight to do change propagation, the notification size is only 3125 bytes for any source_hash serviceability change. Grouped Bit encoding This approach is like the custom bit encoding approach. However, assuming that multiple Source Hashes have similar serviceability to multiple destinations, they are not duplicated but a reference of a portion of the bit array is stored and only the overridden values are stored. Example: Source hash1 is connected to the destination pincode with ordinal 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11. { source_hash1 --> d1, d3, d4, d5, d8, d9, d10, d11 source_hash2 --> d2, d3, d4, d5, d8, d9, d10 source_hash3 --> d3, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d15 source_hash4 --> d3, d4, d5, d8, d9, d10 } We can see in the above example that the set of destinations [d3, d4, d5, d8, d9, d10] are repeating in multiple source hashes. So we will define an ordinal mapping for it and refer to that instead of keeping the destination ordinals in multiple places. Here we mapped it to o1. { o1 --> [d3, d4, d5, d8, d9, d10] } With the ordinal mapping, the final model would be: { source_hash1 --> d1, o1, d11 source_hash2 --> d2, o1 source_hash3 --> d3, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d15 source_hash4 --> o1 } The worst-case scenario is every Source Hash has an entirely different serviceability value to all destinations which is highly unlikely. This grouping drastically reduces in size and we were able to get to under 50MB. That said, all the above models are only capable of providing boolean responses to queries. Adding any additional data which is non-boolean, such as payment limit, fastest SLA, etc. drastically increases the data size. Graphs We looked into graphs to address many more types of queries (2,3,4) mentioned above, and also to reduce the data size. One way to think about serviceability is to represent it as a graph similar to the way a network is created. A source is connected to an MH (Mother Hub), which is connected to one or more MHs/DHs (Delivery Hub) and a DH is connected to multiple pincodes. Supply chain network Network Representation One way to model this information is to hold DH level attributes at the DH Vertex, Pincode attributes at Pincode Vertex, and so on. Given that we have multiple vendors in the System, this information had to be stored at a vendor level. The vendor information along with attributes such as SLA, Cost, etc. are maintained at a connection (edge) level. This did not prove to give great benefits. Neo4j’s modeling of this data came to be around 30 GB. Adjacency List Another way to represent the information was to use the graph for an adjacency list and not store anything on edges. Let us consider the following example. Assume a Vendor can deliver a Mobile from Delhi to Bangalore in 3 days. Similarly, the same vendor can deliver a mobile from Delhi to Hyderabad in 3 days. This, in the network graph, will be modeled as 3 nodes and 2 edges. The data about the SLA will be duplicated on both edges. Network graph If we create a node representing “Source + Vendor + 3 days SLA and other attributes”, and connect all the Destinations which are eligible for the same, we would have 3 nodes and 2 edges, but the data on the edge is nil. Instead of creating a node with all the serviceability data, we split the serviceability data into two parts. Policy data — Contains eligibility information for serviceability. — Is Small serviceable, are mobiles serviceable, what is the COD limit, are dangerous goods transportable. Service Information — Contains the SLA and Cost information. How long will a surface transport service take and at what cost, how long will an air transfer take and at what cost, etc.? A node is created for each Policy, Source & Vendor combination. Also, a node is created for each Service, Source & Vendor combination. These nodes are connected to the destinations where it is valid. This way, we have normalized the combinations of options available and connected them to the right source and destinations. A side effect of this approach is that the number of nodes/vertices could explode since we are creating nodes with some unbounded attribute combinations like source, vendor, SLA (this is maintained at minute granularity), payment limit, etc. However, in practice, we haven’t seen this happening. In our final modeling, the number of vertices is less than 600K. The resulting model looks like this. For the above example, the graph would be: As all query patterns contain a single destination (a customer queries the products for a single destination at any point in time), we always start the traversal from the destination node. A Destination node is connected to multiple Source Vendor Policy and Source Vendor Service nodes. All of them are looked up and used to calculate serviceability. We have done trials with different graph models (18 to be precise) before coming up with this vertex modeling where the cardinality is minimal. Implementation Each node value is hashed and kept in an Ordinal map. The Ordinal map keeps a mapping of Key to Ordinal value. This helps in representing the entire graph as integers. Destinations ordinal map { 0: Bangalore 1: Hyderabad 2: Delhi ... } Source vendor service ordinal map { 0: { source: Delhi, vendor: ekart, sla: 3days, transport_mode: surface, date_range: 1-Mar-2021 to 31-Mar-2021 ... } 1: { source: Mumbai, vendor: ekart, sla: 1 day, transport_mode: air, date_range: 10-Mar-2021 to 31-Mar-2021 ... } ... } For example, destination ordinal 0 is connected to source vendor policy ordinals 2, 12, and 15, and source vendor service ordinals 5 and 8. Similarly, destinations 1 and 100 are connected to their respective policy and service ordinals. Example graph This entire graph would be modeled using the below 2 arrays. The vertical array is the destination ordinals from where the querying starts. The value of the array has a pointer to an adjacency list which is another array that holds connected vertex ordinals. Instead of maintaining a separate adjacency list for each destination ordinal, a huge single dimension byte array is used to store the connected vertices ordinals. Since only the ordinals are being used and the order of the items in the adjacency list doesn’t matter, we sort the list and store compactly using delta variable-length encoding to further reduce the size. Internal implementation Here destination ordinal 0 keeps a pointer to index 0 of the encoded byte array. The number 3 on this index shows the total number of bytes used to represent the source vendor policy ordinals that are connected to this destination. In case if we are not interested in reading policy ordinals, the number 3 can be used to skip those many bytes and go to the next type of ordinals. The next list of numbers is source vendor service ordinals. Given the numbers are stored in delta encoded form, the connected ordinals 2, 12, 15 are represented using 2, 10, 3 (while reading, the previous numbers’ sum would be added to the current number to get the actual ordinal number i.e., 2, 2 + 10 and 2 + 10 + 3), and 5 and 8 are represented using 5 and 3 (5, 5 + 3). This modeling has been inspired by NetflixGraph Metadata Library. This library provides ways to represent the graph as a simple adjacency list along with capabilities to serialize the graph and store it in a file and build back the graph based on the serialized data. We use these capabilities in our deployment. Along with the above model, we have done several optimizations around the way we serialize/deserialize and query, to reduce the footprint and computation. E.g, Instead of doing object serialization using apache serialization utils, writing a custom serialization format for our use case allowed us to reduce the data size by 6x and computational overhead by 22x. One useful tool here is JMH (Java Microbenchmark Harness), it allowed us to benchmark different algorithms constantly and analyze the computation time. Query & Lookup All queries are a single lookup on the graph. First, we identify the destination ordinal from the ordinal map, from there we go to the destination's integer array. The array index provides a pointer to the encoded byte array location and using that pointer we identify all the nodes connected to a destination. It has all the Sources, their eligibility, and services. We filter out the required vertices and fetch SLA, cost, etc basis the request parameters. Results With this modeling, the entire serviceability data catering to all the four query patterns listed earlier are represented under 150 MB of App’s heap memory. This has helped in reducing the hardware footprint by allowing us to keep this model in App’s memory and remove both the key-value stores that were present to serve user path traffic while enabling us to scale higher and provide a more accurate serviceability signal. Deployment The graph is an immutable structure, and it is built in a central place periodically and propagated to all the app machines. The apps load this structure in memory and serve the user path queries using it. Here we opted for pull-based clients deployed in each node serving the data instead of a push-based notification mechanism as it might be lossy and would require reconciliation. The New Architecture 1. All the Serviceability data ingestions are persisted to the Serviceability Document store. 2. The serviceability change processor builds the graph. It periodically Fetches all data from the source of truth and creates a graph (or) fetches the ingestions that have been done since the last graph build to the present and creates a new version of the graph by applying these ingestions to the previous graph. Serializes the new graph and writes to disk. Compresses the graph files written to the disk using the lzma algorithm and uploads the compressed file to the Object store with a new version number. We experimented with multiple compression formats with different configurations. lzma worked best in that the compressed output file size is 9 MB. 3. The apps periodically poll the Object store to check if there is a new version of the graph, and whenever they detect a new version, they download the compressed file, decompress it, load it into memory, and keep it as a passive graph object. 4. All the apps would do an atomic swap of an old graph with a new graph version at a specific time based on their clocks (clock skew can still result in inconsistencies) to avoid serviceability inconsistencies being displayed to the customer. Way forward Currently, we are computing the entire graph periodically and propagating it. In future, we plan optimization of the update pipeline to allow delta updates rather than entire snapshot updates. This will enable us to have a faster TAT for updates and also reduce the network bandwidth utilized for updates. References:	https://tech.flipkart.com/remodelling-flipkarts-serviceability-data-an-optimization-journey-from-300-gb-to-150-mb-in-memory-5c7e9c38bde	['Shyam Akirala']	2021-07-05 05:41:56.636000+00:00	['Scalability', 'Architecture', 'Engineering', 'Design', 'Data Modelling']
Machine learning, data annotation and text analytics for designers	Artificial Intelligence has been a trending topic for the last 5+ years. It had its peek for a most searched term on Google in January, 2018. I had the chance to join the front line in April, 2018 and I have been honored to do my small part in the contemporary Machine Learning landscape. Often when people refer to Artificial Intelligence, they mean Machine Learning. Machine Learning is a scientific study explored in detail by many an expert in the field. In simple terms, it is the process of teaching a machine to deduct information in order to complete given tasks. It may be a simple task as classifying a paragraph of text or a more complex one as named-entity recognition. For further readings on the subject, I recommend these helpful resources: Machine Learning from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series and the Artificial Intelligence Driven Design Series from Awwwards. The project In order to learn, the machine needs to be taught through training data. For that project, the training data was written text that varied from online product reviews to survey responses to chat bot conversations and others. The process of transforming the original data into training data involves manual annotations of the text. This is a long, painstaking and error-prone approach. The problem How to annotate data fast and produce high quality text annotation on a large scale? There are existing tools that offer rapid annotations such as Brat and Prodigy but none of them provides the base of a scalable annotation process in a timely manner. A very talented engineer and I, the product designer, took the initiative to design an internal annotation platform, which will allow : text annotation, curation, correction and review of the data. The final goal was to design a suite of products that will allow the NLP(Natural Language Processing) team to work together in a fast and collaborative manner on the same platform. That was how Sapiens was born. The solution A multi-faceted platform for data annotation.	https://uxdesign.cc/artificial-intelligence-and-design-d449dfd527a4	['Sofiya Urumova']	2020-04-22 00:28:14.735000+00:00	['Artificial Intelligence', 'Product Design', 'Design Systems', 'User Experience', 'AI']
The Year School Stopped and Learning Continued	Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash While some students thrive in classrooms, other children found out that their educational needs were met using different methods during the pandemic Spring Break 2020 Setting: Texas — Way back in the good ole days of education as we knew it. Spring break was ending. My little town was clueless about Covid. Then our local school system postponed returning to school until the following year. It was a type of forced mass exodus — students returning home to learn via the world wide web. Then some students and parents realized they LIKED the freedom of school at home. People are rethinking their priorities pre and post-pandemic. This includes which educational choice best fits their individual children and family. COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the nation. Yet parents, students, and teachers remain flexible. They are (mostly) willing to try anything to keep cobwebs out of their students’ minds during the quarantine. As a homeschooling mama, I do not pay a whole lot of attention to our local schedule district schedule. So education We school from home and have since my oldest was 4. She is now attending her dream college this fall- graduating a year early. (she has plenty of social skills) What I did notice was the volume of emails, texts, and calls I was receiving in March. Everyone was asking the same thing, “how does this homeschooling thing work?” It was a hard question to answer. Our schooling looks different than a traditional classroom.	https://medium.com/@laurashepherd1979/the-year-school-stopped-and-learning-continued-8daff4887392	['Laura Shepherd Copy']	2020-12-16 20:14:43.854000+00:00	['Covid 19 Crisis', 'Parenting', 'Covid Diaries', 'Homeschooling', 'Education Reform']
The Slippery Slope Fallacy: How to Spot Unreasonable Assumptions	High school student David wants to spend the weekend with his friends, but his mom won’t let him. “You have to study on Saturdays,” she insists. “If you don’t, your grades will suffer, you won’t get into a good university, and you’ll end up flipping burgers for the rest of your life!” This is a prime example of the slippery slope fallacy: assuming that a relatively small first step will lead to a chain of events that eventually culminates in a significant, usually negative, outcome. In other words, you assume that if A occurs, then B will follow, and if B occurs, then C will follow. And since C is something you really don’t want, you shouldn’t allow A to happen.	https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-slippery-slope-fallacy-how-to-spot-unreasonable-assumptions-54de8c4741a9	['Patrik Edblad']	2020-02-12 11:19:22.414000+00:00	['Self Improvement', 'Decision Making', 'Personal Development', 'Self', 'Psychology']
Anticipating Needs	Why do we do this and how can we do it well My first job was as a hostess for a large restaurant chain. One of the greatest take-aways I gained from this job, is the importance of recognizing and anticipating customer needs. The idea of anticipating need was something identified as a ‘key to success’ during my training - to anticipate what the customer wants before they have to ask for it. The positive impact of this was pretty simple to understand — customer gets what they want and expect, which leads to a more positive customer experience, which in turn improves customer retention, which meant the restaurant was getting more business ie. profit (the tips weren’t bad either). Everyone wins. The restaurant is busy, customers are happy and everyone is successful. Businesses have always been deeply impacted by the experience of their customers, but in the age of online reviews, the necessity is amplified. The reviews and star ratings from past guests, play a huge role in how someone determines if they will spend their hard earned money here. The experience of a customer needs to be intentionally considered when designing the services. So how do we know what people want? This is where we start to see the crossover of anticipating needs and the intentional design of experiences. When you work with customers day in and day out, you start to see their habits and understand their patterns, but where your customers or users are not in front of you every day or where the service delivery needs to scale, a more intentional approach is likely needed. When we try to scale this, understanding customers’ context, culture, abilities and habits become the key to anticipating need, and leveraging a breadth of observations and customer experiences can greatly enhance your opportunity to create a lasting positive experience. AirBNB Experiences website A few years ago, Airbnb launched a new service on their site called ‘Experiences’ where hosts can build experiences for guests and promote them like they would a guesthouse. A guest can select the type of experience they want based on what they enjoy doing and get a curated list of activities to choose from. This concept takes the original concept of Airbnb of connecting hosts and guests in vacation accommodation rentals and expands to influencing and supporting the overall experience of someone visiting a new place. This concept creates a single point of contact to potentially plan out their entire holiday, making it very convenient for the customer / guest. The other benefit from this is gaining more control over the entire journey and experience of a guest, depending on the scope of what they select, their entire time in the new location could be curated to maximize their positive enjoyment, and like the example from working in a restaurant, positive experiences lead to returning guests. This new service offering ultimately broadens AirBNBs user base, provides a new way for local business to engage in the Airbnb economy, and anticipates the needs and desires of travellers when visiting a new location. This example is one of so many, where businesses get to know their user base (customers), build an understanding of their habits and their needs and create solutions to meet that need. This act of anticipating needs in hospitality is part of the job, but when we take this idea and apply it to other businesses, it isn’t quite as innate and takes deliberate effort and understanding of user experiences to be able to design these experiences and ultimately design products and services that are desirable to their customers. This is what we call User Experience Design (UX). So back to the question — How do we know what people want. Well… plainly… we watch. we listen. we analyze. and then we innovate. In our company, we use a framework called Design Thinking to take us through the steps of this work and use it to communicate the way we learn about people’s needs and experiences and translate those into positive experiences and then we watch, listen and repeat. It is a continuous evolution of learning what people want and need to create a positive experience, one that is highly dependent on the cultural landscape at the time. For instance, the way that someone experiences your business or service might be greatly different if they are no longer able to go into the storefront, or if they now need to stay home for a prolonged period of time and are reliant on the online interactions of your business. In a diversifying world and an ever evolving cultural and social context, understanding users is a continuous exercise. People are demanding a new level of awareness and participation from businesses and the standard for inclusion and equity is rising with changes that are impacting ingrained patterns. Keeping up to this evolution takes effort and being able to respond effectively takes intentional design. It is evident then that a concerted effort to truly understand the people accessing our services is essential to success, where if companies fail to meet the evolving expectations, that customers will move onto another service offering. There is a great deal of diversity in our communities and it is becoming more and more obvious that there is a lot more that we need to understand in order to anticipate peoples’ needs. Inclusion and Equity in design — anticipating diverse needs: In UX there is often a sticker or a tagline that gets tossed around from Nielsen Norman Group “YOU are not the USER”. While the designer and the individual perspective is important at some level, the humility to understand that your individual experience may not be representative of your customers. In digital design, ‘accessibility’ is commonly acknowledged, but not always thoughtfully implemented. We acknowledge things like using plain language, larger font sizes, increased contrast, tagging images… but there is a lot more that can be done to ensure that the breadth and diversity of the population can successfully use your service. Back to Airbnb — Just last month they are highlighting a new element to their experiences service stream, “highlighting a collection of 12 new Online Experiences designed by Hosts with neurodiverse guests in mind.” (Airbnb News Online, March 24, 2021). This approach is identified as being in response to the changes in lifestyle as a result of social isolation from Covid 19 restrictions. Many individuals from this community have been impacted by the isolation. “Neurodiversity refers to variations in the way brains function, process and learn information, and includes individuals with autism, dyslexia, and attention deficit disorders, among others.” — Airbnb News Online, March 24, 2021 This example of emerging services that anticipate the needs, or just plain identifies the needs of a population that might otherwise be lumped in with the masses. You may not be the user. By understanding context and by understanding the diverse needs of their customers, the hosts on Airbnb can meet and exceed their customers expectations. To be successful in this, you first need to know who your customers are and then you need to understand how they do life, what their pain points are, what brings joy, and how they interact with your service. The result might be a small tweak or a completely new service, either way, the result is a happy customer. Doing the research and spending the effort to discover your customers will positively impact your customer’s experience which as we discussed earlier, will result in positive reviews and recommendations, which in turn leads to more customers and more revenue. In closing It sometimes feels simple to anticipate needs when all we see is individual interactions as the influencing factor of the experience. It seems that we know the needs of our customers because we see them day in and day out, but what is evident, is that there is so much more that we don’t know and still need to learn about the people we serve. With the continuous growth and change of our culture, the needs of yesterday are not the same as the needs of today. If we approach service delivery and product design with an attitude of humility and curiosity, and intentionally seek to understand the people we serve, our ability to meet and exceed our customer’s desires is limitless. Being intentional in the design of experiences is the foundation to successful product and service delivery and will ultimately be what keeps people coming back.	https://medium.com/@lenastachiw/anticipating-needs-8a91908c9d3d	['Lena Stachiw']	2021-04-09 19:48:16.613000+00:00	['Customer Experience', 'Design Thinking', 'User Experience Design', 'Design', 'UX']
echoAR featured at VRDays 2020	echoAR was selected as one of the few startups to be featured at VRDays, titled “The Most Immersive Event of 2020”. This year VRDays 2020 is offering more than 15 conferences and panels over 3 days on top of the unmissable, November 4–6, 2020. echoAR was selected for the Immersive Funding Market (IFM) program that brings together the most innovative ideas from throughout the XR ecosystem, and introduces them to potential partners that can help realize their full potential. The session includes companies from fully immersive narrative builders, to game-changing tech startups, to XR academia that shapes the future of the industry. Learn more about the event here. Learn more about the Immersive Funding Market (IFM) program here.	https://medium.com/echoar/echoar-featured-at-vrdays-2020-712f6926b019	[]	2020-12-03 22:31:54.252000+00:00	['Virtual Conference', 'Conference', 'Virtual Reality', 'Augmented Reality', 'Events']
How Social Monitoring Can Transform Your Business	There are two sides to social media: broadcasting and receiving. This is what makes social media so valuable to businesses. In the past, print, radio and TV media was a one-way street: brands put out information, but they couldn’t get anything back from the general public using these channels. Social platforms allow consumers to speak directly to brands — or indirectly share their opinions with the world. All businesses understand the broadcasting part of social media as it works in much the same way that people use social media in their everyday lives, but very few companies take full advantage of the ‘receiving’ side. Brands can’t just monitor responses to their own social media posts. Social media monitoring tools allow brands to listen in on all the public conversations happening on the internet, find those that are important to them and use them to enhance their business. There are may reasons that brands shun social media monitoring. It can seem complicated and expensive, they have other priorities such as producing content and responding to direct messages or small companies assume that nobody is speaking specifically about their brand. Also, when we think about social media monitoring, it’s normal to imagine a huge command center for a global brand where a team of 50 people monitor social media channels 24-hours a day, responding to disasters and jumping on viral trends. Most brands can’t afford this, so they just forget it all together. But the reality is that there are free monitoring tools that a team of one person can set up in a matter of minutes and even small companies can find valuable information. It’s also important to understand that monitoring doesn’t have to be a full time job, you can set up alerts that only notify you when certain keywords are used. The Sether Platform The Sether platform has built-in monitoring tools that make it easy for companies to take their first steps into social media monitoring. We have three options: social media monitoring, review monitoring and mention monitoring. The first two are quite straightforward. The social media monitoring tool helps you to monitor KPIs for your campaigns across your social media accounts. Review monitoring allows you to easy track, view and respond to online reviews from multiple sources in one place. Our mentions monitoring tool is where it gets interesting. You can easily enter keywords, a date range and the geographical locations that you want to search in, and the tool will scan the internet to find every public mention of your terms. As an example, let’s say your company is launching a new online food delivery business in London and you want to find out how people use and react to delivery services. On the Sether platform, you just click on ‘ADD NEW CAMPAIGN’ at the top of the page, select ‘Monitoring’ then ‘Mention monitoring’, input your campaign title and date range, then enter a range of keywords such as ‘food delivery’, ‘take away’, ‘food delivery app’, ‘delivery guy’ and competitor services such as ‘Deliveroo’, ‘Just Eat’, ‘Uber Eats’. Enter your language and location, then Sether will scan for posts starting from today that mention any of these keywords. It takes less than five minutes to find interesting posts like these: This kind of information could help you find out what’s important to your potential customers and help you to stay informed on your competitors’ products. There are many other business use cases for keyword monitoring: Customer service Sometimes people’s complaints about your products won’t be directed at your company. When people complain about your company on public channels, this hurts your brand’s reputation. Monitoring allows you to intervene and turn this into a positive by publicly responding to or resolving the situation. Brand reputation You might not think you need to monitor social media until a PR disaster happens and it goes viral. Monitoring also gives you the ability to respond to potential disasters and fix them before the damage is done. Mistakes happen but it’s how you deal with them that customers remember. Just ignoring it and hoping it will all blow over isn’t an option anymore. Positive PR Monitoring allows you to track down interesting stories about your brand and turn them into positive PR. Fitness tracker Fitbit used monitoring to discover that their trackers were being used in clinical studies and to catch criminals. These were then turned into news stories to create positive buzz. Find leads and build relationships People often use forums and social channels to ask for opinions on products. Answering these posts with info on your products is an easy way to reach these customers and show the wider audience that your company is in touch with the audience, especially if it’s done in a humorous way. You can also offer freebies and discounts to increase exposure. Customer insights Your products aren’t always used exactly as intended by the audience they were designed for. Monitoring can give brands new insights into how customers use their products and any needs that aren’t being met, such as men who prefer women’s deodorants and vice versa. Gauge sentiment Monitoring also gives you an overview of how people feel about your brand and allows you to track this over time. This can be used as an indicator to show that your social media efforts are having a positive effect. Monitor trends If you are closely monitoring keywords around your market and target audience, it’s possible to sport trends and react to them before your competitors do. Competitor intelligence Monitoring isn’t just for mentions of your own products and services. It allows you to monitor what people are saying about your competitors too. Just set up keywords for your main competitors’ brand names and products. You can then gather intelligence on their strengths and weaknesses and exploit them. Find brand advocates Monitoring makes it easy to find people who are passionate about your brand and have a social following. You can then reward and incentivise them to spread the word. Improve products and services If there’s something wrong with your offering, someone will be talking about it somewhere online. Monitoring helps you to quickly find faults and fix them for future iterations. When Barclays bank launched the PingIt mobile money transfer app, they used social monitoring to check for any negative comments. They discovered that people were complaining that the app wasn’t available for under 18s. Within a week they were able to make the app available to 16 and 17 year-olds, keeping their customers happy. Start transforming your business today So, if you want to become more approachable to your customers, never miss a brand relevant message across social media channels, interact with top brand advocates and also key customers, better understand your competitors and also try and bring your lost customers back, social media monitoring is the way to go for you. Without social media monitoring, it’s impossible to get the most out of social media. It’s not complicated, it isn’t expensive and it hardly takes any time at to get started on Sether. You can create an account and use our KPIs monitoring tools for free and we currently have a free trial available for our review and mention monitoring tools. Start listening to your audience and become a more customer-focused business today.	https://medium.com/@sether/how-social-monitoring-can-transform-your-business-ed7b2151e7c1	[]	2019-05-06 11:06:35.538000+00:00	['Social Media Marketing', 'Sether', 'Monitoring', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Monitoring']
SKODA SUPERB (2020)	SUPERB is a best premium sedan from SKODA, and has best power and the comfort which every customer likes in this car….read full blog :https://carsareas.com/skoda-superb-2020/ The car jas many engine options and comes with fuels options, to know more :https://carsareas.com/skoda-superb-2020/ To read more car blogs visit CARSAREAS :https://carsareas.com/ CARSAREAS	https://medium.com/@piyushgujral21/skoda-superb-2020-9218116d82eb	[]	2020-12-17 10:12:46.488000+00:00	['News', 'Latest News', 'Cars', 'Automobile', 'Skoda']
Hilarious Vintage Advice for Women from History	Cancel your open-mic set Our journey starts in the year 1850. American clergyman and writer Harvey Newcomb penned the very catchy, How to Be a Lady, Containing Useful Hints of the Formation of Character. The book offered the young ladies of the 1850s practical wisdom on developing womanly character. One such nugget of wisdom included the following: “Do not allow yourself in the habit of joking with your companions. This tends to cultivate severe sarcasm, which is a bad habit of the tongue.” To put it frankly, a date was no place for Ethel to practice her stand-up routine. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since the mid-1800s. In fact, a sense of humor is often a top trait both men and women look for in a potential partner. Don’t get me wrong; you do not have to be a stand-up comedian while you’re on a date. But don’t be afraid to show all 32 teeth if something tickles your funny bone. Unsure of how to bring the laughs on your next date? Here are a few suggestions to get you going: Minigolf. Try not to laugh too hard when your date hits the ball into the water. Again. Pandemic friendly indoor bowling. See who will be the first to score a strike using plastic cups and balled up junk mail. Buy an inexpensive face painting kit and paint each others’ faces. Complete an online quiz together. Whatever your interest, Sporcle has it. Test your knowledge of Disney moms, NBA teams, the 151 Pokémon from the first generation, or attempt the 4-second music challenge. Bring in another couple and hold a mock Olympics with silly events and wacky prizes. Attend your local dinner theater/murder mystery night. Buy some modeling clay from the craft store and see who can make the best clay reindeer. It’s too bad Mr. Newcomb didn’t realize that while looks will fade, the ability to make your partner snort like a pig will never go away. Sure, some men feel threatened by a woman who can hold her own at open-mic. Such men say it’s not dignified for a woman to make fart jokes or laugh too loud. Needless to say, we aren’t interested in such feeble men. They probably tell bad jokes anyway.	https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/hilarious-vintage-advice-for-woman-from-history-17934031582b	['Chelsea Rose']	2020-12-22 19:14:28.544000+00:00	['Sexuality', 'Society', 'Relationships', 'Women', 'Dating']
Pandemic Investing: How to COVID Proof Your Financial Portfolio	The arrival of COVID-19 in Europe and its spread throughout the world has made traditional investing very difficult. The usual methods of forecasting and modeling just don’t work when you don’t know if businesses are going to be able to operate, if consumers are going to feel safe visiting stores and comfortable spending money, and if supply chains are going to be dependable. As of October 29, the FTSE 100 had fallen 27 percent and the number of COVID-19 cases around the UK and other parts of Europe has rebounded. The good news is that as an individual investor, you may find that you have some extra money to invest right now, money that you would otherwise have spent doing things like going out to eat, going to see a movie, or traveling abroad. Some online trading platforms, such as AJ Bell, are reporting heavier than usual volume since the pandemic began. Despite all of the market uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, there are still opportunities to be had in the market in these turbulent times, if you know where to look. Finding investment opportunities during the pandemic Where should you put your money in this pandemic market? Take a look at the following categories: 1. Gold. Precious metals are a traditional safe haven in uncertain financial times, and today is no different. As of October 21, the price of gold has risen 21 percent since the beginning of the year, a decent return in any market. Keep in mind that mining stocks, those companies that mine gold, can also be an attractive investment during a pandemic. Keep an eye on Newmont Mining, the largest gold mining company in the world, and the only gold mining company on the S&P Stock Exchange. 2. Travel and entertainment stocks. Another place you might want to look at is travel and entertainment stocks. These stocks have been particularly hard hit since the end of the 1st quarter, as travel bans were put in place, restaurants shuttered and consumers advised to stay at home. Those companies that will eventually rebound after the pandemic is over are likely undervalued now. The trick is choosing those companies that will survive and not be forced into bankruptcy by the pandemic. AJ Bell reports that their most heavily-traded stocks for July included the fashion firm Boohoo and British Airways’ parent company International Airlines Group. 3. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms. These companies will likely have a role to play in ending the pandemic and treating those who contract COVID-19. Several companies in the UK and abroad are working on a vaccine and others are working to develop effective therapeutics for COVID-19 patients. Recent heavily-traded stocks in this sector include Synairgen. 4. Robotics engineering and AI companies. As traditional workforces and supply chains become more unpredictable due to the pandemic, it’s a good bet that manufacturing companies will increasingly look to robotics to augment their labor pools and to automate many of their inventory, packing, shipping, and loading functions. Companies like Keyence, the Japanese company that is the world’s leader in factory robotics technology, is likely to see a dramatic uptick in value. 5. Companies that facilitate services from home. Had you heard of Zoom a year ago? If you had, you probably wouldn’t have thought that this teleconferencing company would become the go-to app for every business person, teacher, board member, and extended family around the world as offices and schools shut down and individuals and families sharply restricted their trips outside of the home. As of November 10, Zoom Video Communication’s (ZM) stock value has increased by more than 600 percent since the beginning of 2020. Companies that help consumers get groceries and restaurant meals without having to leave them homes have also experienced a boom. One of these companies is Ocado, the British online supermarket. Says James Lockyer, an analyst at Peel Hunt, “This company could end up revolutionising the entire (grocery) supply chain over the coming years.” It’s certainly a stock to watch. 6. Companies that offer small luxuries. When times are uncertain, consumers tend to forego big expenditures, like vehicles, appliances, and expensive jewelry. Historically, however, they do reward themselves with small, non-essential items. After the 1929 stock market crash, movie theaters were packed, as consumers looked for a cheap way to enjoy themselves. Obviously, movies aren’t the answer in 2020; most movie theaters are closed. However, the same principle applies. During the pandemic, look for companies that sell make-up, medium-priced jewelry, or cabins without a day’s drive. Tips for investing wisely in a turbulent market The way you invest can also, in large part, influence your returns. In a pandemic, there are steps you can take to make sure that you maximize your returns. Just a few of these include… 1. Investing the same amount of money every period. Investing a set amount each period, religiously, is a tried and true investment strategy that works in any type of market. The strategy works because when the market is down your set investment will purchase more shares and thus, when these shares are held for the long term, have a greater opportunity to increase in value. 2. Diversify your portfolio. As attractive as any of the categories we discussed above may seem to you, it’s essential that you put your money into more than one category. That’s good advice at any time, but during the pandemic, no one knows what tomorrow may bring to the market. Having a diversified portfolio will help ensure that some of your investments grow even if some begin to decline. 3. Be disciplined. It’s easy to panic when the market is dropping. However, the exact wrong thing to do during such times is to sell all of your investments and stow your cash in a shoebox under your bed. Instead, take a deep breath and stay your investment course. It helps to know that the Standard and Poor’s stock index has increased by more than 1000 percent over the last 30 years. That includes the recession of 2007 and the sharp market drop following 9/11. The point is that a diversified portfolio held for the long-term generally increases in value, despite market fluctuations. When the dramatic ups and downs in the FTSE and other world markets during the pandemic, you might be tempted to refrain from investing until the pandemic is over. However, this unique time in our history offers a number of opportunities. Look for precious metals, companies that provide a service or product that’s necessary right now, and those companies that may be depressed right now, but will likely rebound strongly when a vaccine is created and distributed and we can all feel safe leaving our homes again.	https://medium.com/@dariendash/pandemic-investing-how-to-covid-proof-your-financial-portfolio-46e7a6487851	['Darien Dash']	2020-11-11 23:12:24.339000+00:00	['Covid', 'Portfolio', 'Investing', 'Finance', 'Pandemic']
Why Should You Use a VPN Extension to Your Browser? What are the Benefits of Using VPN Extensions?	Why Should You Use a VPN Extension to Your Browser? What are the Benefits of Using VPN Extensions? Eliana Brininger May 9, 2019·3 min read As an internet user are you also searching why should to install a VPN extension to your browser? Or are you looking to know passive benefits of using premium or free VPN extension to your browser? If yes, then, in this article, I am going to share a few certain advantages of using VPN extensions. Here we go: Keep Your Away from Hacker’s Eye When an internet user browses the internet with the presence of VPN extension or any other VPN service, then he is being safeguarded with encrypted and secured data and connection. This improved online security also keeps the user away from the attacks of hackers. Bypass Filters and Unblock Sites Another outstanding benefit of using free VPN service is that you can easily unblock a site or bypass the filters that out regional restrictions on your browsing. Such as Youtube or other social networking sites are blocked in many countries of the world, but if you want to access them, VPN services are going to help you to bypass these restrictions. In the same token, if you are outside of America and want to access some significant data, then the use of premium VPN or even premium VPN service is going to help you. Protect Your IP Address IP addresses have great significance to keep your data secure. With the help of VPN extension, you can make your IP address protected. Even VPN extensions change your IP address. However, many VPN services offer WebRTC shield to avoid IP leak, but many of them don’t provide WebRTC protection. In this regard, it is better to install a WebRTC leak shield extension as a separate extension on your browser. File Sharing Without using a VPN app or extension, it always sounds challenging to share a file in online groups, but with the help of a VPN, it becomes straightforward to share files in online communities. Improved Performance If you are worried because of the inefficiency of network and limited bandwidth, then premium VPN are the solutions to your headache. Yes, with the help of pro VPN services like NordVPN or ExpressVPN you can improve your online browsing performance. Reduce Costs Premium VPN services play an effective role in organizations. In your company, it will help you to decrease the cost by eliminating the need for lease network capacity from ISPs. In brief, there are several free and paid VPN apps or extensions are available that offer reliable VPN services to its users around the globe. Therefore, if you are also willing to get the advantage of VPN services then see our suggestions about the best paid and free VPN services below:	https://medium.com/@mobilebackend/why-should-you-use-a-vpn-extension-to-your-browser-what-are-the-benefits-of-using-vpn-extensions-1b8e3bdc82a5	['Eliana Brininger']	2019-05-09 10:38:50.311000+00:00	['Free Vpn Service', 'Free Chrome Vpn Extension', 'Best Free Vpn For Android', 'Free Vpn', 'VPN']
How to build quality backlinks to boost your online profile	If you’re feeling invisible online and frustrated because your potential customers can never seem to find you, then perhaps it’s time to take another look at search engine optimisation (SEO). But don’t be scared of the big bad SEO word! And if you’re already familiar with SEO, then you’ll find it easy to grasp the backlink building technique I’m going to explain in this post. There are so many parts to SEO puzzle. It’s hard to know where to invest your time and money. And SEO is such a slow game. It takes months to get real traction from your SEO efforts. I’m seeing one of my niche websites now just out of the mythical Google sandbox and taking flight. It’s a beautiful sight to behold. But it’s taken months! If you’re looking for a quick and easy win, then I highly recommend focusing on building quality backlinks. If you’re already familiar with how search engine works and their relationship with links, skip on down to the juicy part where I explain the backlink building technique. What are backlinks? Backlinks are links from another website to yours. Other sites might link to your homepage or to content deeper in your site. Watch this video of Matt Cutts from Google as he explains how search engines work, and the importance of links. Why are backlinks so important? Search engines use a complicated algorithm to work out which pages best serve a search request. There are two very good reasons why you should build quality backlinks to your site. Note that when I talk about backlinks, I talk about QUALITY backlinks, not just any old rubbish links. Backlinks can help bring more people to your website The first reason why backlinks are so important is that they can help bring traffic to your website. And who doesn’t want more traffic? More traffic equals more conversions, especially when you’re driving the right kind of traffic to your site. Quality backlinks help create more awareness of you and your website, get you noticed by influencers in your industry, build your online brand and drive traffic. Backlinks suggest your content is share-worthy The second reason why quality backlinks are so important is that a backlink sends a small but sometimes powerful signal to search engines that your content is quality content and worth linking to. Not all backlinks are created equal That’s right. Not all backlinks are equal. A link from an authoritative site will have more power than a link from a new site with flimsy content. Links from .gov and .edu have great value. If your site is about rearing rabbits and you get a link from a rabbit-related website, that’s better than getting a link from a site about table tennis. Don’t risk de-indexation There are foolish ways to build backlinks faster than you can say next Google algorithm update. It can be hard to source organic links from authoritative sites, and by organic, I mean links you do not pay for. One should never ever buy backlinks from a link farm service. If the only reason someone provides a link to your site is because you paid for it, then that is buying a link. Google will catch on and you risk your site being manually penalised for trying to game the system. The outcome? Your site is de-indexed and you no longer appear in the search results of the market-dominating search engine — the total opposite of visibility. With my backlink building technique, I will show you how to play the game, staying within Google’s guidelines. Pin it to read later My technique builds credible, organic links from authoritative sites that will help boost your likelihood of ranking of great keywords. Building backlinks is just one tool in the giant SEO toolbox. But it’s a powerful and effective tool. How to build quality backlinks So, how does one quickly and easily build backlinks without falling foul of Google’s guidelines? Watch my video or follow the steps below. Step 1. Analyse your current backlinks Using an SEO tool like Serpstat, I analyse my website’s backlink profile. (Note that this is an affiliate link, which means if you choose to sign up for Serpstat, I get a small kickback but at no cost to you. I use it and love it and would never recommend something I don’t personally use.) You can use other tools like: If you don’t already use an SEO tool, sign up for a free trial to get a feel for the software and you’ll be able to do the next steps. These SEO tools are a lot more expensive than Serpstat. Serpstat is just as good and does what you need it to do for less than a quarter of the price of the others. To see my backlink profile, in Serpstat, I look at the ‘referring domains’ rather than individual backlinks. Once I see where the links are coming from, it helps to get a feel for what the mix is. Are the links from comments on blogs? Are they from directories? Are they from another website linking to my site because they like what I have to say about a topic? Are they my guest posts I published elsewhere? Is it a link from a collaborative post I contributed to? If you are already yawning and thinking “But I don’t know how to do this” or “I don’t have time for this” then skip down to the bottom because I can do this for you. Step 2. Spy on your competitors The next step is to use the same tool to spy on your top competitors to see where they are getting their backlinks from. There is a wealth of unmined gold in your competitor’s backlink profile. I look at the top 100 domains providing links to their site (if there are 100 or more) and try to figure out their backlink strategy (if they have an obvious one). I export a list of my competitor’s referring domains from Serpstat as an Excel file. Sometimes a competitor won’t have 100+ links. In that case, the list will be much smaller, but that’s OK. Step 3. Build a backlink roadmap for your site I sift through my competitors’ backlinks, remove the spammy-looking links, and distil them into a list of quality sites. Spammy websites Once you start looking at backlinks, spammy links start to stand out and become easy to identify. They might have a strange suffix like .ru or .us and the domain name itself might be a curious mix of letters making no discernable sense. They might have words in the domain name that are completely unrelated to your business. If you visit the page, it might look like this: Don’t waste your time with these websites. Delete them from your list and move to the next site. Keep looking through the backlinks to find quality sites. Quality sites might be: legitimate blogs related to the topic of your site where you can join in a discussion and add value through a well-articulated comment paid and unpaid directories that aren’t spammy and where you could list your business a website that publishes guest posts where you would get a link back to your website a website that links to other good quality sites because of the good content they offer a website such as Quora where your competitor has been helpful and answered someone’s question and added a link to their site. There might be a resources page where you could suggest your site be included. They might have some content about your topic that is old and needs updating and a page on your site would fill that gap. Google likes quality directories. Some directories have a manual review process and don’t accept everyone. Others accept anyone who pays and Google might consider those as paid links. Links from spammy directories have little or no value, or even worse, they might hurt your site. I review at least five of my top competitors and work my way through their top 100 backlinks. I keep track of all this information in a spreadsheet and note what action I take or will take. One cannot knit a quality guest post in three seconds, but I at least note websites that are receptive to blog posts and where I could pitch an idea. Here’s an example of a spreadsheet I set up to capture the DA, information about the type of site and what backlink I might build, whether it’s worth of adding to my content curation list, what action to take and the date actioned, so I can see at a glance the work I still need to do. Download a copy of my free Backlink Research Template (Excel file) for recording your backlink research. I also note the Domain Authority (DA) score for each non-spammy site. DA is a metric created by SEO company Moz. It’s a score out of 100 that predicts how likely a domain is to rank within search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher the score, the higher the site’s authority. And this usually means a backlink from this site is of better quality and will pass more link juice to your website. DA scores update about every month or so and it can be 90 days or more before Moz discovers the backlinks to your website. And even then, it’s unlikely to find all of them. Don’t get caught up in DA dramas. They tend to bounce up and down but if your DA score is higher now than it was six months ago, that’s all you need to worry about. Step 4. Follow your roadmap Now that you’ve filtered the backlinks, removed the spammy and irrelevant sites and worked out the DA score for each, it’s time to start building links. I start targeting the sites with a higher domain score than mine. Credible sites with lower DA are still useful — their DA might increase over time and that backlink will become more powerful. You might also catch the attention of an up-and-coming savvy website owner. They’re more likely to be receptive to a guest post than a site with a DA score over 40. To find the DA of a domain, you can use Moz’s free Open Site Explorer tool, but you’re limited to three free searches a day. You can also install the free MozBar, a Chrome extension that displays the DA of any webpage you visit using your Chrome browser. But that would take FOREVER to look up individual DA scores for dozens or 100+ websites. Instead, I use a paid tool called KeySearch. It’s primarily an excellent keyword research tool and one of the best on the market. It’s also one of the most affordable ones, too. (I’m also an affiliate for KeySearch, but that’s because I know and love it and use it almost daily.) I use the URL metrics tool and bulk paste in domains from my spreadsheet and look them up in one go. Each search costs me one credit and I have 200 credits per day with my plan. If you remove the spammy-looking sites before looking up the DA score in Keysearch, you can save quite a few credits. Start listing your business in the relevant directories your backlink sleuthing uncovered. Start commenting on blogs (and adding value) where your competitors are, regardless of whether the link is DoFollow. I’ll go into this in more detail below and why it can be good for your business. Look at websites with a higher DA score than yours and see if they accept guest posts and then come up with the perfect pitch for them. Don’t be generic, be specific and make sure you’ve read enough of their content that you’re sure the topic you’re pitching is a good fit. Make it as easy as possible for that website owner to accept your pitch. Offer to source quality pictures. You can get quality, free images from Unslpash or Pixabay. Reach out to website owners where you think your content fills a gap. The bonus outcome of backlink research There are a couple of bonuses that can come from backlink research. 1. Good quality content sources Finding good quality content to share with your social media audience can be tedious and time-consuming. I’ve found that this backlink research technique can reveal websites that are worth curating for great content to share with your audience. As you work your way through the backlinks, make a note or even a separate list, of websites that publish good quality content you can return to when looking for something to share. 2. Discover new suppliers Another often unexpected gem is finding new products or services that can be useful for your business. I’ve used backlink research to find new suppliers for my online wallpaper store and from there, do keyword research to work out if it’s worth stocking their products. It opens a whole new world of products I can offer my audience. It’s amazing what falls out when you shake the backlink tree. Keep an eye out for relevant sites for your business. Why organic blog commenting can be good for your business You might have heard that blog comments can hurt your website and you shouldn’t use commenting as part of your backlink strategy. This is rubbish. Blog comments can be great for SEO if they’re done properly and organically. Comments should be: topically relevant — there’s no point commenting on a site about table tennis if your site is about raising rabbits thoughtful and adding value to the post — don’t just comment ‘great post!’ and disappear used to build your brand, attract a new audience and increase traffic used to build a relationship with other blog owners done in one day — spread them out over time, otherwise, they might look spammy to Google not your majority source of backlinks. If a site has a lot of spammy links in the comments section where the commenters are purely after a link, don’t comment. You don’t want your link to be associated with spammy company. Be mindful that the further down the comment list you are, the link juice that’s likely to be passed to your website or the number of people who read your comment will be less. Most comments provide ‘NoFollow’ links. This means that zero link juice is passed back to your site via the link in the comments section. Occasionally you’ll find a site where the comments are ‘DoFollow’, that is, they pass link juice back to your site. But these are rare and you won’t find many sites these days offering DoFollow links because they encourage spammers. You can install a Chrome plugin-in to determine if links on a page are classed as ‘DoFollow’ or ‘NoFollow’. See the NoFollow plug-in. After you’ve installed it, you’ll see a red dotted box around the NoFollow links on any web page you visit. When you can leave your name and website URL in the comments section, use your real name (to avoid being classed as spam by Google) rather than different anchor text or the name of your business. So, for example, I should always comment as ‘Sandra Muller’, not as ‘Melbourne SEO Copywriter’ or some other variation. See this video from Google’s Matt Cutts where he talks about blog comments and when they’re good and … not so good. Comments on YOUR website Opening your site to a thriving discussion in the comments section sends a positive signal to Google, but only if you properly manage them. They help build a community around your content. Back in 2014, John Mueller from Google said great comments can be a positive thing for a website, but bad if you don’t moderate them, allow spammers and flame wars to rage. If you let them run out of control, then that might bring down the overall quality of your website. Unmoderated and out-of-control comments are also a poor user experience. It looks like you don’t care about your website and you’re not paying attention. This is a real turn-off for users and you’re unlikely to attract genuine comments. To summarise, if you’re not abusing comment protocols you are not at risk of Google penalising your site or content — that is, ranking your content lower (all other things considered equal) than it otherwise would If comments bring useful information to the content that you’ve already provided, then comments could be a good addition to your website. It could increase the value of your website overall. If the comments show that there’s a really engaged community, it’s likely that new users will be encouraged to comment when they visit your site. Quality comments can help position you as an authority and your content as worth sharing with their friends and networks. Over to you. What do you do to build backlinks to your site? Do you do a process similar to this or something completely different? Let me know in the comments below. Work with me If all that work sounds like too much for you right now but you’d LOVE the value and benefit a good quality backlink strategy can bring, work with me. Let me create and action a backlink strategy for you.	https://medium.com/strategic-content-marketing/how-to-build-quality-backlinks-to-boost-your-online-profile-9b5172bc2cb2	['Sandra Muller']	2017-12-07 06:47:44.873000+00:00	['Content Marketing', 'SEO', 'Online', 'Content Strategy', 'Backlink']
The Seen and The Unseen Part 4 Trigonometric Series	Naïve Implementation Cosine Function Before writing a naïve implementation I want to see how the series progresses as the no.of terms increase. The value of the series is oscillating between positive and negative that’s because of (-1) that’s being multiplied at every iteration. The values in red are the 5ᵗʰ term rounded off till the third decimal, they are not necessarily zero. I’ll be using the same terminating condition I was using for the exponential function. I will stop the loop once the value of the series stops changing. Instead of finding -1^n, I could just do i = i + 2 and alternate the sign to find the cos value. 2. Sine Function Similarly, sine can be implemented as: The sine and cosine functions are basically the same, the sine function consists of all the odd powered terms and cosine consists of all the even powered terms. Sine and Cosine can be calculated using one function alone. Here is a function that calculates both sine and cosine Using the indicator i = 0 for cosine and i = 1 for sine Now I’ll test this function for correctness. The average runtime for this function is:	https://medium.com/algoasylum/the-seen-and-the-unseen-part-4-6b40fd7f03a2	['Shweta Barge']	2020-07-22 08:55:53.216000+00:00	['Software Development', 'Programming Tips', 'Python', 'Towards Data Science', 'Data Visualization']
New Memories	New Memories Where do last year’s memories go when the new year starts? Photo by Bill Adler “If I’d known you were going to be weird, I’d have gone to the party with Jimmy Howe.” Emma curled her lips into a half-smile. She flicked her head to the side, getting her hair out of her eyes. “You’re a nice guy, Ben, but you’re a little off.” She studied the window and cupped her hands into the shape of binoculars, put her forehead to them, and pressed her hands against the glass. “I don’t see anything.” “You mean Jimmy Howe from Engineering?” Ben shoved his hands in his pockets. “He doesn’t even like parties. He’s not interested in that kind of thing. Besides, he dresses weird. Pants too high, four pens in his shirt pocket.” Ben paused before continuing. “What else did you say?” “I said, I don’t see anything.” Emma tightened the spaces between her fingers to block any remaining light. She peered through the window of the 51st-story apartment for half a minute, turned to Ben, and shrugged. “Nothing.” “It’s not like searching for Santa, who could appear at any random moment between sunset and dawn. We have to wait until exactly midnight, which is — ” Ben scanned his Grand Seiko Spring Drive, a watch accurate to a second a day, a necessity if he was going to share the sighting with Emma, whose soft lips he desperately wanted to kiss, and whose green eyes enchanted him every time she looked his way. Ben had rehearsed asking her to be his date at their boss’ New Year’s party fifty times before working up the nerve “ — in another seventy seconds.” “If Jimmy Howe had been my date — ” She held out her palms. “I know, I know. He wasn’t ever going to come to a party. But if he had, he would kiss me at midnight like normal dates do, instead of slinking off to the bedroom to stare through the window.” Emma sighed and shuffled her feet against the thick carpet, cracking sparks of static electricity. “I don’t know. Maybe I should go back to the living room and find somebody to raise a glass of champagne with in — ” “Twenty seconds,” Ben said. He squeezed her hand gently and to his surprise, Emma squeezed back. “I haven’t believed in Santa since I was six.” “This isn’t like Santa.” Ben lifted his other hand and glanced at his watch. He returned his gaze to the window and focused on the sky. Emma tracked his eyes, looking where he did. A faraway fluttering caught her attention. White wings mostly, though some were blue, green, and yellow. They carried themselves quickly but silently. They were flying up and north, forming a giant V against the night sky. But birds don’t fly at night… As if reading Emma’s mind, Ben said, “Those aren’t birds.” Cheers of “Happy New Year!” and the sound of corks popping zigzagged through the apartment to the bedroom. “What am I seeing?” Emma pressed her nose to the window, fogging the glass as she spoke. “It looks like…magazines?” She wiped the window with her fingertips. “Not magazines.” The flock was fading into the distance like paper lanterns carried away by a river. “Calendars. Those are the discarded calendars of 2019. It happens every New Year’s, but most people are too distracted to look.” “Where do they go?” Ben shook his head. “Wherever our memories dwell, I guess.” Emma’s eyes opened wide. “It’s awesome.” “It is,” said Ben. She stepped to within a breath away from him. “Now kiss me,” she said.	https://medium.com/parson-and-the-chanticleer/new-memories-40f62f1f8012	['Bill Adler']	2020-12-01 16:46:32.747000+00:00	['Science Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Magical Realism', 'Fantasy']
Build Your Docker Images Automatically When You Push on GitHub	Build Rules To let Docker Hub know how and when to automatically build your images you can specify Build rules. You may have multiple rules that apply in parallel, effectively having multiple tags assigned to your images with just one git-push: Build rules for tag-based and master branch automated builds On the above figure we set up two different rules — let’s see what they do. Tag rule A “tag rule” allows Docker Hub to start building an image upon discovery of a new tag in your git repository. This should probably be your preferred way to build images for the official releases of your image. As git tags can be arbitrary and contain anything a developer might choose, Docker Hub allows you to define a Regular Expression, in order to identify which part of a git tag should become part of the tag for the Docker image. In the example above we chose /^[0-9.]+$/ as the regular expression with which the image tag is extracted. Practically speaking, this tells Docker Hub that our git tags are eligible for automated builds, should be in the form of numbers with dots, and that should be the only text of the tag. The image tag that’s extracted and assigned to it is denoted by the {sourceref} attribute entered under Docker Tag. Branch rule A “branch rule” allows Docker Hub to start building an image upon activity on a specific branch. The typical use case here is to have such a rule to build a latest image based on the daily activity of your git repository. The branch to be monitored is entered under Source and the tag to be assigned to the Docker images built from it under Docker Tag. Build your first image As we now have everything in place, we only need to tag the current state of our git repository and push the tag back to GitHub; Docker Hub will do its magic and build an image for us: Pushing a tag to trigger automatic build Indeed, a couple of minutes later Docker Hub has automatically built and tagged the 1.0.0 image: The first automated build of release 1.0.0 To also see our latest image being created automatically we need to push a new change in the master branch: Pushing a change to master branch Again, after a few minutes: latest image built from master branch Docker Hub provides you two additional screen on which you can monitor your builds: Builds screen	https://betterprogramming.pub/build-your-docker-images-automatically-when-you-push-on-github-18e80ece76af	['Nassos Michas']	2019-10-01 04:25:47.972000+00:00	['Containers', 'Docker', 'Github', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Continuous Integration']
Electric Vehicles Community in India	For Electric vehicle owners, it is difficult to find electric charging stations nearby because your go-to solution for finding things on a map (Google Maps) have poor integration for electric charging stations and some of the charging stations shown in Google Maps is not valid. Other apps built by your car companies like Tata EZ Charge app is still in Beta and has very fewer data. For any new technology to emerge and be successful, the community is really important. Corporate and Govt actions will be based on the community’s response and community has to lead the way in adopting and promoting such new technologies. Pluginindia is such a community which I found recently. The community has built an app for finding charging stations in your required cities and towns. The app is a neat one which serves the basic use case well. Also, it has a feature which allows you to add charging stations to the app database.	https://medium.com/@anroopak/electric-vehicles-community-in-india-7803b10a8a7	['Roopak A Nelliat']	2020-12-20 03:16:37.477000+00:00	['Kerala', 'Electric Vehicle Chargers', 'Electric Car', 'Electric Vehicles']
Dispatches from below	(a conversation with my mom, who passed away in 2014) Hi Mom, Well thought I’d check in, it’s been almost four years since you left. And I have to wonder if you didn’t time it just right. Not that I’m not grateful to be carrying on living, I am. I love so many aspects of this life, my very precious life, and every day I wake up and have a positive encounter or drink a good cup of coffee or laugh with my family or snuggle with one of the pets, or feel the warmth of the sun I am so glad to be here. But mom, things have gone to shit since you died. I’m not talking about for me personally, I’m one of the fortunate and privileged people, I’m talking about things in general. You died clutching your copy of People Magazine, when Kate and William were just getting married. The update is, they have three lovely children and seem to be doing well all things considered. Kate can manage the pressure. And the roguish Prince Harry, he married a modern American woman and had a gorgeous multi-cultural wedding that Aunt Sue would have endorsed. So all is okay on the English royals count. And Queen Elizabeth still presides! But over here, on this side of the water it has been a shit show. Mom, you fell into your morphine hospice slumber when the Obamas were still around. There was some comfort in that, you were leaving a world which seemed to be getting better, where common sense and intellect and compassion were still valued and where Keep Hope Alive was the mantra. Oh mom, it’s been a precipitous fall into ignorance and hatred since then. You wouldn’t believe it, Hillary was vilified and pilloried and who do you think won in 2016? That horrible rude Cheeto Trump. He was a big joke to all of us before, but it got serious really quick when the election was over. First of all we liberals went into a national clinical depression for months. Everyone drank and sheet caked in between protesting and crying. Anti-depressant and anxiety med prescriptions went through the roof. Since #45 became the President, each day brings a new horror. People have become more divided and hateful and bigotry and racism are the brands of this current administration. And many people are threatened and beaten and separated from their families all sanctioned through abhorrent new policies or so they are called. Mom, you thought people were getting rude with their iPhones. That is the least of it. Can you believe there is a term now called “pussy grabber”? Your poor ears would have turned crimson and fallen off had they heard that. And this term is used routinely in the headlines and public discourse. People from your beloved Mexico, where you visited fourteen times, are called murderers and rapists by the president. We Americans are used to it now, a daily cavalcade of hideous headlines, threats, tweets and overturning civil liberties, dismantling environmental protections, chipping away at health care, continued school shootings, threats to women’s rights, deportations, imprisoning children, police brutality and so much more. Things that may have seemed absolutely unthinkable when you were still here. It is truly a horrible dystopia, the new normal, like pre-war Germany. Goons are wearing shirts that say “I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat”, KKK rallies are held openly, Nazis have made a resurgence. Now mom, I tell you, as someone who grew up during the Cold War and survived the cuban missile crisis and the arms race, how does that make any sense? It is a come to life horror show. Aside from the political climate, I thought you should know, you did die “feet first”. Literally. You always said you wanted to go out of the house and this world that way, and you did. Feet first. The funeral home staff came and transported you out gently through the front door on a frozen November day. You died peacefully, at home in your bed. Pretty much the way we all hope it will be for ourselves. And Buddy, your cat, he has done a magnificent job since you left, and risen to the occasion. He was pining for you of course, but he has now turned into a wonderful service animal for dad. He has adjusted to dad’s more brusque and teasing ways and he sleeps at his feet every night and watches the news with him. I am not even sure how old Buddy is but he is living his nine lives in the most generous way possible. You would be very touched by his valor. Sir Buddy, such a good fellow. You might be shocked, but dad started cooking fish in the house. Approximately two days after you died. I think he held off cooking fish for fifty years while he lived with you. He knew you hated the smell. But once you were gone he started eating fish with wild abandon. All kinds of seafood from scallops to shrimp, his consolation. He also stopped buying the better quality softer toilet paper, which I think you had ensured in the past, so when I use the bathroom in the house now I too must contend with the cheap stuff. You aren’t there anymore to turn up the thermostat so it is often cold when I visit. He moves a space heater from room to room even though he can easily afford the gas bill. Things are a little more disheveled and dustier. Before you faded into a dream state and unconsciousness, Will and I told you we would take care of Dad. And we have, as best we can withstanding our many obligations which pull us in different directions. We love dad dearly. Even though he refuses to move out of the house, we made sure he has kind and competent caregivers so he may remain there. I visit as much as I can to take care of him, mom. I remember how you said people should never move to be closer to their children, they’ll be lonely and depressed and their children have their own lives and won’t have time for them. So he stayed on in Brookline, at 63 Griggs Road, right where he was with you, all those years. He feels reassured by the familiarity not only of the house but of the neighborhood even if he rarely takes walks through the park anymore. I know the two of you bickered and got petty and irritated with one another sometimes, the way all couples do when they are together for so long. But dad loved you so much. He talks about you as the most beautiful, intelligent, caring and witty woman he ever knew, how he had the happiest marriage, how much he cared for you and what a wonderful wife and mother you were. The memories of your happy times give him comfort, though he will never not miss you. That is why he stays in the house that you shared together, you are there with him, he has you still. I keep you near me too. This world is very overwhelming and cruel and nonsensical at times, more so now than ever. As a friend of mine said after her beloved mother died, “It’s foundational” — in other words, the bottom falls out. I must be brave and help my children and my community and all people who are targets of hatred. So I keep your spirit close. I turn on the radio to classical music in every room, and the gentle strains remind me of you. Calm, order, kindness, beauty. Mozart, you doll, you used to say. Jeff asks why I do this, leave all the radios on when no one is there. The music is on even when I go to work, so when I come home and open the door to my little room, I am greeted by sanity and the feeling of you. That is why. I think of you all the time mom, and I pretend I can talk to you silently and in writing. I just wanted to give you some updates from down here. You are in some form of Heaven, of course, having sherry and discussing poetry with the others. Up there no one knows about Trump and all the sickening things happening here because then it wouldn’t be Heaven. You departed in these last four years, along with Gwen Ifill and David Bowie and countless decent and remarkable people, not to mention my cat Victor — it’s been a hard run. We are trying to carry on below remembering people like you who inspire us not to give up, and to keep hope alive, and to be kind. Mom, I’ll put some fall flowers on your grave when I go visit next time. I know the orange and yellow mums are your favorites. Love, Your daughter (2018)	https://medium.com/@margaretkramer_46045/dispatches-from-below-eba17242527e	['Margaret Kramer']	2021-08-23 03:11:14.202000+00:00	['Mothers And Daughters', 'Memories', 'Loss Of A Parent', 'Trump Administration']
FLAGS, FOR GOD’S SAKE	First thing’s first, Buddhism and Hinduism are VERY different religions. However the are grouped together here because three of the five flags that feature Buddhist symbols jointly feature Hinduism. Since there are only five, I’ll comment on each one. Nepal Oh Nepal, you vexilogical wonder! It is the only non-quadrilateral national flag on Earth. Its two points represent the Himlayas or the two dominant religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. No one can decide. They also say that if you mirror it over the flag pole, you get the shape of a stupa! Kudos for being unique and doing your own thing. Though you make it difficult to fit you in a flag grid… India By law, the flag must be made of khadi, a type of silk made famous by Ghandi himself. In the one month I spent in India, I couldn’t find ONE Indian flag to buy for my collection. In my research for this article, I learned that it was only in 2002 where the flag was permitted for use by private citizens! The extremely specific flag code could be the reason I couldn’t find one. That, and most Indians have very little disposable income and probably wouldn’t waste it on a piece of cloth they couldn’t use anyway. Cambodia It’s like your national flag is a big marketing pitch. “Come to Cambodia and see our one tourist attraction!” No offense to Cambodia. (Actually, yes offense to Prime Minister Hun Sen. You are a very bad man. Shame on you.) The Angkor Wat is a very important historic site for all of humanity, no matter what religion you are. Go see it. Me hanging out at the Angkor Wat Bhutan This is probably up there with the top most bad-ass flags on Earth. Sporting their national symbol, Druk the Thunder Dragon, and the colors of Tibetan Buddhism, this is a flag no collection should be without! Bhutan is also the world’s happiest nation! And it’s obvious why…their national symbol is a Thunder Dragon named Druk! But the winner of the most Buddhist flag goes to… Sri Lanka The gold throughout represents Buddhism as well as the four Bo leaves representing the four main concepts of Buddhism: Mettā, Karuna, Mudita and Upekkha. Also, you can’t lose when you have an angry(?) lion-y-thing wielding a dagger. Unless maybe you are DRUK THE THUNDER DRAGON!	https://medium.com/branding-the-nations/flags-for-god-s-sake-76a88e5711d6	['Michael Green']	2020-01-27 06:14:54.127000+00:00	['Flags', 'Design', 'Religion']
LISS Complaining, More Cardio	Happy Monday! I woke up today feeling ready and motivated to have the most productive week. Ever since I was sick I have felt not-so-great about my workouts, but today I finally hit that point where my motivation is back and I am ready to put in work. My plan for today is to get in the gym at around 5:15pm to get my leg day started. Mondays usually are my days that go by fast because I have so much that I do on these days. I start my day by waking up at 4:40am and going to the gym and do cardio for 45 minutes. With the training program I am on I am doing a cardio circuit called low-intensity sedentary state (LISS) cardio. This program is basically keeping my heartrate in a zone that is only burning fat, not muscle. Once I finish this, I go home and get ready for work and school. I get to work at 8am and work until 11:15am. Once I am off of work, I go to my internship class from 11:30am until 2:30pm to tutor students in writing at the SJSU COMM Center. Lastly, I have class from 3:00pm until 4:15pm, then I finally get to go home. This is now the time I get to go workout! Tonight’s workout I plan on starting with a warm up to get my legs ready for the rest of the gym session. Then, I am going to move into squats and try and do moderate weights with many reps. After, I am going to move in to Sumo Deadlifts and do the same reps and sets and squats. If the gym is not too busy, I might do Hip Bridges instead of Sumo Deadlifts. After these compound movements, I plan on working on accessories and hypertrophy training. My hope is to be out of the gym by 7 and then I am going to go home, watch TV with my boyfriend and eat so I can feed my muscles!	https://medium.com/@hope.thiesse/liss-complaining-more-cardio-7b6e7dc2cb97	['Hope Thiesse']	2019-05-06 18:33:50.057000+00:00	['Cut', 'Shred', 'Workout', 'Fitness', 'Gym']
Saga of Tanya the Evil on Fascism, God, and War	At military academy, Tanya is smart and uses her knowledge of her world to advance her position. She meets a general and suspects that the war currently being waged will turn into a wold war. Impressed, he asks for her to write a report which is then passed along to the higher ranks within the military. Later, she is able to emotionally manipulate another soldier into dropping out of the university in exchange for a safer position. At this point, she seems to have finally found a good path to comfort. She’s doing well in her studies and is on her way to a cushy job. Once she graduates, she can gain an elite position in the rear echelons. So unfortunately for Being X, there won’t be any need for that awesome power she just gained an episode before. Except that report she made earlier leads to a discussion. Turns out the military is very impressed with her knowledge and wants to put her to more work! Realizing her big mouth has caused her some problems. Later, at a dinner, turns out they want to give Tanya her own battalion! And they want her fighting in a position even more dangerous than the front lines! This image here is great because of how it shows Tanya’s inner thoughts and her torment. Reflections are always used to express the inner thoughts and feelings of characters. She’s clearly irritated at her superiors for her new position but she’s also upside down. Her plans have been completely turned on their head. This again blurs the line between Tanya as sympathetic and Tanya as a joke. If Carlo Zen wants us to laugh at her, the creators are going to great lengths to make us identify with her through visual techniques like this first. Her line, though, is interesting. These last few instances have led us to believe that Tanya’s own inability to control her actions is what’s causing her misery. But she’s asking genuinely here, and that might be because Being X is looming in the shadows. He’s always watching, and it’s not unusual to assume he’s pulling some strings, creating meetings between Tanya and her superiors for them to be impressed by her and therefore give her more work.	https://medium.com/@danimetimes/saga-of-tanya-the-evil-is-deliciously-immoral-a3535288466b	['The Danime Times']	2020-05-12 06:28:34.016000+00:00	['Analysis', 'Morality', 'Movies', 'Anime', 'Crunchyroll']
Revelation of Hong Kong 5 Months Protests	Source: The New York Times Hey! Before reading this, we know the Chinese government is ruling over Hong Kong government, we know there are bloody conflicts between the protestants and the police, we know the extradition bill has already taken back, but something we don’t know or we might not have thought is that since when there was a protest that was held for purely political purpose, since when there was a protest that has driven for months and have gained international tractions, since when there were a group of people have already written their death messages before going out to help their peers out from dangers. We shall take a moment to appreciate these guys, for the selfless sacrifices and mindful persistence. Anyways, Let’s begin….. Since June, international affairs such as Trade war pullbacks, Governmental body elections, Brexit and National Day of the Republic of China have happened that Hong Kong has progressed its peaceful marches to protests that turned to wars. Hong Kong Protests were able to sustain this long and gain so many tractions are because of the lesson learned from the Umbrella Movement in 2015 and China’s growing stakes in global politics. There is a lot to talk about, but I have summarized my takes from the revolution into a few parts: Government Strategy: Lucifer Management in Police Force Media & Gangster (Triads) Emergency Regulations Ordinance University Invasions International Stance: Corporates reluctance to comment Global support from Human Rights societies, academia, justice groups Hong Kong acts as first-mover directly against the Chinese Government Hong Kong Scenarios Yellow Economic Circle Arrested Testimonies Changing Stances from Against to Support Adapt Improvise Overcome Government Strategy Lucifer Management — Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. The Hong Kong Police Force has removed policemen disciplinary against protestors, by removing displayed information on his uniform, therefore no one could trace back to the person who was liable for any shootings, sexual abuse or violence. Police Force in Hong Kong has all worked towards the same goal to arrest as many youngsters as possible and having themselves unidentified enables them to do whatever they want, as to achieve management’s goal, as well as personal desire. Interestingly, the drawback of the management is that when upon the reformation of the government, the police force will receive trials altogether because since the first day they have hidden their identification evidence, they would need to bear any consequences altogether. Modern Political Tools: Media, Gangsters and Police International presence was crucial to Hong Kong and was the only reason why Hong Kong has gained so many tractions. To resolve the protests, the government has attempted to combat utilizing media, gangsters and police force. In North America, the impact of media has magnified with internet, journalists with different stances have taken different approach to report current events inaccurately; In China, and Hong Kong, anti-protest medias such as TVB have created fake contents that are against protestants and avoided reporting any contents that are against the police force and triads — as to seek support from the inattentive population. Triads have also taken the lead as oppression against protestors when they have stabbed and beaten general citizens up, as to create a fearful environment where people should not wear black and speak up to that topic. Emergency Regulation Ordinance has broken the Government structure (Judicial, Executive and Legislative) Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong had surpassed the Executive and Legislation Council’s decisions and legislated the Anti-Mask law according to The Emergency Regulations Ordinance. In the past, any laws need to pass the Judicial, Executive and Legislative branch in order to be established, but now any bills or ordinance can be passed overnight under Chief Executive. It is a big deal as police can arrest youngsters without reasons and have also caused injustices — how is it fair to have police with masks on and population without masks on, but not the other way around. This act has further proven government’s ignorance against the population’s five demands, in the meantime Police force’s usage of guns has further loosened and it eventually turned public conflicts to bloody violence. University Massacres (Chinese University — Polytechnic) In November 10, the police force has invaded the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which is home to a lot of protestors and bright minds, also their principal Rocky S. Tuan has previously condemned Police force for sexually assaulted CUHK students. On 12 November alone, over 2,600 tear gas has been thrown to the campus by over three thousand police forces, CUHK has stopped operating and most students are trapped in the university by Police force without medical aids. It has once again put Hong Kong back into a global newspaper headline, also received further condemnation by Japanese, Taiwan, South Korea politicians. Overall, Hong Kong leaderships might be placed in the middle between Chinese authorities and Hong Kong Citizens. It is difficult to manage to fulfill both interests but it is wrong to show no efforts of resolving the problems and utilize the police force as a political tool against Hong Kong’s population. International Stance Apart from NBA, companies like Facebook, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, Activision Blizzard, Cathay Pacific, etc have gotten censored, condemned or removed from the Chinese market. Leadership from most financial institutions like Jamie Dimon, Michael Corbat and Big4 have shifted away from respecting their employees to practice their freedom of political expression strictly against their employees to be associated with this violence. All of these are contributed from the growth of the Chinese market and the opportunities to be benefited by accessing the market, the growing reliance towards the Chinese market has further sharpened the companies’ management stance to be more pro-China and align their values with them, which are apparent to the gaming and luxury industry, Major incidents like 6.12, 7.21, 8.31, 10.1, 11.11 have received much criticism from Human right organization, social impact societies, and justice groups, as police forces have abused their power against the citizens, governments are taking selective execution approach towards protestors and triads crimes. People from overseas have started to pay attention to the events and noticed the difference between the past and now. Pessimistically speaking, Hong Kong protestors are the first group of people who are standing directly against the Chinese government, not the United States or Japan. Economically, Hong Kong has contributed to 70% of foreign investment in China and had taken the role as the Asia financial hub; Socially, Hong Kong citizens are able to speak on Chinese politics because they have known China’s history well enough and was able to tell the difference between the developed westernized democratic world and the emerging centralized Xi’s censorship system. Indeed, the Chinese political environment might not be looking as bright as they look on the outside. Externally, Xi has formed any uneconomical-rapports with foreign countries as he has not received any congratulates from any country on National Day, yet Xi’s aggression was noticed and caused fearfulness to leadership. Internally, Xi has delayed the 14th National People’s Congress for over a year to address his vision at Trade War, Hong Kong Protests and the future of China. Which are bad signs of the Chinese leader, the downturn of China might not be being suppressed by other countries — but facing internal conflict from themselves, just like China’s history? Hong Kong Scenarios One of the biggest observation you will see if you have visited Hong Kong is that they only mess with selective restaurants and visit specific restaurants. That is about the “yellow economic circle”, a database that differentiates restaurants that are pro-protestants (yellow), indifferent to protest (grey) and anti-protestants (blue). Citizens prefer to spend money on yellow restaurants and see it as a form of supporting the revolution. Lee Ka Shing, the richest man in Hong Kong has also taken initiative to support poor-doing restaurants in the economic downturn. Secondly, the government’s intention to divide protestants and supporters up by utilizing undercover, media and triad have not yet succeeded. However, through increasing brutality and ignorance on human rights, they were able to reunite protestants and the Islam, Catholic community together by breaking the trust minority groups have on the police force. The abuse use of tear gas has also hugely affected not just protestants’ health but people in the neighborhood, innocent anti-protestors who were being thrown tear gas at experienced tear gases have started to question the government and its executive body as well. Thirdly and most importantly, when the people of Hong Kong get arrested, they will be yelling their names to others around and announcing that they will not commit suicide. It has become the common consensus that the police kills and frame the victim’s death as “suicides”. In 2019, over 2600 suicides were reported, the worse thing is that no one has come to admit those dead bodies, which implies that their relatives might have also suffered or they have hidden protestants bodies and thrown unidentified bodies from the past down the building. Hong Kong’s revolution has impacted Catalonia people too, as in strategy as well as their spirit of unity. They can adapt, improvise and overcome physical oppression such as tear gas, personal protection, media oppression such as utilizing telegram for communication and varying platforms for informing foreigners, economic oppression by helping one another out by devoting time, energy. I have attached a link to the Hong Kong Police Force evidences of practicing abusive power, available in Traditional Chinese, English and Japanese. https://tl.hkrev.info/en/police-timeline/ Vote for Hong Kong Protestors as Person of the Year 2019 to raise greater awareness https://time.com/person-of-the-year-poll-2019/	https://medium.com/@alex-ha4121/revelation-of-hong-kong-5-months-protests-886622123967	['Alex Ha']	2019-11-19 01:30:32.129000+00:00	['China', 'Democracy', 'Hong Kong']
Pandas: How to get started.. How to start with Pandas.	Photo by Serghei Trofimov on Unsplash Pandas library in python provides a lot of features that are useful not only in data science projects but also for quick data manipulations or conversions. Here I will list a few things that I used in my first Pandas project. Import pandas First and foremost you would need to import pandas into your script. import pandas as pd Read a comma separated file Next you can load a data set saved as a comma separated file (.csv) using df = pd.read_csv(‘datafile.csv’) I prefer CSV format as it is the vanilla format and if need arises you use a simple text editor to peruse it. Pandas uses data frame to store the data in memory, similar to R. In this blog df will be used to denote the variable is a data frame. Display stats Displays stats of the data. matdf.describe() Print all the column names Prints all the variables in the data frame df.columns.values Display the start and end of the data frame Displays the first and the last ’n’ rows in a data frame respectively. ’n’ equals 5 by default. matdf.head(n)<br> matdf.tail(n) Concatenate two data frames Concatenates 2 data frames along the required axis. When axis equals 0, more observations are added to the resulting data frame. When axis equals 1, more variables (dimensions) are added to the resulting data frame. A good explanation can be found here. df = pd.concat([df1, df2], axis=1) Unique values in a column To display the unique values in a column. Good to see different values of an ordinal variable. df.columnName.unique() To make a data frame from arrays The Simplest way to create a data frame pd.DataFrame([[1.0,2.0],[3.0,4.0]], columns=[‘a’, ‘b’]) Drop a column To delete a column df.drop(‘columnName’, axis = 1) Set a column as index Allows you to label rows using an already present column. matdf = df.set_index(‘columnName’) Select conditionally loc command allows you to select rows (indices) from column2 and substitute them with value2, that equals a condition to the values in column1. Note: columnName1 and columnName2 can be the same column name. df.loc[df[‘columnName1’] == value1,’columnName2'] = value2 Get a subset of data frame Get stats from a column for only those rows (indices) where the conditions are satisfied in one or more columns. df.columnName3[(df.columnName1 == value1) & (df.columnName2 == value2 )].mean() Write a data frame to CSV After you preprocess the data you might want to save it to the disk. to_csv function comes in handy to save a data frame as a CSV file, matdf.to_csv(‘matYearCountry.csv’) That's all, go fire up your first pandas project.	https://medium.com/@arccoder/pandas-how-i-used-it-for-my-first-project-1dc83e57b97	['Akshay Chavan']	2020-12-19 21:09:40.725000+00:00	['Pandas', 'Python']
Quality of Education in Government Schools in Pakistan	The quality education is an indispensable and inevitable agent for change as education is a process of civilization and development. The issue of deterioration of quality in education in Pakistan, especially decline in quality of education is a prominent problem. School education provides a pathway to higher education. Mostly students up till 5th grade don't know properly how to read and write English and Urdu even unable to solve basic mathematical problems. The quality of education provided at primary school level is not good enough to form sound base for children for further education. Students join college and university level education with the learning concepts which they gain at school level. The concepts, students learn at school level help in understanding advance form of these concepts at higher education level. If students got sophisticated concepts at this level, ultimately, will work smartly in higher education. This is possible only through quality education. Presently, Quality education is need of the time. In Pakistan, school education is suffering due to many reasons. Teachers’ education, curriculum and basic facilities are the pillars of quality education, and in Pakistan all these are criticized on many forums. One year ago I worked in a local school of my village as part of my course work. It is a girls school till 5th grade. I worked there for 2 months and I used to visit school every Saturday and used to spend whole day with children. It was great experienced as I had the chance to have a closer look and interact with children for such longer period of time to understand some basic problems. Specially i worked with 5th grade students and it was most senior class there. The problems I noticed had some causes like many children were not properly able to attend the school regularly because they had to work with their parents in order to earn money and they were belonging to poor families. Some parents do not send their children to schools because there is lack of awareness regarding importance of basic education for every child. Some children I met were having some family issues and personal problems as well that were not addressed or provided counseling for. I found some loop holes in teaching methods and gap in teacher student interaction. Some children were not able to pay the fee so they were dropped out of school. As far I have figured out and how i can contribute is by arranging discussion meetings with the principal and it the teachers to dig deeper about causes, difficulties and other issues that are affecting children and education. Creating awareness to the parents about need and importance of education. Providing children with counseling, planning activities at least once per week to create more suitable and cohesive learning environment for children. I can consult my mentor of educational psychology to help me in this project. My father has 30 years of teaching experience in school so i can benefit from his experience and involve him in the work. Planning extra curricular activities and engaging children in learning through those activities. Eventually i can motivate some other fellows to volunteer in this cause like my own cousins, friends and other who are educated. Fund raising for children who cannot pay fee. No single person can make a big difference at once but if some of us initiate and add some value by doing their part and lighting the candle of their part then definitely it make a huge difference. Little efforts pays off indeed. Let us all take responsibility of our own part and do something for our coming generations. #Just start and do your part # Educate children, serve our future generations.	https://medium.com/@hina-fatima168/quality-of-education-in-government-schools-in-pakistan-f63b41120c95	['Hina Fatima']	2020-12-26 00:45:14.834000+00:00	['Amal Academy', 'Children Education', 'Education In Pakistan']
Trial 4: A Story Not Just About Race, But Class Solidarity	This weekend I binged the new Netflix documentary series , which I just happened to stumble across during one of my first trips to Netflix in a while. Netflix usually does a great job on documentaries, particularly ones in the “true crime” genre, so even though it was 8 episodes (about 8 hours), I decided to give it a shot, since the story seemed interesting. And it did not disappoint. What I loved about it is that it’s not just a story about race, but about class solidarity. [SPOILER WARNING]: Trial 4 is the story of Sean Ellis, a black man from Boston who was wrongly convicted for the murder of a Boston police officer named John Mulligan in 1993. The whole thing seemed fishy from the start: while he and his cousin were at the scene (a Walgreens) somewhat around the time of the murder to buy diapers, the timing doesn’t add up, and the way Mulligan was shot (five times in the face) would barely be possible unless the person was inside the car with him. But because it was such a high-profile case, there was immense public pressure at the time to find a culprit and put them away, so the moment they realized they had an opportunity with Ellis (who was being questioned about the murder of his two female cousins, which he also had nothing to do with), they ran with it. Ellis went to prison in his early 20s and was in for almost 22 years. The documentary follows Ellis and his lawyer, the incredible Rosemary Scapicchio, through the years-long slog to appeal and eventually dismiss this awful, wrongful, racist conviction nearly 25 years after the fact. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Mulligan was likely part of a group of three corrupt (or “dirty”) cops who were involved in illegal, phony drug busts, the other two of whom were in charge of the investigation of Mulligan’s murder. It is hard to deny that, even if you are not convinced that this doesn’t mean Ellis is guilty, the investigation itself is highly suspect. This is further proven by the fact that it took 3 trials to convict Ellis, after the first 2 resulted in hung juries. Hence the title Trial 4, which documents the preparation for a possible 4th trial after a judge was convinced to overturn the conviction and order a new trial due to the likely tainted investigation. In late 2018, soon after the more progressive District Attorney Rachael Rollins was elected but just before she took office, the interim DA decided to dismiss the charges against Ellis rather than going ahead with a 4th trial, which would almost certainly expose the corruption within the department. Even in dismissing the charges though, no one in power would admit Ellis’s innocence. So while Ellis’s being free was a joyful occasion, the fact that even that joy couldn’t be pure after all he’s been through is completely infuriating, not just for him of course, but for any viewer as invested as I was in his story. Ellis will be able to live at least a semi-regular life now, but I wonder if he feels that he will still have to keep looking over his shoulder, since there will still be many who believe he is a cop killer. While this very well-done documentary is of course about racism and corruption in our justice and law enforcement system, a system that was expressly designed for the protection of the white and powerful and oppression of the poor and non-white, it is also about class. Towards the end of the documentary, when Ellis is speaking at an Innocence Project event and gives credit to all the women who helped him reach this moment-his lawyer Scapicchio, his mother Mary, and his “godmother” of sorts Elaine Murphy (the white mother of a schoolmate from when Ellis was bussed to school in a nicer area for a better opportunity)-he ties together the class solidarity that helped him make it through the many years of hardship and obstacles. He knows just how fortunate he is to be free today, and his dedicating his life so that the many others tragically in his situation can also achieve their freedom. Rosemary Scapicchio is a white, middle-aged woman who grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family with a single mother in the Brighton projects. Much like Sean, she knew poverty and struggle growing up, and was able to work her way through college and eventually law school. She explains in the documentary that her background led her to wanting to defend people from similar circumstances, which you can see in her tireless defense of Ellis against clear corruption. In a powerful scene at a dinner table with her family, even her own mother is outraged at the clear injustice against Ellis. This is such an important example of class solidarity which we need so much more of in all aspects of American life. So much of my focus in my reading and writing is on the intersection of race and class, particularly the long history of the pitting of poor white and black Americans against each other to distract them from the white, privileged elites robbing them all. Scapicchio knows she is going against the police system in Boston, which has historically been run by Irish-Americans, but she does it with pride because she knows the system has wronged this man simply because he is black. At the same time, Elaine Murphy comes from a completely different world than Ellis. She lives in an upper-middle-class suburb of Boston and appears to be well off. This could have easily been a story she barely read when it was in the papers and on the news, or worse, she could have made the snap judgement that Ellis was guilty, as some ex-cops who are featured in the documentary did. Instead, because she had known Ellis since he was a kid and knew he was a kind soul, despite whatever trouble he may have gotten into as a teenager, she became dedicated to doing whatever she could to prove his innocence. I saw just how dedicated she was by hearing how much she visited Ellis while he was in prison-no one visits prison for fun. She also did a lot of work in helping Scapicchio to go through the mountain of files that took years to get that helped expose Mulligan (and the others) for the dirty cops they were. She was as much part of Ellis’s freedom as Scapicchio, and she remained with him for every single hearing and meeting until he finally got the freedom he deserved. In my life I’ve done my best to learn as much as I can about this country’s history, particularly with racism and how it treats black people as a legacy of slavery. James Baldwin is one of my favorite writers who writes extensively on this. But this year, particularly in the wake of the George Floyd murder protests, I’ve done a lot of thinking and realizing about how the hardest part about fighting against racism is the idea of de-centering whiteness. Because most white people (myself included) were taught, as anti-racist educator Jane Elliott explains, not to “see” color and that everyone “should” be treated fairly, we are then encouraged to believe that everyone already is, denying the cold hard reality of our history and present day. This in the end just furthers the status quo of white dominance and everyone else as “minorities.” This is also true in how we look at those who are poor or in the working class. What happened to Sean Ellis and countless others who sit behind bars today is a result of this system that’s not “broken”, but working exactly as intended. Ellis, who is now an advocate for criminal justice reform, learned this through his many years in the system. In the team of Ellis’s mother, Scapicchio and Murphy, you couldn’t ask for better solidarity between race and class. I am so happy that this story has a (mostly) happy ending due to this devoted team, and hope Sean Ellis continues to do well in the life he deserved all along. You can learn more about Sean Ellis’s story by watching Trial 4 and also at Elaine Murphy’s website. (Note: I am an Amazon Affiliate member, so I receive a small commission from any products purchased from my links, at no extra cost to you. Thank you!)	https://medium.com/@undergroundbreakers/trial-4-a-story-not-just-about-race-but-class-solidarity-3bbe62237547	['Underground Groundbreakers']	2020-11-24 01:18:31.247000+00:00	['Police', 'Boston', 'Racism', 'Netflix', 'Criminal Justice']
Motivational Quote — Why is it necessary?	Motivational Quote: A new trend with great benefits on youth! Picture Credit : https://speakerhub.com/blog/101-quotes These years have been really marked by a new wave of speakers sharing positiveness around them wherever they find themselves. As joy and positive attitude carriers, theses speakers receive the title of Motivational Speakers. Truly speaking, this trend is having a great impact on youth. Characterized by breakdown, give up mind, our youth was indeed in need of positiveness recharge. Many young entrepreneurs have emerged by listening to Motivational Speakers. It is such a huge blessing for listeners who now believe in a bright future despite the current reality. We are falling when someone just tells you “You can do it” I definitely approve this new trend of Motivational Speakers but this wave must be very well educated and based on personal experience rather than collection of quotes from books where the Motivational Speakers have not yet experienced these quotes. Big thanks to all the Motivational Speakers around the world.	https://medium.com/@kouassikouakoujeandesire/motivational-quote-why-is-it-necessary-cd5b146facd1	['Jean Desire Kouassi']	2020-01-12 15:19:23.994000+00:00	['Motivation', 'Youth', 'Social Media', 'Impact', 'Leadership']
Atari Token- The Legendary Gaming Company Enters the Crypto Sphere!	Ask any gamer for a list of the most influential game companies, and Atari is sure to be close to number one. They launched their Video Computer System (VCS) back in 1977, changing the gaming world. They might not be as big as they once were, but all that is about to change. Atari is about to become THE name in decentralized, blockchain gaming. Earlier this month at London Fintech Week Daniel Doll-Steinberg, co-founder of the Atari Token & Platform Network, gave a keynote address entitled “Shaping the Atari Project.” Dan spent 17 years as a tech entrepreneur, started numerous companies, and served as an advisor to the EU Commission. All in all, he’s a pretty savvy guy, so when he became involved with blockchain in 2016, he identified seven key points to look for before participating in a token sale. 1. Team Who is on the team and do they have the experience necessary to build the platform? 2. Funding How are they raising money, and is it an appropriate amount? 3. Mechanic How will the token be used and what is the sale process? 4. Regulatory Who are the lawyers and what jurisdiction are they in? 5. Corporate Governance How is the company managed from the outside? 6. Financial Rigor How will finances be managed from the inside? 7. Product Finally, look at the product itself and what this company is trying to build. Most blockchain participants already know this and are sure to do their research, but perhaps you want to know is this: Will Atari token be worth my time? In short: Yes it is. But please, do not take my word for it. Atari Token has four co-founders, Daniel Doll-Steinberg being one of them. Ron Dimant, lifelong gamer, and Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum, are two more. Finally, Atari rounds out the founders, offering their trusted brand recognition and experience. Having more than enough tech experience and dedication to the project plus working with a co-founder of Ethereum (!) makes this a veritable dream team for a gaming token. Not only that, but all the board members and industry specialists have experience in the gaming space. Atari: A Brand You can Trust All that industry knowledge is great, but for a token to truly be successful, the company has to have the right lawyers following all the regulations and requirements that come with crypto. Atari token is incorporated in Gibraltar and has lawyers all over the world, particularly there and in the US. They are sure to follow all security laws, operating under a Purchase Agreement. Atari token maintains strict rounds and follows a structure just like any other company, blockchain or not. They have completed the Founder’s Round and are now starting their private sale. The public or main sale will happen in 2019. They have a strict series of events that happen after the initial contact culminating in KYC/AML/Accredited Investor status. In short, Atari token is crossing all their t’s and dotting all their i’s, and it looks like they will have a great product on their hands. They are definitely a company to watch in the coming months and years as, once again, they revolutionize the way we game. You can watch Dan’s whole speech here and reach out to him with any questions at daniel@blockchainsmokers.com	https://medium.com/teamglasses/atari-token-the-legendary-gaming-company-enters-the-crypto-sphere-11a296749268	['Claire Royle']	2018-08-01 16:07:42.628000+00:00	['Blockchain', 'Crypto', 'Atari', 'Team Glasses']
A New System for Designing Motion With Both Sketch and Figma	Welcome to AEUX One of the goals of the new system is to support more host apps and increase flexibility when working between teams. Exchanging data within the Adobe ecosystem is now well supported in XD and Illustrator, but with AEUX, you can import layers from Sketch and Figma, and support new Sketch features. Plus… Speed has been boosted by 93 percent on build time for complex artboards. has been boosted by 93 percent on build time for complex artboards. Symbol overrides for text and nested symbols are now supported. Symbol masters are located more efficiently, putting an end to beach-balling. overrides for text and nested symbols are now supported. Symbol masters are located more efficiently, putting an end to beach-balling. Image exporting has been reduced by drawing native Ae gradients and eliminating redundant images. exporting has been reduced by drawing native Ae gradients and eliminating redundant images. Text layer accuracy has been majorly improved with position, tracking, leading, upper/lowercase overrides, rotation, and horizontal/vertical flipping. layer accuracy has been majorly improved with position, tracking, leading, upper/lowercase overrides, rotation, and horizontal/vertical flipping. Groups have the option to be automatically created as Ae precomps. Additionally, groups of layers may be precomped and un-precomped with a click even if you don’t use the AEUX importer. have the option to be automatically created as Ae precomps. Additionally, groups of layers may be precomped and un-precomped with a click even if you don’t use the AEUX importer. Additional new features like nested booleans, layer and group masking, shape blurs, options to works with paths or parametric shapes. Learn more and download AEUX AEUX + Figma While Sketch is widely used, many visual designers have also begun using Figma. AEUX was designed to support working seamlessly when switching between teams. Figma’s core feature is online collaboration, so exporting layer data is done through a web app that taps into the Figma API. As of right now, Figma plugins cannot run inside of the design environment, which means layer exporting is done as a more traditional export/import. With a design app that runs online, security is the most important consideration. After authenticating the AEUX export app, you are asked to enter a Figma file URL. The app will gather all the data for each of the frames (artboards) within the file. Each frame may be downloaded individually and any required images will be processed and zipped up as well. Drop the new AEUX.json file into the AEUX panel in After Effects and layers will build. Note: the AEUX app doesn’t track user data, and does not view or store your designs in any way. It is a blind robot that does the conversion of your designs into the AEUX JSON format right within the browser on your machine. Access to file data is managed by the owner of the file from the Share menu. Lessons learned Building tools based on how you imagine another designer working can be tough. Sometimes your best intentions aren’t really valuable or people find new paths that you hadn’t planned for. I learned a lot building Sketch2AE and then learned even more building Overlord (shameless plug for a commercial tool). The biggest lessons I’ve taken from these projects are to limit the amount of mental mode switching. If someone is trying to design, let them design, instead of forcing them to read a manual. Remove copy/paste Layer data is now transferred behind the scenes in order to limit confusion. It’s not totally instant, but by the time you switch from Sketch to Ae, the panel should update to show new layers ready to build. This simplifies the transfer process and allows you to focus more on design. Make it interactive For me, one of the most compelling parts of the design process is trying things and finding what works and what doesn’t. This sits pretty contrary to file importing where you must restart everything again if you don’t prep one layer right. Overlord’s core idea is to let you transfer what you need when you need it. I wanted this concept to be central in AEUX, which required getting away from menu-diving and into a floating plugin panel for Sketch to more closely match the expected tool experience in Ae. Show me what’s happening In the previous version, notifications showed only after a successful export and were easily missed at the bottom of the Sketch window. So you had to wait, and guess if it worked. (This was a really poorly designed experience. I’m sorry about that.) A new floating Sketch panel also provides a dedicated place for notifications (both success and failures). The idea of showing the process extends into Ae as well. From the panel updates to progress bars on heavy comps to failure notification for elements that Ae cannot currently draw. Moving forward UX motion design is growing and we’re all still learning what works and what doesn’t, and how to best execute and test these designs. As we do, we’re trying to share what we learn. I hope AEUX helps you work faster and enjoy the process more. Get started with AEUX Interested in working with us? Learn more about Google UX and send us your portfolio or demo reel.	https://medium.com/google-design/aeux-f79e06e01594	['Adam Plouff']	2019-07-11 17:46:54.767000+00:00	['Design', 'Motion Graphics', 'UX', 'Tools', 'Animation']
Bot-generated landing pages and video CVs for a painless recruitment — VCV Pages Case	Every time a job position needs to be filled you know it’s going to turn into a great ordeal. Obstacles are inevitable in the recruitment process, but there are trendy digital tools to minimize the pain. If you use them properly from the beginning you can seamlessly sail through the various steps of the job hiring process. One thing we know for sure — the right landing page for a job posting is a great start. By reviewing this new product — VCV Pages — we will show that your job postings deserve a landing page powered by the latest technological updates. Buckle up! Why use landing pages? A landing page is a well-designed and simple page with a job description. It has a unique link that you can post on social networks or anywhere else on the Internet. With help from a bot, fill out the page with the job description, then post a link on Facebook or on your website and wait for inquiries and applications — all in one day. It’s simple and doesn’t require any IT-expertise if you use a proper service. Well, why can’t I just post a job vacancy on a company’s website, social media or a job board without using a landing page? Here is a nice metaphor. Let’s say you order your favorite noodles from a restaurant ten blocks away. Instead of waiting for a delivery, however, you have to go there, take the food, bring it home and end up with a cold meal. Almost the same happens when you, for example, post job vacancies on your Facebook page. You receive numerous queries regarding a job listing via messenger, you have to keep all the CVs and assessments (each in different formats) on your email and spend a huge amount of time answering everyone. After you’re done with pre-screening, the next step is contacting every candidate and planning personal interviews, which is also a time consuming process. It’s hard enough if you post only on Facebook, but what if the same job listing is on LinkedIn, a company’s website, job boards or anywhere else? A landing page helps to aggregate all applications, putting them in unified form in one place and sorting them. Less time is spent on screening irrelevant candidates and deleting spam. There will be no more email sharing in job posts, and no emails from candidates who totally don’t match. A link to a landing page can be placed on your corporate portal in the form of a response button. Moreover, the system will automatically collect all the responses for each job posting. You can keep your leads and approach them when you have new job vacancies. Long story short: a landing page is a perfect way to work less and successfully hire. Is a landing page more convenient for a candidate? If you look at the recruitment process through the eyes of a job candidate, you’ll understand that it’s difficult to navigate among the many offers, newsletters and corporate portals. A landing page is a unified entry point — no matter where the link was posted it will lead to the planned destination. The job candidate gets acquainted with the company, the tasks and job requirements and can respond immediately from any device. Moreover, the system will remind the applicant via email that it’s necessary to complete the application process, and if he or she has stopped halfway. A candidate won’t lose a job vacancy — and a company won’t lose an applicant. This is modern recruitment done right. Why use a video CV? Recent studies show that 70% of interviews finished after 2 minutes. That’s highly improbable, however, because if you meet in real life you have to be nice and finish an interview even if you realize that you’re not a good match for each other and the meeting was a mistake. If technology can help avoid useless meetings, then why not use this opportunity? Each video CV is unique. You can evaluate a candidate’s experience and communication skills, and meet only those who are a perfect match for your company. Studies revealed that after two weeks people are able to remember only 10% of information in a text format. That figure, however, is 50% for visual and auditory information, which means that video is more effective. By the way, if you’re looking for young talent, video is much more relevant than standard text format. Video is the most popular and viral content format in social media. We are used to scrolling through blogs, stories on Instagram and live broadcasts. People have lost the habit of writeing long texts. That’s why you shouldn’t worry whether or not job applicants will record a video. Also, video is a good backup plan when you simply cannot make an appointment. Suppose a candidate lives in another city or has a disability. Or the entire country is in quarantine, which is exactly what ‘s happening now. Video interviews are not the same as real-life meetings, but today they are vital for business. How to create a landing with VCV Pages? In order to post a job vacancy, you just need to chat with the bot and it will create a landing page and give you a link. This can be done on the official website. The bot will ask basic information as a company name, job vacancy details and other questions — the process is intuitive.	https://medium.com/@vcvai/bot-generated-landing-pages-and-video-cvs-for-a-painless-recruitment-vcv-pages-case-3486dcd33af5	[]	2020-04-06 09:40:56.294000+00:00	['Vcv', 'Tech', 'Startup', 'HR']
In First Peaceful Transfer of Power, Bazoum is Highly Favored to Become President of Niger	On Sunday, December 27, Niger will hold its 2020 general election for President and National Assembly. Sunday’s election will be historic for Niger as it marks the first peaceful transfer of power in the country’s history. Context: Previous transfers of power in the country have been marred by a consistent trend of coups and civil violence. For best formatting and access to our data and code, continue reading at globalguessing.com Background Niger gained independence from its status as a French colony in 1960, and held its first elections in 1965. At that time Niger was a single-party state, with predominantly uncontested elections. Elections remained relatively unimpeded until 1993 when the country had its first multi-candidate presidential election. Since then, however, each passing of power has been demarcated by significant violence, often in the form of military coups. Niger will hope to buck this trend and demonstrate progress in its democratic institutions both for the sake of optics on the global stage, and for the health and well-being of the country’s people. Incumbent President Mahamadou Issoufou is stepping aside after two terms in office — a constitutional mandate. This move by Mahamadou is, in itself, significant when compared to the presidents of Guinea and Ivory Coast, whoamended their countries’ constitutions to run for third terms earlier this year. Both won re-election. There are over 30 candidates in this year’s Nigerien election, many of whom are first-time presidential hopefuls. And up until recently, there were only two candidates who were considered serious contenders to hold presidential office in Niger in 2021: Mohamed Bazoum, who sat as president of the incumbent’s parliamentary party until this past summer, and Hama Amadou, a former Nigerian Prime Minister. The race also involves former President Mahamane Ousmane who was ousted in a 1996 coup. Amadou’s bid for candidacy in this year’s election was rejected in November by Niger’s Constitutional Court, however, due to a 2017 criminal conviction for his involvement in a child-trafficking scandal. Amadou has maintained that these allegations are the product of political sabotage. Hama Amadou and Mohamed Bazoum meet, November 15, 2019 (Photo Credit: Amadou’s Facebook) Given Amadou’s disqualification from this year’s race, several media outlets have deemed Bazoum to be the clear front runner in the election. This is especially true given his historical relationship with the incumbent. Geopolitical Significance On the global stage Niger has grown in relevance both as a strategic security partner, and as a trade partner. Landlocked, and bordering Algeria, Mali, and Libya. Map of Niger, located in West Africa (Source: Google Maps) Niger is a Saharan buffer zone against the rampant terrorism moving down from North Africa.Two countries that border Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, scored a 0 out of 10 in political risk firm Verisk Maplecroft’s Global Risk index, encumbering the large nation with even more security concerns. The greatest of these concerns has been Boko Haram, a ruthless African-based terrorist organization that peaked in activity in 2014 and 2015. Whereas terrorist-related deaths in the Middle East have been on the decline in the last half-decade, groups like Al-Qaeda have established franchises in Africa and much of that violence has moved there. While violence caused by groups like Boko Haram and AQIM has generally been contained within Northern and Western Africa thus far, it threatens to move further south. Source One of the hottest countries on the planet, Niger has become a strong partner in combating the numerous existential issues that threaten the African continent. With respect to terrorism, Niger has become a key member of African Union’s efforts to stymie efforts by Boko Haram to inflict damage in West Africa and North Africa. Niger has also been active in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WARMU) to support regional security and trade integration between African nations. Economically, Niger is home to the world’s largest Uranium deposits. While the commodity severely fell in favor after the Cold War, and its recyclability has lessened the need for Uranium discovery, the element still holds value. France, for example, derives 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy, although the country hopes to reduce this significantly by 2035. Furthermore, as nuclear energy becomes a central source of electricity for emerging economies, many of which are located on the African continent, Niger may become a more important player both regionally and continentally. Uranium is even traded on public markets through vehicles like North Shore Global Uranium Mining ETF ( NYSEARCA: URNM). Niger is also a consistent exporter of agriculture, gold, and oil. As Uranium prices continue to decline, former president Mahamadou Issoufou, and ostensibly his successor Mohamed Bazoum, are working to attract private sector foreign investment in both Niger’s oil and gold production, in order to reduce the country’s dependence on waning Uranium. To this end, Niger has already broken ground on an oil pipeline from Niger to Benin which is expected to be completed in 2021. With Niger now under the watchful eye of the IMF, and forthcoming investment from countries like China in Niger’s energy sector, Bazoum will be expected to not only maintain, but increase Niger’s already stable GDP YoY growth which is nearing 6%. An increase in gold production could contribute to a contraction in the commodity’s price next year, which may be likely to occur irrespective of Niger given investors’ positive sentiments around the future of COVID-19. Election Prediction There is a 10.55% chance Mohamed Bazoum clears 50%+1 of the vote in the first round of voting. Our prediction has an 89% confidence interval [9%, 15%] to account for authoritarian back-sliding and other factors. There is a 89.45% chance the election goes to a sound round vote. If the election goes to a second round vote, there is a 91.69% chance Bazoum will win it. Our prediction has an 89% confidence interval [89%, 96%]. Overall, there is a 92.57% chance Bazoum becomes the next President of Niger, making him highly favored to win. As discussed earlier, Niger’s history with elections has been riddled with controversy. Several coups and interwoven periods of single-party dominance have set the stage for what is expected to be the first peaceful transfer of power in Niger’s history — a momentous occasion on paper. To that end, Niger’s most recent elections have been bereft of pattern. Since 1999, every general election in Niger has progressed to a second round of voting. In 2016 incumbent president Mahamadou Issoufou was forced into a second round of elections by his competitor, Hama Amadou. A coalition which had formed prior to the election, in order to support whichever party opposed Issoufou in a potential second round, instead boycotted the second round, leaving Issoufou to win effectively unopposed. The election before that followed Niger’s most recent coup. Moreover, Niger receives a “Partly Free” score from Freedom House, with poor scores for free and fair elections. This low score was largely driven by election “irregularities including vote buying, underage voting, and rigging of election results.” As illustrated above, it is clear that Niger’s history with elections has been inconsistent. As such, the outcome of this year’s election is in a similar state of uncertainty. With that being said, however, we at Global Guessing were able to combine historical voting data from Niger’s past elections with polling data conducted by Navanti and the Clingendael Institute (Netherlands Institute for International Relations), and apply appropriate weighting to both datasets to arrive at a prediction that we feel comfortable supporting. Experts are saying that Mohamed Bazoum is the favorite in this year’s election, and our prediction does not deviate far from that forecast. Collectively, however, we have more confidence in a win for Bazoum after two rounds of elections, than after one. Methodology Our approach to the Niger presidential election is similar to the ones we used for Ghana and Burkina Faso. We first calculate what the base-rate is for the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS), Bazoum and Issoudou’s party, using historical election data dating back to 1999. Next, we calculate the current position of Bazoum in the 2020 pre-election surveys. We calculate both of these values for round 1 and round 2 voting. With the historical base-rate and current position, we run a Bayesian prediction model in R with 20,000 simulations for each round of voting (code and data available at the end). We then sort the simulations and calculate the percentage of instances where Bazoum clears 50%+1 of the vote. Finally, we create a human-designed 89% confidence interval to account for democracy score and uncertainty of the data. Base-Rate Determining the base-rate was more challenging in Niger than either Burkina Faso or Ghana. In the instance of Burkina Faso, there was only one other election to reference making the calculation extremely simple. And in Ghana there was a long 20+ year history of continuance of democratic election. By contrast, Niger has had frequent interruptions to democratic rule. Moreover, the 2016 election round 2 vote is a troubling data point to use since the opposition protested the election. For the round 1 historical base-rate for the PNDS candidate, we weighed the 2016 election at 0.83, 2011 at 0.12, 2004 at 0.04 and 1999 at 0.01. We then adjusted this calculated average by adding 15% of the vote total earned by Amadou, with this value being based on how historical opposition votes in presidential elections tend to be distributed as well as a comparison of the round 2 votes for Issoufou compared to total votes case in round 1 (adjusted for average vote decrease between round 1 and round 2). Found the second round base-rate, we weighed both the 2016 and 2011 elections at 0.44, with 2004 being weighted at 0.10 and 1994 at 0.02. To calculate a more accurate result for 2016, we calculated the votes President Issoufou won in the second round of voting, discounted by 75%, as a share of the round 1 total votes: This generated a 2016 round 2 vote share of 62.11% versus the official 92.51%. Finally, we reduced the calculated average by 2% to account for the lack of incumbency effect in this year’s election. Current Position Determining the current position of Bazoum was equally as complicated as the base-rate due to a lack of opinion polling in Niger. For determining the first round current position, we primarily relied on a poll conducted by Navanti and Clingendael, making adjustments based on an online survey primarily answered in Niger’s capital, Niamey, that was primarily answered by younger Nigeriens (important, since Navanti found increased voter intention for youth in comparison to 2016). We also adjusted the poll results by including a +4, -4 variant since the poll was framed as “In your opinion, who will win the election?” We made our adjustment based on the accuracy of US polls focused on predictions rather than vote intentions. Unlike our predictions for Ghana and Burkina Faso, we were unable to reach the same opinion on weights of these different results. As a result, we independently weighed the options then calculated the average: 46.9525%. Andrew weighed the options at the first result at 0.2 due to Niger’s inconsistent election history and potential of a real opposition, the second at 0.65 because it is the common sense narrative (think Occam’s Razor), the third at 0.1 since it is highly unlikely Bazoum drops below 45% in the first round due to Amadou’s bid being rejected and Issoufou campaigning for Bazoum, and the last at 0.05 based on historical results versus current polling. Clay, by contrast, weighed the first option at 0.60, deciding to favor, on balance, the un-adjusted results. Next, he weighed #2 at 0.15 and #3 at 0.20. The slight preference for the third option over the second was due to Niger’s continuing extreme-poverty ( 44.50% in 2014, 41.40% in 2020) and terrorism problems, as well as Issoufou’s diminishing popularity. Finally, #4 was weighed at 0.05 due to the extreme variance from the original adjusted-poll results but still factoring in its possibility as an extreme outside chance. President Issoufou Approval Rating (Source: Gallup) Calculating the round 2 current position was much easier. We discounted the base-rate of Round 2 by how much the current position of Round 1 fell behind the 2016 Round 2 performance of Issoufou: 53.38%. What’s Next All eyes are on what happens on December 27th and beyond. We are watching whether elections in Niger are conducted in a free and fair manner, including voting, tabulation, and any intervention by the Issoufou administration which would unfairly tilt the scale in Bazoum’s favor. We are also watching if there will be any election-day violence by terrorist groups or other actors, as well as any post-election violence and disruption. Should the election go to a second round vote, the actions taken by government and non-government actors will be crucial to watch. No matter who becomes the next president of Niger, the most important issues will be addressing rampant unemployment and continually high poverty rates, as well as addressing the security situation. At the same time, the president will also need to ensure that GDP growth in maintained and, ideally, accelerated.	https://medium.com/@globalguessing/in-first-peaceful-transfer-of-power-bazoum-is-highly-favored-to-become-president-of-niger-233314ca13ad	['Global Guessing']	2020-12-24 23:45:58.691000+00:00	['Elections', 'Predictions', 'West Africa', 'Bayesian Statistics', 'Niger']
Python HOW: Connect to, and Manage a Database	Photo by panumas nikhomkhai from Pexels I’ve put my best effort to provide you with a clear, concise, and detailed description on how to connect to, and manage a SQL/SQLite database using Python TL;DR: full code Introduction A database model determines the logical structure of a database. This in turn determines how data can be stored, organized and manipulated. The Relational Model (RM) is the most popular database model since the 1980s. RM uses a table-based format, where tables are related by common columns Database management system (DBMS) DBMS is the software that you -or applications- use to interact with the database to create, read, update and manage data. The Relational DBMS (RDBMS) is the DBMS based on RM. According to DB-Engines, the most widely used RDBMS are: Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Microsoft Access, and SQLite A database is often referred to by the DBMS used to manipulate it. For example, a database that is manipulated using Microsoft SQL Server is referred to as: Microsoft SQL Server-Database Although not required, all RDBMS use SQL as a standard data access language Database connectivity interface A database connectivity interface allows an application to access data from a variety of DBMSs, using a specific driver for a specific DBMS and operating system. This means that the application can be written without depending on a specific DBMS or the operating system Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard Microsoft Windows interface that enables applications (typically written in C or C++) to connect to DBMSs. While, Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) is a standard Oracle interface that enables applications written in Java to connect to DBMSs PyODBC: Open DataBase Connectivity for Python PyODBC is the Python package for ODBC. Through pyodbc, you can easily connect Python applications to a DBMS-database, using the required ODBC driver Install pyodbc using your preferred package manager: You might want to create a virtual environment first Then, install the required driver for the DBMS-database you want to connect to. For example, if you want to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server-Database, you need to download and install the driver from Microsoft, after choosing your operating system To make a connection to a database, we need to pass a connection string to the connect method of pyodbc. The most important thing to remember is that: pyodbc passes the connection string directly to the DBMS-database driver unmodified. Therefore, connection strings are driver-specific For example, to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server-Database, we provide the following connection string: You can find information about general connection string for most databases here. Make sure to follow the connection string formatting rules found here The connection string can also be passed as arguments, which are then concatenated into a connection string: In the connection string above, we assume that the SQL Server Authentication mode is set to Windows Authentication Mode, so we did not have to provide credentials to get access permissions to the server. However, if it was a Mixed Authentication Mode (i.e. SQL Server Authentication + Windows Authentication), we can still use the above connection string, or the following one where we provide our User ID and Password to get access permissions to the server: Pyodbc also supports Data Source Name connections. A DSN contains information about a specific database that an ODBC driver needs in order to connect to it (information such as the database driver, the server and database names, etc): Lastly, depending on the database you are trying to access, and the version of Python you are using, you might need to set the connection encoding/decoding settings, which you can find here For Microsoft SQL Server-Database and Python 3.x, using pyodbc default encoding/decoding settings is recommended (i.e. no need to do anything) SQLite3: SQLite for Python SQLite3 is the Python package for SQLite, which is the most widely deployed RDBMS in the world (arguably). The main features of SQLite are: An embedded database. SQLite does not have a separate server process (i.e. server-less). It reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files Free for use for any purpose, commercial or private SQLite3 is included with Python by default. To create a connection to a disk-based database, we just need to pass the name of the database to the connect method of sqlite3: If the database does not exist, an empty one will be created for us Executing SQL statements Once we have a connection to the database, either from pyodbc or sqlite3, we can then create a Cursor object which represents a database cursor. We can do this using the cursor method: Docs for cursor Now we have a Cursor object, we can execute any valid SQL query string using the Cursor execute method: Let’s assume that the database we are connected to ( database.db ), has 2 tables T_CUSTOMERS and T_ADDRESSES as such: SELECT statement To select the id , fname , and lname columns from T_CUSTOMERS , we use SQL SELECT : The executed SELECT statement returns rows, which we can retrieve using one of the Cursor fetch functions: fetchone : retrieves one row only, and move the Cursor to the next row : retrieves one row only, and move the Cursor to the next row fetchall : retrieves all rows, and move the Cursor to the end : retrieves all rows, and move the Cursor to the end fetchmany(size) : retrieves a number of rows, and move the Cursor to the next row Note: if there are no rows left, fetchone will return None, whereas fetchall and fetchmany will both return empty lists For example, to retrieve one row only: row will be a Tuple of values, one for each of the columns in the SELECT statement: To get each column’s description, the Cursor description attribute can be used: This description will be a list of Tuples, one for each column. Each Tuple has 7 items to describe the column, the one that matters to us is the first item, which is the column’s name (or alias, if specified in the SQL SELECT ): To retrieve all the remaining rows as a list, we can use fetchall : UPDATE statement To update an existing record in T_CUSTOMERS , we use SQL UPDATE with a WHERE clause Note: if you do not use a WHERE clause in the UPDATE statement to specify which record(s) should be updated, all records will be updated! Let’s update lname='Trujillo' to 'Taqueria' : If we want to know how many records were modified by the last SQL statement, we can use the Cursor rowcount attribute. This will return -1 if no SQL has been executed or if the number of rows is unknown: Let’s check if that record has been updated successfully: DELETE statement To delete a customer’s record from T_CUSTOMERS , we use SQL DELETE with a WHERE clause Note: if you do not use a WHERE clause in the DELETE statement to specify which record(s) should be deleted, all records will be deleted! Let’s delete the record with id=4 : Let’s check how many records were modified: Let’s check if that record has been deleted successfully: INSERT INTO statement To insert a new record into T_CUSTOMERS , we use SQL INSERT INTO Let’s insert the same record we have deleted: Let’s check how many records were modified: Let’s check if that record has been inserted successfully: Long SQL statement Let’s say that we want to select the full name, and city and postal code of a customer with the last name 'Trujillo' . We (or someone else) has written the following SQL statement to do this: The easiest way to pass this long SQL statement to excute is to use the triple-quote string format to encapsulate the statement. White-spaces (including tabs and newlines) should be ignored by the SQL database engine, but if we want to remove them from the left, we can use the dedent function from the built-in textwrap module: Finally, we must call commit on the connection that created this cursor, otherwise our changes will be lost if we close the Script, and close the connection: What is next? Start using SqlAlchemy and Pandas for a high-level connecting and execution of queries and parameterized queries 👉 Happy coding!	https://drgabrielharris.medium.com/python-how-connect-to-and-manage-a-database-68b113a5ca62	['Gabriel Harris Ph.D.']	2020-09-24 12:03:16.172000+00:00	['Sql Server', 'Sql', 'Python', 'Database', 'Sqlite']
What is the foreseeable future of this county to a millennial	What is the foreseeable future of this county to a millennial Sachin Thissera Sep 10·2 min read As a government, its sole duty and responsibility are to uplift the public population of the country and grow the county at a rate to match globalization and eventually become a stable sustainable country for people to live in. In the case of Sri Lanka, it's different. the governing body is distracted by many corruption and the decision makes of the county is more focused on how a pandemic or a critical situation will benefit them and at the same time provide a somewhat related solution for the problem. Sri Lanka holds many natural resources and it's a land with one of the rarest gemstones in the world. With the 24/7 tropical nature, the land is blessed with many natural resources. Whilst from 1980–2021 the growth is in a declining curve. it's mainly due to the leader's Selfish nature and the mindset of understanding ether they would make their life or make the public citizens life better. The politicians are not the direct cause of this, the system any politician enters into is corrupted. The entire governmental body has been corrupted for more than decades and bribery and illegal activities have become a new normal for anyone who enters the political body. In simple terms, a citizen of Sri Lanka should be rich enough to purchase a Rolls Royce in USD to be able to afford a simple economical vehicle in this country. The currency is not what you see on the internet. the government doesn't have enough money to pay the debt, imports are stoped are few downsides that we face now. when will this end or will this ever end is a question none of us have answers to. The simple and only foreseeable solution is to migrate to another country. But again this is not a solution that every citizen can take but with these actions, the result will be a split middle-income class either into the low income or high income. It's better to be a migrated citizen than a refugee to another country I suppose. As I question myself every day, are we blessed with such a wonderful county or are we cursed to be born in such a corrupted county?	https://medium.com/@sachinthissera2/what-is-the-foreseeable-future-of-this-county-to-a-millennial-1b551b11665c	['Sachin Thissera']	2021-09-10 03:50:34.618000+00:00	['Sri Lanka', 'Globalization', 'Politics', 'Solutions', 'Thoughts']
Daily Acts Of Kindness	Unfortunately, we miss some acts of Kindness in our daily life. We get many chances to do acts of Kindness in a day, if we do not miss that chances and do some good deeds it will be cause of our spiritual happiness. I would like to share my last 24 hours acts of kindness that was the cause of my happiness. 1- I am living in an organization Dar-ul-Shafqat a hostel life. My friend Mr, Zubair was very sad about his university fee issue. I gave him good advice that how can be this issue will solve and tried to make him happy. 2- My junior Mr, Adeel Rauf wanted to make his Fiverr profile and he did not now how to make. I helped him and created his profile on Fiverr. 3- Last night i teach tenses my junior students and corrected their mistakes. 4- I helped my friend Ahmad about Fiverr trick how to rank Fiverr Gig who is new graphic designer . 5- I regularly advise my juniors about their future and also spend my time with them to play and enjoy to make them happy. These were not big or hard tasks for me and not took much time but these were very helpful and important for students. So, we should always try our best to help and love others. We should never miss a single chance of doing act of Kindness. We will remain happy always by spreading Kindness.	https://medium.com/@saeed975-pk/daily-acts-of-kindness-b32ce9bdb73a	['Saeed Anwer']	2020-12-16 13:01:08.343000+00:00	['Good Deeds', 'Kindness']
The Five Good Roman Emperors	Publius Aelius Hadrianus “Hadrian” Augustus Reigning (A.D. 117–138) Statue of Roman Emperor Hadrian At the death of Trajan, his adopted Spanish born son Hadrian was proclaimed Emporer by the praetorian guards. Hadrian protested. He did not regard this as a constitutional act, and he requested to be formally elected by the senate, In some respects, he was similar to Trajan, with the same generous spirit and desire for the good of the people. Like Trajan, he also had the same wish to add to the architectural splendor of Rome. Trajan taught him to be a friend of literature and a patron of the fine arts, although he differed from Trajan in not thinking that the greatness of Rome depended upon military glory. He believed that the army should only be maintained; but that foreign conquest was less important than the prosperity of his subjects. In his political ideas and administrative ability, he was a type of the true statesman. He is said to have been a man of wider acquirements and greater general capacity than any previous ruler since Julius Caesar. He was in the best sense liberal and cosmopolitan. Additionally, he was in fact, tolerant of the Christians and put himself in sympathy with the various races and creeds which made up the empire. Hadrian laid down that accusers of Christians had to bear the burden of proof for their denunciations. Against the Jews only, who rose in revolt during his reign, he showed a spirit of unreasonable severity. Hadrian did not believe that the mission of Rome was to conquer the world but to civilize its own subjects. He therefore voluntarily gave up the extensive conquests of Trajan in the East, the provinces of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria. He declared that the Eastern policy of Trajan was a grave mistake. He openly professed to hold fast to the policy of Augustus, which was to improve the empire rather than to expand it. Another piece of evidence of the statesmanship of Hadrian is seen in the fact that he was agreeable, to take advice. While he is said to have shown on some occasions an exceptional irritability of temperament, he is represented as a man distinguished on the whole by “an ability rarely equaled by the Roman princes”. He paid great deference to the senate; and the body of imperial counselors (consilium principis), which had been occasionally consulted by the previous emperors, became from his time a permanent institution. The emperor was not now the victim of unworthy advisers, as in the time of Tiberius, but was surrounded by men noted for their learning and wisdom. These men were often trained lawyers, who were highly skilled in the rules of justice. Perhaps the most important event in the reign of Hadrian was his compilation of the best part of the Roman law. Since the XII. Tables there had been no collection of legal rules. That ancient code was framed upon the customs of a primitive people. It did not represent the actual law by which justice was now administered. A new and better law had matured in the courts of the praetors and of the provincial governors. It had been expressed in the edicts of these magistrates, but it had now become voluminous and scattered. Hadrian delegated to one of his jurists, Salvius Julianus, the task of collecting this law into a concise formation so that it could be used for the better administration of justice throughout the empire. This collection was called the Perpetual Edict (Edictum Perpetuum). Hadrian displayed a stronger sympathy with the provinces than any of his predecessors, and under his reign, the provincials attained a high degree of prosperity and happiness. He conducted himself as a true sovereign and friend of his people. To become acquainted with their condition and to remedy their evils, he spent a large part of his time in visiting the provinces. Of his reign of 21 years, he spent more than two thirds outside of Italy. He made his temporary residence in the main cities of the empire, — in York, Athens, Antioch, and Alexandria — where he was continually looking after the interests of his subjects. In the provinces, as at Rome, he constructed many magnificent public works; and won for himself a renown equal, if not superior, to that of Trajan as a great builder. Rome was decorated with the temple of Venus and Roma, and the splendid mausoleum which today bears the name of the Castle of St. Angelo. Hadrian also built strong fortifications to protect the frontiers, one of these connecting the headwaters of the Rhine and the Danube, and another built on the northern boundary of Britain. Headwaters of the Danube The general organization of the provinces had few changes. There were still the two classes, the senatorial, governed by the proconsuls and propraetors, and the imperial, governed by the legati, or the emperor’s lieutenants. The improvement which took place under the empire in the condition of the provinces was due to the longer term of office given the governors, the more economic management of the finances, and the abolition of the system of farming the revenues. The good influence of such emperors as Hadrian is seen in the new spirit which inspired the life of the provincials. The people were no longer the prey of the taxgatherer, as in the times of the later republic. They could, therefore, use their wealth to improve and beautify their own cities. The growing public spirit is seen in the new buildings and works, everywhere erected, not only by the city governments but by the generous contributions of private citizens. The relations between the people of different provinces were also becoming closer as a result of the improvement of the means of communication. The roads were now extended throughout the empire and were used not merely for the transportation of armies, but for travel and correspondence. The people thus became better acquainted with one another. Many of the highways were used as post-roads, over which letters might be sent by means of private enterprise or government couriers. The different provinces of the empire were also brought into closer communication by means of the increasing commerce, which provided one of the most honored pursuits of the Roman citizen. The provinces encircled the Mediterranean Sea, which was now the greatest highway of the empire. The sea was traversed by merchant ships exchanging the products of various lands. The provinces of the empire were thus joined together in one great commercial community. At the age of 62 Hadrian’s health was declining and thus died of natural causes in July of 138 A.D. After the completion of the Tomb of Hadrian in Rome in 139 by his successor Antoninus Pius, his body was cremated, and his ashes were placed there together with those of his wife Vibia Sabina and his first adopted son, Lucius Aelius, who also died in 138.	https://legacyofgena.medium.com/the-five-good-roman-emporers-d7a807284152	['Gena Vazquez']	2020-04-30 06:25:08.692000+00:00	['Politics', 'Rome', 'Ancient History', 'History', 'Government']
The colour of spring	The UEA campus comes alive with the colour of spring in the form of bright yellow daffodils as the weather starts to warm. The wild daffodil grows to 30cm in height and flowers from March to April (The Wildlife Trusts) but the blooms on display at UEA are most likely to be garden varieties. Nevertheless, they are a welcome sight amongst the imposing grey concrete and dull green grass. The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, has now become rarer than it used to be but can still be seen in the dappled shade of undisturbed woodlands (The Wildlife Trusts). The leaves are a greyish green in colour and the flowers, although lighter then garden varieties, are a striking yellow. Due to the intensification of agriculture true wild daffodils, as opposed to hybrids or garden varieties, are rather rare and found scattered mainly in the west of Britain (Plantlife). The daffodil is the national symbol of Wales as well as being the flower of the county of Gloucestershire (Plantlife). The muted colour of a wild daffodil. Garden varieties are bolder and come in a range of colours, from orange through to white. References Plantlife https://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/discover-wild-plants-nature/plant-fungi-species/daffodil-wild (last accessed April 2020) The Wildlife Trusts https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/wildflowers/wild-daffodil (last accessed April 2020)	https://medium.com/@ueaecologyben/the-colour-of-spring-941c570df9e6	['Uea Ecology Ben']	2020-04-23 10:43:21.697000+00:00	['Uea', 'Plants', 'Wildlife', 'Garden', 'Nature']
Faux Twitch channel is recommending NordVPN with a generous discount	Faux is a popular video gamer and a Twitch channel that focuses on Runescape Livestream videos. For those who don’t know Runescape is one of the first massively popular MMORPG games where you play for a hero that over time gains experience, new skills and abilities. Moreover, you play with other players and can compete against them or cooperate to participate in magical quests. One thing that pleasantly surprised me as I browsed through his videos was a recommendation to start protecting yourself online with NordVPN. It’s a cybersecurity software, and Faux even throws a great discount on top of that. How to get Faux NordVPN special offer? Faux genuinely cares about his viewers’ privacy, that’s why he is recommending a leading privacy protection software — NordVPN. With his exclusive coupon code, you can buy this service with a 70% discount for just $3.49/month for a three-year plan, so it’s a perfect opportunity to secure yourself online for years to come. You can download it from Google store by following this link, or get it for your iOS by clicking here. Click this link to get the 70% NordVPN deal from Faux What does NordVPN have to offer? NordVPN is a prominent Virtual Private Network that has been around for almost a decade and has over 14 million userbase. People use it to secure their Internet connection and protect their online privacy. There’s no denying that the Internet has become a dangerous place where cybercriminals try to steal your banking credentials, and data-mining companies are selling your data to third parties with or without your approval. NordVPN establishes a secure and encrypted tunnel between your device and one of its’ servers, making it much harder to spy on your data. Additional encryption makes your Internet traffic indecipherable to third party spectators, and obtaining your personal data becomes no easy task. For this reason, it is highly advisable to use it on public Wi-Fi networks, that usually have weak security measurements and are exploited by cybercriminals. Some more NordVPN benefits A VPN has many use cases, so let’s go step by step over each one of them: You can choose from a variety of 5600+ servers in 59 countries, which is one of the most significant numbers in the industry; By picking a server, you can change your IP address, which makes tracking via IP address a nearly impossible task; By changing the IP address, you can also bypass geographical restrictions or access blocked content in countries that tightly control online traffic; Minimalistic UX/UI design makes the App comfortable to use where everything is one click away; There’s a 24/7 professional customer support team that will help with any issues you encounter online. Furthermore, Faux is not the only one to appreciate NordVPN. You can check these entertaining YouTube channels that also recommend using it. Sakitech YT channel focuses on the latest technology trends, so he knows what he’s saying when advising NordVPN. Or you can check out RossBoomsocks, a League of Legends player if you’re into this video game. Don’t hesitate any longer and protect your privacy with NordVPN	https://medium.com/@jinglerenostin/faux-channel-is-recommending-nordvpn-ddf4c917bb69	['James Mosby']	2020-05-27 08:48:41.313000+00:00	['VPN', 'Discount', 'Deal', 'Cybersecurity', 'Privacy']
Review prophecy Project	Hello everyone. I’m back and today I’m going to present to you a new project called: Prophecy a community outreach project. Come on! Let’s find out what interesting this project is !! What is prophecy? A network that translates the values of economic drivers to consensus on the state of the network’s economic policy. This is the first decentralized operating system for money. The prophecy takes advantage of the primitives found in inheritance finance to introduce monetary policy innovations. Prophecy is an organization that exchanges the value of entertainers based on currency to come to agreement on the terms of the organization’s monetary strategy. This is the main decentralization framework for cash. Prophecy uses natives found in old accounts to make strides in monetary strategy. Prophetic token ($ PRY) is the token behind the prophetic and prophetic profit group. Prophecy is equipped with a novel financial deal tool that influences the social psychology of natives that often occur in conventional money-related deals. Known as a PoCD (or Proof of Revenue Submitted), this tool establishes a financial environment that helps to stimulate open market interest to counter a decline in confidence. Prophecy’s mission is: Set up a reasonable currency Provides the most complete source of socio-economic data Fight off the time-sensitive downturn of economic forces nearby. Next we will learn about the Prophetic pool Gone are the waiting periods of weeks or months for rewarding profits. The Prophet Prophet’s profit groups allow you to earn in the blink of an eye so you never have to wait for your earnings. Winners receive income right after the profit group ends. You can join groups, win a large amount of tokens and receive them within minutes. The prophetic group is a creative twist on existing profit group structures, reversing the system and ensuring the majority of participants win, rather than the minority. The pool is formed and participants participate, with an 80% chance of winning when the pool closes. We encourage further participation through the inclusion of a ‘ceiling tax’ (further explained below) to ensure the value of the Prophecy continues to increase, along with the continued burning of tokens. In the future, users can start their own pools. Prophetic groups have ways to invite friends or followers to join groups. The outstanding features of the Prophet project: 1. PoCD: The prophecy is equipped with a new economic consensus engine that helps promote the natural sociological primitives contained in traditional monetary policy. Called PoCD (or Proof-of-commited Decay), this instrument creates a monetary environment that stimulates open market demand to counter a decline in value. 2. Bare-Tax: It is said that liquidity is the oxygen of the financial market, and old assets make up the old market. Prophecy implemented an incentive parameter that refines the impact of the network through contributions. Prophecy introduces Bare-Tax that creates speed, a way to encourage the use of Prophecy tokens in the community. 3. Burning: The foundation of modern economic policy is Burning’s contractual supply model. By systematically reducing the total circulating supply, Prophecy takes advantage of deflationary features as a means of maintaining and increasing its market density. Stabilizing demand through Art of Burning. 4. Meta-Metrics: Prophecy’s computational infrastructure maintains its monetary policy in a digital economy. Promote economic compensation with Meta-Metric. Information Prophet token The prophecy will start with 200 million PRY tokens, with an initial circulating supply of 100 million PRY tokens. This is the number of tokens we will start before the burning schedule starts. 40% of tokens are reserved for rewards via profit groups, betting and burning. Prophecy Token (PROPHECY) Symbol: PRY Decimals: 18 Total Supply: 200,000,000 Circulating Supply: 100,000,000 Private Sale = 25% of total supply (50,000,000 Prophecy Tokens) Private Sale whitelist — CURRENTLY LIVE Price: 1 ETH = 78,000 $PRY Tokens (30% bonus) Private sale hardcap: 600 ETH Total hardcap: 600 ETH NO softcap! LISTING PRICE (Uniswap): 1 ETH = 60,000 Prophecy Tokens Tokens Distribution 10%: tokens are devoted to marketing and partnerships 10%: of Prophecy tokens are intended for liquidity and development 10%: among the tokens with a group token that is locked, not accessible for 6 months 25%: token dedicated to exclusive pre-sale 5%: token reserved for private pre-sale. Conclusion Prophecy intends to be a platform that offers comprehensive and innovative solutions related to modern financial systems, designed to outperform the existing financial landscape. With some features like PoCD, Burning, Staking, etc., Prophecy is optimistic that they can present a better financial system than traditional financial systems — in plain words,Prophecy is a better decentralized operating system for money. If you are looking for investment opportunities, this project is probably one of the projects you should be interested in. Above is the information about the Prophecy project that I have introduced in detail, if you have any questions please comment below. !! See you in the post next time. ► For more information please visit links below: Web: https://prophecyproject.io Telegram: https://t.me/prophecyproject Chanel: https://t.me/ProphecyPrice Twitter: https://twitter.com/Buy_Prophecy Medium: https://prophecyproject.medium.com Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Prophet_DeFi DeFi Bounty: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5295023.0 ►Author Bitcointalk Username: tunaduong BitcoinTalk profile link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2402029 Eth Address: 0xc497b8F4f9dE31fAF4DE9AAB127E2cFA51A95C0c	https://medium.com/@david-tuna1/review-prophecy-project-6aeda4f617a5	['David Tuna', 'Review Project']	2020-12-17 16:02:35.544000+00:00	['Review', 'Token', 'Exchange', 'Prophecy']
Bridging The Gap: MLS Soccer is inching closer and closer to Continental Glory	While no American teams have done it yet, a simple look back at the last decade paints a very straightforward inevitability: An MLS club can and will win it’s first CONCACAF Champions League Title soon — it’s just a matter of time. The Pinnacle of North American Football On a crisp late-December night in Orlando, Andre-Pierre Gignac, Tigres legend and eventual competition top scorer managed to net Tigre’s winning goal and bring what seemed like a cruel curse to it’s grateful end. The ‘Team of the Decade’ as the current Tigres outfit is known in it’s domestic league, finally managed to end a haunting run of three CONCACAF Champions League Final appearance losses in 5 years with the last coming in the previous year: a heartbreaking penalty shootout loss to crosstown rivals Monterrey. Tigres can be proud of what they have achieved — the final jewel in the crown on top of a very successful era of club-level football. For this team, the fourth time really was the charm. The Tigres win signifies something big — for Mexican club soccer this is another notch in their Champions League-era (2008-Present) dominance period of North American soccer. No other national leagues have produced a winner of the competition in the modern era. In other words, Mexican clubs have managed to win for 13 years in a row. But this period of dominance will come to meet its eventual end sooner rather than later. As seen in the fantastic run put together by LAFC, MLS teams are now knocking on the door of continental glory. It is just a matter of time. In arguably the harder of the two paths to the final, LAFC managed to knock out three Mexican clubs along the way including eventual Liga MX title winners Leon. Prior to the Tigres — LAFC final, only Alianza of El Salvador manged to score on Tigres back in February of 2020. What followed was an impressive run of clean sheets by the club in order to reach the final. This was snapped by LAFC, with a fabulous fast break and chip by Diego Rossi. In this way, it is evident that even against the best and most experienced sides in North America, MLS sides can show up on the day. The statistics on the day only further this claim: Tigres’ 54% to LAFC’s 46% possession, Tigres’ 119 to LAFC’s 167 successful passes in the opposition’s half, and Tigres’ 12 to LAFC’s 9 chances created paint a very tight game and not one we may expect from a dominant Mexican side versus an MLS side traditionally. A zoom out and quick search of the internet will also show something surprising: MLS teams have managed to reach the final in three out of the last 6 iterations of the competition. In other words, 50% of the finals in the last 6 years have featured MLS clubs. In the last 10 years, this rate drops to 40%, or four out of the last 10 iterations have featured MLS clubs. It is also interesting to note that for the 2020 season only one Mexican team - Tigres — managed to make it into the list of top 5 teams with the most shots on target per match category. This means that, even when facing powerful opponents, MLS teams on average managed to get shots away that challenged the keeper. MLS teams do manage to be dangerous in the games. Credit: FotMob When using CCL performance as a proxy it is evident that the traditional gap between Liga MX and MLS is closing, and it is closing fast. In this way, MLS clubs are starting to establish themselves as formidable opponents in the league and it is just a matter of time before we see an MLS club crowned as continental champions and arguably sooner rather than later.	https://medium.com/@footydeets/bridging-the-gap-mls-soccer-is-inching-closer-and-closer-to-continental-glory-d78a4422093	['Ani']	2020-12-23 19:22:41.773000+00:00	['MLS', 'Concacaf Champions League', 'Lafc', 'Football', 'Soccer Analytics']
The Letter I Received from House Rep. Matt Cartwright	MATT CARTWRIGHT 8TH DISTRICT, PENNSYLVANIA December 11, 2020 Mr. David Kain (Personal address redacted) Dear Mr. Kain, Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, a bill I am proud to cosponsor. As your Congressman, reducing the cost of health care is one of my top priorities. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to respond. Medicare is an American success story. Medicare, an earned benefit, ensures that seniors will get the health coverage they worked a lifetime for. Due to its high success, many groups have called to enact a larger nationwide Medicare plan to solves America’s health insurance crisis. Although the Affordable Care Act significantly decreased the number of Americans without health insurance coverage, millions of Americans are still uninsured. According to the Kaiser Foundation, high premiums are the main barrier to access. One way to address lack of access and rising costs is to establish a publicly funded universal health care system, also referred to as Medicare for All. H.R. 1384 would establish a privately-delivered, publicly-financed universal health care system. This bill would expand the Medicare program and provide universal access to care to all Americans. The program would be primarily funded by a modest payroll tax on employers and employees, a financial transaction tax, and higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans. I am proud to cosponsor this legislation and look forward to working with my colleagues to advance this important legislation. For far too long, America’s health insurance system has made health care more costly, less accessible, and less efficient for families and small businesses. As your Congressman, I am working to improve the affordability of, and access to, health care for all Americans. You may be interested to know that this Congress I voted for H.R. 965, the Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples Act (CREATES) Act. H.R. 965 outlines the civil actions a product developer may bring against a license holder for blocking the production of a generic drug. If an eligible product developer prevails in a civil action, they are entitled to receive the product without delay along with monetary compensation. It is critical that we bring down drug prices and control our nation’s health care spending. That is why I was proud to vote for this bill when it passed the House as part of H.R. 987 on May 16, 2019. Sincerely, Matt Cartwright Member of Congress MC/EK	https://medium.com/written-tales/the-letter-i-received-from-house-rep-matt-cartwright-96db720efca8	['David Kain']	2020-12-17 12:39:37.681000+00:00	['Nonfiction', 'Covid 19', 'Democrats', 'Written Tales', 'Healthcare']
The Edit	The Edit It’s never a good idea to mix work and home life Photo by Bill Adler Nausea erupted up Detective Sanchez’s esophagus as he surveyed the crime scene. Books lined the wall-to-wall, teakwood shelving opposite the living room window. On the adjacent wall was a framed page of the New York Times bestseller list from June 11, 2020 and a photograph of a couple in their thirties on a beach, their arms around each other, both with broad, relaxed smiles, their shadows long. A thick, hardcover edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary and a photography book of 19th century New York City covered about a third of the glass coffee table in front of the leather couch. Next to the dictionary was a Moleskine notebook and a Bic ballpoint pen with red ink. Sanchez snapped on rubber gloves and stepped cautiously around the body parts that littered the room. A hand with deformed knuckles lay on the couch’s center cushion, blood coagulated around the wrist. Strewn around the room, like somebody had been playing a macabre tossing game, were a leg with a knobby knee, an arm with eczema-covered scales, an ear clogged with wax, a crooked belly button, and a blond toupee whose underside was coated in sweat. A blood-soaked saber rested handle down at the intersection of two walls. This murder doesn’t need a homicide detective, just the coroner, Sanchez thought. I could have been watching a Friends rerun. “What happened here?” a rookie cop asked. He dammed his lips together tightly. His face changed color from pink to pale. Sanchez picked up a toe with a bad case of nail fungus, slipped it in a Ziplock bag, and sighed. “He was a writer. He married his editor.”	https://medium.com/tempest-in-under-1000/the-edit-b4fdb0556e1c	['Bill Adler']	2020-07-21 14:01:03.732000+00:00	['Mystery', 'Crime', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Flash Fiction']
What’s new in GetSocial?. Product Updates (September 2017)	For those with a little more time… Over the last few months, we’ve been focusing on expanding our business and bringing new customers up to speed. Throughout the third quarter, we developed several new projects and welcomed customers with massive websites. As we wanted to maintain this trend, both our engineering and product teams battled for their own roadmaps, something that can be crazy to manage at times. Ultimately, we spent the last few months optimizing and developing for scale, something that was greatly needed. Once those processes were completed, we were able to circle back into our product roadmap and developed a few, long-requested, features. An improved Viral Alerts System Our Alerts feature notifies our customers once their content is becoming viral. The first version of the feature would automatically define which content should be considered for analysis, removing outliers (low and high) and focusing on the others. As that removed some control for our customers, we removed this ‘relevance threshold’ and added a new field for the condition builder. Now, you can define an alert based on a minimum or maximum number of sessions an article receives. With it, you’ll be able to create queries such as the following: If you activate this alert, you’ll be notified once an article receives more than 1,000 visits, at least 100 shares or more than 500 visits coming from shares (referrals) in a single day. You can learn all about the renewed Viral Alerts feature on our knowledge base. A new integration: Google Tag Manager As bigger customers join GetSocial, new needs start to appear on our feedback surveys. One thing we’ve learned over the last few years: the bigger the company, the bigger the challenges to implement code on their websites. As we’re now mainly working with Audience Development, Social Media or Content Marketing teams, it has become unusual for these folks to refer us to their development teams. In fact, most of them use some sort of Tag Manager software to implement their MarTech stack. Without surprise, Google Tag Manager is amongst the most used. With this in mind, and apart from our current Google Tag Manager tutorial, we developed a native integration that allows any GTM user to install GetSocial on their website without handling any code. You can learn all about this new integration on our knowledge base. A new Insights Report Many of our customers are agencies or teams that produce reports to their peers and, obviously, bosses (we all have them). We wanted to facilitate these processes as we shift into a more constant presence in our customers’ daily tasks. Because we live and breathe on top of data, we decided to make the most out of it, and automatically produce relevant content about our user’s data. On our new reports, you’ll find stats about what the best days and hours to post are, top performing content and even the power of your social users. Here are some screenshots of this new feature: How are people sharing your content? When should you be posting your content? When is your audience sharing it? Along the way, we’ll transform this from an automated email into a self-service report system, where you’ll be able to push whatever data you want or define a specific cadence to receive such information.	https://medium.com/getsocial-io/whats-new-in-getsocial-9f77faf5ae14	['João Romão']	2017-09-13 16:58:42.448000+00:00	['Product Management', 'Google Analytics', 'Google Tag Manager', 'Integration', 'Product']
Erdogan is now in debt Turkey after tearing down the country’s economy	Turkish President Erdogan is asking for a small loan from the World Bank. He said that it will be used for a new project that will help prevent the closure of viable micro and small enterprises (MSEs) affected by the health and economic shocks of the Coronavirus pandemic and also maintain employment levels during the crisis. But it will be impossible for Turkey to repay this debt in the short to medium term. According to some reports speculating online, it was mentioned that Erdogan plundered the Turkish wealth through his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, and now he is just taking advantage of the economic crisis in Turkey but his main reason of this loan is to continue to support his unlawful activities. He is bragging before that Turkey is an industrial and rich country that lends Somalia and other countries. How about the huge amount of money he spent for supporting terrorist groups?	https://medium.com/@joiecooper2/erdogan-is-now-in-debt-turkey-after-tearing-down-the-countrys-economy-8d65b2546360	['Joie Cooper']	2020-12-23 14:26:18.351000+00:00	['Coronavirus', 'Economic Crisis', 'World Bank', 'Erdogan', 'Turkey']
Ultracrepidarianism- Have You Heard About it?	Ultracrepidarianism is a strange word that describes an all-too-familiar thing: opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge. While HeroX values the insights and disruptive perspectives of ‘outsiders’ and ‘misfits,’ a quick perusing of any internet forum (looking at you, Yahoo! Answers…) will prove that rampant ultracrepidarianism far outnumbers the distribution of genuine information and valuable advice. This is partly because the deluded conviction doesn’t discriminate — it can be held by people large and small, young and old, poor and rich. These individual instances contribute to the overall deleterious effect of people who insist to others that “they know,” when in fact they don’t. The Usual Suspects — All of Us? We’ve all see examples, some more conspicuous than others. There are the blustery businessmen declaring that they know how to “do politics,” as well as rural agrarians assuming “total understanding” of global economics, and even the suburban academics who interject their moderately well-read opinions as dogma. As Levitt and Dubner describe in their book Think Like A Freak, so many people insist to know, even in situations where they don’t, because the risk is low and the potential for reward is high. Many of us discover early on in life that there is little consequence for guessing incorrectly, and there are often great rewards for people whom luck favors with a correct guess. Think — most gameshows are basically built around this premise. Even more unsettling, as the Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates; the likelihood that someone will voice a view is often inversely correlated to their competence or understanding of the subject. That is to say, the less about a subject someone knows, the more likely they are to overestimate their understanding. This unfortunate trend fills our world with misinformation. When it becomes difficult to say a simple “I don’t know,” we perpetuate a culture where assumptions reign and facts find themselves dissolved and corrupted by opinions. Saying “I Don’t Know” Try it now. Say it out loud. Say “I don’t know.” Don’t be defensive or forlorn. Don’t say it with hostility. Just give it a whirl. It’s ok. You don’t have to know, you can find out. In fact, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of younger “digital native” generations is the immediate reflex to check a reliable source on the internet, via smartphone, when the conversation turns to unfamiliar territory. Of course, it’s getting harder and harder to know what constitutes a reliable source anymore, and good luck finding one. Still, admitting what you don’t know creates an opportunity. Contrary to some popular instincts, it doesn’t signify weakness. As long as you’re willing to approach the world with a growth mindset, you can know, if it’s even something about which you care to learn. Memory and Research At any given time, this is what your knowledge of the world looks like. No matter how much you learn. It always represents an infinitesimal sliver of what there is to know. And that’s ok. On one hand, as Carol Tavris and many other brain researchers make clear- our perceptions, beliefs, and memories are wrought with fallibility, so it’s responsible and rational to want to hold back and downplay your presumed knowledge until you can verify its accuracy. But, as Josh Foer makes clear, your brain does have an amazing capacity for storing information. So, awareness of mental fallibility doesn’t excuse you to stop trying. Remember: the breadth and fidelity of your innate knowledge shape how you think and feel about things in every new moment. Always Get Two Sources At least two sources; more is always better when validating facts. But this is where the root of ultracrepidarianism is turned on its head. While the term derides people who to speak outside of their expertise (etymologically speaking: cobbling shoes in particular), it is important to find a diverse set of data before you settle upon your own conclusion. The paradox of knowing is that “the opposite of a great truth is also true.”	https://medium.com/@herox/ultracrepidarianism-have-you-heard-about-it-6f931861715f	['The Herox Blog']	2019-10-08 17:06:02.424000+00:00	['Knowledge', 'Crowdfunding', 'Psychology', 'Human Behavior']
How to check your windows based system’s battery and power status?	Have you ever wondered about your system’s capabilities especially battery capacity, estimated life, recent usages, overall state, etc? I did and so I started looking for solutions online and after being completely exhausted by no good product in the market to fulfill my needs. I decided to build a tool called, Powir. So, Powir is a Windows 10 based tool to monitor and analyze your system’s power and battery usage. It provides you with various information and statistics about the current and overall history of the power and battery usage of your system. Powir is 100% free and completely open-source for anyone to download/build and use. :) Installation is as simple as running: There were various reasons behind building this tool such as: 🔍 Complete lack of any such power/battery monitoring analyzing tool available in the market. ❌ Obscure documentation over how to find battery statuses on the Internet. 😖 Native solution requires running commands from terminal which outputs unclear and not satisfactory reports of the system. Hence, I decided to work on this mini-project to help the needs of everyone whether developer or not to get a clear picture of their system’s capabilities. 🏃‍♀️ 100% portable app with no installations required: download and run! 🧹 Provides you with a simple and clean UI to list your battery and system information. 🔋 Shows you the trend in battery capacity as well estimate life since the OS was installed. 🧾 Ability to export all the data via various formats: PDF (app), JSON (processed), HTML (original report) — - 💖 App is completely open source with all of the documentation available on Github at: https://github.com/SlapBot/powir/ 🐤 Follow me on Twitter for more updates or any query: https://twitter.com/ugupta41 🚀 Relevant Product Hunt Launch: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/powir/	https://medium.com/@ujjwalgupta_85665/how-to-check-your-windows-based-systems-battery-and-power-status-c46bf17af75e	['Ujjwal Gupta']	2020-06-14 07:06:54.624000+00:00	['Open Source', 'System', 'Windows 10', 'Battery', 'Analytics']
Solar PV mounting systems to observe expanding use of tracking technology	With solar industry dominating the renewable sector and installation of ground mounted systems soaring, buoyant growth is expected in solar PV mounting systems market size. According to Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) of IEA, renewable capacity additions should grow by more than 300 GW each year from 2018 through 2030 to attain the goals of the Paris Agreement. Solar mounting systems become indispensable to help PV systems connect to the rooftop. The systems are designed such that they can resist inclement weather. Stakeholders will eye to surmount high upfront cost by efficiently designing mountings to bolster the power generated in both commercial and residential spaces. Global Market Insights, Inc., has projected solar PV mounting systems market size to surpass US$16 billion by 2026. With fast construction, optimum space utilization, attractive design and better quality, stakeholders are manufacturing solar mounting structures, keeping structural integrity into consideration. Demand for rooftops with versatility that can be ideal for all sorts of roof designs has risen in the past several years. As such, mounting solutions which are durable with a high load capacity have fueled the trend, while growing interest towards corrosion-resistant and rust-free materials has instilled confidence among stakeholders. A new trend as caught the eyes of commercial and residential users — floating solar. Given that space availability, shade and age may be a challenge for end-users seeking rooftop mounting systems, floating photovoltaic (FPV) has gained an uptick. So much so that the EU has given the nod to a project which will streamline the mooring and anchoring of floating solar plants. Floating solar will open up attractive markets in the green energy transition with possible upsides such as reduced water evaporation, reduced civil works, reduced grid interconnected costs, reduced shading, reduced algal blooming and enhanced water quality. Solar tracking technology has gained immense traction in the past several years as they produce more electricity owing to direct exposure to solar rays. Applications of single axis and two axis solar trackers have witnessed an uptick, while the latter is designed to propel solar energy collection throughout the year, the former allows tracking of sun from east to west. Legacy players are designing trackers for a wide range of loading conditions to help end-markets respond aptly to weather conditions to reduce loading on the structure. With the advancements in AI, innate ability to manage environmental conditions and integration with string inverters, solar PV mounting systems market outlook is slated to remain buoyant. North America is likely to come up as a happy hunting ground following the footprint of solar tracker mounting systems in commercial and utility sectors. Installation of mounting structure for large scale solar power plants has become more pronounced in the region. Demand for PV mounting systems which are innovative, robust in application and immensely flexible will continue to witness adoption in the region. In addition, strong potential from rooftop applications in the U.S. will provide lucrative growth opportunities for stakeholders to boost North America solar PV mounting systems market outlook. A transition towards affordable, reliable and clean electricity is palpable in the robust proliferation of solar PV mounting systems in the global front. Penetration of ground mounted solar systems that have structural rigidity, modular design, ability to withstand years of hostile environment conditions, corrosion resistance and are easy to install will become noticeable in residential, commercial sectors.	https://medium.com/@groundalerts/solar-pv-mounting-systems-to-observe-expanding-use-of-tracking-technology-d7b14af80faf	[]	2020-12-08 13:34:02.603000+00:00	['Solar Energy', 'Renewable Energy', 'Solar Pv Mounting Systems', 'Solar Pv']
20 Essential American Slang Words for English Learners	American slang can make things so interesting for English students. Has this consistently happened to you? Your companion asks: “Hello, what’s happening?” You react: “Um, the sky?” Your companion was truly asking you, “How is it going/How are you?” In any case, how were you expected to know? This is the ordinary language from genuine in the U.S. The language that you’re not instructed in an ESL class. Here’s an overview of probably the most widely recognized American slang. It will assist you with understanding your companions better, it will help you fit in and obviously, it will assist you with trying not to more humiliating circumstances in American English discussions. Assets for American Slang Words for English Learners and ESL Students While we can’t cover each and every American slang word in English, there are bunches of spots to discover them on the web. The University of Massachusetts’ rundown of American slang: An in sequential order rundown of regular slang words and expressions with their implications. Some of it is explicit toward the Northeast locale of the U.S. Dave Sperling’s ESL Slang Page: An exhaustive, in order rundown of slang, which additionally has models. A portion of the slang isn’t so normal. Generally utilized American Slang from Manythings.org: This likewise has an exhaustive rundown. Dissimilar to Dave Sperling’s ESL slang page, this page allows you to see the model first. So you can figure the importance first before you really observe the definition. Creativa: This isn’t actually a slang asset, however, it will show you how to convey nonchalantly yet expertly in business settings. Creativa gives engaging recordings, helpful however sudden tips, and goes past only English to encourage your non-verbal communication, pitch, and explicit articulation tips. Creativa is another item from the FluentU group. Here’s an example video from Creativa’s Mastering Business Video Calls in English course, which has tips for communicating adequately: 20 Essential American Slang Words for English Learners and ESL Students Magnificent (Adjective) Magnificent is quite a well-known slang word in American English and everywhere in the world. You’ll hear everybody from the youthful to familiar axiom it. At the point when you utilize the word magnificent, you’re communicating that you think something is brilliant or stunning. It very well may be utilized in a sentence or it very well may be utilized in a single word answer. You may have just heard this American slang word in the pleasant tune “Everything Is Awesome,” which you can watch and tune in to here. There are even some different words from this rundown in the tune! Even better, since that video is accessible on FluentU, you don’t need to stress over missing a solitary word. FluentU has intuitive captions — you can click any word for a moment definition while you watch. Furthermore, there are cheat sheets and fun tests to ensure you recollect new words. To watch that video (and the full library) with all the learning highlights, look at a free FluentU preliminary. A wide determination of FluentU recordings is likewise accessible on YouTube. The channel gives you admittance to a huge load of recordings including other slang and articulations that will assist you with talking normally, for example, this clasp about peculiar expressions in English:	https://medium.com/@remanalex34/20-essential-american-slang-words-for-english-learners-8e004256cbb4	['Alex Reman']	2020-12-26 07:32:21.557000+00:00	['English Language', 'English Learning Apps', 'English Learning', 'English Speaking', 'English']
How to build resilience and reframe negative situations	“If Tiwa can do it, I can do it!” These were some of the words of encouragement that we heard from Tiwa Ogunlesi during the incredibly engaging and inspiring talk that she gave at the Triangirls x Confident and Killing It event in November. Just as it was for many of us, the start of 2020 was tough on Tiwa. She spoke about how staying positive and resilient helped her overcome her challenges and gave us lots of helpful advice on how we could do the same. “What if challenges are here to grow you, not break you?” Tiwa is an incredibly charismatic and engaging speaker. Her positive energy really shone throughout the talk and it was evident that she is someone who lives by what she teaches. Tiwa began by asking us to reframe the stories that we tell ourselves about our failures and to see setbacks as launchpads to success. She reminded us that failures are a natural part of our journeys and are not our identities. They have a start date and an end-date, and if we see them as moments in time or as part of the process, we can begin to move past them. The science of well-being Tiwa taught us about the 5 pillars of well-being: Positivity Engagement Relationships Meaning Accomplishment This is also known as the PERMA model of well-being. The basic premise of this model is that you may feel happier and more fulfilled when you give time and are intentional about each of these pillars. A way to work on the pillar of the relationship might be to invest more time in your relationships by scheduling non-work check-ins. This could help you feel more connected and supported, and ultimately, happier. A way to work on the accomplishments pillar might be to keep a track of your wins and to celebrate your achievements. Ultimately, each one of us will work on these pillars differently and to varying degrees, but setting aside some time to focus on them regularly will help us feel more positive as a result. Busting 3 common myths of happiness Perhaps the most helpful segment of the event for me was when Tiwa helped us challenge 3 common myths and beliefs we hold about happiness: 1. The myth that emotions are a sign of weakness. Emotions are, in fact, simply energy in motion, and not an indicator of strength or weakness. Tiwa reminded us that both positive and negative emotions are healthy. The important thing is to not get stuck. 2. The myth that happiness comes after success. Putting your happiness after a goal post is risky since goalposts are always shifting and changing. You need happiness in order to be successful, and not the other way around. 3. The myth that how you feel is who you are. This is a challenging one for many of us, however, Tiwa reminded us that how you feel and what happens to you are two very different things and not part of your identity. It’s important to avoid internalising setbacks or failures and the negative feelings associated with them, as we are not defined by our circumstances. Live in the realm of positivity One of the key takeaways from the session for me was that resilience is something that is built by choosing positivity and always looking for a way forward. You may not be able to control the situation, but you can always control how you respond to it. Tiwa wrapped up the event by reminding us once again to live in the realm of positivity and hope and said that if nothing else, we should quote her on, and remember this: “Your worth is intrinsic. You matter simply because you exist.”	https://medium.com/triangirls/how-to-build-resilience-and-reframe-negative-situations-3f3bb874166b	['Radhika Ankulkar']	2020-12-19 13:52:47.891000+00:00	['Women In Tech', 'Positivity', 'Wellbeing', 'Resilience']

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