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Lessons From Red Bull’s Marketing | Marketing With a Limited Budget
1. If you can’t afford to sponsor events, create your own
Like many young startups, Red Bull didn’t have the resources to advertise on TV events, radio shows, or billboard ads. Instead, they decided to create their own event: The Red Bull Flugtag. Roughly translated as flight day, the competition consists of “building homemade, human-powered flying machines” to jump off a three-story deck with water as the landing site.
Red Bull Fugtag in Lyon, France 2019. Image by Frank Olaya on Euronews
Given the absurdity of the event, large crowds began gathering to witness the spectacle, and word quickly spread about the Red Bull brand. Since its inception in 1991, the Red Bull Flugtag has attracted huge masses, with a record-breaking 220,000 thousand people attending in 2012.
2. Guerrilla marketing
In Red Bull’s early years, they placed empty cans in crowded public areas to create the impression that the brand was popular. Given the high pedestrian traffic, this was an ingenious way to get free advertising and gain notoriety. They could even target specific groups of people by leaving cans on college campuses, stadiums, or night clubs.
While this strategy was controversial and likely unauthorized, it was probably worth the gamble given the low-cost and high potential reward. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/lessons-from-red-bulls-marketing-b8e44aeb2856 | ['Kenji Farré'] | 2020-07-20 20:13:06.761000+00:00 | ['Red Bull', 'Advertising', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Strategy'] |
Software Is Not a Product | Software is a component. It should work together with and not against or not in place of the hardware. The practice of manufacturing good-enough low quality hardware then coupling it with a logic board and calling it a day literally jeopardizes lives. More of that here :
Killing off Tradecrafts
Tim Cook once stated that the reason for outsourcing the manufacture was simply because United States lack the necessary skilled workers specialized in precision tooling. We are talking about the same company who is religiously against repair works and against ownership. Talk about hippie capitalism. These folks, like it or not dictate your life and who gets to make a living or not. They have articially made it impossible to carry out trades. Vocational schools are replaced by sketchy online software classes and youtubers with no skill whatsoever than just running a pyramid scheme of circle-jerking.
In case you are capable enough, Software-centric business doctrine is simple : Handle it where you can control it. Bay area people especially hate removable hardware, quality craftsmanship, closed circuit systems and static anything. Nebraska called it though ;
Software is a service. Software can not be a product itself. I repeat. Software. CAN NOT. BE. A. PRODUCT. Because software can not be a product, suppliers force the product to become obsolete without the software so they can work around the loopholes. It is unacceptable. The burden must not be on the buyer. In case you would like your product to be dependant on your software, consider this a burden for your entity. You are now obliged to make, whatever unnecessarily software ridden piece of article you have just sold, to operate just as fine and under circumstances designated with customer as it was advertised.
Battle of Effs
I am calling it.
Efficiency is inefficient in ensuring efficacy.
Thank to physics, bay area people can not bend rules as much as they would like to but they can sure as hell warp minds. They shamelessly market the idea that efficiency is something they project in their ideas. Whereas they are the absolute opposite of efficiency.
A small li-po battery can not outperform a big li-po battery. Bigger is bigger. A smaller sensor can not outperform a bigger sensor when it comes to photography. A small engine car can not outperform a bigger engine car.
Quality and performance can only be appreciated when their extremes are considered. You can not appreciate a leica camera if you are displaying it on an LCD. You require the proper display device and appreciation of the craft itself to distinguish it from a smartphone camera.
The M1 Chip, 1.0 turbocharged european vehicles, 3000mah battery iphones all have one thing in common. They try to make up for what they lack in hardware in the software department. This is called fraud and “getting tricked by a business”. For what its worth they are efficient in their act but they lack efficacy.
We are not there yet
We as humanity have not advanced far enough to depend on software solely. Let alone technology, our laws and regulations couldn’t keep up with all the lingo. We have collectively made data hoarders rich for decades and GDPR was only discussed couple years ago. Sadly all it achieved is legitimizing the data hoarders. We are far too primitive to rely on software but we rely anyways. It works horribly, even Bay Area folks and their pristine top notch systems fail. But it is “Good Enough”. Whole industry is under the effect of dunning kruger syndrome. We produce sub-par software and content with it. We even go ahead and call this abomination a product.
Whatever language you utilize to “craft” your “product” you are essentially using program text to create a mathematical object describing a state space and the transformations in this state space. When “crafting” the space you end up having to visualize the output. Most often than not when a software fails it fails because code that get executed does the exact thing it is designed to but the design is the culprit.
Product Designer? What?
You can design your “service” around software and it would be suitable. It would make the process of maintaining a team, relaying ideas and handling issues much easier. When you set sail with the “product” mindset you are bound to fail at whatever business you are conducting. Software is a component at best. The sooner you realize this and act upon it the better.
A chair is a product because you can understand it as a human being. You see the material, weight, flaws instantly. You can test it, repurpose it and above all you do not need the permission of salesman to alter its color, fear of manufacturer to invade your privacy and guaranteed diminished benefit over the years. If a chair were a software you would expect it to break one day, get put together the other day, find a stranger casually sitting on it, changing its color without asking you, perform better or lesser: UNEXPECTEDLY each day.
When software is treated as a product you inherently increase the anxiety within your team. It is not tangible. It can haphazardly stop operating one day and employees have to start each day, go to bed each night expecting this.
Chair stays relevant to its initial purpose. Software does not and can not. Stop putting software in the center and focus on delivering the service or components you have promised to your customers. Also stop stealing methodologies from Toyota and other manufacturing geniuses. You can not apply Kaizen to a project that is considered a product but its codes cryptically hidden away from even the trained eye let alone an RTE. I don’t have a dog in this fight so don’t consider me a neo-luddite. Consider me a customer who is not satisfied with good enough. | https://medium.com/swlh/software-is-not-a-product-cb62cad2d3ff | [] | 2020-12-17 08:35:13.833000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Software', 'Software Development', 'Productivity', 'Product Management'] |
White Blood Cell Segmentation With Keras Using Unet | Convolutional Neural Networks and Machine Learning/Deep Learning in general, has been implemented in a variety of fields. Medical imaging is one of the most intriguing ones, and so I decided to use AI to approach the problem of cell segmentation in microscopic images.
The What
Consider the image below — a microscope slide that contains a bunch of cells, including one white blood cell. If a person wanted to analyze the white blood cell, they would first have to figure out which one the white blood cell, actually is. You would have to do the same thing if you were to have a computer perform analysis on the white blood cell. The problem of separating parts of an image is called segmentation. There are a variety of ways to do this, but I performed semantic segmentation — assigning each pixel in the image to a class. In this case, the classes were white blood cell and not white blood cell. To gain a more thorough understanding of semantic segmentation is, I’d recommend checking out this great article.
The How
To perform semantic segmentation, I used a popular model called Unet, which was created for medical image segmentation like this but has since been used for many other types of images as well. You can read more about Unet here, but it basically uses a CNN to generate feature maps for images, and then uses Upsampling layers to output a final image, with the same size as the input image.
Unet architecture
In my Unet, Inception was used as the ‘backbone’. Here is a look at the code for the model.
I decided to use this dataset which includes the images as well as masks (which I made binary), and resized images to 128x128, to work with the network. After training for 15 epochs, I was able to achieve an impressive 98% accuracy.
Below is an image that I tested the model on, and the image after applying a binary mask which the model generated.
As you can see, it worked pretty well! For a demo, complete code, and more information, please check out the project on Github.
Conclusion
Although the task here can be considered simple, it can actually be very helpful to medical professionals around the world, especially in third-world countries, where they may need a bit more help. It can also aid different AI’s, because it is a lot easier for analysis programs to work with a segmented image, where the main subject is clearly presented. The model can be further improved by utilizing the other features in the dataset. Although I used binary masks and only had 2 classes, the dataset actually offers masks that include the 3 classes — background, cytoplasm, and nucleus. Overall, I think it’s clear that segmentation is just another great example of how AI can be applied to real life to truly help people. Thanks for reading, and keep creating!
Look at the project on Github at this link: https://github.com/zarif101/blood_cell_segmentation_unet | https://medium.com/dev-genius/white-blood-cell-segmentation-with-keras-using-unet-7a81c6bd2f3b | ['Zarif Azher'] | 2020-09-28 07:43:27.008000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Machine Learning', 'Segmentation', 'TensorFlow', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
How To Improve Business Productivity In A Post-Covid World. | There is no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has turned many aspects of the business world upside down. In addition to business closures and staff shortages, the growth of productivity has slowed for economies all over the globe. While multiple past studies have shown remote working to be more productive, the assumptions were not made with national lockdown, increased household stress, and extended school closures in mind. Now as businesses and their CEOs look to move forward in the midst of the new normal, many of them will have to turn their focus to finding innovative ways to foster productivity in a new environment while still remaining compliant in a post-Covid-19 world.
Restructure Business Functions According To The Value Added To The Business
For businesses, the Covid-19 fallout has included the fast track of several business functions, particularly digital business functions like marketing, eCommerce sales, and customer service. In a time where face to face service is becoming increasingly difficult, restructuring your business process to prioritise them according to their importance in the current climate can help you decide where to dedicate your energy, funds, and resources to improve productivity.
For instance, during the pandemic digital marketing and customer service have become crucial for businesses looking to return to normal after Covid-19. Most businesses have been shut for months and even after reopening, social distancing guidelines limit the number of customers they can serve in-store. Customers are also changing their purchasing patterns. Their screen time averages have increased 50 percent or more while another 50 percent now shop online more frequently. Capitalising on the change in customer patterns and the value of business functions can unlock a whole new level of productivity for a business and its employees.
Focus On Business Efficiency For Heightened Productivity
Now more than ever, business efficiency will prove to be paramount to business survival and maintaining productivity. Tackling internal business efficiencies and processes like repetitive business processes can maximise productivity and minimise distractions. For instance, utilising the benefits of digital business tools like video conferencing software to keep employees and managers connected. Another way to improve efficiency and ensure your organisation flourishes after the pandemic is to redraft your business budget to eliminate unnecessary costs. With declining revenue streams and additional costs to meet new health and safety regulations, making sure your business is financially efficient will be imperative if you are to weather the global financial consequences.
While there are financial relief options available to help US and UK businesses survive the rigors of Covid-19, 25 percent of them say financial relief will not be enough. Reducing overheads like utilities and office rental costs while working from home can provide a much-needed cushion against cash outflow. As for what it means for business productivity, a business that is able to reduce cost per output can claim to be more efficient and productive. As a bonus, the additional funds saved can be redirected to further increase productivity by investing in digital marketing software, remote working collaboration software, or even expanding your delivery vehicle fleet to match increased eCommerce sales. In a recent survey by Workfront 2020, approximately 56 percent of workers say productivity is being held back by obsolete technology at their company.
Empower Employees To Take Control
With remote working the norm for almost 50 percent of UK workers, businesses must explore opportunities to keep them engaged. Remote workdays may have doubled since Covid-19 but it also presents challenges like the increased isolation and roadblocks to encouraging worker morale. Studies from the Harvard Business Review and the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business have shown that empowered employees perform better at their jobs and are more motivated, which in turn impacts business productivity.
Empowering employees also encourages innovation on their part. For such a unique situation like the Covid-19, most businesses will agree that they need all the help they can get to successfully navigate it. Giving employees the confidence and tools to provide recovery solutions in-house not only saves money and time for the business but encourages employee loyalty and pride at a time where staff storage is a now. Therefore, having a workforce that is motivated and empowered to keep productivity high is extremely valuable. Providing opportunities for employee inclusion in the decision making process for the business going forward post Covid-19, prioritising employee-mentor connections, and maintaining an effective internal communication hierarchy in your business are all great places to start and can have a huge impact on creating empowered and productive employees.
During the first few months of the Covid-19 outbreak, an encouraging 75 percent of employees said they felt the shift had helped them improve their productivity. However, with it being clear that businesses need to prepare for the long haul, managers must begin to think of strategies to avoid having that surge in productivity wane. While it is a new territory for most, a few simple moves can boost productivity and keep your business Covid-19 compliant.
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊 If you enjoyed this article, hit those clapping hands below many times👏 It would mean a lot to me and it helps other people see the story.
My purpose is to help 1 million people by 2020 to live the lives they desire. To help people find happiness and become better organised and more productive so they can do more of the important things in life.
If you would like to learn more about the work I do, and how I can help you to become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website or you can say hello on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to my weekly newsletter right here. | https://medium.com/carl-pullein/how-to-improve-business-productivity-in-a-post-covid-world-e9d53c31dd4a | ['Carl Pullein'] | 2020-11-11 01:02:30.972000+00:00 | ['Business Survival', 'Work', 'Business', 'Productivity', 'Covid 19'] |
Matrix Operations in Java: Determinants | Matrix Operations in Java: Determinants
Computing the determinant recursively
In my never-ending effort to translate all of that linear algebra I toiled over in college into functioning Java code (make fun of it on github), I came across one operation that gave me a perfect opportunity to use recursion: computing the determinant of a square matrix.
First, we’re going to talk a little bit about the determinant, so we know what computation we’re dealing with. After that, we’ll implement it recursively in Java in the Matrix class––this version is readable, but computationally expensive for large matrices. If you want to cut to the chase and see the code, feel free to check it the full Matrix class on github. It’s a work in progress!
What is the Determinant?
Without getting too bogged down in the details (we’ve got Wikipedia for that), the determinant of a square matrix is a real number computed from the entries of the matrix. This number gives a very general idea of the nature of the transformation represented by that matrix. And when I say, “A very general idea,” I mean that you can tell whether the volume of regions in the vector space will stretch or shrink, whether orientation of the vector space will flip under the transformation (if the determinant is positive or negative), and whether or not the transformation is invertible (if the determinant is zero or non-zero). This is greatly oversimplifying the matter, and probably gave all linear algebra professors a heart attack, so for that, I send my condolences.
If you are unfamiliar with determinants and would like to develop a high-level intuition, I highly recommend the video on determinants from 3Blue1Brown’s wonderful Essence of Linear Algebra series.
How do we compute the determinant?
The answer: It depends on the dimensions of the matrix. The determinant is only defined for square matrices, so as we will see once we get to the determinant method, we only need to proceed if the number of rows is equal to the number of columns.
Case 1: A 1-by-1 matrix
In the case of a 1-by-1 matrix, we have only one entry, and the determinant is equal to that entry.
Case 2: A 2-by-2 matrix
In the case of a 2-by-2 matrix, like this one:
A 2-by-2 matrix
The determinant is defined as follows:
The determinant of a 2-by-2 matrix
Just a note on notation––we denote a matrix as an array of numbers surrounded by square brackets, and to denote the determinant, we replace the square brackets with vertical bars.
For our recursive solution, these will be our base cases.
Case 3: An n-by-n matrix, where n > 2
Although there are multiple ways to compute the determinant of a larger matrix, we’re going to the Laplace expansion, also known as cofactor expansion. To simplify the implementation, we’ll always be expanding along the first row, but this expansion can work along any row or column. In practice, when working by hand, it’s a good idea to expand along a column or row with lots of zeroes in it.
Let’s motivate this explanation by looking how we’ll proceed in the case of an arbitrary 3-by-3 matrix:
Determinant of a 3-by-3 matrix
There are a few things going on in this definition that we’ll need to accomplish.
We need to be able to compute a 2-by-2 matrix (check!) We need to be able to remove the i-th row and the j-th column, in order to extract specific 2-by-2 matrices from our 3-by-3 matrix. Each of these smaller matrices are known as a minor matrix. We need to iterate over the first row, multiplying the entry at [i][j] by the determinant of the 2-by-2 matrix created by dropping row i and column j . We need to add up these products with alternating signs.
Once we’ve nailed down the 3-by-3 matrix, we can compute the determinant of a 4-by-4 matrix as follows:
In other words:
We need to be able to compute a 3-by-3 matrix (check!) Extract a specific minor matrix by dropping a specified row and column. Multiply each entry in the first row by the determinant of a specific minor matrix. Add up these products with alternating signs.
Hopefully, you’re catching the pattern, and can see the Case 2 is actually just a specific instance of Case 3, so the same logic applies. Here are the general steps for computing the determinant of an n-by-n matrix:
We need to be able to compute a (n-1)-by-(n-1) matrix (check, starting at 1-by-1 and continuing via induction!) Drop a specific row and a specific column to create a minor matrix. We need to iterate over the first row, multiplying the entry at [i][j] by the determinant of the (n-1)-by-(n-1) matrix created by dropping row i and column j . Add up these products with alternating signs.
Because our n-by-n determinant relies on the (n-1)-by-(n-1)th determinant, we can handle this recursively.
Recursive Implementation in Java
To keep the focus on the recursion at work, we have a couple of things that need to be explained:
Matrix.isSquare(m) accepts a matrix m and returns true if the values returned by Matrix.getNumRows(m) and Matrix.getNumColumns(m) are equal. All of these methods have both static and instance methods ( m.getNumRows() and m.getNumColumns() )––The main functionality is carried by the static method, and the instance method simply contains a call to the static method, passing this as an argument .I tend to prefer nesting calls to static methods over chaining calls to instance methods (thinking functionally, rather than OOP-ally), but this is personal preference. I use instance calls to condense my code for readability in longer expressions. Matrix.getEntry(m, row, col) returns the entry in the matrix at [row][col] . Again, I’ve included both static and instance methods, so you’ll see both Matrix.getEntry(m, row, col) and m.getEntry(row, col) in this code. To facilitate the alternating signs, we have a factor of Math.pow(-1, col) in our loop. Technically, this should be Math.pow(-1, row + col) , but since we’re iterating over 0-th row, I have omitted the row + from this expression. Both Matrix.minorMatrix(m, row, col) and m.minorMatrix(row, col) return a copy of the Matrix object, with the specified row and column dropped.
So, without further ado, we have everything we need for our recursive determinant method:
public double determinant() {
return Matrix.determinant(this);
} public static double determinant(Matrix m) {
if (!Matrix.isSquare(m)) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException(
"Determinant undefined for non-square matrices");
} double determinant = 0; if (Matrix.getNumRows(m) == 1) {
determinant = Matrix.getEntry(m, 0, 0);
} else {
for (int col = 0; col < m.getNumColumns(); col++) {
determinant += Math.pow(-1, col) *
m.getEntry(0, col) *
m.minorMatrix(0, col).determinant();
}
}
return determinant;
}
The static method first checks that the matrix is actually square.
If it is, it checks the dimensions to see if the base case (1-by-1) is met. If so, it returns the only entry in the Matrix .
If not, the method iterates over the first row of the Matrix , multiplying each entry by the cofactor, which is the determinant of the minorMatrix created by dropping the row and column that intersect at that entry. A running total is created with alternating signs, and eventually returned by the method.
Final thoughts: Easy to implement, nightmare to use
Although the logic and implementation of this recursive approach is more or less straightforward, the performance prevents it from being the best choice in application.
To demonstrate this, we can write a quick test that times the computation of the determinant for larger and larger matrices.
public class TestDeterminant {
public static void main() {
double[][] entries;
Matrix m;
long startTime, stopTime;
for (int n = 1; n < 15; n++) {
entries = new double[n][n];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) {
entries[i][j] = (int)(Math.random() * 100);
}
}
m = new Matrix(entries);
startTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println(n + ": Determinant =" + m.determinant());
stopTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Time to compute: "
+ (stopTime-startTime)/1000000000.0 + "
");
}
}
}
Because I wanted to publish this post today (and not next month), I’ll just include output from the first eleven iterations:
1: Determinant = 22.0
Time to compute: 0.001712278
2: Determinant = 1416.0
Time to compute: 5.02671E-4
3: Determinant = 50983.0
Time to compute: 1.07971E-4
4: Determinant = -6111005.0
Time to compute: 5.90001E-4
5: Determinant = 3.7196212E8
Time to compute: 0.001294636
6: Determinant = 5.1611999688E10
Time to compute: 0.003171898
7: Determinant = -1.31321831346E12
Time to compute: 0.012757574
8: Determinant = -1.490499465611603E15
Time to compute: 0.079006758
9: Determinant = -1.8423702281090192E16
Time to compute: 0.548071933
10: Determinant = -1.058731125176544E18
Time to compute: 4.887458597
11: Determinant = 5.11833707950967E20
Time to compute: 54.786274411
For matrices smaller than 10-by-10, the determinant can be computed in less than one second, but computation becomes prohibitively slow above this, and even the Wikipedia article, which contains a Python implementation, has a special section about how unscalable this approach is––O(n!). That means a 15-by-15 Matrix would take around 3 weeks. | https://danhalesprogramming.medium.com/matrix-operations-in-java-determinants-ca7c8022944a | ['Dan Hales'] | 2020-11-01 22:48:18.213000+00:00 | ['Object Oriented Design', 'Linear Algebra', 'Mathematics', 'Java'] |
Irregular Menstrual Bleeding? A Hysteroscopic Polypectomy May Be the Solution | Irregular Menstrual Bleeding? A Hysteroscopic Polypectomy May Be the Solution
Endometrial polyps are a common cause of abnormal uterine bleeding
Getting prepared for surgery can be scary. Learning about an upcoming procedure alleviates fear and anxiety. Let’s talk about endometrial polyps and how to fix them with a hysteroscopic polypectomy. We will answer questions about how long the procedure will last, what’s involved, what to expect, and even advice on packing your bag.
While your surgeon preps, we’ll make sure you’re ready.
What are endometrial polyps?
Everyone has heard of colon polyps. Your father probably showed you pictures after his recent colonoscopy. #TMI. Polyps are small finger-like tissue growths that appear on any mucosal surface in our bodies. The colon is one common spot, but polyps can grow anywhere, like the nasal cavity, cervix, and inside the uterus in the endometrial cavity.
Endometrial polyps are small overgrowths of tissue hanging inside the cavity of the uterus. The vast majority are benign, but in rare, cases polyps can be cancerous.
Polyps are most common in women age 20–40 but also contribute to postmenopausal bleeding. Fortunately, most polyps are noncancerous, but they can cause frustrating bleeding between periods, during exercise, and after sex.
Endometrial polyps can be found on a transvaginal sonogram, a hysteroscopy, or a specialized sonogram called a saline-infused sonogram.
Many women have endometrial polyps without having symptoms (asymptomatic). Others suffer from irregular menstrual bleeding and spotting.
What is a hysteroscopic polypectomy?
Hysteroscopy is a simple procedure where a doctor uses a small camera called a hysteroscope to evaluate the inside of the uterine cavity. During a hysteroscopy, a surgeon can remove uterine fibroids ( myomectomy) and polyps (polypectomy) without cutting or removing any part of the uterus.
A hysteroscopic polypectomy combines the visualization of hysteroscopy with a cutting device to remove the polyps without making any incisions on your body.
Your cervix will be slightly dilated to allow the introduction of the camera into the uterus. The gynecologist confirms proper placement and evaluates the polyp to identify its attachment to the uterus. A resection instrument is chosen and placed down the operative channel to allow surgical removal.
How long will I be in the hospital?
Hysteroscopic polypectomies are outpatient procedures. You may go home as soon as the procedure is complete if performed in the office setting. If the procedure is done under general anesthesia, you may go home when you have completed the postoperative recovery.
Can my family visit me?
Some hysteroscopic procedures can be performed in a medical office setting. Other hysteroscopic procedures are done in a hospital or Ambulatory Surgery Center. A trusted family member should drive you to and from the appointment. Your family is welcome to stay with you before and after this outpatient procedure
Does my procedure require an anesthetic?
Anesthesia is required for a hysteroscopic polypectomy procedure. The anesthesia type will vary depending on the surgical setting, the surgeon’s experience, and office equipment availability.
Oral sedation, paracervical block, IV sedation, and general anesthesia are all potential anesthetic options.
What’s the procedure when I check-in?
Most surgeries will involve a preoperative visit with your surgeon to go over the procedure’s risks and benefits in detail. Your surgeon answers questions regarding your upcoming surgery. The surgical consent form is reviewed, signed, or updated with any changes.
In most settings, patients will receive a preoperative phone call by a nurse or medical assistant one to two days before surgery. If any blood work or preoperative testing is required, it will be scheduled and confirmed.
If the hysteroscopic procedure is being performed in an office setting, the process may feel like a normal office visit.
For hospital or ambulatory surgery center based procedures, the staff will guide you to the preoperative holding area to change into a surgical gown and store your valuables. You will meet the nursing team who will provide care during your stay. An IV will be placed at this time. The anesthesia team will come to interview you and answer questions. Typically your surgeon will also come and review any last-minute question.
What happens in the operating room?
After the preoperative evaluation, the team will guide you to the operating or procedure room. You will move from the mobile bed to the operating table. Once you are positioned comfortably and safely, the anesthesiologist will give you medication through your IV.
The OR nursing team will cover your body with sterile drapes and prep the vagina for surgical sterility. The team then performs a “surgical time-out.” A surgical safety checklist is read out loud, requiring all surgical team members to be present and attentive.
The surgeon then performs the surgical procedure.
Once the procedure is complete. A post-procedure review is done together as a surgical team. All instruments and equipment are counted and verified. When finished, the anesthesiologist will begin to assist the patient in waking up for transfer to the recovery room.
How long will I be in the operating room?
Multiple medical device technologies can be used to perform a hysteroscopic polypectomy. Gynecologic surgeons typically have a personal preference or comfort level with one or more of the various options. Each medical device works by combining the visualization of hysteroscopy with a cutting device to remove the fibroids.
The most common technologies include hysteroscopic scissors, lasso, grapes, or an electrosurgical resecting device such as Myosure™, Symphion™, or True Clear™. While each system functions differently, each subscribes to the same basic concept: polyp resection under visual surveillance.
Your cervix will be slightly dilated to allow the introduction of the camera into the uterus. The gynecologist confirms proper placement and evaluates the polyp to identify its attachment to the uterus. A resection instrument is chosen and placed down the operative channel. A small cutting instrument slides down next to the camera for surgical removal.
The polyp is cut into small pieces and removed. The procedure is complete once we have restored a normal-appearing uterine cavity.
When the treatment is finished, the devices are safely removed.
How long will I be in surgery?
Once the patient enters the operating room, a series of safety steps must occur. This process takes about 20 minutes.
The operative time for a hysteroscopic polypectomy varies. Small, soft polyps may take only a few minutes. Large, dense, or hard to reach polyps may take longer.
In general, 30 minutes of operative time should be expected.
When can I go home?
Postoperative recovery time will vary from person to person. Each patient must meet certain discharge criteria. The patient’s vital signs must be stable. The patient must be alert, oriented, and able to walk with assistance. Postoperative nausea, vomiting, and pain must be controlled as well as confirmation of no postoperative bleeding.
The nursing team will go over discharge instructions, and the plan for postoperative pain management options will be confirmed.
Hysteroscopic polypectomy procedures require a minimal amount of postoperative recovery. Patients are often discharged as early as 30–60 minutes after the procedure.
What is the usual recovery time
Most women should be able to return to normal daily activities the next day. You should speak with your physician about the resumption of sexual activity. You should not use tampons for up to seven days after the procedure to reduce the potential risk of infection.
The short term effects on menstrual bleeding vary. Most will see immediate improvement. Others will experience spotting as the polyp fragments and endometrial tissue are expelled.
You should be able to resume all work and household activities the day after your procedure. You should expect to feel a little vaginal soreness for 2–3 days. Mild uterine cramping is also common.
Some patients will require mild pain medication like NSAIDs or even low dose narcotics for a brief period of time.
It is wise to wear a sanitary pad for a few days as you may experience vaginal spotting or dark vaginal discharge.
You will be instructed to abide by pelvic rest for approximately one week. This includes no douching, no sex, and no tampons.
You should call your doctor if you experience heavy vaginal bleeding, fevers, or worsening abdominal pain.
Light bleeding, spotting, and brown or black discharge is common and expected. Sanitary napkins are advised.
Your doctor will schedule a postoperative examination 1–2 weeks after the procedure. The fibroid specimen pathology report will be reviewed during this visit.
Danger Signals to look out for after the procedure
After a hysteroscopic polypectomy procedure, we expect light spotting and vaginal discharge.
If you experience heavy bleeding, abdominal or pelvic pain, a fever, or pain that increases over time beyond 24 hours, call your physician. After any surgery, contact your physician if you meet any of the following criteria:
DANGER SIGNALS TO BE AWARE OF POST PROCEDURE
Pain not controlled with prescribed medication
Fever > 101
Nausea and vomiting
Calf or leg pain
Shortness of breath
Heavy vaginal bleeding
Foul-smelling vaginal discharge
Abdominal pain not controlled by pain medication
Inability to pass gas
What preparations should I make for aftercare at home??
Hysteroscopic procedures require very little postoperative care. Vaginal discharge and spotting are expected. One should have a supply of sanitary pads available. Sexual activity should be avoided until cleared by your doctor. One may resume a normal diet and exercise the day after the procedure.
What information should I provide to my doctors and nurses?
It is imperative to provide your doctor with an updated list of all medications, vitamins, and dietary supplements prior to surgery. All medication and food allergies should be reviewed. Share any lab work, radiologic procedures, or other medical tests done by other healthcare providers with your surgeon prior to your procedure.
Previous version published on Medika Life July 2020 | https://medium.com/beingwell/irregular-menstrual-bleeding-a-hysteroscopic-polypectomy-may-be-the-solution-5c77d00fbecc | ['Dr Jeff Livingston'] | 2020-08-01 01:00:48.775000+00:00 | ['Womens Health', 'Women', 'Health', 'Surgery', 'Menstruation'] |
Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech | Google Photos Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Big Tech
A new policy perfectly illustrates a core issue across the industry
Photo: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
After five years of Google Photos offering unlimited, free storage of “high-quality” compressed images, Google announced on Wednesday that its policy is changing. Starting next June, any new photos you upload will count toward the 15 gigabytes of free storage offered to every Google account. (Your old photos won’t.) After that, you’ll have to pay a subscription fee for Google One, its cloud storage service.
In one sense, that’s a totally reasonable policy change for a product that has become wildly popular since the initial free-storage offer. Storage isn’t really free or unlimited, after all, and 15 gigabytes is still a lot of space. Some even argue that paying Google directly for services such as Google Photos represents a healthier business relationship long-term than paying with your data or attention.
But viewed from another lens, it’s a galling bait-and-switch and an object lesson in anticompetitive behavior by a Big Tech firm. The unlimited free storage offer was arguably Google Photos’ top selling point, one that few, if any, competing providers could match. The company was likely willing to lose money on its service in exchange for the photos’ value in training its A.I. systems and for the value of keeping users in its broader software ecosystem.
Now that Google has lured more than 1 billion users to the service, making it an integral part of their digital lives (not to mention a huge hassle to switch), that original selling point is gone.
As Platformer’s Casey Newton pointed out on Twitter, though, the real losers here are not Google Photos users. It’s still a great product in many ways. The losers are all the rival photo apps that Google Photos crushed on its way to the top, including startups such as Everpix, Loom, and Picturelife. (Newton reported on the struggles of photo storage startups for The Verge in 2015.)
What was once a hotly competitive and innovative space is now largely controlled by Google and a few other giants, such as Apple. And this points to another set of losers, albeit a nebulous one: everyone who might have benefited from the new ideas and fresh features that were never developed because startups didn’t stand a chance against Google.
It would be easy to reach for a sardonic “don’t be evil” reference here. But what Google is doing here, and why it matters, isn’t best understood in moral terms. At every step, it was just doing what successful companies do. It offered a great product for free because it could afford to, it crushed competitors largely by virtue of being the best option on the market, and now it’s raising prices because the free storage offer has served its purpose.
Instead, this move is best understood from the standpoint of competition and antitrust. It’s Google’s vast size and scope — the way its products in different markets complement and cross-subsidize each other — that gave it unmatchable advantages over smaller rivals. In retrospect, the free storage offer looks a lot like predatory pricing, whether that was Google’s intent or not. But the bigger picture is that Google, like other dominant platforms, has its hand in so many different, mutually reinforcing lines of business that it will always be incentivized to leverage them in anticompetitive ways. From a certain standpoint — the standpoint of maximizing profit and shareholder value — it would be foolish not to.
It’s that sprawling, multifarious nature of digital platforms that the U.S. House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee sought to address with its hefty report last month recommending a suite of new measures to rein in Big Tech. The Google Photos episode is just the latest example of why such measures are needed.
There’s a common misconception that calls to break up Big Tech are motivated by enmity or jealousy of success. No doubt such enmity and jealousy exist, but those aren’t why serious antitrust advocates believe we need to act. And the serious proposals on the table to “break up Big Tech” aren’t about vengefully smashing the companies to bits as I explained in August. They’re about restricting the largest platforms’ free rein to leverage their power across different business lines.
We need new antitrust laws for Big Tech not because big tech firms are evil but because they can’t help themselves. They’re playing on the playing field they’ve been given. And if it’s all downhill from their side, then the answer is not to blame and shame them but to fix the field. | https://onezero.medium.com/google-photos-just-made-the-case-for-breaking-up-big-tech-420dc6b5d375 | ['Will Oremus'] | 2020-11-11 23:44:34.062000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Google Photos', 'Big Tech', 'Google', 'Antitrust'] |
Google Summer Internship 2020 | Apply! Be A Part of Google | It is to inform you that Google Summer Internship 2020 is now open for applications. This is a global program and is available for all international students worldwide.
What is Google Summer Internship 2020?
If you are a university student and don’t want to waste your time this summer, the Google internship 2020 is the one for you. The best thing about this internship is that these projects are open source and you will work with an experienced mentor.
You will receive a stipend and a certificate at the end of this internship. Also, it is a remote internship which means you can easily work from your home and be a part of this amazing online community.
Important Details
Here are some of the details of this internship.
Internship name: Google Summer Internship 2020
Google Summer Internship 2020 Countries: All people worldwide
All people worldwide Age limit: Above 18 years
Above 18 years Duration: 3 Months
3 Months Stipend: Maximum $6000, Minimum $3000
Maximum $6000, Minimum $3000 Internship dates: May 18, 2020, to August 10, 2020
May 18, 2020, to August 10, 2020 Deadline: March 31, 2020
Eligibility Criteria for Google Summer Internship 2020
The following criteria are required to apply for this internship,
The age of the applicant must be above 18 to apply.
The applicant enrolled in Bachelors, Masters or Ph.D. is eligible to apply.
The applicant belonging to any nationality is eligible to apply.
Benefits of Google Summer Internship 2020
There are a lot of benefits that come with this internship. Let’s take a look at them.
Selected candidates will have the opportunity to work for Google.
A stipend of Maximum $6000 and Minimum $3000 will be paid to the candidates.
The candidates will be given an Internship certificate on successful completion of the internship.
The amount of the stipend depends on the candidate’s country. To check the Google internship stipend for your country Click Here.
Some Useful Tips to get Selected for Google Summer Internship 2020
If you want to get selected for this internship, here are some things that you should keep in mind.
Submit a detailed proposal for the project. Discuss what you want to do and how you are planning to do it. Also, mention some additional features and changes that you want to see in the project to make it better.
All the projects are open source. So, start studying and contributing to them as soon as you apply for the internship.
Stay in touch with the online community. This will show your interest and dedication to a particular project.
Ask your mentor to review your project proposal before submitting it to any organization. They will provide you with useful suggestions and feedback.
How to apply for Google Summer Internship 2020
To apply for this internship, you will need to fill an online form. Click Here to apply right now.
Application Deadline
The last date to apply for Google internship 2020 is March 31, 2020. After this, no application will be entertained. Therefore, interested applicants are advised to apply before this date.
We wish you the best of luck for joining this internship and to improve your skills. People Also Read: Elon Musk Motivation Story | https://medium.com/codixlab/google-summer-internship-2020-apply-be-a-part-of-google-1498e17a34c2 | ['Mustufa Ansari'] | 2020-03-21 19:05:11.216000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Google', 'Tech', 'Internships', 'Summer'] |
Seattle Airbnb Listings — an analytical picture | Apartment Listings
Apartments offer maximum flexibility to travellers who want to an experience as close to home as possible when they stay for work or pleasure in a big city, for extended periods usually. The option to cook one’s own meals is one of the biggest advantages in this regard. Houses offer a more space when it comes to this. So I decided to look specifically at apartment and house listings.
Apart from missing values and dropping/imputing them, the prices also had to be converted to integer values from strings. Yes, one listing also had 0 bedrooms in the value field.
For at least four or more guests, listings with at least two bedrooms would work. After a little cleaning up and taking into account listings that need a minimum of two nights’ stay and have at least two or more reviews per month, most apartments appear to have either two or three bedrooms, hence I treated them as categorical variables. And these listings are within the USD 150–160 per night range.
Apartment listings have major clusters in Queen Anne and Other neighbourhoods
The full map of apartment listings can be viewed here.
A little reminder is also necessary that more reviews per month can also mean negative reviews, but that didnt seem to be the case in this subset, going by the individual numerical reviews scores at least.
For apartment listings which accommodate four or more guests and have at least two or more bedrooms (but without the monthly review subsetting), around 41% listings are Downtown, while 19% are in Other neighbourhoods and around 13% are in Capitol Hill. Among these Downtown listings, majority of the listings are in the USD 200–450 range, while those for Other neighbourhoods are within USD 250-odd.
After narrowing it down to two or more reviews per month, the share of Other neighbourhoods goes up to around 30%, while Downtown is now second at around 28%. So, lower prices do tend to attract more guests, if monthly reviews is to be considered a parameter. And listings within the USD 250 upper bound also have better annual availability.
It is also worth considering that the number of bedrooms at this stage goes up again for apartments in some areas when the data is grouped by neighbourhoods, with some listings in Other neighbourhoods having as many as six bedrooms available.
With regards to annual availability, the Other neighbourhoods do well again.
As for price distribution of apartment listings with these specifications, the median is at USD 149.5 | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/seattle-airbnb-listings-an-analytical-picture-219782bed297 | ['Sukanto Mukherjee'] | 2020-07-16 16:21:35.810000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Airbnb', 'Pandas', 'Data Visualization'] |
You Should Be Paying Me | You Should Be Paying Me
Why are men pretending to be sex workers online?
Picture the scene: a dimly lit room taken up nearly entirely by a bed. I’m on my back, my legs spread, counting the ceiling tiles. I’m 22 years old, blonde, and often the subject of sexual harassment on the street. The man rubbing his stubble against my vulva is in his mid fifties, has terrible personal hygiene, and is not by any means conventionally attractive. Why am I enduring this torture, you ask? Well, it’s because he’s paying me.
About two minutes into having my genitals mauled at, I fake a porn-star orgasm just so he’ll stop touching me. Satisfied at his sex-god skills, glad that he is Not Like Other Clients and cares about me having Authentic Pleasure during our time together, the client says the words that I fear the most.
“You should be paying me!”
It’s not always there. But I see it, sometimes, the look in their eyes when they say that. It’s an idea, a fantasy: perhaps, like me, they could have mind blowing and totally, obviously, mutually enjoyable sexual intercourse with people and get paid for it? Sometimes it’s a passing fancy, but on some dark, dismal days I see the idea take flight in their mind.
And then I see it. The profile on Adultwork, the same one that booked my friends and I mere days ago. It has been switched from seeking services to offering. The client has uploaded a grainy picture of himself sweating in a rugby shirt with a beer in hand, and another of his grimy genitals over a stained duvet. His profile text has been filled with badly punctuated paragraphs about how much he likes eating pussy and how great he is at it. He doesn’t seem to understand that escort advertising boards are not slightly more taboo dating websites.
I cringe.
Is that my fault, I wonder? Did I instil that poor, foolish man with a bizarre confidence in his horrific oral skills? Is he now under the impression that not only is his tongue bearable, but it has monetary value? Should I have taken one for the team, perhaps, and endured it until he gave up? I have created a monster.
Days from now, someone with a PhD will write a useless paper in which they count the profiles of these clueless chancers and use this meaningless statistic to claim that straight male sex workers are common and the industry is not as gendered as once thought. The idea that one might need to successfully sell sex at least once to count as a sex worker is trivial to them. But it’s too late, anyway. By faking orgasm, I have caused the body of academic scholarship on sex work to become diluted with bad statistics. It is my fault. It’s all my fault.
I would feel even guiltier if I thought that these men were actually being hired. The prospect of someone paying even a small amount of money for what I was being paid to endure is horrifying, but luckily I do not have to worry about that. Nobody in their right mind would book what is so clearly a fantasist for a sexual encounter. The very, very tiny pool of female clients would almost certainly book an established male escort with semi-decent ad copy and pictures.
Perhaps an escort like Marc, who last year advertised himself as the premier escort in the North East of England? Marc’s skills in the sack were so godlike that he had emerged as the top escort in the whole of the North East early enough in his career to have just six twitter followers and zero reviews. He was happy, however, to reply to everyone’s Tweets to tell us how much he wanted to have sex with us – as professional colleagues, of course, and therefore for free because it was basically networking.
Marc, as a very serious escort running a very serious business, decided to run a retweet competition to give back to his clients. This canny businessman tried to give away a free night with him as a prize, and when he received a grand total of three retweets – all of them from real sex workers trying to call his bluff – generously agreed that everyone would win. Had he been a client (though as we must remember, he was a very real award winning sex worker and definitely not a fantasist) then the man would have thought he had found it, the golden loophole that allowed him access to all of the escorts he desired: pretend to be one of them. Simple, really, and surprising that it hadn’t been thought of before.
Except it had. Repeatedly. And we were all sick of it.
His profile showed several telltale signs that he was a pervert fulfilling his own sexual desires rather than a professional, and at least once a week we spot the same things on near identical accounts. There are bizarrely improbable claims, like the suggestion that a client had shown up with her friend for an unplanned threesome or that the neighbour’s wife had sussed out his very real profession and shown up for an “early Christmas present”, both things that definitely happen outside of pornography.
Nobody seems to understand that sex work is about selling a fantasy to a client, not having a mutually satisfying hook up with extra steps, and they keep talking about women paying to perform unprotected oral sex on them as if that is supposed to be enticing. It is unclear if any one of them has ever met a woman, because they seem to think women everywhere are lining up to buy their skid-marked boxer shorts and club together with our friends to watch them masturbate in the corner at our girls’ nights. Without fail, the accounts all harass real sex workers, trying to have sex with us for free under the guise of “filming content”.
Occasionally we even recognise the men as our bad clients, the clients we have warned other workers about. At that point it stops being just obnoxious and starts becoming scary.
Marc, by the way, deleted his account after being asked why all of his “videos of sessions” had been stolen from porn sites.
When I posted about this phenomenon on Twitter, my mentions exploded. In fact, days later, I put my phone down to wash my face before bed and came back with 20+ notifications.
While the likes and examples contributed by my peers can attest to the fact that men essential cosplaying as prostitutes is a widely observed (and derided) phenomenon, a not insignificant number of people – clients, “straight male sex workers” and, bizarrely, genuine female sex workers – were flocking to my mentions to suggest that I, a lesbian worker with a pimp who has sex with men for as little as £10, was punching down on the far less privileged straight white men who only see clients they’re physically attracted to. In fact, the whole of Australia and its apparently booming market for straight male sex workers seemed to turn out to call me a whorephobe and misandrist. How will I ever recover?
So, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing against male sex workers. In fact, I am personally friends with at least fifteen. Because they’re not in the business for their own sexual gratification, all of them see the men who make up the vast, vast majority of potential clients – regardless of their own sexual preferences.
I don’t deny that a select few male escorts have successfully found female clients. I do, however, think that if you’re privileged enough in this industry to cater to the 0.5% of the client base that you are personally attracted to, you’re probably too privileged to contribute anything of value when we start talking about our rights and welfare. Feel free to re-enter the discussion when you start seeing clients you’re pretty sure are dangerous because you can’t afford not to, or when you get raided and have to have sex with a cop as a bribe.
And, esteemed straight male escorts of Twitter (and of Channel 4 documentary): please don’t insult us by spinning such unbelievable stories as “I see my high class clients on a mattress on my kitchen floor” and “I don’t have sex with clients on the first date despite literally being paid to do that” and expect us to believe that you have carved out a stable income.
Especially when you have a separate income stream “coaching” other men to become male sex workers for women.
We’re prostitutes, not idiots. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/you-should-be-paying-me-c9b8d0a9a5bd | ['Lydia Caradonna'] | 2020-08-24 16:46:30.826000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Work', 'Sexuality', 'Social Media', 'People'] |
Will You Marry Me | Blast From The Musical Past
Will You Marry Me
-A Song By Paula Abdul
Paula Abdul
Just girl to boy, I’d like to share this thought with you, Our love’s a joy, Two one’s have made inseparable two, Last night my heart spoke to me, And it said you’ve found that lover-friend, So, now I’ve finally got the courage just to ask you baby, ooh…..
Will you marry me boy….
A song still asking that question, a bold question, will you marry me? I’m still loving it. Timeless classic!
Check it out and have fun! | https://medium.com/blueinsight/blast-from-the-musical-past-74ed571201bf | [] | 2020-12-05 17:20:59.262000+00:00 | ['Songs', 'Classic Music', 'Music', 'Blue Insights', 'Love'] |
Better Python Code. You have a function, which calculates a… | Better Python Code
How reading other people’s code shaped my style
Code readability is a hot topic. We do not agree on what it looks like and we do not agree on how much of it is needed. It is rarely discussed on a new project and practically never on a project with only 1 developer.
The obvious advantage of striving for readability is to have code, which is easier to share between developers and which is easier to maintain, expand, correct and modify later on.
Consequently, if you hope for your project to be long-lived or if you hope for it to grow with plenty of new features, there are benefits to be gained. If your code is easy to read and understand, then new developers can be onboarded quicker and will be valuable sooner. Arguable, they will also make fewer bugs, because it is far easier to make a mistake when dealing with code, which you barely understand than in straightforward code.
But, the biggest problem with readability is, that it is not objectively measurable. It is subjective in its nature. English, written with Japanese katakana letters, is not readable to me, because I am not fluent in katakana. For somebody else the opposite might be true, they are fluent in katakana, but not in English. None of these 2 examples is objectively more readable than the other.
Code will always be exquisitely more readable and maintainable to those, who wrote it, than to those, who came after them.
Nevertheless, you can do a lot to help your successors understand your intentions. Here are my 3 random illustrations.
Use the more common default
Problem
You have a function, which calculates a user’s favourite colour. The calculation is complicated, so you will cache the result, but you will let the programmer decide whether she wants a freshly calculated colour or the value from the cache.
Question
Here are 4 possible definitions. They are 4 possible variants to the 2 questions:
should the default be USE cache or NOT USE cache?
should the parameter’s name be use_cache or ignore_cache ?
Guideline
To answer “should the default be USE cache or NOT USE cache?” we must look at how our function will be called.
If we already have a bunch of functions, with the same cache behaviour, then we should prefer to copy that behaviour.
If the programmers will use cache 80% of the time, then this should be the default behaviour of this function.
Let’s say, that we want the default to be USE cache.
To answer the second question “should the parameter’s name be use_cache or ignore_cache”, we must look at the inside of the function. How do we use this parameter in if-statements? Do we usually say if xxx or if not xxx ? Extra points can be lost with a double negation, i.e. if not ignore_cache , such statements are especially difficult to keep in mind.
Which of the following 2 options do you prefer?
Hint: One useful test for code readability is: do you need a pen and paper, to remember the flow of a function?
Option A) using use_cache=True
Option B) using ignore_cache=False
I definitely prefer Option A. The if not ignore_cache followed immediately by a if ignore_cache with a nested if not ignore_cache is just too much for me. It looks like an absurd complication of what must have started out as a simple flow.
Problem²
What if we absolutely have to use ignore_cache because all the other functions use it or because this function already exists and is used heavily?
Proposal²
Refactor the function. You can do something as simple as create an internal variable use_cache = not ignore_cache or you can look at the flow of the function and see if there is something that can be done to improve it.
Maybe something like this would work:
Prefer safelisting function arguments to using **kwargs
Problem
You class accepts many, many init parameters. To save time (or because Pylint has a limit of 5 parameters per function) you decide to group them all into **pizza_properties :
Question
How stable do you find the above code? Do you think it will prevent bugs or be a breeding ground for them?
How have we documented which keys in piza_properties we support? Will the next developer have to go through every Pizza class to get a list of possible parameters, their types and their default values? Have we just added a 2-level parameter lookup?
What if the call to PizzaMaker.create_pizaa() is already nested somewhere deep inside the project's code? This 2-level parameter lookup might be 10 levels deep already.
What if create_pizza is also called in a function with semi-specified input parameters? This can get out of hand quickly.
But maybe the more important question is: How secure do you think the above code is?
We have just enabled all future developers (and possibly users) to have direct access to the pizza table in the database. Every column in the Pizza database model is accessible. Yes, we might have some model/database-level validators, but why let a potential attacker this close to the database? What if there is a bug in the validators?
Just by calling:
I have the potential to create faulty data, which will be very difficult to spot and debug.
Guidelines
It is always safer to safelist possible parameters as opposed to blocklisting them. And it is always safer to spell out each parameter we support. This gives us also the chance to raise an error early if an unexpected parameter is encountered. Someone might have just misspelled the word cheze , but an error with a message create_cheeze() got an unexpected keyword argument 'cheze' is much more informative than receiving a database error.
There will, of course, be times, when it makes sense to use **kwargs or *args , but this is mostly useful for passing parameters between 2 well-defined functions/classes.
We should always look at our code from the view-point of other developers. How will they call it? How will they figure out what they can call it with? And we must always limit what our function can do! Trust no one, as they say. Even if you think your function cannot get un-sanitized user input, you can never be sure that everybody else properly sanitizes user input before sending it to you.
So, what can you do to make this code better? Many different things, here are some of my immediate ideas.
Proposal A)
We can define (Marshmallow) schemas for the input parameters. This will allow us to validate the parameters before we use them:
Proposal B)
We could define dedicated PizzaMaker s for each pizza type.
Both of these proposals might not be the perfect solution to our problem, they both certainly consist of more code than the original solution. But they also both validate the pizza_properties , they do something helpful in the extra lines of code.
Functions and classes are for free, use them
Functions and classes are just an abstraction layer. They are just commentary of the code, they explain the purpose of the code and guide other developers towards the intentioned use.
Problem
Your app’s users can create 10 different types of objects. They can create: issues, tasks, people, events, news, … . All of these objects have a title , except for people, they have a name .
When you show dropdowns of issues, you show the issues’ title s, when you show dropdowns of people, you show people's name s.
1 if -statement shows up a lot in your code: obj.name if isinstance(obj, Person) else obj.title .
Question
Is 1 line already considered code-repetition? Are we already violating the DRY (=do not repeat yourself) principle?
Or is 1 line too little to create a dedicated function?
Guidelines
Functions and classes are for free. As long as a function does some work, it is worth having it.
When we move some functionality into a dedicated function or class, we fence it off from the other code and we give it intent. Consequently, it will be much easier to replace or upgrade it.
In our example, we can do:
and then (IMPORTANT!) replace every if with a call to this class. It is crucial that we also replace as much outdated code as possible with the new code. This will signal other developers that they too have to use PrimaryTitleFiner when resolving the title.
While doing this, we will no doubt also find other, similar if -statements. Maybe one like this: "name" if isinstance(obj, Person) else "title" and maybe one like this: "name" if obj_type == "Person" else "title" . Now that we have created PrimaryTitleFinder , we can add to it all the variations of all the if -statements. Alternatively, we can unify the different if statements and simplify the code base a bit.
Conclusion
Readability is in the eye of the beholder. But ignoring it completely creates chaos in your project.
Everything we built needs to be maintained, updated, refreshed to suit the changing times, changing requirements and expectations.
As long as we hope for our projects to become big and maintained by many people, we need to care about how others will interact with it. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/reading-other-peoples-python-code-3-examples-a3548595f35f | ['Ines Panker'] | 2019-12-24 14:40:09.449000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Refactoring', 'Python', 'Code Readability'] |
Bare-Minimum Moves for People With No Time to Exercise | Bare-Minimum Moves for People With No Time to Exercise
If squeezing in a workout feels like a pipe dream, here’s a little something you can do instead
A notification just popped up on my phone’s lock screen from the app FitOn. “NEW Quarantine Workouts,” it said. “Gab Union and DWade will make you sweat, laugh all at the same time.”
“God, I love Gabrielle and Dwyane. That sounds so fun,” I thought. And then I picked up the baby I’d just finished nursing, changed her diaper, set her down on a blanket, loaded the dishwasher, and picked up my laptop to go back to work (I’m Elemental’s new executive editor, btw — hello!) for a few minutes before a toddler lost a dinosaur and needed my help finding it.
Among a certain set, there seems to be a renewed focus on fitness right now: Studios and apps are streaming countless classes every day, people are setting ambitious goals for their at-home workout routines, Jake Gyllenhaal is filming himself putting on a T-shirt while in a handstand. And when ~all of this~ started, I, too, got a tiny bit excited about having more time to exercise now that commuting from Brooklyn to Medium’s Manhattan offices wouldn’t be part of the equation. I got a new pair of running shoes. I downloaded FitOn!
Then reality set in. You’ve probably already read all those great pieces about how, as lucky as one may be to have a home and a job and not have to work in a hospital or a grocery store, it is still not easy to work full time and have small children living in your home and cook and clean all the things and take care of the cats and fix the broken appliances yourself. I’m not going to try to write my own version, because I don’t have time. And anyway, what I would do if I did have time is exercise.
Spending so much time staring at a computer or hunching over a baby means that much of my day is spent with the muscles on the front of my body contracting and the muscles on the back lengthening.
As it happens, though, in addition to being a full-time coronavirus editor, I am a certified personal trainer. I don’t usually train clients, but I do know a bit about fitness, have been fairly committed to exercising as an adult, and am pretty good at designing workouts.
So while hanging out on the app with DWade and Gab isn’t really in the cards for me at the moment, I can say that I’ve been fairly intentional about the movement I’ve been squeezing in during spare moments (baby in the Jumperoo, toddler in front of Sesame Street). My focus: The posterior chain, aka all the muscles on the back of the body. Why? Spending so much time staring at a computer, hunching over a baby, leaning over sinks and pots of pasta, and bending over to pick up toy dinosaurs means that much of my day is spent with the muscles on the front of my body contracting and the muscles on the back lengthening. Over time, those posterior muscles can become chronically overstretched and weakened, which has all kinds of unfortunate consequences for the way our bodies function and feel. Bad posture, aching necks and backs, stiff and clicky hips, even less optimal breathing: nothing good.
Someday I’ll find a way to fit in regular, complete, challenging workouts again (maybe?). But until then, here’s what I’m doing to counteract the hunch, keep my back happy, and at the very least, feel like I have enough power to conquer another day. It’s not everything — it’s not even a real workout, by most people’s definition — but right now, something is better than nothing. (And listen, sometimes nothing is okay, too.)
None of the exercises you’ll see below require equipment, although you’re welcome to use dumbbells, cans, or water (or wine) bottles where applicable to make things more challenging. (If you don’t have any of those things, just do more reps. These moves actually get tough pretty fast!) You can use a yoga mat if you haven’t had time to vacuum lately, but it’s not required. And you don’t even need to change into workout clothes if for some reason you are not already wearing leggings or sweatpants. Oh, and if you have a second to warm up first (jogging in place, doing some vinyasas) that’s great, but it’s also not a huge deal if you don’t. It’s not like you’re doing a bunch of clean and jerks or something.
You can also do this sequence as often as you like, although once a day, or even once every couple of days, is perfectly fine. Do each move once, repeat the series if you can, do it a third time if no one’s interrupted you yet. Don’t overthink it. Just do what you can, and wash your hands.
Is, Ts, and Ws
These moves help strengthen the stabilizing muscles around your shoulder blades, retraining them to stay back and down, which allows your chest to open and your neck to feel less strained. Performing them standing with your torso angled toward the floor also helps strengthen the erector spinae muscles that support your spine.
Is:
Begin standing with feet about hip-width apart.
Keep knees slightly bent. Engage your core (think about “zipping up” your ribs and pulling your belly button toward your spine) and hinge forward at the hips so that your upper body is angled toward the floor.
Keep your gaze slightly ahead of you to encourage your spine to remain neutral.
Keeping your core engaged, slowly bring your arms up alongside your head, thumbs facing up, so your whole upper body is in a straight line — engage the muscles around your shoulder blades for stability — then return your arms back down toward the floor.
Perform 10–20 reps, stopping when you feel your muscles fatigue to the point where you need a break.
Ts:
Stand with feet hip-width apart, knees slightly bent.
Engage your core and hinge forward at the hips, keeping gaze slightly ahead of you.
Keeping core engaged, reach your arms out to the sides, thumbs facing up, so your body forms a T position — feel your shoulder blades squeeze together — then return your arms down toward the floor.
Perform 10–20 reps.
Ws:
Stand with feet hip-width apart, knees slightly bent.
Engage your core and hinge forward at the hips, keeping gaze slightly ahead of you.
Keeping core engaged, reach arms out into a Y shape with palms down.
Imagine your arms are between two panes of glass and bend your elbows, pulling them back and down until your arms are in a W shape.
Return to Y, then pull back into W again for 10–20 reps.
You don’t even need to change into workout clothes if for some reason you are not already wearing leggings or sweatpants.
Glute bridges
Bridges challenge your glutes and lower back and provide a gentle opening to the hip flexor muscles, which spend so much of the day contracting as we sit. The key to making bridges as effective as possible is to intentionally squeeze your glutes as you work (otherwise your quads may end up doing most of the work for you, and your butt, sadly, remains neglected). This is also a good time to work on your pelvic floor — you can engage it as you lift your hips and relax it as you lower.
Lie on your back with knees bent and feet hip-width apart.
Your heels should be a few inches in front of your fingers when you extend your arms.
Press into your feet, engage your core, and squeeze glutes to lift hips up, keeping shoulders and upper back on the floor.
Lower hips toward the mat slowly, allow your seat to gently tap the floor, then squeeze glutes to lift hips again.
Perform 10–20 reps. You can also try any or all of the below variations.
Variation one:
With hips lifted, squeeze your right glute, allowing the left to relax and dip/lower slightly.
Then switch, squeezing the left glute and relaxing the right.
Perform 10–20 squeezes on each side.
Variation two:
With hips lifted, scoot your left foot toward the middle, and lift your right leg into the air.
Lower and lift your hips with just your left foot on the floor.
Perform 5–10 reps, then switch legs.
Variation three:
With hips lifted, shimmy shoulders underneath you so you can clasp your hands together.
Hold the position and breathe deeply for 30–60 seconds.
Bird-dog
This move strengthens the postural muscles of the spine, and because it requires good balance, it challenges your core. Focus on a sense of lengthening as you lift to help stimulate the fascia, important connective tissue which becomes stiff when we’re sedentary, leading to discomfort.
Begin on all fours. Extend your right arm, resting your fingertips gently on the floor in front of you; at the same time, extend your left leg, resting your toes on the floor behind you.
Engage your core, find balance, and lift your right arm and left leg, feeling a long, lengthening stretch from your heel all the way through your body and to your pinky.
Raise and lower your arm and leg together for 10–15 reps, then switch to the left arm and right leg.
Donkey kicks
Donkey kicks are a simple way to strengthen the glutes and hamstrings, which become weak and overstretched when we’re inactive. If 20 reps aren’t enough for you, feel free to just keep going until you can’t maintain good form. You can also nestle a dumbbell or other weight behind your knee to make it more challenging, or try it with your leg extended instead of bent at the knee. | https://elemental.medium.com/bare-minimum-moves-for-people-with-no-time-to-exercise-309ea63a1385 | ['Anna Maltby'] | 2020-05-05 17:20:35.145000+00:00 | ['Workout', 'Health', 'Exercise', 'Body', 'Fitness'] |
The top 10 practices to make your smartphone more secure | The amount of sensitive information stored on your phone can be staggering. We have it with us everywhere we go. Our work, study, play, flirt and even we pay with it. And from pickpockets to malware, threats are plenty. By applying a few simple practices you can reduce chances of successful attacks.
1. Always install iOS & Android system updates as soon as they appear
Smartphone users often postpone system updates or ignore them altogether. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen people actually annoyed by a system update notification. Most either don’t know what this update is or don’t want to “waste” a few minutes for the update to be install. But these updates are rarely released for cosmetic reasons only. It costs a lot to deliver an update and when it comes it’s usually fixing some important system issues. Never assume that your mobile system is 100% secure. There are major vulnerabilities found inside both Android and iOS every few months. When you push “skip”, you’re giving hackers more time to prepare exploits and attack your device.
2. Don’t install applications from untrusted sources
This one should be obvious, but I know it’s not. There are alternative markets for both iOS and Android apps and they are doing well. Yet, apps from these aren’t verified by the official anti-malware software, so their safeness is dubious at best.
Even downloading apps from the official store, you have to be cautious. It’s not unheard of that some malware slips through the scanning mechanisms. It’s good to analyze at least a few reviews before installing an app. Also, take special care of which permissions are you granting. Avoid applications that need unexpected permissions.
3. Do not root/jailbreak your device (unless you know what you’re doing)
There are many advantages of rooting/jailbreaking your phone, and I won’t argue with that. It gives you a complete control over the system. Yet, that power can be misuse if you’re not cautious enough. It’s harder to break things with a limited user profile. But root user can mess things up by making changes to system files or by installing a wrong application.
Root/jailbreak apps might contain malware built for one purpose. Steal your money, private photos or personal information. In 2015 one of the jailbreak tweaks intercepted 225 000 valid iCloud accounts. As it turned out, all were used for fraudulent in-app purchases.
And last, but not least, you are very likely to have problems with the system updates both on Android and iOS. System update can revert your jailbreak/root or even it wouldn’t be possible to install an update at all. And, as explained in the first point, this can be very dangerous.
4. Use protection mechanisms provided by your device
Both Android and iOS offer many out-of-the-box security mechanisms. First of all, make sure that you have your phone secured by a lock screen. From the standard PIN, through patterns to biometrics: fingerprints scanner and face recognition. All have pros and cons. The bottomline is that without any lock screen protection data can get hacked in a matter of minutes.
If you’re an Android user make sure that you have encryption on. Starting from Android 5.0 encryption should be turned on by default. Unfortunately, most of the device manufacturers turn it off in their OEMs explaining it with enhancing the performance. Mind that encryption off means unauthorized access to your device data.
Moreover, it’s usually a human who is the weakest spot of smartphone’s security. All built-in security measures are not worth a penny if you use a weak password. Did you know that almost 20% of 4 digit pins are either “1234”, “0000” or “1111”? Moreover, the top 20 most popular pins cover more than a quarter of PINs out there. When it comes to lock screen patterns, statistics are also quite interesting. More than 10% of them are letters, often first letter of user’s name or someone close to the subject. What is the point of encrypting your device when you use “1234” password?
5. Backup your data
This point is not about the protection of your phone but about the safeness of your data. If you do not backup your important files and photos, you are risking losing them. Your phone can get stolen or broken any day, and with it, you lose your data. As they say, there are two kinds of people — those who do backups and those who will do.
6. Turn on remote tracking and wipe
When someone steals your phone or you lose it, having location settings on can get your device back. To this end, iOS suggests using “Find my iPhone” app, while Android offers an Android Device Manager. Both let user locate their device while it’s still on. And if you have sensitive data on your device consider wiping it remotely. If you’ve backed it up, you wouldn’t lose anything.
7. Disable all premium services (WAP billing, SMS premium, call premium etc)
This is not directly connected with the phone you are using but more with your telco provider. Most of them enable all premium services by default. To subscribe to a premium service you usually have to either:
Send an SMS to a PREMIUM number,
Provide your number on a website and confirm with an activation code,
Open a WAP billing link while browsing on GSM network.
Scammers use all above to trick people into subscribing premium services which are useless and cost a lot. The first two methods need a victim tricked into performing some actions, yet the third one is much easier to fall for. User agrees to a buy by clicking the link.
There is a simple way to protect yourself from such scums. All you need to is disable all premium services. Do it through the self-care application or a customer service helpline.
And if you need to use premium SMS, use a prepaid card.
8. Beware of public hotspots
Hotspots in restaurants, fast-foods, cafes, trains etc., allow to sniff your internet traffic. Think twice before connecting to such networks. If you don’t have other choices at least avoid using unencrypted protocols (like HTTP) to prevent a leakage of your passwords or pictures you’re uploading. You can also use VPN — it will make the whole communication encrypted.
9. Disable unused communication channels
It’s a good practice to turn off unused communication channels. Besides saving a few minutes of your battery life this can make your phone immune to many attacks.
Even established and trusted technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi WPA2 protocol can have major vulnerabilities.
Sometimes it’s not even necessary to take advantage of any vulnerability. An attacker can set up a network having the same SSID as the one your device was using before. If you haven’t specifically disabled it in the settings, your device will connect to it automatically. Imagine a daily number of devices that would connect to a network having the same SSID as McDonald’s or Starbucks Wi-Fi.
10. Clear your device and remove unused applications
We stopped worrying about removing unused apps. We can only blame growing storage space in our smartphones. If you’re using your phone for some time, it most likely contains at least a few applications that you will never use again. Even if they are safe at the moment, they might contain a vulnerability that is not yet known and might cause you problems in the future. You might even forget that you have these apps on your device. This point is especially important for users who did root/jailbreak their device. From time to time it’s also worth checking if the app permissions did not change over time.
You have to keep in mind that none of these practices will make your phone 100% secure. That’s impossible and was never the point of this post. These practices and a healthy dose of common sense can make it harder for any attack to succeed. And as they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Don’t push your luck too far and start being proactive about the security of your smartphone. Today. | https://medium.com/miquido/the-top-10-practices-to-make-your-smartphone-more-secure-31507ababeb4 | ['Jerzy Biernacki'] | 2019-01-02 11:25:34.654000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'iOS', 'Software Development', 'Android', 'Security'] |
Hard to Live in Paradise. | Hard to Live in Paradise.
They see beaches and we see struggle.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
Let’s swim naked one more time.
Maybe it’s my fault. When other people drink, they want to fuck. When I drink, I want to commit arson and slap people. You’re the same way. We met in a nightmare inside a dream.
People see the beach and the waves. We see the edge. A life where it’s so easy to fall into drugs, debt. People see lovely photos on Instagram — and we are in the struggle.
There are so many gray areas. Gray places. Places where the soul withers and dies. Nothing is dangerous. People call customer service when they experience a personal tragedy. They want to forbid bad things. Anything that is inconvenient isn’t real. The disease isn’t real.
We bleed. We get bitten by spiders. We watch the injuries heal. We sell baked goods so we can get our teeth fixed. We don’t have insurance and we also don’t have the bullshit illusion that insurance means anything.
We are alive. That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. We glisten in the sun. It’s shallow, maybe, but everything is shallow. You can buy into your own bullshit or buy into someone else’s. You can sell nude photos online, or you can sell your time in a warehouse and pretend the latter is more noble.
You know who wants you to believe that? The people who want you to work in the warehouse.
Morally, there is no difference between the two.
But no one knows how hard it is to live in paradise. They see glitter and sunsets and assume we must be doing something wrong. They don’t see how often we slept in sand…but they also don’t see how much we don’t mind.
We have each other. Laughing under the stars, enjoying one more drink and wondering how we’ll get the money for the next one. | https://medium.com/are-you-okay/hard-to-live-in-paradise-3fd1329997c7 | ['Lisa Martens'] | 2020-12-10 21:28:31.520000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Travel', 'Beach', 'Society'] |
5 Important Learning Strategies for Programmers | 2. Take Breaks
Wait, what? That sounds unproductive! Actually, quite the opposite.
We all (me at the front) set aggressive deadlines for finishing up a course module in one day just to check it off our plan and progress ahead.
What we end up doing is just cramming in a lot of information in a lot less time. This is a big no!
The problem here is the same as it is with binge-watching. We barely remember what happened in all the episodes. We just remember the start and the end of the series.
Instead, if we watch only one episode per day, every day as we sit to watch the next episode, we exercise our brain trying to remember what has happened until now in the series. This way, we tend to remember those episodes for a longer period of time.
This ever happened to you?
When you are trying to fix a bug for hours and you are just tired, give up and just go to sleep. The next day when you wake up, you fix that bug within minutes!
It’s because you gave that much-needed break to your brain and regained your productivity.
Key take-away: Avoid cramming, take breaks as you learn so that your brain is able to process and remember all the important information. | https://medium.com/better-programming/5-important-learning-strategies-for-programmers-cdffa94a448d | ['Dhananjay Trivedi'] | 2020-01-15 00:29:04.675000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Learning', 'Productivity', 'Programming', 'Inspiration'] |
Are Our Moral Beliefs Fully Determined by Evolution? a Response to Richard Joyce. | Are Our Moral Beliefs Fully Determined by Evolution? a Response to Richard Joyce. Anthony DiMauro Follow Dec 20 · 13 min read
In the Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce examines the nature of our moral sense through a genealogical account and seeks to determine if we are justified in holding moral beliefs after learning more about their etiology. Joyce’s so-called evolutionary “debunking” of morality occurs in the last chapter of his book, and it concludes that we, given our evolutionary and genealogical history, ought to “cultivate agnosticism regarding all positive beliefs” involving moral concepts until evidence is found in favor of or against the belief.
It is my goal here to argue that, although we may yet have reason to cultivate agnosticism—or even be immensely, radically skeptical about moral beliefs—Joyce’s argument does not give us reason to do so.
More specifically, after outlining in greater detail the relevant parts of Joyce’s argument, I will, through posing a particular objection, attempt to show that Joyce’s debunking theory via his “belief pill” analogy ought not persuade us to embrace a radical skepticism, as he does not show how the influences of his contrived genealogy of our evolved moral sense determine a genealogy of our moral beliefs.
That is, it seems that there is still room in Joyce’s system for moral facts to influence a genealogical account of moral beliefs in way that both is different from that of our moral sense and allows us escape the agnosticism Joyce claims is rational to maintain; in which case, it may be yet reasonable to hold positive beliefs as they are not proven fully determined.
I then consider a possible (and what I take to be a very strong) response from Joyce to my objection and thereafter the consequences of such a response.
I. JOYCE’S ARGUMENT
It would benefit this discussion to outline Joyce’s main argument in chapter 6 of his work. Joyce begins by presenting to his reader a thought experiment surrounding the hypothetical use of what he calls “belief pills.” These belief pills instill particular beliefs you may not otherwise have held. He uses the belief that Napoleon lost at Waterloo as an example. Once the pill is administered, you believe Napoleon did, in fact, lose at Waterloo.
Joyce then asks us to suppose we discovered that this belief pill had been administered to us.
This discovery, Joyce says, “should undermine our faith in the belief” about Napoleon. We ought not be certain that Napoleon lost at Waterloo until we administered ourselves the antidote and sought out evidence for or against the belief. Until then, we should be agnostic about the belief.
For Joyce, this thought experiment serves as an analogy for our moral beliefs.
Just as discovering our belief that Napoleon lost at Waterloo stemmed from a causal process that was not determined by evidence—the belief pill—cultivated agnosticism about that belief, so too should we cultivate this agnosticism when discovering our moral beliefs are caused by an evolutionary process that is not determined by (moral) facts.
Namely, the evolutionary process of natural selection.
This non-moral cause of—and its influence on—our moral sense and its development is reason enough to take the antidote, says Joyce. That is, it is enough to cultivate agnosticism about all positive claims about the moral belief.
If we wanted to place this part of his argument in premise-conclusion form for clarity, we may outline it as follows:
P(1): We have an evolutionary history that contains a genealogy of moral sense that was shaped by a non-moral cause (in that does not make reference to any facts about morality); namely, natural selection. P(2): Moreover and given this evolutionary history, the beliefs about moral facts have been fully determined by the evolutionary influence of natural selection. — — — C: Therefore, because of this influence, we have no reason to form positive moral beliefs nor think the ones we do form are correct.
I will now pose my objection to Joyce. I will attempt to show that, although we may have reason to be agnostic about our moral beliefs, Joyce’s argument should not convince us, as it is not evident that the content of our moral beliefs be fully determined through his argument.
II. THE PARTICULAR GENEALOGICAL OBJECTION
It is clear from this argument that Joyce has not shown us how it is, exactly, that this discovery of natural selection with regard to the development of our moral sense ought to undermine our reason to think there are moral facts and, more importantly, consider our beliefs about them to be fully determined. More precisely, it does not follow that given a non-moral cause of an evolutionarily adapted moral sense or capacity to hold beliefs, our beliefs are fully determined by that same influence.
Even if it is the case that the existence of our beliefs is parasitic on our capacity to hold them (that our moral sense provides), it does not fully remove the possibility that a separate and later genealogical account of those beliefs account for moral facts. Another way, the use of the capacity influenced and fully determined does not cause, necessarily, that the beliefs held by way of that capacity be also fully determined; although, they likely are, to some extent at least, somewhat determined.
The point is we cannot conclude they are fully or even mostly determined based upon the given premises.
Indeed, it seems plausible to think that this seperate genealogical account could have occured and developed tangentially to the moral sense, after its own development through natural selection.
It seems that it is also remains plausible, within Joyce’s system, that our moral beliefs may have been developed through an entirely separate process; perhaps a type of moral edification — one that references, or even teaches how to access and reference, moral facts. That is, through a separate or noticeably distinct genealogical track, moral facts can be discovered and thereby allow us to form beliefs representative—or in significant accordance with—those very same facts, in which case agnosticism would not be a reasonable position to hold.
What this distinctness between a genealogy of capacity (moral sense) and a genealogy of use (moral beliefs) could look like is something of its own important project. However, what I will offer is that I take the plausible distinctness between the two genealogies to follow the standard indiscernibility of identicals threshold of there being at least one thing that is true of A that is not true of B or visa-versa; that is, the genealogy of our moral beliefs is distinct from the genealogy of our moral sense if at least one thing about the genealogy of our moral beliefs is true of itself and not true of the genealogy of our moral sense.
What exactly might be true of the former but not the latter could be a number of things. It could be true for the genealogy of our moral beliefs that they began at a point later than the genealogy of our moral sense — thus making it true that one began at a point in time that the other did not. This would satisfy the definition of distinctness and would make the genealogy of our moral beliefs distinct from that of our moral sense, thus disallowing conflation of the two terms as Joyce at times does. Of course, the thing true about one and not the other could be more substantial, and deal with the differences in the nature of the genealogies themselves; however, this is all I shall offer on the notion of distinctness here, as it is beyond the scope of this essay.
Importantly, I am not endorsing this view, but merely attempting to display the remaining plausibility of not-fully-determined moral beliefs contra Joyce’s claiming otherwise.
If one is not convinced by my objection, let her consider an analogous case.
Consider, for example, our capacity to understand precise abstract concepts such as numbers. Now consider the ability with which we use this capacity to grasp numbers to perform measurements, analyze astronomical phenomena, discover Euclidean space, sum, and perform predicate calculus.
If it were at this very moment discovered that this capacity is a result of natural selection due to, say, ability to count the number of predatorial lions in an effort to know when one is safe (as Philip Kitcher suggests in a memorable example) as it would likely be better for survival, would we say that we ought to be agnostic about all measurements and mathematical calculation we have made with this capacity? Obviously not.
The summation of 2+ 2 = 4 and mathematics qua mathematics is not “debunked” on the basis of this capacity being influenced by the evolutionary process of natural selection. Similarly, our held moral beliefs are not “debunked” on the basis of the moral sense being influenced by evolution through natural selection,
It is possible that Joyce may respond by claiming the mathematical case is really not analogous to the moral one; that my example is an unfair analogy. However, this objection is unfounded and does nothing to his purpose.
Of course I am not arguing that mathematical beliefs are perfectly analogous in quality, what they predicate, or their respective qualia. Merely note that I am using mathematics somewhat arbitrarily and one will find this objection absurd; that is, I could have substituted numerous concepts or branches of knowledge for my analogy. This fact lends itself in the main to my point of criticism! My criticism was aimed at the logical structure of the argument, and the consequences of its premises.
In a word, my criticism wants to show that Joyce’s argument overgeneralizes.
If Joyce were to somehow reject the mathematical example on the basis of structural analogousness, he would have to explain where exactly it went wrong. It seems that the structures of the cases are identical in that they both stem from an external, evolutionarily influenced capacity and thereby — using Joyce’s premises — infer that the use of the capacity to form beliefs within it form beliefs that are fully determined by the same influence.
Viz., Joyce’s claim and my example follow the same tract: the formation of a moral or mathematical belief within their respective capacities through mental exercise within those capacities (a priori reasoning, deduction, induction, analysis, synthesis intuition, etc.) would merely result in evolutionarily determined beliefs, thus making it rational to cultivate agnosticism about our respective beliefs.
In one case we ought to be agnostic about moral beliefs, in another, mathematical beliefs — but these could be replaced with beliefs about drama, honor, etc. The cases line up perfectly insofar as the argument runs from — from a level of high altitude — an-influenced-capacity to influenced-beliefs-within-the-capacity. More exactly, the analogy follows the premises outlined by Joyce’s argument while merely replacing “moral” capacities and beliefs for “mathematical” ones. Indeed, the analogy follows Joyce’s argument structure and its consequences precisely.
Thus, to clarify how this part of my argument works, my aim is to criticise the logical structure of Joyce’s argument and show how, given what he has laid out and claimed, his argument overgeneralizes to include within it nearly all beliefs about almost all concepts that make reference to their relevant facts. This is, I suspect, something very few, including Joyce, would like to sign their name onto.
III. A POSSIBLE RESPONSE FROM JOYCE THROUGH STREET
Joyce may be tempted to object to my argument claiming that in fact the moral sense’s being influenced thereby corrupts our beliefs about moral facts, as the corrupted capacity provides that the use of tools within that capacity are also corrupted. This line of argument might take the form of something found in Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma”.
In her essay A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value, Street presents both horns of her dilemma to the moral realist and goes on to fend off various objections and solutions that the realist could potentially respond with.
In one particular section, Street fends off the objection that corrective measures of human reflection could be used to negate the evolutionary corruption of our ability to make reference to moral facts and our moral beliefs, in which she writes:
“Thus, if the find of evaluative judgements with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence and the objector has offered no reason to doubt this part of the argument then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.”
Joyce could perhaps similarly argue against my objection, claiming that the moral beliefs with which we hold about the moral facts are as fully determined as the capacity to hold them through our moral sense is; since, it would seem to be the case that the exercise (“the holding”) of our moral beliefs is rooted in the evolutionarily determined capacity.
IV. THE CONSEQUENCES OF THIS RESPONSE
I should note that I used Street’s objection specifically here as I find it the most compelling response Joyce could potentially pose to my objection.
It seems, however, that while Street’s use of the claim that contamination of our genealogy ultimately also contaminates our ability to comb through our beliefs is at least somewhat plausible (within the context of her argument), for Joyce it manifests a new kind of dilemma, one in which he: (i.) must admit that our moral beliefs are not fully or mostly determined by an evolutionarily influenced moral sense or (ii.) widen the scope of his claim such that he must argue that all our concepts themselves are evolutionarily influenced and thus determined.
That is, he must undercut his argument thoroughly or accept a claim no philosopher (including, I presume, Joyce) has up to present wished to commit himself to.
To begin, consider the first issue (i.).
This arises by not responding in Street’s fashion outlined above and thus grants that the genealogical account of our moral sense does not affect or contaminate our moral beliefs.
If they do not contaminate our beliefs, then Joyce is yet without an explanation of how the genealogical influence of evolution on our moral sense determines our beliefs, causing his prescribed agnosticism to be unfounded. This is, quite obviously, something Joyce would not wish to do as it removes all or most of the force of his argument.
If he were to otherwise use Street’s claim (option ii.) and apply it in response to my objection, his issues become twofold. First, if it is the case — as this particular objection contends — that the genealogy of our moral sense does truly contaminate the moral beliefs we hold such that we can not reliably comb through them to determine facticity or any other desirable quality, it seems we would not even be able to comprehend the notion of the concepts maintained and entailed by the sense.
It seems Joyce would suggest this latter option is correct.
He writes:
“Suppose that the imaginary belief pills do not generate particular propositional beliefs, but rather dispose you to form a belief about a particular concept — a concept that wouldn’t figure in your beliefs. Thus, instead of a belief pill that makes you believe Napoleon lost at Waterloo, it’s just a ‘Napoleon’ pill that makes you form beliefs about Napoleon in general.”
If you were to find out this pill was administered, like that of the propositional belief pill analogy, Joyce claims it ought to undermine all your beliefs concerning Napoleon.
This is a much stronger claim (and one reminiscent of Street’s discussion of the second horn of her dilemma) that seems, put charitably, to attend to far too much.
This is an even stronger claim than what was outlined in § 2, as it accounts for all beliefs about the relevant facts about all concepts (respectively) and the tools those concepts contain. It seems that by this principle, evolution could account — and thereby contaminate and fully determine — for all concepts in which we have a cognitive capacity or sense that allows them; e.g., mathematics (at least geometric and algebraic concepts), logics, physics, and even general particular concepts.
It is clearly implausible to suggest that we ought to be agnostic about everything conceptual; even a Pyrrhonian skeptic would not traverse that much ground.
Joyce, then — to reiterate — seems to have to either concede his position or accept a claim that would leave us with nothing outside the scope of the agnostic, both of which I presume Joyce has no intention of doing.
Moreover, there is a less subtle reason to yet reject this kind of response: the use of the contamination principle still does not either acknowledge or dispel the possibility of a separate genealogy.
That is, claiming the corruption of the use of tools within a corrupted capacity does not describe how the corruption is transferred (for propositional belief or concepts!). Although the genealogy of our beliefs may find its roots in (or be contingent upon) our naturally selected moral sense, this fact alone does not say how this impacts the beliefs we hold.
It is likely the case that the influence upon our moral sense has somehow impacted which beliefs we tend to be attracted to — and Joyce’s argument seems to suggest this; however, it is, as far as Joyce’s argument takes us, implausible to conclude with any certainty that these moral beliefs have been fully determined by his genealogical account of the moral sense.
Although the genealogy of our beliefs may find its roots in (or be contingent upon) our naturally selected moral sense, this fact alone does not say how this impacts the beliefs we hold. It is likely the case that the influence upon our moral sense has somehow impacted which beliefs we tend to be attracted to — and Joyce’s argument seems to suggest this; however, it is, as far as Joyce’s argument takes us, implausible to conclude with any certainty that these moral beliefs have been fully determined by his genealogical account of the moral sense.
Now, after considering a criticism by analogy and an objection in § 2, an objection to my own objection through the use of Sharon Street’s work in § 3, a dilemma faced by Joyce, and the various consequences of his potential responses in § 4, I shall offer a brief word in conclusion.
VI. A WORD IN CONCLUSION
I have above outlined Joyce’s argument as charitably as possible and posed what I take to be a serious flaw in Joyce’s argument (or, more precisely, his logical structure and conclusion). I have attempted, through what I take to be a serious objection to his claim, to show the issues with his ability to defend the claim as it is subject to losing its force or inadvertently overgeneralizing.
Although it stands to reason that we may yet have reasons to cultivate an agnosticism about our moral beliefs, it seems that the case for this as a complete moral “debunking” was not realized through Joyce, who needs to do more work explaining the relation of possibly distinct genealogies if he is to maintain his claim that moral beliefs are fully determined. | https://medium.com/curious/are-our-moral-beliefs-fully-determined-by-evolution-a-response-to-richard-joyce-33c300dfc08e | ['Anthony Dimauro'] | 2020-12-22 23:09:43.283000+00:00 | ['Evolution', 'Metaethics', 'Ethics', 'Science', 'Philosophy'] |
Intro to Post-Structuralist French Philosophy for Data Scientists (Part II) | Why Post-Structuralist? What’s Structure?
What is structuralism? Philosopher Simon Blackburn paints an anthropological view of structuralism as:
“…the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.”
Influenced by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explored the universals of human culture, such as kinship structures (matrilineal or patrilineal? communal or individual?) and their corresponding effects on taboos of incest. A similar interest in structure inspired work on abstract mathematical structures by the Bourbaki group in the 1960s. The notion of structure has had a lasting influence on sociology, too, tracing back to the work of Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. More recently, Anthony Giddens developed “structuration theory” analyzing social systems as self-regulating, invisible structures constantly shaping and constraining the social behavior within them.
Generalizing, we can say the following. Structure is what allows patterning, and thus regularity, to be observed against a fixed background, providing a center from which all elements are oriented. At this level, structures permit and define the identities of elements which, taken together, constitute the structure. Indeed, the identity of the elements cannot be determined except by reference to the element’s relations to other elements. Let’s look at these ideas more closely.
Structures: Self-regulating Systems Closed Under Transformation
Jean Piaget gives a nice treatment of structuralism that may resonate with data scientists. Piaget says structures are different from mere aggregates and have three necessary properties:
Wholeness: Although composed of individual elements subject to unique laws, the elements together define the structure as structure. The system does not rely on elements external to it. Transformation: Elements within the structure can be transformed according to sets of laws which define the nature of the transformations. Self-regulation: Transformation of elements never yields results external to the system. In other words, all transformations of elements lead only to elements internal to the system (in mathspeak: the structure is closed under transformation). Structures self-preserve themselves, though they may evolve when elements are transformed within them.
So with that background, we can understand what exactly Derrida was reacting against and why people call him a “post-structuralist.” He is rejecting the idea that there is only one structure (Western logic/metaphysics) or only one way of ascribing identity to an event or thing. Remember that Wittgenstein claimed in his Tractatus that logic was the (only possible) description of that very structure. If we go outside the structure, we must remain silent.
Derrida, however, argues that we unnecessarily limit ourselves if we think this way because we, as humans, possess the power to define new structures (and corresponding identities) at will. Let’s now look at some key influencers of Derrida before we jump into his actual writings.
Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash
Forebears of Derrida: The Three Masters of Suspicion
When first approaching Derrida it helps to have a basic familiarity with the ideas of those who have influenced him. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx have been referred to as the “masters of suspicion” for the way in which they have questioned the ideological bases and methods of Western knowledge production. Derrida will combine these ideas in a rather idiosyncratic way to critique the foundations — the axioms, so to speak — of Western logic. One general concern is whether logic is a description or an idealization of thought. If it is a description, then whose description does it correspond to? If it’s an idealization, then whose ideal is it? For more background see Part I here (Hegel & Foucault).
Nietzsche
All three thinkers shared a similar concern with a kind of “false consciousness.” Let me explain. For Nietzsche, our inherited (Judeo-Christian) moral values turn out to be contingent and not necessary truths, based on historical contingencies, such as who defeated whom in battle. Truth and power were two sides of the same coin. Everything we believed to be true was, in reality, an expression of the will to power (in Foucault’s words, “the will to truth”). The powerful use the linguistic guise (or “discourse”) of truth to hide and close off questioning about the origins of their power. The exquisite skeptic, Nietzsche claimed there were no facts, only interpretations. If God was dead, and God’s intentions contained the truth behind the meaning of things and their names, then the truth could now never be known. Truth is a mere rhetorical device clothed in metaphysical garb, given to us in order to preclude an infinite regress of skepticism about its foundations.
Freud
Freud’s contribution is slightly different. Based on a kind of “hydraulic model” of the mind, his work revealed the ego’s battle against the id in his book Civilization and its Discontents. Freud explained that what we thought were our “true” desires and needs were actually symbols of a much deeper, repressed need for something else (typically unresolved sexual urges). There was a vast unconscious network of impulses scurrying around in our minds of which we were, of course, unaware. The neurotic person was one whose ability to repress these animalistic urges was less than perfect. Freud’s ideas of powerful unconscious drives went against the influential ideas of Plato and Aristotle, where man was essentially rational and his virtuous soul was kept in neat and proper order by reason. We are not pre-formed Cartesian subjects capable of achieving perfect self-knowledge, but incomplete fractured entities. Our incompleteness as subjects puts limits on our objects of knowledge.
Marx
Marx implores us to take up the skepticism of Nietzsche and see how those in power have used an ideology of truth to repress and alienate those without power from their true potential as humans. Marx’s focus was on liberation: on freeing persons from their ideological shackles — the institutions, norms, and practices of a society — that blinded them to their true nature. The idea of false consciousness in Marx relates to our mistaken pursuit of our interests, when in fact these “interests” reflect the goals and needs of the powerful ruling classes (note the connection with recommender systems: they claim to recommend what we are “interested in” but actually reveal what the company is interested in selling). We have confused appearance with reality. If we could transcend this state of false consciousness, as the movement of the Hegelian dialectic supposes, we could finally realize our true interests. The ruling classes are those with the means of material production (e.g., economic capital) and this is what grounds ideology through a process of reification, or a “naturalizing” of what is accidental and contingent and treating it as necessary and fixed.
Photo by Dan-Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash
Exposing the Internal Contradictions of Western Metaphysics
The literary technique of Deconstruction is famously associated with Derrida. Roughly put, the idea is that structures contain the seeds of their own destruction. Western thought, obsessed with reason since Plato, has unknowingly relied on a system of rhetorical metaphors masquerading as reality. It has imposed a way of thinking, a structure to thought (logic), and defined it in such a way that anything not following its rules is therefore illogical. Deconstruction broadly seeks to reveal the dominant rhetorical devices implicit in Western philosophical thinking, and encourage us to instead view what was previously fixed and solid as flexible, capable of infinite play through the creative interpretation of signs.
Here’s a metaphor of my own to help make sense of things. Imagine pulling a single thread from an old sweatshirt and the sweatshirt instantly unravels, revealing it to be nothing more than some loosely held-together threads. Pulling the thread is analogous to exposing the internal contradictions of the structure. In this case, structures are systems (“totalities”) of Western thinking which put (Western) logic and (Western) reason at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy. The contradiction is that what they assume to be necessary is in fact contingent. The tunnel vision of Western thinking, and its assumption of the possibility of absolute knowledge, prevents it from ever achieving absolute knowledge!
By systematically excluding other kinds of knowledge from its canon, it is necessarily forced to fail in its goal of attaining complete knowledge.
A Binary Misinterpretation of Derrida: Us vs. Them
Derrida’s work itself is a performance piece against the totalization of Western metaphysics in modern life. Yet today some people use his ideas to promote a totalization of academic thought in the name of social justice. It’s true though, his ideas were deeply shaped by his outsider experience as an Algerian-born Sephardic Jew growing up in Post-World War II France. You have to remember he came of age during the 1968 Student Movement.
In the modern political sphere, there seems to be an intuitive appeal for grand-narratives (filtering historical events to fit a simplified causal arc) and binary thinking. Derrida would have been repulsed by the binary, us vs. them logic used to stifle opposing, marginalized views. Derrida might argue that America is experiencing something similar to a Nietzschean transvaluation of values, expressed as a will to power under the banner of social justice. In response to calls for social justice, Derrida would have said something like “Whose Justice, Whose Rationality?” (see Alisdair MacIntyre’s 1988 book of the same title). We should be wary of anyone calling to stifle the voices and perspectives of others.
Binary logic is a logic of power: it makes it exceedingly easy to exclude, to round-off. But reality is inherently messy and complex. Binary logic is at its most repressive when forcing something which sits perfectly between two poles to move completely to one or the other. Derrida wants to focus our attention on the liminal space between quantized values: to the analog continuity of being rather than digitally discrete Being. We gain from recognizing, not ignoring, the complexity of Being.
Remember Hegel and his dialectic of synthesis-antithesis? Well, we might interpret Derrida as doing something similar: by accepting that things may be both A and not-A (perhaps at a later time) we open ourselves to the understanding of an even greater unity, where we see each prior instance as a limiting case of something grander and more abstract.
Derrida also was deeply impressed by cybernetics and information theory. We must at some point round off measurements of real numbers in order to do anything useful with them. We must compress them. Imagine if you had to send someone all the digits of pi! But when this rounding process is repeated over and over, this eventually leads to unpredictability. It is a fact of our existence as finite beings (i.e., we don’t have infinite storage capacity) that “chaos” will eventually present itself as the unpredictability of systems. In short,
Binary logic is great at compression, but bad at truth. Truth is nice, but could take forever to transmit.
Similar to how Gödel and Turing showed the limits of logic using the tools of logic itself, Derrida sets out to deconstruct the totality of Western metaphysics — using the very concepts of Western metaphysics. If Derrida can reveal the illogic of logic, if he can introduce doubt as to its foundations, then he provides a motive for change.
The Dilemma of Continuous vs. Discrete, Analog vs. Digital
Derrida is really getting at fundamental metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Derrida and Gilles Deleuze were fascinated by a tension central to information theory: how do we balance our needs for compression with truth?
If we compress too much, we lose essential structure and become susceptible to the effects of noise. We might think redundancy can shield us against the harmful effects of noise, but this shield costs something — namely, transmission time and storage space.
To virtually guarantee you receive my message correctly, I could send you 1000 extra copies. But then you’d have to be able to store all of them and they’d take a while to send. By the time you receive them, they may no longer be useful! (It’s kind of like when you discover you never responded to a friend’s Facebook message from six months earlier and you realize it would be kind of useless to respond to “Hey, you want to hang out this weekend?” half a year later, so you don’t respond).
Likewise, I could send you a single, perfect copy of my message, but if I’m unlucky and something happens to my message, you’re not going to get the exact message I sent. It’s brittle without the shield of redundancy.
Logocentrism, Science, and The Metaphysics of Presence
Much like the Frankfurt school Critical Theorists who decried the effects of following instrumental reason to its logical conclusion — leading to the horrors of Auschwitz — Derrida’s task is to protest the dominance of Western metaphysical thinking, passed down since Plato’s theory of the forms. He calls this Western bias towards the use of reason logocentrism.
Logocentrism is the striving inherent to Western metaphysics towards totality, the idea that subject can reach perfect self-identity with object. If we achieve a complete description of the world, then the identity of knower and known dissolves and there is perfect transparency between subject and object. Objects are unmediated by any kind of re-presentation (they are fully present to the subject!). Knower and known are indistinguishable. Logocentrism is this quest for perfect self-transparency between knower and known, subject and object. It is the immediate and unmediated presence to consciousness of eternal and immutable essences — these are called Eidos in Greek.
If mind acts as a mirror of nature, then logocentrism is the striving towards making this mirror as transparent as possible via the logical reduction of a complex reality. If logocentrism were successful, then our internal representations of an external reality would be identical with reality and we would know the mind of God.
Even today we find traces of logocentrism in our most modern scientific theories of the universe. Here is Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time:
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle to everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would truly know the mind of God.
Appearance and Reality
We have now come back full-circle to the age-old philosophical problem of distinguishing between mere appearance and reality. We now see why Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are referred to as the Masters of Suspicion and why they had such an impact on Derrida. Each of these thinkers made the startling claim that what we naively assumed to be reality was merely appearance.
Two related questions now arise:
When does a thing under a different representation stop being that thing? What distinguishes a thing and a representation of that same thing and two separate things?
The Nature of Uncertainty in Probability and Statistics
Derrida’s ideas have even deeper implications for the concept of uncertainty. Now, the subject of uncertainty has a complex past and there are differing views about what it is. Neural network pioneer Bart Kosko, for instance, says we need fuzzy logic on the basis of a distinction he makes between epistemological and metaphysical uncertainty. The crux of the debate is whether uncertainty is located in objects themselves (fuzzy logic), or in observers of objects (subjective Bayes).
Metaphysical uncertainty: The identity of something is not indeterminate due our lack of knowledge about it. The object itself is intrinsically fuzzy. No amount of information we receive can change this! Roughly put, fuzzy logic is a mathematical framework where elements in fuzzy sets have membership functions expressing the degree of membership in various sets (but these degrees don’t need to sum to 1). Traditional set theory (i.e., ‘crisp set theory’) is, from the point of view, just a special case of fuzzy set theory in which membership functions can only take on the two values of 1 or 0.
Epistemological uncertainty: The identity of something is determinate, but we lack enough information to settle the question completely. This is broadly the subjective Bayesian view of uncertainty. Bayesian statistician Dennis Lindley argued that fuzzy logic was unnecessary because the only kind of uncertainty that mattered was epistemological uncertainty, and Bayes’ formula gives us all the tools we need to deal with it.
Here are a couple geometrical examples to illustrate some of these questions. They have to do with identity and difference and they challenge the binary logic essential Western scientific thinking.
Sine & Cosine as 2D Projection of a 3D Unit Helix
Are sine and cosine really just 2D projections of a 3D unit helix? Derrida would say there’s no answer to this question. There are no truth conditions for definitively settling the issue: we choose one representation when doing so suits our particular problem at hand. This is effectively the neo-pragmatist position on truth taken by philosopher Richard Rorty. Derrida would claim this is a case of metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological, uncertainty.
Back to Plato’s Cave: are sine and cosine really just 2D projections of a 3D unit helix? Source: Reddit.
Triangle Inequality
Here’s another geometric example illustrating some problems of perspective and identity. When the interior angles approach 0, the length of z approaches x+y. When the left and right interior angles of this triangle get to 0, the triangle collapses into a line. At that point, how would we distinguish between a line and a triangle? Is the figure a line, or is it a special case of triangle with 0 degree angles? Is it neither? Both?
The Triangle Inequality. Source: Wikipedia.
Liminality and The Logic of Classification Accuracy
A confusion matrix showing four possible outcomes of binary classification. Note there are two (FP, and FN) ways to make an error and one may be much worse than the other in social or ethical consequences. Source: Wikimedia.
Anyone who has spent time working with highly imbalanced datasets knows accuracy is a bad metric to evaluate a classifier’s performance. The reason is of course that when one class is, for example, 10X more common than the other, it’s very easy to achieve high accuracy by simply predicting the most common class in every new case. Assuming my test set is drawn from from the same distribution as my training set, if it has 100 observations and I know from the training set that 99% them are negative, then I can simply predict negative for all test cases to achieve 99% accuracy.
The problem in using accuracy to measure predictive performance is that it assumes all errors (FP/FN) have uniform cost. If we ask of our predictive algorithm that it maximize accuracy, it will do this. This is the double-edged sword of Adorno & Horkheimer’s instrumental reason at its finest. But the way it does so may not align with what we expect.
So what will happen? The algorithm will trade-off bad predictions of the minority class for good predictions of the majority class! After all, overall accuracy is simply a weighted average of the accuracies of each individual class weighted by the proportion of training examples in the class. Because minority class predictions occur less often, the algorithm wastes no “effort” in correctly classifying them. In short, it merely does what any instrumentally “rational” agent might do when asked to maximize some objective.
Simplicity of Binary Classification & Performance Metrics in ML
Derrida would not like the logical simplicity of many ML classification tasks. Reality moves, grows, changes: there is no black and white — only varying shades of gray.
Digital representations work through compression, by rounding or capping a continuous input signal into a discrete number of bits (assuming log base 2). We can see why digitalization of human experience is problematic: digital circuits might store a continuous voltage of 1 if inputs exceed some value, and 0 if they fall short of some threshold. But what happens to all those analog values that, by chance, fall between these two margins?
Derrida is asking us something similar here. What would happen if we didn’t “round off” our complex social reality to make gender and ethnic identities fit some discrete values? We set classification thresholds, compute confusion matrices and corresponding ROC curves. Derrida would point out that while some particular cutoff threshold would maximize our ROC curve, given a different context another cutoff might be better. There is no “single” best cutoff: it all depends on how it’s applied.
Derrida drew on ideas from logic, physics, and information theory to argue that there was no final truth about the meaning of a given text outside of a given frame of reference. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
With that general overview of themes, let’s dig into some actual work of Derrida. The discussion below draws mostly on ideas from his book Limited Inc.
Derrida and the Problem of Context
Derrida is perhaps most famous for his insistence that it is a precondition for the possibility of communication that there be no absolutely determinable contexts of signification or meaning. Derrida sought to jettison the ancient Greek/Platonic ideal of logos, that there exists some pure form of intelligibility in a concept or event — that an event could ever be understood outside of a frame of reference, from God’s point of view. Plato, for example, held that logos is what accounted for the ability of particular cases (tokens) to refer back to general, abstract forms (types). Tokens are understood as tokens because they partake in the general form or Eidos.
Semantic Communication
For Derrida, any kind of semantic communication through the written mark (what he refers to more generally as writing) implies an absence of presencing (meant in the Heideggerian sense of truth as aletheia, as disclosure or uncovering of Being, see my post here for more details) when the mark is received and “decoded.” Yet the original presencing must include the conscious state of the sender of such a message. But once this state is signified via the written mark (once this presencing has been re-presented in its written, symbolic form) it is dead and must now function in the absence of the original intention of its author.
Derrida says “representation supplants presence,” or carries or stands in for what originally was present. The act of writing itself brings a “rupture” between it and the context of its production which are “inscribed” in the written mark. Yet we can nevertheless communicate without knowing who the author of the mark was or what the “collectivity of presences” inscribed in the mark were. Derrida is not trying to eliminate the notion of meaning, but instead point out a problem in an account of semantic communication he traces back to the ancient Greeks.
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash
Detaching Sign from Signifier
Upon the moment of reception of a sign, the context — including the conscious experience of the receiver — has changed. Space and time have passed between the original authorial act of inscription and its reception as text. But Derrida argues that there is no need to posit, as a traditional correspondence theory of truth might, that the referent of the mark (in its productive context) must be present in order for the mark to be made intelligible by its receiver. Indeed, the absence of its original author is a source of creative strength for the text.
In fact, that the signified (referent) and signifier (the written mark) can be detached is what permits communication as such. If the mark could only refer to the original singular moment of its inscription, then by definition it could never be iterable. But since marks are indeed iterable, it follows that whatever the receiver receives, is not quite what was sent.
To illustrate this point, Derrida adduces the citation. The effect of citation is to cut off the “vouloir-dire” of a mark from its “given context,” and permit the “engendering of an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.” In other words, I can cite anyone out of context and thereby produce a new context. I can do this an infinite number of times and thereby generate an infinity of possible meanings for a set of marks.
This phenomenon is what’s behind the decontextualized “sound bite” and also seems to drive the creative power of open-source libraries/packages in various programming languages. The original author of package created these functions to solve some particular problem, but I can find a use for the same function in solving my own, different problem.
Today I would argue that our digitally recorded behaviors are essentially “behavior bites,” extracted from their originary moments of intention and repurposed and interpreted in a way useful for data collectors.
Photo by Oleksandra Bardash on Unsplash
Iterability of Writing and Chomsky’s Discrete Infinity
This functioning in differing contexts depends on the “iterability” of the sign. The iterability of writing is a precondition for the existence of writing. Iterability is what ties repetition of identity to difference (“alterity”). For it is through replication that identification is even possible. Re-cognition assumes cognition: regularity cannot occur prior to the ascription of identity to events. But it is through a kind of gestalt switch, or re-framing, that suddenly the identity of a repetitive event is cast in a new light. I am reminded of the difference between discrete and continuous numbers, between analog and digital Being.
Derrida’s concepts of citation and iterability have an affinity with Noam Chomsky’s characterization of the “discrete infinity” of human language, summarized in his New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind:
Human language is based on an elementary property that also seems to be biologically isolated: the property of discrete infinity, which is exhibited in its purest form by the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, . . . Children do not learn this property; unless the mind already possesses the basic principles,
no amount of evidence could provide them. Similarly, no child has to
learn that there are three and four word sentences, but no three-and-a
half word sentences, and that they go on forever; it is always possible to
construct a more complex one, with a definite form and meaning. (pgs. 3–4)
Photo by ev on Unsplash
Behavioral Data as Public Signs
What does Derrida got to do with data science? Derrida’s ideas help explain how our digitally recorded behaviors (our personal data) become detached from conscious, intentional presence (our subjective experience online), thereby becoming digital “public signs’’ which can be algorithmically manipulated and combined in novel ways by recommender system designers.
Derrida is not saying that the notion of “meaning” can be eliminated. He is claiming that meaning is irreducible to what appears to us in a text because distanciation between author and reader severs us from the original authorial moment of intention. This act of distanciation, however, gives us an opportunity for creative play in advancing new and original interpretations of signs.
Digital distanciation opens the question of whose interpretations count and how these interpretations are put into action and applied to real people
For example, many digital platforms use recommender systems (and increasingly reinforcement learning) to determine the content and format of our online experiences. But on what interpretations do these recommendations rest? The downside of digital distanciation is that we can now never know the original “true’’ intention in the absence of the original act of the data subject, if such a thing existed. What did you really mean when you clicked the “buy now” button? Did you intend to buy it, or was it a mistake?
As long as data subjects do not possess legal rights to enter into dialogue with data collectors, they cannot negotiate the meaning of their digital behaviors. Data collectors, in an effort to save money and time, choose to re-present and not present the author of the data to account for his behavior. To me, however, it’s not clear why this must be so.
Why should others get to one-sidedly interpret a representation of my action in my absence?
GDPR: Personal Data Rights for Dialogue and Interpretation
If we follow the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we let the data subjects themselves decide what their digitally recorded behaviors mean. If you’re interested in reading more and learning about the philosophical foundations of the GDPR, you can check out our paper Beyond Our Behavior: The GDPR and Humanistic Personalization. | https://towardsdatascience.com/intro-to-post-structuralist-french-philosophy-for-data-scientists-part-ii-d00cd8194174 | ['Travis Greene'] | 2020-12-11 10:34:49.009000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Ethics', 'Social Justice', 'Philosophy'] |
The Frontline Workers Are Our Pandemic Soldiers | The Frontline Workers Are Our Pandemic Soldiers
Their battle is different, but they deserve respect.
Photo by CDC from Pexels
Today marked yet another day where Americans woke up to a morning of record-breaking COVID-19 cases. Again, I saw yet another article about nurses pleading with the U.S. public to believe in the severity of the virus.
It got me thinking: would we do this same thing to soldiers fighting a war? I know there have been others to draw this parallel, but it’s powerful enough to bring it up again.
Don’t think too deeply about this, but imagine for a moment that what was happening now was not invisible. Imagine it was a war, in our country, with military personnel who were advising us to stay inside to stay safe. Imagine they gave us all simple instructions that would likely keep us protected from the enemy: wear a mask, don’t gather in groups, and stay inside as much as possible. By following these orders, we could let them do their job outside: defeat the enemy.
Do you think we would listen to them?
Well, I do! And I think you would too.
So why is this pandemic much different? Because the virus cannot be seen? Because it does not brandish weapons with bullets? Because it is quiet and not earth-shattering in its explosiveness? Because it has no voice with which to directly threaten us?
None of that makes it any less real, or any less dangerous.
Not believing in the pandemic is one thing. Not listening to the people who deal with it daily, and therefore don’t have a choice whether or not to believe in it, is a whole other thing. A whole other ignorant thing.
Continuing with the military example, you wouldn’t discredit what a soldier coming home from battle said was happening — would you? Even if you didn’t agree with the war; if you heard someone with direct experience speak about it you would respect and believe in what they were saying, right?
I would! And look, I am a person who wishes wars and violence would cease to exist. But I would still believe our military members if they came home from a battle and discussed what was happening. I still support our military members for their tremendous work and service. And I look to them with deep gratitude. After all, let’s get real, I could never do what they do!
So, why is it that we cannot apply this same sentiment — en masse — to the frontline health workers?
They are fighting for our safety, just as the military does.
They are sacrificing time spent with their families, just as the military does. They are jeopardizing their own health and wellbeing for the good of other people — people like me and you! Just as the military does.
While I know our country’s history of supporting military veterans' reintegration is far from perfect (to say the very least), I think most people give a lot of respect and recognition to them. Far more than it seems they are providing the frontline nurses and doctors who fight this pandemic around the clock. | https://medium.com/politically-speaking/the-frontline-workers-are-our-pandemic-soldiers-cb4401042427 | ['Kristy Lynn'] | 2020-11-25 22:01:03.663000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Covid 19', 'Society', 'Pandemic', 'Perspective'] |
Automate Your Linux Deployment Using Azure DevOps | Configure your Linux server for automation
Now, this would be the fun part. Microsoft already did all the heavy lifting with the boring installation things. Now it is our turn to automate things.
1. Make a script to automate NGINX configurations
To add new NGINX configurations we will create a shell script, add this add-nginx-conf.sh script on the home directory:
A shell script to add NGINX configurations automatically.
This script will create a search for configuration files named using the associated DNS, it will create a new one if it was not found. Once found, the new configuration routes will be added there. Mind you, the configuration route in this script would be a basic proxy pass, you might want to add more configurations to the script if you want to use it for production.
The shell script accepts three parameters. The DNS, proxy route, and the port being used:
sudo ~/add-nginx-conf.sh <DNS> <proxy route> <app port>
Example:
sudo ~/add-nginx-conf.sh yourdomain.com enrichment_track 14321
In this example, the script will add configurations for the yourdomain.com domain, with a reverse proxy to port 14321 in the enrichment_track.
2. Make a script to automate system service configurations
To add new system service configurations we will create a shell script, add this make-service.sh script on the home directory:
A shell script to automate the making of systemd services
Before you copy and paste the code, notice the <user> and <server environment> tags in the script. Please change it to your corresponding user and server environment beforehand. Server environments in this case would be either Development or Production.
The script will generate new systemd service files that would run .NET Core projects. To generate scripts for other types of applications you would want to change the given template.
The shell script accepts two parameters. The service name, and the project name used:
sudo ~/make-service.sh <service name> <project name>
Example:
sudo ~/make-service.sh CI-Build API-Project
In this example, the script will add a new system service file CI-Build.service, that runs a dll file named API-Project.dll.
3. Setup a user to run systemctl and Nginx commands without password prompts
For automation purposes, the user that you used to install your Azure Agent needs to be able to run systemctl and Nginx commands without a password prompt. To remove the password prompts on sudo run:
sudo visudo
We need to run all the commands in the script using sudo without having a password being prompted. So, we make exceptions for those commands, and the corresponding scripts we are going to use.
Then add this on the last line (change the <user> tag beforehand):
<user> ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/systemctl, /usr/sbin/nginx, /usr/bin/chcon, /usr/bin/chown, /usr/bin/echo,
/usr/bin/touch, /usr/bin/sed, /home/<user>/make-service.sh, /home/<user>/add-nginx-conf.sh
Exit and save the config file, then try running one of these commands using sudo. You should not be prompted for a password.
A full explanation on how to run a sudo command without a password can be seen here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/automate-your-linux-deployment-using-azure-devops-ffe4ba7c938b | ['Agustinus Theodorus'] | 2020-12-25 03:02:11.985000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Azure', 'Microsoft', 'DevOps'] |
Loading your app from the network using QML | QML does sounds like it’s inspired by the HTML judging by pronunciation but it’s a fairly different type of technology where QML is used to develop (native) applications using QML, which is a new language in itself, that can be paired with JavaScript and extended by C++, while HTML, in essence, was created to make web pages using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
We have evaluated in previous articles how you can make web apps using QML and Qt for WebAssembly, however, that results in an HTML application that is run, presumably, on the web. QML also has WebGL plugin to stream application over the network, but that has different limitations.
So the question comes, could we actually have a native app built using Qt/QML that can load QML from the network so that your application could be (re)loaded on the fly without re-installation?
Netflix Android TV app with ability to reload application (source)
Well, we can.
QML Loader
QML has a Loader element which is used to dynamically create and load parts of your QML application . This is a common use-case in apps when you cannot have huge app with all elements created in advance. You would dynamically create parts as you need them.
In QML there are different ways to do that using different elements (i.e. StackView or SwipeView), but the basic one is a Loader and is commonly used with other components.
Loader can load a QML file (using the source property) or a Component object (using the sourceComponent property). It is useful for delaying the creation of a component until it is required: for example, when a component should be created on demand, or when a component should not be created unnecessarily for performance reasons.
There is nothing better than one small example to show how it works:
Item {
width: 200; height: 200
MouseArea {
anchors.fill: parent
onClicked: pageLoader.source = "Page1.qml"
}
} import QtQuick 2.0width: 200; height: 200 Loader { id: pageLoader }anchors.fill: parentonClicked: pageLoader.source = "Page1.qml"
This is directly from the Loader docs and what is does is loads all new content from Page1.qml into a current position where Loader is (don’t forget, you can always use QML scene to prototype QML code quickly).
(If you are interested more in a video presentation there is a nice one from KDAB on Youtube)
Now, that seems simple enough. But what is not really obvious (if you don’t read documentation ;)) is that source property is an URL. And while that can be used to reference resource files (qrc://) or local files (file://) it can also be used to load a network file (http(s)://) and that is what we are going to do today.
So in this small example it would be as simple as to replace source with a network location, which in this case could be:
onClicked: pageLoader.source = "http://localhost:8000/Page1.qml"
HTTP Server
As expected, this also requires a HTTP server to serve those files, which I leave as an exercise to the reader but NGINX is very good choice that we used in production in similar setup in one company I worked for.
For easy demo setup you can use any of the oneliner HTTP servers to get this example running.
In this case I have Python 3 available so I go to the directory where the QML file is located and run:
python -m http.server 8000
Our app
We will use inspiration from Netflix application above where we can reload application.
Lets have two files. One will be used to load our app, and the other is going to be our main app content.
AppLoader.qml
property string appUrl: " Window {property string appUrl: " http://localhost:8000/App.qml width: 400
height: 400
visible: true
title: qsTr("Hello QML from network") Loader {
id: loader
source: appUrl
anchors.fill: parent
} Button {
text: "Reload"
onClicked: {
loader.source = ""
loader.source = appUrl
}
}
}
App.qml
import QtQuick 2.0 Rectangle {
color: "black"
Text {
anchors.centerIn: parent
color: "white"
text: "Coming from the network! " + Math.random()
}
}
So this results in:
QML app loaded from network!
And clicking a Reload button we will get a different number any time as expected. Now you are ready to add your QML app content and this can be reloaded on the fly without rebuilding your whole application and restarting it. This can be quite convenient on platforms where app upgrade and redeploy is not a fast process or just during the prototyping phase.
With one BusyIndicator you are ready to show loading state while actual application is loading (in asynchronous way) and with WebSocket you could signal that there was a change and that app should be reloaded to pick up a new version.
Note: if you use qmlscene you will need to create an empty qmldir or loading will fail, this is also what you would need if you would like to load a whole QML module
Where to next
First things first. You should read about QML Loader sizing just to make sure you understand how the sizing of loaded elements is done, and it is quite flexible in how you want to control it.
Second. We focused only on QML loader as that is probably a common element already used in your application and it enables us to reload parts of the interface, or as in this case, potentially even a whole app.
However, you can import QML modules from the network directly. In that case the setup is similar as it is locally (and you will need qmldir file as briefly mentioned above), however, you cannot easily reload your application. For that a restart of the whole application would be needed and with that you cannot really change the location of your QML files after deployment without upgrading your application.
With Loader, you can always dynamically set source location to wherever you HTTPS server is, if that would be needed.
Worth mentioning is that with this you load only QML part of your application and obviously, not any part of AppLoader.qml is loaded or the native C++ extensions you might be using. That is all still part of your native application. Think of it like a Web browser loading web application. You can modify your loaded application but if you need to make changes to your native part then it’s the same as it would be to upgrade your web browser.
Hopefully this analogy makes sense, if not, a bit of hard work with trial and error will get you there ;)
Until the next time, happy loading! | https://pkoretic.medium.com/qml-webapps-loading-qml-from-the-network-b5900445e4b | ['Petar Koretić'] | 2020-11-02 10:48:20.646000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Qml', 'Software Development', 'Web App Development', 'Qt'] |
Meetup Computer Vision Paris | Sicara's blog
We build tailor-made AI and Big Data solutions for amazing… | https://medium.com/sicara/meetup-computer-vision-paris-a7b210d19faf | ['Jean-Régis De Vauplane'] | 2020-01-29 17:08:28.563000+00:00 | ['Meetup Paris', 'Meetup', 'Meetup Computer Vision', 'Computer Vision'] |
You Need This Scheduling AI. Do you have an assistant? Perhaps you… | Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash
Do you have an assistant? Perhaps you should.
In the world of bots and messengers and AI, something like scheduling and calendaring is actually something you should consider. What if 20–50 minutes a week were given back to you by a scheduling bot always helping you keep your calendar straight?
I have been watching x.ai for years now and have been a paying subscriber. It’s a valuable tool for any digital worker, leader, or executive.
You should sign up, now that the free service has expanded — don’t get left behind when the revolution comes (psst. its already here)
I do not work for or make any money from x.ai, I just like their service and know that more people who use it makes my service better. | https://medium.com/connected-well/x-ais-awesome-scheduling-ai-is-now-free-a00744838819 | ['Robert Merrill'] | 2019-09-12 20:02:34.343000+00:00 | ['Future Of Work', 'Calendar', 'AI', 'Scheduling', 'Bots'] |
Vue 3 vs React — Learn-by-Doing. React published a tutorial which… | Photo by The Nigmatic on Unsplash
React published a tutorial which creates “Tic-Tac-Toe” game for the purpose of learning by doing. I liked the way Dan Abramov explained basics of JavaScript in “Just JavaScript” series and React in “Tic-Tac-Toe” tutorial.
I have created the exact same “Tic-Tac-Toe” using Vue 3. Vue 3 code looks straight-forward than React, but I will leave the judgement to the readers 😄
The final React project created by Dan Abramov is available here The final Vue 3 project created by me is available here
💡Codepen has lot many restrictions. So both React and Vue 3 code shared has squeeze all the components into a single JS files
Screenshot of Tic-Tac-Toe
Inspecting the Code
We have three components:
Square
Board
Game
The Square component renders a single <button> and the Board renders 9 squares. The Game component renders a board.
Square Component
In the Codepen version of React tutorial, Square component has been created as functional component. In Vue 3, functional component is not recommended.
Performance gains from 2.x for functional components are now negligible in 3.x, so we recommend just using stateful components
Topics to learn
Create a simple Vue Component
Use props — please refer the guide for more details
💡Square has only one button element. So I have leveraged event bubbling and handled the click in Board (parent) component. | https://medium.com/js-dojo/vue-3-vs-react-learn-by-doing-d958b4d17e36 | ['Prasad Jayakumar'] | 2020-12-07 02:03:50.646000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Vue', 'Beginner', 'React'] |
Democratizing Visualization By Lowering the Barrier of Entry | We quickly realized that these projects could fulfill several goals. As we encouraged designers not to fear experimentation, and even make mistakes, they could push the boundaries of what is acceptable and orthodox in visualization. Fast Company captured this aspect of our collaboration by writing that we were turning “artists loose”. That was indeed one of our purposes. We’ve done stories, similar to those you might find in a traditional news publication, related to elections in Germany, Mexico, France, and Brazil, the Oscars, and the World Cup. We’ve also done quirkier ones, such as this story about the kinds of restaurants people search for the most in different parts of the United States.
We envisioned this collaboration as an educational endeavor. As you can see in our repository, most designers that we partner with write making-of articles about their projects. We want these articles to help new generations of visualization designers understand how experienced professionals think, what their process is, what roadblocks we often find, and how to overcome them. Many of these articles are illuminating. Just read Maarten Lambrecht’s thorough writeup of his Eurovision visualization, Giorgia Lupi’s explanation of Accurat’s AR project Building Hopes, or Schema Design’s explanation of how they compared Google searches for diseases with actual incidence of those diseases. Moreover, the code of most of the projects we’ve done is shared through GitHub, so it can be easily repurposed.
Building Hopes, Giorgia Lupi
Around 2017, we took things one step further. We thought that our collaboration could go beyond designing one-time data-driven and visualization-driven stories. What if we created easy-to-use browser-based tools that anyone could use to design their own data projects? That same year Google News Initiative helped fund Flourish, a freemium tool developed by visualization studio Kiln which allows anyone to create interactive data visualizations without code. Flourish offers free and paid versions, but the premium version is available for free to any news organization.
Later, we released two free and open-source tools, Morph and TwoTone, in collaboration with Datavized. Morph is a playful generative art tool that lets you upload any dataset, map it into objects such as lines or bars, and then randomize properties of those objects such as color, rotation, and position. TwoTone is the first data sonification tool that works entirely on your browser: upload any data and then transform numbers into sounds and music. We are already planning to launch a few other open-source tools focused on other needs when it comes to working with data, such as cleaning datasets and getting them ready to be visualized, or analyzing textual information.
Video still from Data Visualization for Storytelling and Discovery
In parallel, we may take yet another step in our collaboration: training. Both of us have plenty of experience teaching free online classes and workshops, such as those hosted by the Knight Center at the University of Texas since 2013 (here are the materials from the latest one). These have helped tens of thousands of people from more than 100 countries learn how to design graphs and maps.
In the Fall semester this year we’ll launch a new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that will cover all steps in the data journalism pipeline: how to use free software tools to find and download data, verify it, clean it, wrangle it, and explore it. The course will also provide an introduction to technologies such as machine learning and AI with an in-depth discussion about how to present numbers as graphics or stories. More details will be available soon through Twitter and other platforms (@albertocairo @smfrogers).
Data and data journalism have arguably never been as vital as they are now, as readers and students all over the world hunger for the facts behind the story. We want to help aspiring data journalists the world over realize that now is the time to take the field and make a difference. Truly, anyone can do it — and we want to help.
Alberto Cairo is Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami and author of books such as ‘How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information’. Simon Rogers is Data Editor at the Google News Lab and Director of the Data Journalism Awards. | https://medium.com/nightingale/democratizing-visualization-by-lowering-the-barrier-of-entry-c46d30a2ab41 | ['Alberto Cairo'] | 2019-07-23 17:09:45.397000+00:00 | ['Data Humanism', 'News', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Journalism'] |
Bokeh 0.13 Released | We are pleased to announce the release of Bokeh 0.13!
Highlights include:
Bokeh app components are embeddable in custom templates #4986 , #7978
, New RangeTool added for selecting ranges interactively #7795
Max websocket message size now configurable #7374
Significant performance improvement for property validation #7977
Added cumsum transform to cumulatively sum CDS columns #7961
transform to cumulatively sum CDS columns Simplified hover tool usage #7921
DataTable regressions fixed #7891 , #7924
Plus several other bug fixes and documentation improvements. For full details, see the CHANGELOG and Release Notes. Additionally, examples for each release are uploaded to CDN. Click here to download.
If you are using Anaconda, Bokeh can most easily be installed by executing the command conda install -c bokeh bokeh . Otherwise, use pip install bokeh .
Upcoming 1.0
Bokeh development has reached a point of stability. While there is still plenty of work to be done (expanding test coverage, improving documentation, fixing lots of bugs, and adding new features), the core feature set is largely complete with respect to the original roadmap. Most importantly, the API is now in a place that the core team is happy with and prepared to defend over a longer term. In recognition of this development:
The next release will be Bokeh 1.0
We will spend a short period of time working on some high priority tasks, and making some necessary changes to our build and release infrastructure. We can use help during this time! There will be more frequent 1.0.0dev releases in this time, please help test with them as much as possible. Of course, any code or documentation help is also still very appreciated. Come by the Gitter "Dev" channel and ask about how to get started.
For those curious: the reason for the version bump to 13 now after such a long 0.12.x series is that some build and deployment infrastructure switched over to NumFocus assets, and we wanted to have a clear demarcation of that switchover.
Improved Support for Custom Templates
When Bokeh was started, we had a grand ambition of being able to work purely from Python, “No web-tech required!” To that end we built a layout system that can be used to construct web UIs with rows and columns and grids of things. And it works reasonably well for simple things. If you are prioritizing ease-of-use it can even do for some less simple things. But inevitably, users wanted to use Bokeh for very sophisticated layouts-more sophisticated than the built-in layout can handle.
Until now, only Bokeh standalone documents could flexibly embed individual plots and widgets, using the components function. Bokeh applications were constrained to use only a single top-level Bokeh layout, and this proved to be extremely limiting for users that wished to build sophisticated dashboards with Bokeh. With the release of 0.13.0 , it is now possible to embed individual application components as well. As an example, here is a Bokeh app with several components placed individually inside a Bootstrap dashboard layout template:
In this case we add roots to the document that have a name property set:
plot = figure(..., sizing_mode="scale_both", name="region") curdoc().add_root(plot)
Then, those roots can be referred to in your own Jinja template blocks like this:
<div class="col-md-4 col-sm-4 col-xs-12">
<div class="x_panel tile fixed_height_320 overflow_hidden">
<div class="x_title">
<h2>By Region</h2>
<div class="clearfix"></div>
</div>
{{ embed(roots.region) }}
</div>
</div>
You find the code for this example in the GitHub repository. The User’s Guide also has a new section describing a standard template that anyone can use to quickly get started.
To be sure, there are still issues and kinks to work out. But this advances the possibilities for Bokeh applications a long way, and we look forward to seeing what users come up with!
Range Selection Tool
It’s always nice when a very old issue can be closed, and I am happy to report that the long standing request for a “range” tool has been completed. It is now possible to create a RangeTool to automatically control a range:
# This tool will control the x range on `plot`
range_rool = RangeTool(x_range=plot.x_range)
The tool will display an overlay on the plot it is added to, and this overlay can be dragged and resized to update the range it is configured with. This is often useful for allowing users to zoom in on long time series plots:
It’s also possible to configure the tool with both an x_range and a y_range at the same time, in which case the overlay is a box that can be dragged and resized in both horizontal and vertical directions.
New Cumulative Sum Transform
A new cumsum transform was added to bokeh.transforms . This transform generates a sequence of cumulative sums from the values in a ColumnDataSource column. This can be useful for simplifying any plot that needs to position things based on running totals, such as pie or donut charts:
p.wedge(x=0, y=1, radius=0.4,
line_color="white", fill_color='color', legend='country', source=data # Use a cumulative sum on the angles to compute start/end
start_angle=cumsum('angle', include_zero=True), end_angle=cumsum('angle'))
Hover Tooltip Improvements
The hover tool has had some limitations in some circumstances in the past. Specifically, users have wanted to display a hover name depending on the glyph that is hovered over. Previously, this would require creating and sending an entire column filled with the name, which is wasteful and redundant. Now, the name property of a glyph may be displayed in a hover tooltip by using the new $name special variable:
p.circle(..., name="foo") # "$name" displays "foo" over these circles
p.circle(..., name="bar") # and displays "bar" over these
Additionally, there were some difficulties with stacked charts. Basically, there was no easy way to have the different glyphs for each stack level refer to different columns. Before, the only way to accomplish this was to create a separate new HoverTool for each stack layer. Now, there is a way to add some indirection, by using the column variable @$name . This syntax means: use the value of $name to specify the column name to display in the tooltip. Stack methods such as vbar_stack also now automatically set name of each renderer to the corresponding stack value, to make things even simpler:
regions = ("East", "Central", "West")
# and "@$name" will display values from a corresponding column for each
# glyph, e.g. @Central, @North
p.vbar_stack(departments, ...) # The glyph for each stack level will set name to a different region,# and "@$name" will display values from a corresponding column for each# glyph, e.g. @East p.vbar_stack(departments, ...)
Finally, in an effort to streamline the use of hover tools, the figure function now accepts an optional tooltips argument. Supplying tooltips this way will cause a HoverTool to be created and added to the plot (if needed), and configured with those tooltips.
A stacked bar example below demonstrates all of these changes:
fruits = ['Apples', 'Pears', 'Nectarines', 'Plums', 'Grapes', 'Strawberries']
years = ["2015", "2016", "2017"]
colors = ["#c9d9d3", "#718dbf", "#e84d60"] data = {'fruits' : fruits,
'2015' : [2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 4],
'2016' : [5, 3, 4, 2, 4, 6],
'2017' : [3, 2, 4, 4, 5, 3]}
# and the variable "@$name" looks up a column of the same name
p = figure(x_range=fruits, plot_height=250, title="Fruit Counts by Year",
toolbar_location=None, tools="hover", tooltips="$name # The "$name" variable shows the hovered glyphs's name property (i.e. a year)# and the variable "@$name" looks up a column of the same namep = figure(x_range=fruits, plot_height=250, title="Fruit Counts by Year",toolbar_location=None, tools="hover", tooltips="$name @fruits : @$name") # Each sub-renderer has "name" property set (to a year) automatically
p.vbar_stack(years, x='fruits', width=0.9, color=colors, source=data,
legend=[value(x) for x in years])
NumFocus Committee Change
When Bokeh was first applying for NumFocus fiscal sponsorship, Jake Vanderplas generously stepped in to help round out the required project committee. Recently it became possible for long-time Bokeh contributor Luke Canavan to join the committee, so Jake is stepping aside. Thanks Jake, and welcome Luke!
I’d like to thank the 301 total contributors who have helped make Bokeh such an amazing project. If you’re interested in helping out, drop by the Dev Chat Channel!
Thanks,
Bryan Van de Ven | https://medium.com/bokeh/bokeh-0-13-released-b544caf44f1a | [] | 2020-09-10 20:40:56.070000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Open Source', 'Data Science', 'Bokeh', 'Data Visualization'] |
Can floating gardens help Bangladesh’s farmers withstand climate threats? | Photographs by Zakir Hossain Chowdhury
Bangladesh’s annual monsoon rainfalls submerge lowland areas for months on end. But in the rural southern district of Pirojpur the crops rise with the floodwaters.
Farmers here sow their harvests on floating rafts made from water hyacinth plants. This traditional method — known as dhap — allows farmers to grow food even when severe floods threaten livelihoods elsewhere in the country.
Photographer Zakir Hossain Chowdhury has had a firsthand view of the contrast this monsoon season. Floods damaged at least 160,000 hectares of cropland and displaced 300,000 people across the country in July. But in Pirojpur and two other southern districts where farmers have used floating gardens for generations, families continued to grow crops even as the waters rose.
Chowdhury’s images show strips of vegetation unfurled in tidy rows over submerged land, and farmers tending to their buoyant crops in tiny boats. With parts of Pirojpur flooded or waterlogged for up to eight months of the year, farmers here say they’re entirely dependent on their floating gardens.
Climate change is making Bangladesh’s yearly monsoon rains more volatile and more intense — in some cases, severe floods have fuelled permanent migration away from rural areas. Agricultural experts say floating gardens can be one way of adapting to mounting disaster risks by strengthening food security.
Bangladesh’s government includes the expansion of floating agriculture as part of its climate change adaptation strategy, and various NGOs have set up projects elsewhere in the country. The UK-based Practical Action has worked with local groups to introduce floating gardens in Gaibandha district, in Bangladesh’s north, allowing people to grow crops throughout the year even when it floods.
But floating gardens have their limitations. The practice requires large stretches of land covered in still water through most of the year, enough water hyacinth plants — an invasive species — to build the floating rafts, and a market to make such farming profitable. And while floating gardens may be disaster-resistant, they’re not disaster-proof: it’s unclear how they’ll withstand further climate threats like drought, temperature rise, or soil salinity caused by rising sea-levels and storm surges.
In a 2013 paper, Haseeb Md. Irfanullah, the former head of the disaster risk reduction and climate change programme for Practical Action in Bangladesh, said the government and NGOs must better study climate change’s impacts on floating agriculture before promoting it as a surefire adaptation method.
“Development agencies are too mesmerised by the sheer simplicity and buoyancy of this agro-technique,” he said.
For farmers in Pirojpur, however, floating gardens are already integral to livelihoods.
“For eight months of the year, our land goes under water and then we have nothing to do,” said 62-year-old Abdul Jalil Hawladar. “We do this cultivation to survive.”
Adapting to a changing climate | https://newhumanitarian.medium.com/can-floating-gardens-help-bangladeshs-farmers-withstand-climate-threats-ba23429702fa | ['The New Humanitarian'] | 2019-10-03 14:38:54.187000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Environment', 'Photojournalism', 'Bangladesh', 'Farming'] |
Basic equations to visualize complex dependencies | A question like “What happened to sales last year?” sometimes requires a complex answer. “Well, it is a bit complicated: volume went down, but then prices went up, but as a result sales were up”. A simplified mathematical equation can help you visualize this.
Sometime in the near future I will post here how to do a proper “sources of change” analysis. | https://medium.com/slidemagic/basic-equations-to-visualize-complex-dependencies-1fbae5d0b011 | ['Jan Schultink'] | 2016-12-27 08:43:16.552000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Presentation', 'PowerPoint', 'Presentation Design', 'Data Visualization'] |
Exploring Isotype Charts: “Our Private Lives” | Otto Neurath was an educator, so he understood how vital education was essential to the character of its culture. “The Young Population ages 13–20” is a visual index of children in school and in the workforce. Each page is identically designed but the difference between them is stark.
Children in Britain go to work far earlier than American children. It’s easy to understand the seated blue icons represent those in school, grey as “others” (the text suggests they are in college, a rarity at the time) while the red icons march off to work. The chart shows how few British children continue formal education after 15 and the text at the bottom points out “Less than 10% continue education after 17.”
While I have been writing primarily on the design of the charts, of equal importance is the design of the icons themselves, and this chart presents three icons that are very different in how they are read. Notice, how variations on the icon of a generic person have different meanings: seated, standing and moving. Our natural visual intelligence reads so much into each: the seated, stable blue icon, the standing transitional grey, and the red, armless child walking away from the school. Designer and artist Gerd Arntz took great care in adding subtle details to each icon to communicate the nuance of a story without being too explicit. Each section is then aligned under additional icons representing ‘school’ on the left, and a box on the right for ‘occupation’ such as agriculture, manufacturing, and justice.
This Isotype chart acts as a followup story to the preceding chart by exploring the grey figures representing the “other”. In this chart, each blue figure represents 1% of a million citizens attending a University. Each mass of hollowed-out figures becomes a background population, arranged as a sort of unit comparison and silent majority fading into the background. The student icons are now active, marching off to study at the university, their color inherited from the previous chart as the blue for ‘at school.’
Like in other charts from this book series, this design creates an easy to compare story by summing and organizing the populations into rows of equal groups. Since the Neurath’s had already understood a general 1:3 ratio between the populations of the two countries (as discussed in “Population and Livestock”), they continue to use this design to show the relative difference in student populations, not the difference in the total quantity.
Lastly, the placement of the students and population icons conveys a very different meaning than our previous charts. By overlapping the students and group icons we read the chart as an integrated population. This meaningful detail reinforces the overall story as a cultural portrait and demonstrates how nuanced the relationship between the chart design and the overall message is.
The British employ far more private services than those in the US. By aligning the blue vs black under the explanatory icons, the point is clear. While the aggregation of commercial vs private is a bit all-encompassing, it’s an understandable division of labor, illustrated by the icons for white-collar (desk, coffee) and service industry (barber), vs maid and cook (vacuum, oven) on the right.
While the systematic nature of Isotype cleverly outlines data with an objective, Otto and Marie subtly position each chart to explain why the two cultures are similar or different. In illustrating the different educational expectations in the previous two charts, “Personal Services per 200 Population” suggests a reason for children leaving school to join the workforce is to become private servants. If we extend the story back to the chart “Sex Distribution in 1930”, we can assume many of these domestic servants are likely women due to the gender surplus. The associations and connections created across charts are essential to the educational concepts of the Isotype charts as a series. | https://medium.com/nightingale/exploring-isotype-charts-our-private-lives-part-2-a3aa51c7b08f | ['Jason Forrest'] | 2020-03-13 15:54:26.884000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Dvhistory', 'Icons', 'Data Visualization', 'Information Design'] |
How to set up winning Marketing Automation Workflows with HubSpot | How to set up winning Marketing Automation Workflows with HubSpot Atisha Follow May 15 · 9 min read
This post has been written by Shriya, a Certified HubSpot Expert at pickSaaS.
Marketing automation is a hot trend in marketing right now. And why not? Marketing automation aims to streamline, automate, and create efficient business workflows to boost productivity, increase revenue, and also measure the efficiency of marketing strategies.
While businesses across all parallels of the industry are now tempted to adopt marketing automation, they must first address the most critical issue — which operations they should automate.
The challenge of identifying the tasks that need automation is real, especially when considering the creation of detailed workflows to drive a company’s marketing strategy. Once you figure out the areas that need automation, you will not only save a substantial amount of valuable employee time, but you will also be able to guide your leads better throughout their customer journey.
In this post, we’ll talk about some of the most pivotal marketing automation workflows that you should incorporate into your business design. Also, we’ll enlighten you on how to create marketing automation workflows that will take your business operations to the next level.
So, let’s get started!
Tips for Marketing Automation
1. Lead generation workflows
When you adopt marketing automation, you must be ready to manage a large volume of leads. And for that to happen seamlessly, you need to create and incorporate the right workflows in place.
Email lists
Email lists take the #1 position in automated workflows. In this workflow, you’ll have to group new subscribers (leads) into different segments according to the actions they use to interact with your brand. For instance, you should group all the leads who sign up for the company newsletter in one email list category and create a separate group for the leads who request quotes or purchase from you, and so on.
Welcome workflow
After you have placed your leads in their respective email lists, the next course of action is to design the welcome workflow. A welcome workflow is nothing but a welcome message for your leads to signify the start of a new relationship with your brand. You can design email list-specific welcome workflows to engage your new contacts and introduce them to your brand values, USP, and products/services.
Evangelist workflow
Once the email lists and welcome workflows are set in place, now it’s time to design a dynamic automated list of contacts who actually engage or interact with your brand regularly. HubSpot calls this list the “smart list.” You can create a smart list by using various triggers. For example, clicks on your emails or social media posts, number of form submissions, and visits to your website are some important triggers. Based on these triggers, you can create an email workflow that will leverage this list to encourage evangelists to interact with your content and share them on the different marketing channels.
2. Lead nurturing workflows
All of your leads will not convert into loyal customers immediately after their first interaction with your brand. It takes time and nurturing. As a marketer, you are responsible for guiding them further into the buying process (customer journey).
Lead qualification workflow
It is a well-established fact that not all leads are worth pursuing. This is why it is crucial to create a lead qualification workflow to check if a lead meets your set requirements (age, location, job title, budget, interests, etc.). This will allow you to fine-tune your leads and identify the ones that are worth your effort and time.
Sales rep notification workflow
Every website has certain focus pages and events that attract more customer attention and more conversions than others. You must identify these pages and events using an attribution reporting tool (HubSpot has a fantastic one!). Usually, these triggers are about us page, pricing page, product page, testimonials page, etc., basically, the pivotal pages that customers/prospective customers view while evaluating your brand and making purchases.
Once you’ve figured out what the special triggers are, you can set up an internal email notification to notify your sales reps about these high-value triggers. Make sure to provide your reps all the relevant information about individual leads so that they can draft personalized marketing and promotion messages for them and send them out at the right time.
Lead scoring workflow
Lead scoring is a technique wherein numerical values are assigned to your leads based on the information that you’ve collected on them. Lead scoring aims to help you see how far along is each lead in their buying process. Accordingly, you can prioritize the most valuable leads and engage them with highly customized messages and marketing campaigns to drive them deeper into the buying cycle.
You can create lead scoring workflows that will automatically update the scores as users take the desired action (visit, register, purchase, etc.), thereby signifying their interest to purchase from you.
Tag assignment workflow
As we said earlier, lead segmentation is an important aspect of targeted marketing. To segment leads under various categories, you must create appropriate tags and include specific characteristics in each tag, such as “first-time buyer,” “repeat buyer,” “unresolved ticket,” and so on. However, every time a new lead comes on board, you shouldn’t have to assign them to segmented email lists manually. So, design a tag assignment workflow that can automatically assign new contacts to the relevant email lists and also tweak their segmentation tags as they progress along their customer journey.
Behavioral targeting workflow
Behavioral targeting is a marketing approach wherein you send targeted messages to your leads or customers according to the actions they take on your website or the way they respond to your marketing campaigns. Essentially the user behavior will dictate your behavioral targeting workflow. For example, you can create a workflow to trigger geo-targeted mobile ads. You could also create a dynamic email nurture drip campaign that responds according to a lead’s engagement with your site, or set up automatic sales outreach emails that trigger when a prospect downloads your content.
3. Engagement workflows
As new technologies and trends make their way into the marketing domain, customer journeys become more and more complicated. This means that marketers need to rethink their customer engagement strategies and develop innovative techniques to encourage their customers to stay loyal to their brand.
Re-engagement workflow
While it’s true that all leads will not interact with your brand, does that mean you should let go of the prospects that haven’t interacted with your company in a while? Definitely not. You should re-engage them and steer them toward your brand. By designing a re-engagement workflow, you could do so by sending them exclusive offers, discounts, and coupons to re-ignite their interest in your brand. The triggers for sending a re-engagement message could be various factors, including last website visit, form submission, email click, and purchase, to name a few.
Seasonal offer workflow
Seasonal offers and discounts make a great opportunity to steer your target audience towards you. While you don’t need to worry much about personalization for seasonal messages, you must remember that the importance of seasonal events varies from person to person. For instance, Christmas will hold little importance to a non-catholic person, and Christmas offers will perform best in Christian dominated locations. This is why it is imperative to gain relevant personal info about your customers, so you can target them with personalized messages and offers in the right seasons.
You can design seasonal message workflows for different buyer segments and email lists. These workflows will then automatically send appropriate messages and promotional offers to customers in the various marketing and holiday seasons.
Reward workflow
Another fantastic way to keep your target audience engaged and happy is to reward them for their loyalty. You can create reward workflows to offer digital rewards, coupons, freebies, tokens, etc., to users as they continue to show interest in your brand. Also, you can set several milestones or touchpoints (as per the customer journey) and tune these workflows to automatically send out specific rewards to users when they reach a particular milestone. In this way, you can ensure that your customers will keep coming back to you time and again.
Cart abandonment workflow
e-Commerce companies are well-versed with the phenomenon of cart abandonment. Often, visitors and users browse your site and add items to their cart, but at the end moment (checkout and payment), they abandon their shopping cart and leave the site.
A cart abandonment workflow can help you combat this issue. When a user adds items to their online shopping cart but eventually gets ready to leave your site without making the purchase, this workflow can trigger a pop-up to ask whether they surely want to leave the site. Furthermore, you can also set email triggers to remind users of the items they left behind and offer a special coupon code to motivate them to purchase from you.
4. Customer retention workflows
Once you convert visitors into leads and then further convert them into customers, your aim should be to convert them to loyal customers (repeat buyers). This is where customer retention enters the picture.
Upselling workflow
One of the most important truths of marketing is — customer-brand communication must never stop. So, even if you have converted your leads into customers, you must continue to communicate with them to sell your other products/services. The idea is to upsell your products. By using dynamic lists of contacts who make repeat purchases of a particular product, you can automate workflows to upsell or upgrade those contacts to premium customers. These workflows will automatically send messages and emails to such contacts with relevant product recommendations (based on their past purchase history, interests, etc.).
Auto-response workflow
The modern-day customer does not want to wait long for replies when they reach out to customer support. Today, customers want instant service. So, when your customers reach out to you regarding a technical issue, or product complaint, or a request, you don’t want to leave them hanging. This is where you implement auto-response workflows designed to interact with your customers through different communication channels like chatbots, live chats, web forms, etc. To make the process easier, you can create customer IDs for different tickets and tag their status as “resolved,” “unresolved,” “in process,” and so on. These tags will allow you to keep track of the active tickets and the resolved ones.
Customer feedback workflow
Stats show that nearly 93% of online buyers claim that online reviews influence their purchase decisions. What does this mean? It means that positive customer reviews and testimonials are marks of your credibility as a brand. Thus, you must create an online profile containing positive reviews of your products/services on platforms like Google Reviews. Naturally, this should be an automated workflow that is triggered when customers purchase from you. However, it is important to send feedback requests a few days or a week after a customer purchases from you.
By now, you must have gotten an accurate idea about the different types of automation workflows that you can incorporate in your marketing plans. While these are a few tried and tested tips for marketing automation, you need not implement all of them together. The key to creating a successful marketing automation strategy lies in determining what are the specific automation needs of your business and then choosing the ones that are most relevant for you.
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-> Estimate your CRM project | https://medium.com/softwaresupp/setting-up-winning-marketing-automation-workflows-9540df76806a | [] | 2020-05-15 10:16:37.326000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Automation', 'Sales', 'Business', 'Hubspot'] |
Growing Your Own Vegetables at Home is Fun and Rewarding | Starting off slow by propagating lettuce
Propagating lettuce has got to be one of the easiest vegetables to do. Grab the remnants of a romaine heart and simply add it to a cup with water. I began to notice that the water would get murky after 2 or 3 days so that's how frequently I changed it. Also, after some days, the oxygen in the water starts depleting since the plants need it to survive so changing the water frequently is important.
My lettuce growth update
After a week, the romaine heart grew about an inch and I was ecstatic. The growth of the lettuce was exponential especially since I was diligent about changing the water and keeping it on a sunny windowsill.
Eating this lettuce was one of my proudest moments and the best part about it is that you can grow the same romaine heart over and over again. | https://medium.com/naturehub/growing-your-own-vegetables-at-home-is-fun-and-rewarding-a2afa99592a3 | ['Ana Gomez'] | 2020-12-30 08:53:56.967000+00:00 | ['Propagation', 'Hobby', 'Food', 'Health'] |
Need to know | Not everybody needs to know
Why I choose to walk alone?
Why I won’t stick to the norm?
Where I go?
And where I’ve come from?
Some questions that you hammer throw
Their answers are only mine to know
Let it go
For you’re on a need to know basis
And that you don’t need to know. | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/need-to-know-a370147f4ac9 | ['Tasneem Kagalwalla'] | 2017-09-01 13:55:58.510000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Life Lessons', 'Society', 'Life', 'Questions'] |
Why I Ditched the Corporate 9–5 Grind for Sex Work | Why I Ditched the Corporate 9–5 Grind for Sex Work
Valuable life and business lessons I learned when I postponed my career for the strip club.
Photo by Shangyou Shi on Unsplash
I’ll never forget the first time I put in the long hair extensions, painted on the smoky eye and red lipstick, and stepped into the black-laced lingerie set. I could barely walk in those seven-inch black platform heels, but I had never felt this sexy in my life. I wondered, could I pull off being a stripper with an MBA and postpone my corporate career?
The sex industry was a plausible option for me was because sex work lived within my inner circle. A few of my best friends were strippers; some of them were going to college during the day, and a few had already graduated from the university in town. Not one of them felt rushed to settle down and get a 9–5 job corporate job with their degrees; they danced, traveled, and invested instead.
It was interesting to see the ways everyone outside of this world shamed them for stripping when actually they were some of the best role models I’d ever known.
My dancer friends were responsible; they saved their money and invested wisely. They were refined; they traveled often and learned new languages. They were independent; they relied on no one to pay their bills for them. They made more money than they would’ve ever seen working a regular job with their college degree. They were smart; they stayed away from the dangerous dancers at the clubs. Because, while the harmful stereotype that all strippers are prostitutes, drug addicts, and have daddy issues is far from the truth, these types of dancers exist.
I admired these women. They capitalized on their current advantage — being young, beautiful, and in incredible physical shape — to live a stress-free life. A life where money was never a problem, one where work schedules didn’t exist.
I was almost finished with my MBA requirements when I considered auditioning at the club my friends danced at.
They had suggested I audition at the club many times before, but I always dismissed the idea of myself as a dancer. I was naturally slim, but I didn’t have large breasts or a big butt. I didn’t exercise much back then, and I had no rhythm. Picturing myself dancing near a chrome stripper pole made me burst into a nervous laugh.
“I would be so awkward giving a lap dance,” I told my friends.
Their typical response was always a wise one.
“You don’t have to be a great dancer to be a great stripper. You have to be smart in the way you carry yourself and confident that you can make customers want you. That’s it. You can make them want you with your eyes, your body, your words, whatever. But once you’ve intrigued them, you’ve made yourself a customer. And a loyal customer is the stripper jackpot.”
“Sure, some girls have bigger boobs, bigger butts, and long blonde hair,” they told me. “But if the other dancers aren’t smart like you, they have to work twice as hard, and their customers never come back for them. Beauty and sex appeal are what this industry lives on, yes, but being able to connect with a customer is and always will be more important.”
It sounded possible. I had sex appeal and was great at connecting with others. Still, I thought there was no way I could be sexy in a room full of hungry, horny strangers. No way. And it wasn’t until I finished my MBA before I took the plunge. If they hired me, my life had the potential to be changed forever. And if I wasn’t hired, I’d find a job with my degree. The stakes weren’t very high.
The day I auditioned, I sat in the parking lot of the club with my Victoria’s Secret duffle bag on the passenger seat of my car questioning myself, “What are you doing here? You should establish your career and network with other professionals. Why are you here?”
I became so nervous I felt nauseous; I had no idea what I was doing. After 10 minutes in my car, I texted my friend.
“I’m leaving. I can’t do it.”
She replied, “It’s your choice. If you feel it’s right, go ahead.” If she would’ve told me to suck it up and be brave, I would’ve driven home. But her kind and casual response gave me the push I needed. “I can do this,” I said to myself. I walked in terrified as ever and got hired on the spot.
Just like that, I had disposable income, freedom, and excitement at my fingertips. I was single without kids, so I traveled often while dancing; I made friends quickly, and I met lovers around the world.
I continued dancing for almost four years before quitting.
When I officially quit, I knew it in my heart that I had reached the end of my career in this industry. There wasn’t a single incident that led to my “retirement” but I could feel that I was done. The job didn’t excite me and the money didn’t satisfy me. I dreaded getting ready for a night shift. I hated putting on a fake smile and having fake conversations. I hated ordering fake drinks so I could drive home after my shift. I wanted a regular job. I wanted normalcy.
I wanted to answer the question, “So, what do you do for work?” without having anxiety. I wanted to be uncomplicated. I wanted to be a member of society again, and while dancing — at least in my last year — I felt like a complete outcast. My time as a sex worker had come to an end. | https://medium.com/sexography/why-i-ditched-the-corporate-9-5-grind-for-sex-work-89c86c8f6099 | ['Erin Taylor'] | 2020-09-15 22:53:50.575000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Society', 'Women', 'Sexuality', 'Money'] |
GOOGLE AI CONTEST | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/altsoph/google-ai-contest-eed23cfdeb6f | ['Aleksey Tikhonov'] | 2017-09-09 20:19:10.583000+00:00 | ['Почитать', 'AI', 'Rus'] |
Sales vs Branding — Pick Wisely & Focus. | image from ERE Media
A lot of businesses are focusing on the wrong things and yet they wonder why they’re not building the traction they need to survive in the long-term. The problem that businesses face stems right down to Sales vs Branding.
Are you in it for the short or long-term?
If your answer is long-term then you better listen up, because too many people think that because they’re making “sales” today, that they will be their tomorrow or next year. We live in a world where things are changing at a very fast rate, this includes technology and of course how you get sales.
Today you might be making 49% of your sales on Google AdWords, next think you know that is no longer relevant and your now down over 30% of your sales for the year. You might say that won’t happen, but I would like to ask you to take just a few minutes to look at how we no longer shop because we read something on the News Paper. At one point in history many businesses used the News Paper like it was Google AdWords. The businesses that had a strong brand survived when the News Paper got replaced, but the ones that solely survived on sales took hard hits and went out of the market.
So… what is the difference between sales and branding?
Sales — This is when you “sell” something (service or product) through a “track-able conversion.” For example, I made a sale on Google Ads for my awesome product. It cost me x to advertise it and I made x ROI. A sale is basically easy to track at the most part.
Branding — This is when you tell a story, show your identity and leave a “mark” in someone’s heart. When that person sees your logo or product, they “feel” something because they’re attached to that brand. You can’t track branding ROI the same way as a sales transaction.
Image Credits: kdcarmichael
The Power of Branding
Nike has done something to my heart and millions of people on this planet to the point Nike doesn’t even need to advertise on Google Ads when people are looking to buy a pair of shoes. Automatically when I have a thought of “shoes,” Nike always comes to mind.
That is the power of branding, Nike does not have to track you down to make a sale, instead, you look for Nike to get something you trust and believe in because of the image they imprinted your mind and HEART. This is why branding is always going to win the long term, because no matter what medium people use (Google, Facebook, Tv and etc.) to find products, they will always find the brand that touched them in their heart in whatever new medium the future generation will use.
Sales are very important to a business, I’m not dismissing that. But, if you take a closer look at the power of branding, you will realize it has a much greater ROI. For example, how many pairs of Nike shoes do you think the average “Nike Lover” has? Do you think that Nike lover will grab a new pair of those new awesome pattern Nike shoes that just got released? The answer to those questions will show you how powerful of an ROI branding has. One Nike Lover could generate a way greater ROI compared to you having to relay on marketing every sale you make. Below, I even explain further on how great of an ROI branding is.
Branding Meets Social Media aka “Bragging Rights”
No one is going to brag on social media that they just purchased a product with no brand behind it compared to a well-known brand like Nike. This is where the power of branding even brings more value.
The minute a person shares a post on Instagram, Facebook, Snap Chat and etc. about your product, it creates incredible results. Number one, it adds more value to your brand when more people are talking about it. Number two, it will convert a person to like your brand and look into it more because someone else is talking about it. Finally, remember that one thing about where sales mediums are changing with our News Paper example? Well, guess what, your brand will go with your fans wherever they’re and trust me, your fans will be faster than you when finding the next “Instagram or Facebook.”
Think of bragging rights as an unofficial way of equipping your awesome sales force to go out and get you more customers and build you a stronger brand. If people don’t have anything to “brag” about as far as your business, then they won’t go out and advocate for it. The best way to equip people is by actually making them fall in love with your brand.
Sales vs Branding, lets just say…
This is not even a fair fight, branding will crush sales in the business world always. Matter of fact, did you notice how I used Nike instead of Adidas or some other shoe brand as an example? I used the word, “Nike” over 10 times and I bet I got you think about Nike more after you finish reading this article. That puts the nail in the coffin when it comes to Sales vs Branding and why you need to pick wisely and focus.
Thanks for reading!! Hit that ❤ if you enjoyed the read :D | https://medium.com/entrepnuer-revolt/sales-vs-branding-pick-wisely-focus-c0143d004840 | ['Steve Aura'] | 2017-03-28 15:36:56.302000+00:00 | ['Branding', 'Sales', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Dusk, Trying Not To Panic | The setting: A nondescript room in a faded-beauty house. She waits to be restored to her former glory, though this particular room (once the staff dining area) was most likely never terribly impressive.
The walls are white, smudged with perhaps a century’s worth of fingerprints, awaiting the day when the already-purchased blue paint will be applied, the interlocking foam flooring will be laid down, and I’ll turn it into a workout room. The elliptical machine, 15 years old, mocks me to my right. It needs to be fixed, and I’m currently using it as a clothes rack for my hooded sweatshirt.
I remind myself that I need to borrow a lamp from one of the guest bedrooms because the fluorescent lighting in this room is starting to drive me batty.
I sit in a burgundy tufted faux-leather executive chair at a long fold-out table, gazing into the large monitor/docking station combo I brought home from my office the last day I went to work, more than two weeks ago.
Behind me, if I were to turn around, I’d see a window with a view to the back portico, and one of our gardens, which was what they called the yard according to the early 20th century blueprints we found in a secret compartment in the library. The forsythia is blooming, and the daffodils too. I crave their vibrant yellow, bright as the sun that only exists in my imagination, on this gloomy day.
My table’s surface, the same blah color as the walls, is increasingly piled with papers, as it begins to mimic my office in that building 30-odd miles down the road where I normally spend my workdays. It’s just how I roll. Organized mind, organized spreadsheets, mess of a desk.
I strive for normalcy in a time when there’s none.
Aside from the random papers, and my day planner (usually reserved for personal appointments and thoughts, while I use my Outlook calendar for work obligations — different parts of the brain, you see) scissors, thread and needle, and a couple of hacked-up t-shirts adorn the space. They’re reminders of two days ago when I was trying to make COVID-19 masks for my husband and me before he realized we had two previously-used dust masks in the basement, remnants of last summer’s outdoor sanding project.
He soaked them in rubbing alcohol and we wore them to my mom’s house to pick up some things from her basement, as she prepares to move later this month, at the most inopportune of times.
I worry, I worry, I worry.
In the background, the tail end of Governor DeWine’s daily press conference, a Q&A between various reporters and our state government, is an unexpectedly calming influence through choppy waters. I sip my quarter-glass of boxed wine as part of the ritual — Wine with DeWine, 2:00 every afternoon, all across the state (only a taste, because I’m working). Ohio’s curve is flatter than most, thanks to a sensible governor who listens to his experts. He’s given us our latest, greatest superhero, Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health.
I hear my husband moving around in the kitchen, a few feet away from my makeshift office. He always works from home, and now that I am too, his schedule perplexes me. There’s no rhyme or reason to when he eats, while I am very much like clockwork, lest my low blood sugar turn me into a raging beast (or stoke the fires of my eating disorder with the sweet control of hunger pangs).
I’m aware of the stillness. No birds (do they know something we don’t?), few cars outside, though our street is wide, and once GPS was readily available, it became a frequent cut-through for those wanting to circumvent traffic lights. The quiet is eerie, especially once the sun goes down.
It’s reminiscent of returning to my rural home town after living in the big city for a couple of years. Accustomed to the sirens and shouting and hubbub, I suddenly realized I was frightened of the silence, and that I could never really go home again.
I smell the faint sweetness of crisp-fried cabbage (if you don’t cook it too long, you won’t get that sulfur smell), and feel the spot on the ball of my foot where I burned myself cooking. Yes, yes, it IS possible to do this — if you wear sandals around the house, as I always do, and flip whatever’s on the baking tray a bit too zealously. This, this is how you end up with a small, piping-hot piece of perfectly-browned tofu stuck under your foot.
It makes me smile, though, the ridiculousness of burning myself there, preparing the evening meal, multi-tasking a bit too much, as I talked on the phone to my mom at the same time.
Rushing thoughts, rushing tasks, slow the mind, quiet space. Shoulders fall, eyes close, breathing slows. The sun dips below the horizon (will we see that pink supermoon tonight, through the inevitable clouds?), and soon I’ll put a record on the turntable, join my love in the living room, sip a snifter of brandy, and sink into nightfall. | https://medium.com/creative-humans/dusk-trying-not-to-panic-b21ba36f8970 | ['Kathryn Dillon'] | 2020-04-09 00:08:50.219000+00:00 | ['Writing Prompts', 'Anxiety', 'Self', 'Creative Humans', 'Creativity'] |
Don’t “80/20” Your Dream | Don’t “80/20” Your Dream
For true happiness, optimize daily to-dos but not your greatest pursuit
Photo by Ethan on Unsplash
If you use the 80/20 rule on everything, you’ll live an unsatisfying life.
Ironically, Vilfredo Pareto only discovered this seemingly universal principle — that 20% of the input usually account for 80% of the output — because he outright ignored it.
Pareto obsessively tracked the output of his vegetable garden. The man counted peas in spreadsheets — in 1896! He noticed a pattern in the distribution, which he applied to land ownership in Italy. When it held up, he became famous, and today, the principle named after him is everywhere.
Vilfredo Pareto put no less than 100% of his energy into a mundane, meaningless hobby and it led to a scientific breakthrough — his actual work.
Rather than “Settle for doing one fifth of the job,” the lesson here is this: If you don’t give your best somewhere, you’ll never get to the top of anything. Or the bottom, in Pareto’s case.
If you only do 20% of the work, you’ll only get 20% of the satisfaction, regardless of the outcome. Humans aren’t designed to half-ass every day. Some days, sure, but not every day. We max out at 100%, no less.
If you never try your hardest, you’ll never know what you’re really capable of. Sure, you get the comfort of “I failed because I didn’t try,” but that only lasts so long before it decomposes into regret.
The 80/20 principle is fantastic for everything you don’t really care about.
If you walk ten minutes away from the airport before calling an Uber, you’ll save 20% on the fare. Exercising for ten minutes a day is better than nothing.
But if your finances or your health are everything to you, you don’t want to take the easy way out. You want to go all-in and go all the way.
If you want to write a bestseller, 20% won’t cut it. If you want to be rich by 40, 20% won’t cut it. If you want to be an exemplary dad, 20% won’t cut it.
Tim Ferriss wrote about the pareto principle in The 4-Hour Workweek — but he wrote about automating a company he didn’t care about. With the book, however, he left nothing to chance. He engineered every aspect of it, and that’s why it became such a hit.
When you find your unique path to greatness, walk on it. Walk all the way.
You don’t always have to exert yourself. Yes, giving 100% in an irrelevant area can help you move forward in an important one. But if you don’t go all-in somewhere, some of the time, you’ll never feel what the 80/20 rule promises but fails to deliver: “Today, I did my very best — and that was enough.” | https://ngoeke.medium.com/dont-80-20-your-dream-eba8cc5ee43 | ['Niklas Göke'] | 2020-07-02 10:11:34.348000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Life Lessons', 'Happiness', 'Career Advice', 'Creativity'] |
Here are Fascinating Secrets from 3 Ancient Mystery Cults | Here are Fascinating Secrets from 3 Ancient Mystery Cults
Citizens whispered about their disturbing activities
Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy — Image by Public Domain
Unlike today, it was much easier to be secret and mysterious in ancient times.
Ancient societies had little or no media, and the news stories that did exist took weeks, if not months, to circulate to the general public. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that these mystery cults thrived during the first three centuries.
Common traits of ancient mystery cults
These secretive ancient cults shared many common traits:
All of them had very rigorous and prolonged initiation ceremonies, which included ritual purifications and fasting.
Secrecy was demanded of its members through vows.
They performed group rituals, orgies, meals, and dancing, which reinforced bonds among its members.
All of them emphasized a connection to the movements of the stars and planets and the seasons.
These mystery cults shared a central belief in death and resurrection. Part of their mystery was whether or not they took this literally or allegorically.
There was no written scripture or dogma as all things were based on individual experience, which added to the mystery.
All of them used mental shock, such as physical pain and terror, to induce altered states.
The challenge of learning about mystery cults
One of the biggest problems in learning about ancient mystery cults is trying to find information about them. In addition to their hiding behind a shroud of secrecy, most written ancient records have been lost. And we’re only left with scattered pieces of information to reconstruct entire ancient civilizations.
Mystery cults offered a personal appeal to certain people during those times. Keep in mind that many of them lived in societies where their emperor's worship was demanded of all citizens.
Apart from these official observances, people who desired an individual experience were perfect candidates for these ancient cults. They offered individuality and direct contact with a divine being in an atmosphere of others with like-minded goals.
Let us examine three of these ancient mystery cults. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/here-are-fascinating-secrets-from-3-ancient-mystery-cults-f14c2c924a22 | ['Charles Stephen'] | 2020-11-04 16:03:44.887000+00:00 | ['Cult', 'Society', 'Culture', 'History', 'Religion'] |
Why I’m Coding with Emojis in Jupyter Notebooks | Why I’m Coding with Emojis in Jupyter Notebooks
Some of you may think this is a sacrilegious idea. I don’t plan to replace all my x, y, z with smiling faces. However, this can be a great feature to add an extra touch to your presentations
Image adapted from photo by bruce mars on Unsplash.
When I first realised that we can use emojis in code I was quite surprised. Currently, emojis can’t be used to define variables or functions in Python. They can, however, be used as strings in lists, dictionaries, pandas dataframes, plots, and so on. Other characters like Greek letters can also be used, not only in strings but also as variables! Using emojis and non-Latin symbols in the code is probably not a good practice in most contexts. However, I argue that there are several situations where they not only are acceptable but desirable.
Imagine you are a teacher introducing code to a young audience .
. Or maybe you are presenting your work to an audience without a strong programming background.
to an audience without a strong programming background. Or maybe you want to make your data plots more engaging .
. Or maybe you are implementing a paper full of mathematical expressions with plenty of Greek letters.
In situations like these, the use of emoji and non-Latin characters can be a good way to better express your code and engage with the audience.
Communicating ideas in a clear and engaging way is a very important skill for a data scientist.
Let me show you three examples!
1. Teaching code
Learning code for the first time can be a challenging experience. Making the code more colourful with emojis can be a great way to facilitate learning. The image below is just a simple example.
First, I define a list of fruits and a list of fruits I like.
Then the exercise is to print “I don’t like” or “I like” followed by the fruit icon for each of the fruits.
Example of teaching loops and conditions with fruit emojis. Image created by the author.
This example is great to teach about loops and conditions! I could use a list of the letters in the alphabet instead, but you have to agree that it would be a boring example. The motivation is very important for learning, and that’s why it matters to go a step forward in the way concepts are presented. | https://towardsdatascience.com/why-im-coding-with-emojis-in-jupyter-notebooks-23f08585ed3d | ['Miguel Pinto'] | 2020-06-27 03:18:20.297000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Towards Data Science'] |
Building and Visualizing Decision Tree in Python | Building and Visualizing Decision Tree in Python
Learn to build and visualize a Decision tree model with scikit-learn in Python
Decision Tree
Decision trees are the building blocks of some of the most powerful supervised learning methods that are used today.
‘A decision tree is basically a binary tree flowchart where each node splits a group of observations according to some feature variable. The goal of a decision tree is to split the data into groups such that every element in one group belongs to the same category.’
One of the great properties of decision trees is that they are very easily interpreted. You do not need to be familiar at all with machine learning techniques to understand what a decision tree is doing. Decision tree graphs are feasibly interpreted.
Python for Decision Tree
Python is a general-purpose programming language and offers data scientists powerful machine learning packages and tools. In this article, we will be building our Decision tree model using python’s most famous machine learning package, ‘scikit-learn’. We will be creating our model using the ‘DecisionTreeClassifier’ algorithm provided by scikit-learn then, visualize the model using the ‘plot_tree’ function. Let’s do it!
Step-1: Importing the packages
Our primary packages involved in building our model are pandas, scikit-learn, and NumPy. Follow the code to import the required packages in python.
After importing all the required packages for building our model, it’s time to import the data and do some EDA on it.
Step-2: Importing data and EDA
In this step, we will be utilizing the ‘Pandas’ package available in python to import and do some EDA on it. The dataset we will be using to build our decision tree model is a drug dataset that is prescribed to patients based on certain criteria. Let’s import the data in python!
Python Implementation:
Output:
Age Sex BP Cholesterol Na_to_K Drug
0 23 F HIGH HIGH 25.355 drugY
1 47 M LOW HIGH 13.093 drugC
2 47 M LOW HIGH 10.114 drugC
3 28 F NORMAL HIGH 7.798 drugX
4 61 F LOW HIGH 18.043 drugY
Now we have a clear idea of our dataset. After importing the data, let’s get some basic information on the data using the ‘info’ function. The information provided by this function includes the number of entries, index number, column names, non-null values count, attribute type, etc.
Python Implementation:
Output:
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 200 entries, 0 to 199
Data columns (total 6 columns):
# Column Non-Null Count Dtype
--- ------ -------------- -----
0 Age 200 non-null int64
1 Sex 200 non-null object
2 BP 200 non-null object
3 Cholesterol 200 non-null object
4 Na_to_K 200 non-null float64
5 Drug 200 non-null object
dtypes: float64(1), int64(1), object(4)
memory usage: 9.5+ KB
Step-3: Data Processing
We can see that attributes like Sex, BP, and Cholesterol are categorical and object type in nature. The problem is, the decision tree algorithm in scikit-learn does not support X variables to be ‘object’ type in nature. So, it is necessary to convert these ‘object’ values into ‘binary’ values. Let’s do it in python!
Python Implementation:
Output:
Age Sex BP Cholesterol Na_to_K Drug
0 23 1 2 1 25.355 drugY
1 47 1 0 1 13.093 drugC
2 47 1 0 1 10.114 drugC
3 28 1 1 1 7.798 drugX
4 61 1 0 1 18.043 drugY
.. ... ... .. ... ... ...
195 56 1 0 1 11.567 drugC
196 16 1 0 1 12.006 drugC
197 52 1 1 1 9.894 drugX
198 23 1 1 1 14.020 drugX
199 40 1 0 1 11.349 drugX
[200 rows x 6 columns]
We can observe that all the ‘object’ values are processed into ‘binary’ values to represent categorical data. For example, in the Cholesterol attribute, values showing ‘LOW’ are processed to 0 and ‘HIGH’ to be 1. Now we are ready to create the dependent variable and independent variable out of our data.
Step-4: Splitting the data
After processing our data to be of the right structure, we are now set to define the ‘X’ variable or the independent variable and the ‘Y’ variable or the dependent variable. Let’s do it in python!
Python Implementation:
Output:
X variable samples : [[ 1. 2. 23. 1. 25.355]
[ 1. 0. 47. 1. 13.093]
[ 1. 0. 47. 1. 10.114]
[ 1. 1. 28. 1. 7.798]
[ 1. 0. 61. 1. 18.043]]
Y variable samples : ['drugY' 'drugC' 'drugC' 'drugX' 'drugY']
We can now split our data into a training set and testing set with our defined X and Y variables by using the ‘train_test_split’ algorithm in scikit-learn. Follow the code to split the data in python.
Python Implementation:
Output:
X_train shape : (160, 5)
X_test shape : (40, 5)
y_train shape : (160,)
y_test shape : (40,)
Now we have all the components to build our decision tree model. So, let’s proceed to build our model in python.
Step-5: Building the model & Predictions
Building a decision tree can be feasibly done with the help of the ‘DecisionTreeClassifier’ algorithm provided by the scikit-learn package. After that, we can make predictions of our data using our trained model. Finally, the precision of our predicted results can be calculated using the ‘accuracy_score’ evaluation metric. Let’s do this process in python!
Python Implementation:
Output:
Accuracy of the model is 88%
In the first step of our code, we are defining a variable called the ‘model’ variable in which we are storing the DecisionTreeClassifier model. Next, we are fitting and training the model using our training set. After that, we defined a variable called the ‘pred_model’ variable in which we stored all the predicted values by our model on the data. Finally, we calculated the precision of our predicted values to the actual values which resulted in 88% accuracy.
Step-6: Visualizing the model
Now that we have our decision tree model and let’s visualize it by utilizing the ‘plot_tree’ function provided by the scikit-learn package in python. Follow the code to produce a beautiful tree diagram out of your decision tree model in python.
Python Implementation:
Output: | https://medium.com/datazen/building-and-visualizing-decision-tree-in-python-2cfaafd8e1bb | ['Nikhil Adithyan'] | 2020-11-04 08:21:28.685000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Data Visualization'] |
Our website launch: New colors, new tech, new challenges | A couple of weeks ago, we launched our new brand image along with our fresh new site which shows the work we have done with some of our clients. It was also an opportunity to update the tech stack that we were using for our landing pages.
There are three essential parts of our new site:
VueJS is our main tech to create components. It ensures scalability, maintainability, and great performance.
ThreeJS powers the graphics of our Home view.
With Lottie, we created both beautiful and meaningful animations throughout our site.
Let me go over our reasons behind this powerful combination.
The progressiveness of VueJS
As I said, we wanted to start fresh with our site so we assessed that jQuery was not quite meeting our expectations in terms of maintainability, scalability, and developer experience in general. For those reasons, we thought of using a framework that we were familiar with, so we narrowed the options to React and Vue.
However, we felt like we didn’t really need a full SPA since the content and what was rendered was basically static. We needed a better fit for the challenge. For that reason, we decided to go with a Multi-Page App instead, working with Vue as a perfect replacement for jQuery.
What is a Multi-Page App? Well, a Single Page App has only one HTML file with all the applications in it and JavaScript does all the magic with the in-memory router (like vue-router, react-router, etc.). A Multi-Page has an HTML per route, so we will have a new Vue instance on each page we create. One of its advantages is great “first load” times, reaching a First Contentful Paint on about 1500ms — 2000ms and an overall code bundle (without assets) under 300kb per page.
You may think: “Yeah pretty good FCP times but you can do it with jQuery too!” Sure, we can but there are far better advantages in code quality, maintainability, and scalability than plain Vanilla JS. And we can talk about the ongoing changes in Vue that make it a far better option as a modern framework.
Vue has been a blast. Its progressiveness helped us a lot to have new choices for our projects and create amazing solutions.
The challenge of ThreeJS
As you may have noticed, there are a lot of flying dots on our home screen which are powered by ThreeJS. If you don’t know what that is, let me help you: it’s a powerful JS library that lets us render high-performance graphics using OpenGL which is written in GSGL and will run on the GPU. We have never done something like that before so we needed to understand how ThreeJS works and, trust me, that’s no simple task.
ThreeJS principally uses geometry and material that combined will form a mesh. For the giant dot ball we called the “supernova” we started with two shaders created by the community: a vertex shader — that calculates the position of every element — and a fragment shader — the dots that you see. Then we configured the rotation speed, the dots’ size, morph, and dnoise attribute, and we were done. Not that much work here but it was great as an introduction to ThreeJS.
However, we had to create the particles that were coming out of the supernova from scratch. How did we accomplish that? As I said, ThreeJS elements use geometry and material, so we coded them:
The material for our particles
The geometry of the particles
As you may have noticed, the particles are created with a canvas element for the material and then customized to meet the needed color, size, and shape. The geometry is basically a bunch of vectors that will mark our particles’ position and then we can move them by changing these vectors’ X and Y values.
Now, the problem is the performance: how can we make thousands of particles render and move without having a performance bottleneck? Well, there are two approaches to solve this issue. First, we have the particles all over the view, so the solution was to set a buffer size ridiculously big so it can handle the number of particles for as long as the user stays on the site. The particles were created dynamically via an EcmaScript Generator so the buffer won’t always have its memory in use, just allocated.
Example of a generator that creates particles
This first implementation had a problem on low-end PCs that couldn’t load the full buffer size and render the particles. As we iterated the designs, the particle count and position changed and now they are just on the “hero” section. The buffer is much smaller so the particles are easier to control and we can reuse them, so when they reach the “end of the screen”, they will be re-centered.
Smooth-as-butter animations with Lottie
For our workflow animations, we used Lottie, an Airbnb library that helps our team to create and ship animations at 60fps and under 200kb. Of course, this is a huge benefit when the time is crucial or the animation is really complicated to code.
Our workflow animation made with Lottie
All in all, our new site has a great design and we put a lot of effort into creating something new that we haven’t done before. The colors may be new, but our commitment to deliver rock-solid digital products with top-notch technology is still as strong as ever. We really hope you pay us a visit at wolox.co. | https://medium.com/wolox/new-colors-new-tech-new-challenges-f6c0f8ba2dd4 | ['Martin Callegari'] | 2020-11-10 19:48:37.858000+00:00 | ['Lottie', 'Software Development', 'Frontend', 'Threejs', 'Vuejs'] |
資視月誌：半年了，我們在做什麼？ | To be the foremost driver that pioneers the latest technological breakthroughs to propel our society toward the perfect blend of science and art.
Follow | https://medium.com/visuallylab/%E8%B3%87%E8%A6%96%E6%9C%88%E8%AA%8C-%E5%8D%8A%E5%B9%B4%E4%BA%86-%E6%88%91%E5%80%91%E5%9C%A8%E5%81%9A%E4%BB%80%E9%BA%BC-23c4729346d3 | [] | 2019-08-07 09:18:02.373000+00:00 | ['Work', 'What We Do', 'Data Visualization', 'Startup', 'Visually Lab'] |
House Price Prediction With Machine Learning in Python | House Price Prediction With Machine Learning in Python
Using Ridge, Bayesian, Lasso, Elastic Net, and OLS regression model for prediction
Image by Markus Spiske on Pexels
Introduction
Estimating the sale prices of houses is one of the basic projects to have on your Data Science CV. By finishing this article, you will be able to predict continuous variables using various types of linear regression algorithm.
Why linear regression? Linear regression is an algorithm used to predict values that are continuous in nature. It became more popular because it is the best algorithm to start with if you are a newbie to ML.
To predict the sale prices we are going to use the following linear regression algorithms: Ordinal Least Square (OLS) algorithm, Ridge regression algorithm, Lasso regression algorithm, Bayesian regression algorithm, and lastly Elastic Net regression algorithm. These algorithms can be feasibly implemented in python with the use of the scikit-learn package.
Finally, we conclude which model is best suitable for the given case by evaluating each of them using the evaluation metrics provided by the scikit-learn package.
Why Python?
Python is a general-purpose, and high-level programming language which is best known for its efficiency and powerful functions. Python is loved by data scientists because of its ease of use, which makes it more accessible. Python provides data scientists with an extensive amount of tools and packages to build machine learning models. One of its special features is that we can build various machine learning with less-code.
Steps Involved
Importing the required packages into our python environment Importing the house price data and do some EDA on it Data Visualization on the house price data Feature Selection & Data Split Modeling the data using the algorithms Evaluating the built model using the evaluation metrics
Let’s now jump into our coding part!
Importing required packages
Our primary packages for this project are going to be pandas for data processing, NumPy to work with arrays, matplotlib & seaborn for data visualizations, and finally scikit-learn for building an evaluating our ML model. Let’s import all the required packages into our python environment.
Python Implementation:
Importing Data & EDA
As I said before, we are going to work with the house price dataset that contains various features and information about the house and its sale price. Using the ‘read_csv’ function provided by the Pandas package, we can import the data into our python environment. After importing the data, we can use the ‘head’ function to get a glimpse of our dataset.
Python Implementation:
Output: | https://medium.com/datazen/house-price-prediction-with-machine-learning-in-python-cf9df744f7ff | ['Nikhil Adithyan'] | 2020-11-07 19:50:00.641000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Algorithms'] |
How to fix your Angular Material input field from being broken in Safari | How to fix your Angular Material input field from being broken in Safari Tremaine Eto Follow Mar 17 · 3 min read
I just want the fix!
I’m a developer too, so I know sometimes I just want the fix I can plug in right away — if it doesn’t work, I’ll read more to see the nuances of the solution to see if I can then figure it out. So without any more ado, here we go.
In your relevant .css file:
input {
-webkit-user-select: all !important;
}
Versions I saw the problem in
I’ve seen other people with this issue — one person was on Angular 6.0.3 and @angular/material 6.2.1, so it seems like this can actually come up in many different version variations.
What the problem looks like
In my Angular application that uses Angular Material, users saw some weird behavior — but only when they were using Safari.
An input field (using mdInput within an md-input-container ) I had in the app was not behaving at all like it should; users couldn’t actually type in it! I did some more checks, and it turns out this was in all my input fields. If users could type in them, it would only one letter or so, but most of the time all input was restricted.
Below, I made a .gif of the screen capture where I replicate the issue.
What you can’t see in the .gif is that I was typing like a madman on my keyboard trying to get any of my input to register. It wasn’t inserting at all.
Debugging the issue in Safari
In Safari, the idea of a developer console is not as easy to get to as in Google Chrome or Safari out of the box. You can’t, by default, right-click on an element on your page and then click Inspect Element . You first have to go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced and then select “Show Develop in Menu Bar”.
From Develop , you can then click on Open Web Inspector . Actually, even better, you can also right-click on elements now and click Inspect Element like you expect.
The problem
So basically, when you click Inspect Element on an offending input, you’ll see this atrocity:
The -webkit-user-select there is set to none ! This means you can’t type in that box! For some reason, Safari disables these inputs by default.
The fix
Like I said earlier, you can experiment with the different values for -webkit-user-select to see which enables the input. all , auto , and inherit worked for me, for instance, but you’ll probably want to be careful with which one you choose. w3 schools has some guidance on what some of them mean. I liked all , so that’s what I used.
input {
-webkit-user-select: all !important;
}
Note that this affects all inputs in this .css file’s scope, which I assume you want to do for Safari.
The result
Yes. Yes it is. | https://medium.com/cloud-native-the-gathering/how-to-fix-your-angular-material-input-field-from-being-broken-in-safari-1419b12007ee | ['Tremaine Eto'] | 2020-03-17 04:43:01.266000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Angular', 'Front End Development'] |
The office is dead (2): a postcard from the edge | Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash
There are thousands of businesses like ours right now. In fact, we count ourselves amongst the lucky ones since we can see our way to definitely being here next year.
I was fascinated by Courtney Rubin’s piece of a few days ago…
… and thought it might be interesting or useful for others to describe our recent experience of this topic as a real-time working case study.
We’re a health tech start-up who’ve built an enterprise platform to help hospitals work better, co-designed with clinical teams. We’ve been going since late 2017 in Queensland, Australia and our early growth has felt very rapid. As the coronavirus hit, we were at 32 staff.
For office space, we worked in a more or less traditional model over two floors of the same commercial block — one larger space (227sq. m) that can have about 23 programming workstations operating at the same time and a smaller one (125 sq. m) that can have about 13. Each has a meeting room, kitchen space and small chill-out area.
Like almost every other business, COVID-19 hit us with massive and sudden turbulence to our revenue, and sadly we had to reduce our headcount by six. We read the scientific and government advice extensively in the early stages of the crisis and voluntarily moved ourselves to home working about two weeks ahead of our local lock-downs on March 16th.
Shortly after this, our very dynamic operations manager, Leigh, swung into action and created a long list of options for how we could respond both in the immediate throes of the crisis, as well as how we could change our shape in the future. This enabled us to take a paper with a spread of options in it and get support from our Board.
About three weeks ago, the topic of what the ‘new normal’ would look like for us came up with quite a lot of comments in our (virtual) all-hands and it was clear we needed to begin the process of deciding together what the best way forward was for us as a group.
So, we took Leigh’s analysis and focused it into four specific options to talk about as a group: have no office, keep both floors, only keep the bigger office or only keep the smaller office.
As a leadership team, we try and operate on the basis that nothing is off the table — let’s discuss it. After a round of small-group conversations involving every member of staff it was clear that we unanimously wanted to retain a central office in some form.
But there was an important spread of opinions and preferences about how much time we should either mandate or allow people to be in the office for. Some people said they preferred working in an office for some of the week, others that they wouldn’t mind if they never came in.
It didn’t take a logistical genius to figure out that the amount of space we need at a minimum is directly related to how many ‘people days’ we need to accommodate.
So, we sent out a survey to everyone with two simple but powerful questions:
Do you think there should be one or two mandatory days in the office? Considering your own personal working style how many days would you ideally choose to work in the office?
We got a 100% response rate in less than one day and the results were fascinating:
Healthcare Logic staff answer to question 1 (survey taken April 27, 2020)
Healthcare Logic staff answer to question 2 (survey taken April 27, 2020)
Key takeaway 1: over 75% of us thought there should be only one mandatory office-day or had no preference! This surprised us, since some of the anecdotal discussion in the small groups had initially led us to think the preference would be for a higher number of mandatory days.
Key takeaway 2: nobody wants to work even four days a week in an office, let alone five! Nearly half of us only want to office-work one day a week, a third two days a week and a quarter three days. This was another big surprise, and left us feeling as if some genie was out of a bottle.
As a group, we don’t want to go back to how it was.
For us — and we cannot be alone in this — when staff preferences are taken into account, there is no business case for anything other than a minimal office space.
There was one further factor that came from the discussions with our engineers (our biggest staff group, natch). This was the ability to arrange joint programming and get-together time that would acknowledge both our ‘craft groups’ (for us: R&D, data engineers, web developers and testers) and the ‘task groups’ that form our scrum teams delivering our version of agile.
To solve the problem of acknowledging the need for both craft group and task group time together, we came up with a ‘Week A’ and ‘Week B’ model that looks like this:
Healthcare Logic team rotation for minimum office space: developed April 29 2020
We think this could work better than before, since we can now envisage more specific education and development programs for both the scrum teams and craft groups, giving us potentially more useful time together . As a part of this change, we are also introducing the concept of ‘bookable workstations’ as a fully available schedule for any combination of staff to be able to book any combination of available space.
Our ‘anchor and mission’ team — Customer Success — are predominantly externally focused in any case, and were least concerned about dedicated time in the office since they already function well on a virtual and customer-facing basis.
This approach also means of course that we save a useful amount of money. We are lucky in that we have a great relationship with our landlords and are on a flexible lease that comes up at the end of May, so letting go of the bigger office with all its associated costs is a quickly realisable net saving in the region of $70k AUD each year, or nearly $3k per head.
We’ve decided to give nearly half of this straight back to our fantastic staff in the form of fully catered lunches for teams on mandatory days (in a ‘strategic partnership’ with one of our cool local cafes — shout out to https://www.facebook.com/simplecoffeehouse/), parking allowances meaning parking is free for when people are in work, new branded rucksacks to carry the noise-cancelling mics and headphones people have asked for and last but not least a fully catered once a month celebration and planning day that we will hold at a local venue where we can all get together.
Overall, the participative approach to decision making gave us some surprising data that helped clarify our final call — and hopefully will mean we can ‘own’ the decision as a coherent group when we hit the inevitable snags.
For us, the ‘office’ as a concept is not quite dead — but one of our office spaces is, and we can see a model enabling us to thrive on 35% of our previous space. And as leaders of a start-up with global ambitions in the near future, leaning in to these changes in this way enables us to develop our people, processes, culture and (internal) technology for the exciting challenges ahead. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-office-is-dead-2-a-postcard-from-the-edge-dbaaca128079 | ['Prof Martin Connor'] | 2020-05-14 04:19:11.934000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Office', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Marker'] |
11 Amazing Facts You Might Not Know About Chatbots | Chatbots are the next big thing.
What is a chatbot? They come in two flavors:
Virtual assistants, which help you find information, remember stuff, or buy things. Think Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant. These are powered by machine learning, meaning they rely on artificial intelligence to learn and figure out what you want.
Messaging apps, which essentially allow businesses and brands to be online 24/7 providing customer support (e.g., instant responses, quick answers, complaint resolution). Think Facebook Messenger, Kik, WeChat, and Slack. These types of chatbots are only capable of interacting with users by following pre-programmed rules.
What you see and experienced so far is just the beginning of what is forecast to be a billion-dollar industry in less than 10 years. Many top brands, including Uber, Sephora, and CNN, have already adopted chatbots.
Here are 11 amazing facts you might not know about chatbots.
Fact 1: 1.4 Billion People Use Messaging Apps
The top four messaging apps are bigger than the top four social networks, according to BI Intelligence. More than 1.4 billion people used messaging apps in 2016, according to eMarketer. By 2019, more than 25 percent of the world’s population (roughly 1.75 billion people) will be using mobile messaging apps.
Fact 2: People Are Ready to Talk to Chatbots
According to a report (Humanity in the Machine) from media and marketing services company Mindshare, 63 percent of people would consider messaging an online chatbot to communicate with a business or brand, whether on messenger or on SMS messaging. A survey conducted by myclever Agency found that they would use chatbots to obtain “quick emergency answers.”
Fact 3: People Want to Contact Retailers via Chat
Online chat and messaging apps are the preferred way for 29 percent of people to contact retailers when making a purchase decision, according to [24]7. That means people are equally likely to contact a retailer by phone or use a chatbot and more likely to use a chatbot than to contact a retailer via email (27 percent).
Fact 4: There Are More than 30,000 Facebook Chatbots
As of September, there were 30,000 chatbots on Facebook. Those chatbots have been used by millions of people in 200 countries.
Fact 5: Most Chatbot Conversations Start With “Hi”
“Hi” and “hello” are the two most popular ways to start a conversation with a chatbot, according to Dashbot.io, a bot analytics provider. Other popular messages included a question mark, “hey,” “help,” “yes,” and a thumbs up icon.
Fact 6: Consumers Are Ready to Buy Things via Chatbots
Thirty-seven percent of Americans say they are willing to make a purchase through a chatbot, according to DigitasLBi. On average, consumers would spend more than $55 per purchase. If a chatbot were available, 33 percent of UK residents would buy basic items like clothes and food, according to myclever Agency
Fact 7: Consumers Won’t Put Up With Bad Chatbots
One bad chatbot experience could be costly. According to the DigitasLBi report, 73 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t use a company’s chatbot after a bad experience. According to Mindshare’s report, 61 percent of people would find it more frustrating if a chatbot couldn’t solve a problem vs. a human.
Fact 8: Consumers Want Recommendations From Chatbots
Thirty-seven percent of all consumers — and 48 percent of millennials — are open to receiving recommendations or advice from chatbots, according to DigitasLBi. Breaking this down further, consumers are interested in recommendations for products from retail stores (22 percent); hotels/accommodations (20 percent); travel (18 percent); products from a pharmacy (12 percent); and fashion/style (9 percent).
Fact 9: Don’t Blur Lines Between Bots, Humans
An overwhelming majority of consumers (75 percent) said they want to know whether they are chatting with a chatbot or a human (48 percent considered chatbots pretending to be human “creepy”), according to Mindshare. The robotic and artificial nature of responses clued in 60 percent consumers that they were interacting with a chatbot, according to DigitasLBi.
Fact 10: Chatbots Will Be Indistinguishable From Humans by 2029
Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist, and engineer at Google (who has a pretty good knack for making accurate predictions) predicts that chatbots will have human-level language ability by the year 2029. “If you think you can have a meaningful conversation with a human, you’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation with an AI in 2029. But you’ll be able to have interesting conversations before that,” according to Kurzweil, as quoted in The Verge.
Fact 11: People in China Seriously Love Chatbots
Xiaoice is a ridiculously popular chatbot in China, according to Engadget. The average conversation length is 23 conversations per session (CPS). The average CPS for pretty much every other chatbot: 1.5 to 2.5.
Bonus fact: Pretty soon chatbots will be ridiculously popular in the U.S. as well. Are you ready for the amazing chatbot revolution?
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About the Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Originally posted on Inc.com | https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/11-amazing-facts-you-might-not-know-about-chatbots-8cdf331181f8 | ['Larry Kim'] | 2020-05-05 02:31:33.711000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Messaging', 'Tech'] |
The SaaS Learning Curve | The SaaS Learning Curve
(or, why SaaS = Service as a Software)
Originally published by Sean Sheppard on the GrowthX Blog.
The SaaS Learning Curve for most founders is longer than it needs to be. So long that it outpaces most early funding, leaving founders short of the traction milestones required for their next funding round.
Founders can avoid this outcome with one simple but powerful realization: It’s not your technology that wins, but the insights you generate by seeking fit within a market.
That’s worth Tweeting, don’t you think?
It’s not your technology that wins, but the insights you generate by seeking fit within a market. CLICK TO TWEET
That means you need to resist the temptation to focus on building a product and spend your time (and early funding) on working closely with early customers in solving a specific problem. A problem large enough to sustain you through the learning curve.
Here’s a trick to make this easy (please share):
Start thinking of SaaS as Service as a Software, not Software as a Service. CLICK TO TWEET
Service First Makes for Better Software
People don’t care about your products. They care about their problems. If you can solve their problems partially today via Service as a Software and more fully over time via Software as a Service then you will increase your chance of winning. This requires you to be high touch and low tech until you no longer have to be.
Servicing your customer accelerates your learning. Your best opportunity to learn and build what you want is by manually servicing your customer. It can take years to build a self-service product. So build a service-first culture and leverage that approach to build what your customers want.
There’s No Shame in Leading with Service
The now-common refrain from the investment community about predictable, recurring licensing revenue puts pressure on founders which is not always correct. As such, it has convinced a generation of SaaS founders that they’re failing if they have to lean in with services while they are building a more whole and complete software.
This can create a whole host of unhealthy and misaligned behaviors that can result in a longer learning curve which in turn creates the potential need for more time and runway to learn and ultimately reduces win rates.
It’s true that humans don’t scale, but neither do startups that build interesting features without solving a market need. In the early days, you’re not ready for scale. A services mindset helps you find fit with a market need (and, ultimately, something worth scaling).
Adopt a Service-First Mindset
A Service as a Software approach helps you develop deeper insights into the problems you’re solving and build a more robust and stickier software solution for your market. Far from worrying, SaaS founders should rejoice when their early customers are asking for service! Where they should worry is if the market doesn’t respond. Silence speaks louder than words!!
Service as a Software is more than an important mindset to help founders focus on problems over features. In some circumstances, services-first can help a SaaS startup beat the competition. Tom Tunguz penned a great blog on this topic. Finish reading this article and then head over to his site to learn why in early markets, services can be a competitive advantage.
Selling Vision vs Reality
Service as a Software does not mean stop selling your vision. It means stop selling your product to customers (as if it’s complete). Instead, recruit early partners who share your vision and are willing to implement your reality. And your reality as an early-stage startup is that most of what you’ve built is riddled with “happy accidents.”
A startup is a series of experiments. You need to constantly ask yourself WWBRD (What Would Bob Ross Do). He would celebrate being less wrong tomorrow than he is today! Be like Bob; be a learn-it-all (not a know-it-all).
So how do you identify and recruit early partners? I’m glad you asked
Recruiting Early Partners
I’m often asked, “which customers do I go after first”? The framework for answering that question starts with asking the same question differently: “Which customers are open to sharing my vision while accepting my reality?”
The answer is in Geoffrey Moore’s must-read book, “Crossing the Chasm”. The cohorts most likely to share your vision with an appetite for accepting your reality are referred to as Innovators and Early Adopters. These groups of people are willing to take the risk associated with working with incomplete products to realize a shared vision.
Innovators represent about 10% of the market and will provide you with great product feedback but rarely have a budget. As such, they are quite useful in the pre-revenue stage of a Service as a Software company.
Early Adopters represent another 10–15% of the market and they have a budget. They often buy because they seek a competitive advantage. They see that being achieved by working with you to realize what should become a shared vision for your product.
The Early Customer Mindset in the SaaS Learning Curve.
Regardless of your customer, all commerce is human to human (until the bots take over). It is vital to recognize that humans rely on the humans building the product to solve their problems; they don’t rely on the product.
After all, when was the last time anyone sought recourse from a product when something goes wrong? Never! They seek recourse from those who convinced them to join them on a wayward journey. They expect service from you, not your product!
The Early-Stage SaaS Metric that Matters the Most: Learning
The next question I get is “how do I know where I am in the learning curve, or if I’m making progress?” To effectively commercial innovation you need to accept that learning precedes revenue. If you start the journey with a Service as a Software mindset and build a functional learning organization, you will accelerate your path through the SaaS Learning Curve.
This requires you to create an environment that supports rapid on-the-job learning by adopting a growth mindset, developing your business acumen, facilitating cross-functional communication, and embracing ambiguity.
Reserve the right to be better tomorrow than you are today based on what you’ve learned. CLICK TO TWEET
Learning powers your early journey as a Service as a Software founder. It helps you efficiently transition from a non-scalable (but critical) Service as a Software approach to a profitable, predictable and scalable Software as a Service business. | https://medium.com/the-mission/the-saas-learning-curve-a699afe19ac0 | [] | 2018-10-08 15:01:02.662000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Learning', 'Technology'] |
A Beginner’s Guide for Getting Started with Machine Learning | If you’ve landed on this article, chances are that you’ve been wondering what Machine Learning is all about or perhaps how to get started off. Do not worry, let us get all of this covered in the next few minutes!
Image Source: Thermo Fisher Scientific — Machine Learning is a subset of AI
Lately, it seems that every time you open your browser or casually scroll across the news feed, there’s always someone writing about machine learning, its impact on human-kind or the advancements in AI. What’s all this buzz about? Have you ever wondered how technologies ranging from Virtual Assistant Solutions to self-driving cars* and robots ever function?
Do not worry! You’re at the right place to get all your questions answered!
What is AI?
Programs that behave externally like humans? Programs that operate internally as humans do? Computational systems that behave intelligently?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of Computer Science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence — Source: Wikipedia.
Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence!
Machine Learning: A Precise Introduction
“Learning is any process by which a system improves performance from experience.” ~Herbert Simon
Machine Learning is an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed—Source: Expert.ai
Machine learning is nothing new. The history, in fact, dates back over 60 years to when Alan Turing created the ‘Turing test’ to determine whether a computer had real intelligence or not. The idea was — “To be called intelligent, a machine must produce responses that are indistinguishable from those of a human.”
Image Source: Zeolearn — A Brief Timeline of Machine Learning
As a human, and as a user of technology, you complete certain tasks that require you to make an important decision or classify something. For instance, when you read your inbox in the morning, you decide to mark that ‘Win a Free Car if You Click Here’ email as spam. How would a computer know to do the same thing?
Machine learning is comprised of algorithms that teach computers to perform tasks that human beings do naturally on a daily basis such as this one! The first attempts at artificial intelligence involve teaching a computer by writing a rule/set of rules.
Image Source: InterSystems — Traditional Programming vs Machine learning
If we wanted to teach a computer to make recommendations based on the weather, then we might write a rule that said — IF the weather is cloudy AND the chance of rainfall is greater than 50%, THEN suggest taking an umbrella.
The problem with this approach used in traditional expert systems, however, is that we don’t know how much confidence to place on the rule. Is it right 50% of the time? Less or More?
(You may also refer the above diagram illustrating Traditional Programming vs Machine Learning)
Types of Machine Learning
Depending on the context of the problem, they can be classified into three major categories —
Unsupervised Learning
Hindsight — Descriptive Analysis (What happened?)
(What happened?) No Labels
No Feedback
Find Hidden Structure in Data
Supervised Learning
Insight — Predictive Analysis (What will happen?)
(What will happen?) Labelled Data
Direct Feedback
Predict Outcome/Future
Foresight — Prescriptive Analysis (How can we make it happen?)
(How can we make it happen?) Decision Process
Reward System
Learn Series of Actions
Uses of Machine Learning
Unsupervised Learning
Algorithms Used — KNN, K-means Clustering, Hierarchical Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction
Organize Computing Clusters
Social Network Analysis
Market Segmentation
Astronomical Data Analysis
Supervised Learning
Algorithms Used — Regression, Classification, Decision Tree, SVM
Stock Prediction Problem
House Price Prediction
Cancer Prognosis (Malignant or Benign)
Weather Forecasting
Algorithms Used — Q-Learning, SARSA, DQN, DDPG
Credit Assignment Problem
Game Playing
Robot in a Maze
Balancing a Pole
Machine learning has made dramatic improvements in the past few years, but we are still very far from reaching human-level performance. Many times, it still requires the assistance of a human to complete its task.
Getting Started with Machine Learning
Requirements and Libraries
Python (latest release — 3.9.0) is the most preferred language coming to Machine Learning. Preference for Python3 over Python2 is usually observed. GPU and larger RAM is usually preferred when you’re handling huge amount of data or when a greater amount of processing is required otherwise, it isn’t.
Here’s a list of useful libraries for Machine Learning —
Pandas — Popular Python library for data analysis. It provides many inbuilt methods for grouping, combining and filtering data.
Popular Python library for data analysis. It provides many inbuilt methods for grouping, combining and filtering data. Numpy — Popular Python library for matrix processing and to handle multi-dimensional arrays.
Popular Python library for matrix processing and to handle multi-dimensional arrays. Matplotlib — Popular Python library for data-visualization.
Popular Python library for data-visualization. Scikit-learn — Popular library to get started off with Machine Learning, has inbuilt functions for most Supervised and Unsupervised algorithms.
Popular library to get started off with Machine Learning, has inbuilt functions for most Supervised and Unsupervised algorithms. Scipy — It contains different modules for optimization, linear algebra, integration and statistics, popular for Machine Learning.
It contains different modules for optimization, linear algebra, integration and statistics, popular for Machine Learning. TensorFlow — Popular for high-performance numerical computation developed by Google. Widely employed for Deep Learning Applications.
Popular for high-performance numerical computation developed by Google. Widely employed for Deep Learning Applications. Keras — Has high-level neural networks API capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano.
Has high-level neural networks API capable of running on top of TensorFlow, CNTK, or Theano. PyTorch — It has an extensive choice of tools and libraries that support on Computer Vision, NLP and many Machine Learning programs.
It has an extensive choice of tools and libraries that support on Computer Vision, NLP and many Machine Learning programs. Theano — Library that is used to define, evaluate and optimize mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays in an efficient manner.
For more implementations using these libraries refer my GitHub Repos — https://github.com/tanvipenumudy/AI-ML-Weekly-Challenges https://github.com/tanvipenumudy/Deep-Learning-Labs
Here’s a list of useful IDEs/Platforms/Editors/Environments —
Getting Started with Google Colaboratory
Colaboratory or ‘Colab’ for short, is a product from Google Research. Colab allows anybody to write and execute any arbitrary Python code through any browser and is especially well suited to Machine Learning, Data Analysis and Education — Source: Google Research Docs.
Getting Started with Colab—Snapshot 1
As soon as you open Colab, a menu is popped-up that contains the following tabs:
Examples — Contains a number of notebooks of various examples.
Contains a number of notebooks of various examples. Recent — Notebooks that you have recently worked with.
Notebooks that you have recently worked with. Google Drive — Notebook stored in your Google Drive.
Notebook stored in your Google Drive. GitHub — You can add Notebooks from your GitHub Repositories after connecting your Colab account with your GitHub account.
You can add Notebooks from your GitHub Repositories after connecting your Colab account with your GitHub account. Upload — Upload from your local directory.
Otherwise, you may create a new Notebook by clicking on ‘New Python3/Python2 Notebook’
Getting Started with Colab — Snapshot 2
A new file is initialized to ‘UntitledX’, you may also change the file’s description on the top left corner of the document. Apart from that, there is a scope of changing your Runtime Type/Environment from the drop-down menu ‘Runtime’ to either None, GPU or TPU (It is None by default), in some versions, there is also a possibility to toggle between Python3 to Python2 and vice versa.
Getting Started with Colab — Snapshot 3
All Python/Jupyter Notebook commands are functional on Google Colaboratory.
By clicking on the +Code or +Text icon, you may initialize a new Code or Text Cell in the Notebook.
Commonly used Commands on Google Colab
Here’s a list of commonly used commands on Google Colaboratory —
Command for installing any python library (Only confined to that runtime)
! pip install PythonLibrary
Command to import files from a link (Only confined to that runtime)
!wget link
Command to upload any local file (Only confined to that runtime)
from google.colab import files uploaded = files.upload()
Additional Topic: Google Sheets for Data Mining
In simple words, Data Mining is defined as a process used to extract usable data from a larger set of any raw data. It implies analysing data patterns in large batches of data using one or more software. For segmenting the data and evaluating the probability of future events, data mining uses sophisticated mathematical algorithms.
Image Source: MicroStrategy — Data Mining Explained
Data mining has applications in multiple fields, like science and research, it helps businesses get closer to their objectives and for better decision making. As an application of data mining, businesses can learn more about their customers and develop more effective strategies related to various business functions and in turn leverage resources in a more optimal and insightful manner.
Image Source: Zapier — Illustration of Google Sheets
Google Sheets is an online spreadsheet app that lets you create and format spreadsheets collaboratively with your team in real-time. Let’s now understand how Google Sheets could be utilized for Data Mining.
Helps in Collaboration
Add-ons for Text Analysis
Add-ons for Text Mining
Power Tools
Finding Fuzzy Matches
Google Analytics
Supports Socrative Data Mining
The inbuilt add-ons within Google Sheets provide statistics and data analysis functionality right in Google Sheets, avoiding the need to download data to a separate customized statistics application. Instead, you have to select the variables you want to analyze, and do the entire analysis in a single go.
“Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.” ~Nick Bostrom
For further queries, feel free to drop a mail at tp6145@bennett.edu.in
Additional Resources
My Related Blogs
AI-ML Weekly Challenges
Deep Learning Labs | https://tp6145.medium.com/a-beginners-guide-for-getting-started-with-machine-learning-7ba2cd5796ae | ['Tanvi Penumudy'] | 2020-12-29 10:44:16.411000+00:00 | ['Data Mining', 'Deep Learning', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
5 programming languages to look for in 2021 | 5 programming languages to look for in 2021
The TOP 5 programming languages that I think will trend in 2021
Overview
Today exists hundreds of programming languages. And the top (most used) can change along with the market demand because each year new trends and problems emerge. One language can be more suitable for a specific task and others could fit better in another. It is difficult to choose one language over another without knowing the context of the problem that will solve.
In my opinion, as long as the language solves your problem it doesn't matter which one you choose. I think the more important it’s what you do with the language (write clean, readable, and performant code) as you can write good or crappy code with any of them.
I know this is a controversial subject (not like iPhone vs Android but still a little provocative) and probably you will not share the same opinion on which one is the most popular.
Fifth: Kotlin
“Developers love clean, concise code. Less code takes less time to write, less time to read, and is less susceptible to bugs. But with Java, you must write a lot of code to get even the simplest things done. You’ve probably already experienced this if you’re an Android developer.” Aritra Roy, techbeacon.com
Kotlin first appears in 2011, was designed by JetBrains and it is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose programming language. It became so popular that, according to google, since 2019 it is the preferred language among Android developers¹.
Because it requires less code to do the same thing as other programming languages projects can be developed faster. It also supports using existing Java libraries which is a big plus as Java has an enormous ecosystem. Another reason to justify his popularity is the fact that is officially supported by Google for Android development.
It’s a programming language to keep an eye on especially if you work with android.
Fourth: GO
“Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice.” Sammuel Tesla
Go was introduced in 2009 and is now supported by Google. Is described itself as expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. One of its strengths is the concurrency mechanism that makes it easy to write multithread applications.
It’s no surprise that it is popular. In 2019, an article on dice.com said it was one of the best-paying top tech skills².
Third: TypeScript
“By understanding JavaScript, TypeScript saves you time catching errors and providing fixes before you run code.” https://www.typescriptlang.org/
Typescript is a programming language that appears in 2012 and was designed by Microsoft. His mission is to allow the development of applications at a larger scale and transcompiles (compiler source-to-source) to JavaScript. All javascript programs are also typescript valid programs.
Is loved by many actively supported by Microsoft as it continues to add more features and today is in version 4.1. Each day JavaScript apps are migrated to Typescript because it is more scalable and maintainable.
I’m sure we will hear a lot from Typescript in 2021.
Second: JavaScript
“The strength of JavaScript is that you can do anything. The weakness is that you will.” Reg Braithwaite
JavaScript is the language we love to hate. You can do almost everything with it and it is everywhere (servers and clients).
Created in 1995 it is a lot older when compared with the above programming languages.
To this day millions of websites still depend on third-party JavaScript libraries and I believe the list will continue to grow in 2021. With the introduction of other frontend frameworks, that are almost always attached to JavaScript, the applications using JavaScript could be even more in the future.
Honorable mention: PHP
This day looks like every programmer hates PHP and that is because they probably don’t know it as is today. PHP 5 and PHP 7 are like two different languages.
Unless you have some specific needs PHP is the language to use in most cases. It simply gets the job done and that's why is still the dominant language in web apps and it will be for a long time. Since PHP 5 the language has improved a lot and is evolving every day.
Recently was released PHP 8 comes with few cool features. Take a look here.
First: Python
“Python will probably be the most favorite programming language for developers in 2021.” Artur Yolchan, owner of coding skills
Python has been here for a long time. Created in 1992, is an interpreted, high-level, and general-purpose language. Its clean syntax helps developers create readable code for small and large scale projects.
Adopt in the science community for its simplicity and ecosystem, also is often learned in schools the popularity will continue to grow. You will hear from python in the next year.
Which of them should I learn?
Well, that's a difficult question. The most important thing is to understand and know how to write code that everyone can read. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses so beware of that and you will be fine.
Programming isn’t just about the language.
I hope you like and be nice in the comments. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/5-programming-languages-to-look-for-in-2021-d3d039eb5e5f | ['Eric Walker'] | 2020-12-21 12:01:27.905000+00:00 | ['Programming Languages', 'Programming', 'Go', 'Typescript', 'PHP'] |
Discovering Depeche Mode: Interview with Daniel Miller of Mute Records | Kenny Gates: Daniel, where did you go to school?
Daniel Miller: I went to King Alfred’s School in North London from 4 to 18 years old. At the time it was regarded as a progressive school. This was 1955 to 1969. There were a number of unusual things about it for the time: there were no school uniforms, it was mixed, it wasn’t purely academic — they tried to play to your strengths — and it had an arts background, a lot of people in the creative industries went there. It taught you to be a bit more self-sufficient than a normal school, which just puts you on the path of the curriculum.
How would you describe yourself as a boy?
I definitely had a sense of wanting to do things differently. I was lazy. I was really bad at school in an academic sense. I was overweight but I was pretty funny.
We did quite a lot of comedy at school — I’d love to write comedy for a living if I was any good at it. There were a lot of things I really enjoyed but was really bad at like sports, science and playing music.
I was my own person; I am an only child. My parents were refugees from Europe, from Hitler. They were both based in Vienna, both actors, but they actually met in London. So I had a pretty liberal upbringing, and the school emphasized that. My boundaries were quite broad.
I was besotted with music from an early age. And then when I was about 12, The Beatles and the whole British boom came out; all of a sudden everyone was in a band in school. I was transfixed by it. I was in a band, the worst band, but it was a lot of fun.
All bad musicians gravitated towards each other. Paul Kossoff was in my class at school — an amazing guitarist who went on to play in Free. He tried to teach me to play guitar; even he failed. Another great musician in my class was Nick Potter, who went on to play in Van Der Graaf Generator.
The cast of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again
Did you write comedy?
Me and three other friends wrote it and performed it around school — it was impersonations of teachers. Taking the piss, basically. We were really big fans of a show on the radio called I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. It featured people like John Cleese, Graeme Garden and Graham Chapman. One day we said: ‘Why don’t we send our scripts to John Cleese?’ He wasn’t mega-famous at that time, — We looked him up in the telephone directory and called him. He said: ‘Of course, send me them.’ So we did, and he said: ‘These are really good, come and have a meeting.’
We were 16 or 17 at the time. We went to see him; he was really friendly and gave us some tips and was very supportive. Then there was this new program, which nobody had heard of at the time, called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They pre-recorded the first five episodes. He invited us to one of the recordings — it was the episode with the famous ‘nudge nudge’ sketch. None of it had been broadcast. We went backstage and met all the guys. It was amazing, really.
After school, my passion was music and my second passion was film. I went to art school in Guildford and did a three-year course in film and TV. It was terrible most of the time. I started there in September 1969. I went for my interview that spring and met all the staff. During that summer there was a big student uprising in the college. The staff on the course supported the students, and all got fired. So by the time we turned up, it was a completely different staff and curriculum to the one we signed up to. So we went on strike.
Somehow I became a bit of a spokesman — I learnt quite a lot about politics at that time. The college had a little sound studio with three ¼-inch tape recorders in it, and we used to do experiments with tape loops and things like that. We’d also have guest lecturers; one was Ron Geesin, a poet and sound artist who’d just worked with Pink Floyd, and he’d just bought a synthesizer — an EMS Synthi A, basically the same thing Brian Eno used in Roxy Music but in a suitcase. That was my first hands-on experience with a synthesiszr and it blew my mind. That was around 1970.
Let’s jump to the late 70s—why did you start a label?
Punk was happening, and the whole DIY, release your own records thing was in bloom. Punk rock was great in some senses: it cleared away a lot of shit, but musically I found it quite conservative. A lot of people quickly moved on to other things. So it was a combination of timing in terms of punk, the DIY movement and relatively cheap synthesizers on the market. I felt it was my time — I was driven to make some electronic music.
I bought a second-hand synthesizer — a Korg 700S. I was working as an assistant film editor at ATV at the time. I came up with a couple of tunes, literally in my bedroom. People think of bedroom recordings as a modern, laptop invention. It wasn’t. There were loads of people recording in their bedroom in the mid-70s. I read about how to put out a single; it was an article by a group called The Desperate Bicycles who pressed their own single and distributed it by bicycle. I knew I’d have to make 500 copies, but I didn’t think I’d sell any.
So this all happened in 1977?
Yes and early ’78. I got the test pressings and thought I’d see if any shops were interested. The pressing plant was in East London, so the first shop I came to was Small Wonder Records — a famous independent shop and label at the time. I played the single to Pete from Small and he said: ‘Yeah, not too bad. I’ll take ten.” Then I went to the Rough Trade shop and talked to Judith who was working in the shop. When I asked her if she’d be interested in the record, she said, I’ll go and see Geoff [Travis], who was working in the back.
Geoff Travis at Rough Trade
He and Richard Scott, his business partner, listened to it in the shop, in front of all these super-cool people. I was standing there so embarrassed. I was thinking: ‘They don’t like it.’ When it finished they said: ‘We love it, we’d like to do a distribution deal for you. How many are you going to press?’
I said 500 and they said, no, you’ve got to do at least 2,000. They lent me the money to press the extra records. Jane Suck at Sounds Magazine got hold of a test pressing, reviewed it and made it ‘Single Of The Century’. I couldn’t fucking believe it. It then got other good reviews and John Peel played it.
Did you pay yourself royalties?
I ripped myself off! I was not Kobalt: I was not very transparent. The 2,000 sold out very quickly.
I bought one…
Well I’ll drink to that. I think maybe it did 10–15,000 in the first few months. College and alternative radio started playing it in America; I didn’t even know what alternative radio was — I didn’t even know what distribution was! It was very weird for me as I had no expectations. It was one of the first post-punk electronic singles; it came at the same time as others like Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, the first Throbbing Gristle single…
I thought I’d bought this cool underground record. It turns out you were selling loads!
[Laughs] I wasn’t selling that many. If you got in the Top 75 in those days, overnight you’d sell 100,000 records. Woolworths would buy it automatically, along with all the jukeboxes. That didn’t happen. So selling 15,000 was a successful underground record.
Were you still living with your parents?
My father had passed away, but I was staying at my mother’s place at the time.
How did she feel about it — didn’t she want you to be a doctor or a lawyer?
No, she was totally encouraging. She wanted me to do what I want to do — whatever I had a passion for. She did that with her own life. By 1960s London standards, my parents were relatively bohemian. They weren’t hippies though! My father was an actor and had his own German-speaking theatre for refugees during the war. He was an indie! I got a bit of both of them.
So what came next?
I was helping out at Rough Trade doing a bit of promotion work. I was in a position where I had to make a decision: I was getting demo tapes, which I didn’t really like that much and I didn’t want to start a label.
Fad Gadget aka Frank Tovey
Then I was introduced to Fad Gadget [Frank Tovey] by a guy called Edwin Pouncey — the NME punk cartoonist who went under the name of Savage Pencil. It was the first thing I’d heard that I’d really liked. Then I met Frank, who was Fad Gadget, and we got on really well. We shared a similar vision and I said: ‘Let’s make a single.’ That really was the beginning of Mute Records as a label, as opposed to just my own thing.
Why call it Mute?
I had a list of 100 names and it was on there. The idea of Mute came from film. When you shoot film, you normally shoot it with sound. When you shoot it without sound, it’s called ‘mute.’ Because I was working in a cutting room, an editing room, I saw this word Mute everywhere. I liked it.
Depeche Mode, 1980
How did you meet Depeche Mode?
Fad Gadget’s single came out in 1979 and we started working with a couple of other artists — D.A.F, significantly, which was the first album release on Mute. Fad Gadget made our second album, and he was promoting it doing gigs around London. He was booked to play The Bridge House in Canning Town. The guy who booked it, Terry Murphy, was a real East End guy, who liked to support East End musicians; he knew Frank’s father, who was a big East End figure working in Smithfield’s market.
Terry booked Depeche Mode to support because they were from Basildon, Essex, which was an East End overspill town. I saw them during the soundcheck and they looked really dodgy, in homemade New Romantic clothes. They also looked really young.
They had three little synths supported on beer crates, and the lead singer had a light that he shone upwards to make himself look gothic. But when they came on stage that night, I watched the first song and just thought: ‘What?! That’s fucking incredible! What the hell’s that? I’m sure it will go downhill from here.’ But it didn’t — it just got better and better.
Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, 1980
Most of the songs they played in their 30-minute set ended up on the first album. I couldn’t believe what I’d heard; great songs, unbelievably well-arranged. I went backstage and said: ‘Hi, I’m Daniel from Mute. I really enjoyed it.’ They were being all cool, but said: ‘We’re playing here again next week supporting someone else.’ So I told them I’d come down. I took a couple of people with me including NON — Boyd Rice — who was a big pop fan, and my first employee, Hildi Svengard.
They both said: ‘Daniel, you’ve got to do this.’ I went back and said to the band: ‘Do you fancy doing a single?’ They said yes, and it was “Dreaming Of Me.”
You were early to sign them…
I remember, typical of the British press, that there was an article [on the next wave of supposed New Romantics]. Depeche did a gig at The Hope & Anchor in Islington: Roger Ames came down, so did Chris Briggs — all these major label A&Rs were there, all trying to sign the band.
At the end of the gig, I went back stage and all these people were already in the dressing room saying: ‘Mute’s a nice little label, but they’ll never get you any success. There’s only two people working for it.’ The band just said: ‘Yeah, but we’re going to stick with them for the moment, see how it goes.’
They put their trust in me and I wanted to return that trust by doing the best that we could do. I was determined to make it a success… I was convinced we could do it on our own. The majors were so arrogant and condescending, I thought: ‘Fuck you.’
The band were offered quite big advances [which they turned down to stay with Mute]. We didn’t have a contract, no lawyers, no managers: we sold a fuck of a lot of records and they made a good amount of money without any of them.
Do you remember the first time it crossed your mind that what you were doing was meaningful — that it was changing culture and people’s lives?
You have to remember that in the early 70s electronic music was still elitist — people couldn’t engage with making the music because everything cost a fortune. I was a huge electronic music fan though, and in my head electronic music was the ultimate punk music especially as much cheaper synths came on the market — you didn’t even need to learn three chords. So right from the beginning I wanted to communicate that electronic music could be homemade, anti-elitist — that was the message I was sending out when I released that first single and I’d like to think that I went some way to achieving that.
What’s the biggest-selling Mute album of all time?
It must be Violator. That sold around 10m or 11m. [Moby’s] Play worldwide was the same, but we didn’t have the rights for North America.
Have you ever dropped an artist? If so, why?
Of course, yes. Loads! The idea we didn’t drop artists was a myth that was around Mute in the 80s or 90s. If I feel that I’m more excited by an artist than they are about themselves, that’s a reason to drop an artist. There was a phase where we dropped a lot of artists, and it was because they’d run out of steam; it wasn’t to do with money — it was creative reasons. They tended to be relieved, actually — they felt obligated to make records but weren’t enjoying or making very good music.
I’ve heard you say there are no priority artists at Mute. Can you explain?
Yes. With every record, whether you think it’s going to sell a thousand or a million, you should do the very best possible job to ensure that it attains those targets. Of course an artist that’s going to sell a lot of records takes up a lot of time. But I hate the word ‘priority.’ Why would you release a record and not work it to its full potential? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
What makes Mute different from other labels?
I think Mute has to be different from other labels. Let’s put the majors to one side because there’s such a clear difference between us and them: especially now, the majors are very focused on pop. That’s not a criticism, that’s a fact. Everything’s very track-driven these days. I love pop, but not in the conventional sense. Majors are very numbers-driven, sometimes only numbers-driven. I’m not criticizing the people who work there, but the natural corporate structure is all about numbers.
Mute is about working with really great artists, particular artists. I think we have our own character because of the artists we choose to work with and the way we work with them. I’m a fan of Warp, Domino and many others, and they’re all different. Independent labels like that still have their own character — they’re not homogenized. Who can honestly tell the difference between Universal, Sony and Warner? Not many other labels have our breadth of roster. Our understanding of artists as a team is very good. We’re not fashion-driven. And we’re really, really nice people. I think we’re even nicer than [PIAS].
You might be right. You still seem to really enjoy what you do. You recently turned to me in a moment of passion about Mute and said: ‘I love it!’ It seemed sincere.
I have a personal rule: so long as I like more than 50% of what I’m doing, I’m really, really happy. The reality is there’s a lot of shit you have to deal with on a daily basis. But if I think things are moving forward with the company and our artists, I feel very lucky.
You’re a leader, a boss of a label. Have you felt the loneliness we all feel in that position? How do you deal with it?
Sometimes, yes. Of course. There were moments in the history of Mute, especially when we sold to EMI. I remember the day I signed about 500 fucking contracts… You feel very responsible: you can blame everyone else or criticize everyone else, but in the end, you’re responsible, and you have to deal with it on a personal level.
A good example is Vince Clark. He was in Depeche Mode and had huge success very quickly. Then he was in Yazoo and had instant success. Then he did Erasure [first record], and it was a flop. From the age of 18 to 24 or something, he couldn’t put a foot wrong. And for whatever reason, Erasure started really badly. We questioned it together, even getting to the point of saying, ‘Maybe you should go to another label.’ I felt an incredible weight of responsibility — firstly because it was a great record, but also because Vince had been incredibly loyal to me. I hate it when a record doesn’t do as well as it should do.
Erasure, 1989
So why did you sell to EMI?
Even though we still had Depeche and Erasure, we had some years in the mid-to-late 90s which were very poor, very light. Depeche were making records less frequently, Erasure’s sales had started to go down. It was the Britpop era, which I had no interest in at all. Britpop represented everything I hated — the antithesis to why I started Mute; it was very retrograde, non-progressive yet all-pervasive, especially in the mainstream media.
Inevitably, we had a few financial issues. We’d always worked with individual distributors around the world — [PIAS] in Benelux, Virgin in France etc. — and I still think that’s the best way of doing things. It allows you to pick the best people in each country. But I needed some cash. I thought maybe if I did a worldwide distribution deal I could get more money. Mute was not very highly regarded in those days — a lot of people felt it was over. I had staff, artists, and I was being offered not-very-good deals.
Moby, 1999
And then, like the cavalry coming over the hill, we had [Moby’s] Play. A lot of people believed in Play — including you, Kenny — before it was a hit. I totally believed, obviously. Yet we had released three singles and nothing was really going on. Then we released a fourth single, having asked what I should have asked myself on day one: ‘What’s my favorite track?’ Not ‘what is the obvious single?’ It was “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad.”
It exploded. All of a sudden, I was regarded as a ‘genius’ again. I was ‘past it’ for a long time before that, of course, but that’s the music business for you. Emmanuel De Buretel, who I’d known since the beginning of Mute and who was running EMI Continental Europe, had always wanted to buy Mute. I thought: ‘Okay, we just sold 8m records, we’re in a really strong position. Do I really want to go through all of that shit again?’
So I gave Emmanuel a list of what I wanted; it was less about money, although that was on there, and more about creative control. He said yes to all of them. Plus he was starting an alternative distribution system and wanted to make it global with Mute as the lead label.
Just before we were about to sign the deal, Emmanuel’s boss Ken Berry — who’d I’d known for years — was fired. Literally as I was about to put pen to paper, Emmanuel got a new boss, Alain Levy, who came from a very different world. He signed off on the Mute deal though, no problem, but things had changed.
We were still based on Harrow Road in that crazy building. And it was all fine. But Ken Berry had been a bit of a mentor to Emmanuel. After he went, there was tension between Emmanuel and Levy. Eventually, it got too much and they parted company — Emmanuel left EMI. Levy was still treating me very properly at that point. He let me decide who I reported to.
I definitely didn’t want to be reporting into the U.K., so I said I’d stay with Continental Europe — where JF [Jean Francois Cecillon] took over from Emmanuel. Let’s say we came from two different worlds: he’s an Arsenal fan, I’m a Chelsea fan… Then EMI had their own problems, and we got caught up in it.
Do you regret it?
No. I can’t possibly regret it. It was the right thing to do at the time, it gave Mute stability and for quite a few years we had real autonomy. It was an interesting experience, but in the end it became impossible. Creatively, EMI never questioned what I signed — they kept their word. The problem was international, which was always very important to me.
I felt that you couldn’t just break artists in the U.K., you have to do it over a number of territories for them to have longevity. That became impossible at EMI. They wouldn’t release anything internationally unless it had become a hit in the U.K. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t let me sign anything, it was that I didn’t want to sign anything. The kind of artists I wanted to sign wouldn’t survive in that system. So I decided to leave and start again.
Are you aware that what you’ve achieved with Mute is extraordinary?
Thank you, but I don’t think of it that way. I live in the moment. I don’t think about the past too much: that only really happens when I’m at a gig and someone comes up to me and says, ‘I grew up with your music.’ Obviously, that means a lot to me. I’m proud of it.
New Order, 2015
Tell me about New Order, then. How did you come to sign them?
Obviously, I’m familiar with their music. I’d met the band a few times over the years. And I knew Tony Wilson well. Anyway, they decided that they didn’t want to stay with Warner Bros. Nicki [Kefalas] from Out Promotions — who does both their TV and radio and our TV and radio promo — suggested they come and see me. I talked to Rebecca Boulton and Andy Robinson who manage them. I went up to meet the band, we had a lunch and had a very positive discussion about their vision for the project and we got on well.
I was nervous, obviously, as I had no idea what the music would be like — and, of course, that was the most important factor for me. They played me some rough work-in-progress things that I thought sounded very special. The band and their management did a lot of due diligence on Mute — the management met our German and American companies and spent a lot of time with us — we all felt comfortable. So we said: ‘Let’s do it.’
Are there values at Mute as a company?
In a very broad sense. They are so built into our DNA we don’t even think of them. It’s not like [affects American accent]: ‘The core values of our operation are creatively, transparency, sustainability and diversity.’ I’ve never had to think like that, thank God.
Have you ever felt betrayed professionally?
Once or twice. Betrayal gives me inspiration, though.
‘Betrayed’ is a really big word, so I’ll say ‘let down’ — this is the first time I felt really let down: When D.A.F. came to Mute, they slept on my floor, I took care of them, basically we were all broke. Their album was the first on Mute so it had a very special meaning to me and I did everything I could for them. And then they left to go to Virgin.
Of course I was really pissed off. I remember it really clearly: I always got on best with Robert Gorl, the drummer. I was sitting in my car with him at the time they decided to leave and he played me some tracks from the forthcoming album — the one that wasn’t going to be on Mute. I thought, ‘Fuck, that’s so great.’ And I played him some Depeche stuff — we had just started working with them — and he went, ‘Fuck, that’s so great.’ It was a weird moment but it was inspiring too. I realized I didn’t want it to happen again.
VP of Warner Bros. Records & co-founder of Sire Records, Seymore Stein
Are there any people in the business who stand out as real mentors or inspirations to you?
Seymour Stein who I got to know really early on. He licensed TVOD, and was the first American music person I met. His energy and spirit were amazing, and obviously I loved the bands he signed. I still feel close to him today. We hang out and get on. There’s been different people along the way — Rod Buckle from Sonet at the beginning, certainly.
Without Rough Trade’s enthusiasm and confidence at the beginning, things could have been very different. But once Mute got going and Rough Trade had huge success, we were all caught up in our own chaotic work and didn’t really have such a close relationship with Geoff. I never thought of the other independents — Factory, 4AD, Rough Trade, Cherry Red — as competitors. I felt we were collaborators working together to build something special. That’s still the case, really.
What are your ambitions for the next decade?
Stay alive and keep doing what I’m doing now. Keep being innovative and work with great artists, whether they sell a thousand records or a million records.
Here’s the question I ask everyone: Are you a romantic?
In what sense? I’m reasonably good at buying flowers for my girlfriend if that’s what you mean! I wouldn’t describe myself as a romantic — a dreamer, maybe. It depends on your perspective.
Before you did the EMI deal, you did deals with your individual licensees — including [PIAS] and others around the world. It cost you serious money but it looked after us. Are you aware that demonstrated supernatural loyalty?
No it didn’t, not really. We’re working in a very human business. Music is emotional. I can’t separate the human from the business side. If I like people we work with who do a good job for me and my artists, I can’t, you know…
Well I’m afraid that’s what I call a romantic, Daniel…
Okay. So long as you don’t call me a new romantic, we’ll be just fine.
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[Top photo: Daniel Miller. Credit: Joe Dilworth] | https://medium.com/cuepoint/discovering-depeche-mode-interview-with-daniel-miller-of-mute-records-484bf6eb795d | ['Yael Chiara'] | 2016-09-15 07:58:17.876000+00:00 | ['Rock', 'New Wave', 'Featured Rock', 'Music Business', 'Music'] |
3D Backlog Management | Managing or prioritizing backlog and re-prioritizing work in progress are some of those activities that usually make a product owner very busy. This is not a breaking news, obviously. Product Owners have lots of things to consider as they:
1. keep some work in the backlog (as unsorted as a pile of chopped wood);
2. sign off some work to go into production;
3. re-prioritize work that is already in progress.
At times, the boundaries between a pure production flow (Work In Progress, as in Kanban) and backlog are quite blurred. Some items might stall, if it turns out that they need to be re-prioritized and/or returned back to “the pile of chopped wood”. You might wonder, as a product owner, or a project manager, when is it OK to go with the 2D map which plots work against the In Progress states (as in the classical Kanban board), or when you might need a 3D concept map to balance your decisions against multiple priorities? Are there any workarounds you can use for a 2D map to make it work as a 3D one, if there are more things to consider than merely putting work through the production flow?
Some of you might be familiar with the concept of story maps vs. process maps, but I’m using a bit different perspective here. A part of it is covered by the story map concept of “a walking skeleton”, but what I’m trying to highlight is the speed and convenience with the 1–2–3 of a product owner’s actions.
Here’s a 2D Kanban board, where Planned is some prioritized, ready to go to In Progress work:
You might need to introduce a yet another buffer for the sorted out Planned state. That’s when you most probably add the Open state:
Backlog -> Open -> Planned -> Work In Progress -> Done
The Open and Planned states are not the sequential production states. The Planned state, actually, represents the result of applying some other 3rd dimension, e.g. some set of business or any other priorities. As a product owner, you need to sift the work through many decision criteria, bouncing it between Open and Planned as often as needed. That’s what we call “grooming the backlog”.
If you operate within this 2D environment, on a physical or electronic Kanban board, you might use tags, or colors for the cards, or add more non-production states which are essentially priorities (as Open — Planned states).
Now take a look at this visual. It’s a little bit different from what is considered a story map concept, as I’m using another set of coordinates, where X-axis is work, Y-axis is progress, the X-Y plane is any work in progress AND Z-axis is any other 3rd dimension, or lens, through which you filter the backlog or work in progress. The red lines in the Z-plane against the X-Y plane represent those various influences, or the filtering criteria.
3D Backlog Visualization (my scribbles)
If you’re using some tool to switch and rotate the criteria on the Z-axis fast, you’re much better off grooming your backlog, prioritizing work, and tracking work in progress. I’ve mentioned some workarounds, such as using tags, or colors for cards, or introducing the states that are not actually “production” but rather “prioritizing” states. Another traditional technique is prioritizing work in lists, not on a board. But all those practices are quite limiting. They don’t provide enough versatility.
The arrows on the Z-axis plane, as shown above, are essentially swimlanes, if you look closer, and they add another layer of flexibility to backlog management. If 2D workarounds are limiting, or your current backlog management practice does not include using a swimlane, you might want to consider adding it to your work process, as a product owner. It will work exactly as on the visual above: the rapidly switchable Z-axis shafts (swimlanes) that highlight certain backlog items and work in progress. | https://medium.com/quandoo/3d-backlog-management-b1dc25f84cbb | ['Olga Kouzina'] | 2019-07-18 11:04:07.522000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Agile', 'Startup', 'Product Management', 'Kanban'] |
Nothing is real, and that is okay | Across many of Robert Greene’s books, there a reoccurring theme — to be effective in life, you have to learn to see the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.
Obviously this is easier said than done. It takes practice to develop and master this skill. We are naturally meaning attribution machines, we spin stories and see patterns to make sense of the events in our lives and the world around us.
None of us really see life as it is.
Or maybe there is nothing to see. Maybe nothing is real.
From a scientific viewpoint, there is nothing at the foundation of reality but the experiences created and interpreted by the observing self. Stimuli from an external environment filtered by the structure and capabilities of our senses, neurons and synapses, brought to life by the ego and consciousness.
But beyond physics and metaphysics, maybe nothing is real even from a social point of view.
The world around us, the one we think we live in, the one with the rules and norms and expectations, the one with the constraints and limitations, doesn’t really exist. We act like it does. We believe it does, and we eventually create it, by our expectations, beliefs and behaviour.
I think about this in terms of the market place and the world in general, questioning my preconceptions around brand, self-image and success in the real world. The battle as a creative, as a maker, is balancing the need to make things for the self, to create to learn and for creation’s sake, against making things that have wide appeal, that get famous, that resonate and succeed in a capitalist world?
How do we do that?
Some things work better than others. There are certain creative formulas that draw eyeballs and grab attention. Appealing to our baser instincts of lust, superiority, righteousness, indignation generally have a more immediate and visceral reaction than appealing to the sublime, or rationality.
Is it good or ethical to change ourselves, to change our packaging, change our story to achieve a goal? Does authenticity still matter, or should we just wear the masks we must, spinning the webs and illusions that get us what we want?
How long can you wear a mask before it becomes your true face?
Can we use this idea as a tool instead? Reaching forward to ‘pretend’ our way into the person we want to become. Is there an ethical way to ‘fake it before we make it’?
If nothing is inherently real, does that free us to be anything we want, anything we choose to be? Or is there a real self waiting to emerge? Where is the space for authenticity?
Is what we call authenticity just trying to hold on to a past story? Trying to make your actions today be congruent with the person you have always been?
If we must embrace forward-facing stories, pressing on to what we must be that we aren’t yet, then perhaps we can embrace the notion that nothing is real and just go ahead to create the new experience we desire.
Which means we second guess ourselves less. We are less tripped up by expectations, by the burden of our self-conception. We no longer use the excuse, ‘no I can’t wake up early because I am not a morning person’. We just go head and work our way to becoming early risers. We are free to change and be who we want to be moment to moment.
I read somewhere a while ago that behaviour drives emotion and behaviour drives desire.
It means that we can change desires. We are who we are now because we have conditioned ourselves through our choices and behaviours. We love junk food, or leisure or low-value entertainment and activities because we have behaved in ways that reinforced those desires in us.
We are also familiar with change, growing out of things and into things as we develop over time.
But if behaviour drives desire, then we can speed up change in the directions we choose. It will feel weird and horrible at first, but over time, after constant action, desire changes to match behaviour.
The more I workout, the more I enjoy it, the more I crave it. Something I would not have imagined possible years ago. The tricky part is that initial hump you have to push across. Doing something consistently enough to change desire.
If nothing is real, ( and the timeline is malleable, which is another idea for another time having to do with changing the past) then we face the questions, what should we do, and how should we do it?
If nothing is real, then our fears are unfounded and unreal. It means there are no real lines, no real restrictions, just illusions, promises and agreements. We can honour them and we can break them.
Is there then no morality?
If nothing is real and anything is permissible, it does not mean that it isn’t without consequence.
So, perhaps nothing is real but everything has consequence.
The idea that nothing is real then becomes a liberating idea that allows you to morph and change as needed. It also frees you from constraints of expectation. If nothing is real, then its okay to create the image you need to get what you need to get done sorted. But know that what you create will have an effect.
If nothing is real, and you want success in a certain arena, if you want more eyeballs and attention to your work, to your brand, then you have to work and rework your brand until you find resonance. And that is not something to fight, it is something to embrace, to practice at until you get it right.
But whatever you create, must be aligned with your true values. If you are not aware of your values, you run the risk of building something empty, losing touch with that which is most fulfilling, the highest expression of your soul. | https://oto-basex.medium.com/nothing-is-real-and-that-is-okay-fac9db7cb597 | ['Otoabasi Bassey'] | 2019-08-21 19:57:55.065000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Reality', 'Creativity', 'Success'] |
Disappointing Myself | It happens every day.
Image by Sergey Safronov
I know where I want to be.
I know who I want to be.
I know who I am.
I hear the word potential and cringe.
I look back and see everyone who has dropped off on my journey and cheer.
The closer I get, the harder it feels. The closer I get, the more I feel like it will never happen.
Days and weeks and months go by. Nothing. Till I realize that those days and weeks and months are something on their own.
Disappointing myself means not appreciating my gift.
Disappointing myself means not transforming.
Disappointing myself means giving up.
CRY | https://medium.com/cry-mag/disappointing-myself-b31897153ec6 | ['Kern Carter'] | 2019-10-25 11:06:01.465000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Self Love', 'Poetry', 'Creativity', 'Creative Writing'] |
Review — ‘august’ by Taylor Swift | On august, Taylor Swift sparkles in the coastal sun like broken glass. The space between the lines is just wide enough for you to feel the salinity of the air. Having been in the business for over a decade, Swift had perfected the art of recollecting a relationship. This time, however, she was neither the love-consumed poet nor the grief-strucken songwriter. Instead, she dissolves effortlessly into the role of the other woman.
Taking place right after a certain illicit affair falls apart, august serves as a scrapbook by which to recollect a summer that burnt as quickly as it blossomed. A fever dream soaked in fatalism. Swift documents the fateful interaction between a boy and girl seeking to fill a void in themselves. Yet, for events that seem so personal, we never hear this woman’s name. Coupled with the resignation in Swift’s airy vocal performance, august tells the story of a faceless woman.
A woman who, at the end of the day, knew that her legacy in the big picture was destined to be a silhouette of her body in the background, stripped of her identity. Because that’s what it means to be the other woman. To be the stained toy that’s only every played with under the cover of nightfall. To know that, despite wanting to write her name on this man’s back, despite wanting to change for the better, the writing was on the wall. He was never hers, and you can’t lose something that was never yours to begin with. | https://medium.com/the-music-cove/review-august-by-taylor-swift-dc59dd6e6830 | ['Raunaq Nambiar'] | 2020-08-27 16:09:36.954000+00:00 | ['Taylor Swift', 'Culture', 'Pop Music', 'Music Review', 'Music'] |
Would Fela have welcomed French President Macron to his Shrine? | The only way to meet the President of France as a Nigerian is to be a high-ranking politician or be very rich or famous.
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Why are they grinning?
If none of these describes you, then you’d have had to make do with being one of a few hundred people to have received an invitation to the New Afrikan Shrine this past Tuesday 3 July.
So when the bearded R&B man turned actor Banky W, as host, said we should sit anywhere as there is no VIP section in the shrine, he was half-lying. In a sense we were all VIPs. But even so the seats closest to the stage were for the real VIPs: Macron and Governor Ambode. To prove their own importance, the men showed up several hours after the whole thing was to start.
I had arrived after an expensive and creative way of finding the Shrine: involving paying several bike-men to subvert the bumper-to-bumper traffic imposed on us all by these powerful men. I say find because none of the usual signposts leading to the shrine were present: No one asking me to buy “SK”; no smell of weed as compass; no suya sellers; no petty traders on the day they could make really high sales. Instead I was asked very nicely for my invitation. I whipped out my phone, more out of shock at meeting a polite policeman than anything else. But of course, it wasn’t really me he was being polite to. He was working with the idea that a person who could get an invitation to meet Macron was probably important. I laugh.
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Now inside, the wait had begun. Banky continued with some filler nonsense about the “special relationship between Africa and France”. Does he even know what he’s saying, I wondered. The geographical incompatibility — the usual gibber that equates a European country to the entirety of the black continent. He was smiling his music video smile, unaware he was putting an exploiting country in the position of benign patron. But of course no one ever accused Banky of political consciousness. A video of platitudes for Macron from Trace TV succeeded Banky’s speech.
“As promised the president of the French republic is here,” Banky said around 9.45pm.
Macron met the artists Victor Ehikhamenor, Ndidi Emefiele and Abraham Oghobase. (No literary artists were showcased.) Even for a Frenchman the combination of cameras and jostling meant art appreciation could take a hike, so the president made approving noises. In company of the Lagos governor, Macron then moved to the VIP section. Already we were informed that some persons already seated close to the stage had to leave. No VIP sections, eh?
The dance group Footprints of David performed a welcome number in Yoruba. Sitting with the governor in front, Macron wore no jacket on his long sleeved shirt; Ambode wore a t-shirt. Speech here, speech there, speech everywhere. It seemed strange that a Nigerian city was welcoming a foreign president with loads of talk and no pounded yam.
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“We are glad to have you in our midst,” Ambode said as Fela rolled in his grave at the idea of politicians taking over his son’s podium. A brief tour of the shrine became a tour of Macron’s face on other people’s phone screens. All of these important people became animated at the idea of a small, slim white man smiling into their phones. This welcome proved enough to empower the night’s guest to make pronouncements on Fela. “He was a politician because he wanted to change society,” said Macron.
He later said something more in the spirit of Fela: “What happens in the shrine remains in the shrine.” Apparently back in 2002 as a French embassy intern, Macron had visited the Shrine. He’s a cool expat kid then; pretty sure he was offered a few intoxicants.
“I do believe we have to change,” he said in response to a different question from the accented Keturah King. “We have to build a new common narrative…this place is important for African culture.”
Macron of course belongs to a generation of Europeans, of white people from South Africa to Australia, who want to shrug off the impact of the past while enjoying the riches that past has given their present. “My generation never experienced colonisation,” he said, adding that, “We have to move forward”. This of course is a no brainer. But, as someone said, “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
Today Paris is dotted with pretty produce made from the past and immigrants are asked not to seek it? As he went on, Macron’s smiling anti-immigrant stance turned up. Africans, he said, “have to build their future here in Africa and we have to assist them.” He then announced that there would be a culture season in France for Africans and by Africans. “We need new people to make a [new] narrative.”
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So Macron came to ensure Africans stay put in Africa while France gets a chance to see the best of African culture. Good girls might go to heaven, but the rich and famous go to Paris. The poor can inherit Africa.
Yemi Alade came on around 10.40pm with a medley featuring ‘Ferrari’, ‘Kissing’ and other bland Yemi Alade songs. Selected because of her deliberate courting of French Africa, Ms Alade split her music between both languages of her oeuvre. But her performance didn’t quite fit the atmosphere. Cameroon’s Charlotte Dipanda followed. Neither performer quite drew the attention of the Shrine. In fact, it seemed only the presence of the governor or the small white guy from France could do that — evidence of the inappropriateness of the selected singers but also a tribute to Nigeria’s eternal worship of whiteness and power.
At some point in the night, Kunle Afolayan got Macron to do some acting surrounded by Nollywood royalty — Jide Kosoko, Ramsey Nouah, Rita Dominic, Omotola Jalade among them.
“He doesn’t know,” whispered a friend of mine. “He will see himself in a film or two.”
I chuckled. If it would take Macron to bring back the Afolayan that made Figurine and October 1 then the director’s sheepish smile onstage was permissible, but watching the gaudy mess onstage, I had a sinking feeling that Afolayan’s era of quality filmmaking might be over.
Mo Abudu, another believer in gaudy mess as cinema, asked Macron a few questions. To one question, Macron said he was available to act in Nollywood. Ms Abudu, in heels towering over the man, then asked how a Nollywood film could go to Cannes and win the Palme d’Or. I snorted. It seemed the kind of question the producer of such a film as Fifty would ask. Her real question was how can shallow good-looking films like mine win the prestige on offer at Cannes? The real answer is they can’t. But Macron, ever the diplomat, said, “I’m not the one to answer this question. Abderrahmane Sissako is the one to answer it.” The man who made Timbuktu came out on Macron’s prodding and gave a noncommittal answer. “Work hard and be patient,” he said. Ms Abudu clearly wanted an annotated roadmap to Cannes glory. No such luck.
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Near midnight, the place was near empty as Ara the drummer performed, dancing her red hair for Macron’s pink face. Ambode, with no hair, whispered something in Emmanuel-with-the-good-hair’s ear. Ara approached and handed the Frenchman a gift. Youssou N’dour and Angelique Kidjo would be drawn to say a thing later. “Are you still alive?” asked Kidjo. “I don’t know about you but I’m tired.” She spoke for all of us.
Banky, who was still alive, launched into superlatives to bring on Femi Kuti. As always the eldest Fela son was manic on the keyboard. The dancing girls in green and orange ass-shaking gear appeared in their cages. Macron, whose country has “liberté” as first word of its motto, didn’t seem to notice their appearance.
A part of Femi’s song had the line “dem just dey lie”. If it was a line directed at politicians, he had two of looking him in the eye. But, of course, if Fela’s activism was reckless, Femi Kuti’s has been relatively risk-free. This endorsement of politicians was the next step. Some might even say it was inevitable. I asked a Fela scholar friend if my thoughts were uncharitable. Would Fela have gone this route?
“Macron wouldn’t have gone near the Shrine were Fela to be alive,” said Kayode Faniyi, confirming my suspicion. “That’s assuming Fela didn’t ‘sell out’ in his later years, ease into a national icon of the sort endorsed by government. And given Macron’s paternalistic comments about Africa last year, ‘Beasts of No Nation’ might be on full blast. And really, Macron’s politics in France has so far been problematic, so yeah, it wouldn’t have been a nice reception.”
Femi Kuti bowed elaborately and thanked the governor. “He feels the pain of Africa,” he said about Macron, whose view on immigration seemed to have found a willing mouthpiece in Femi who said it was possible to have Africans stay here. Thankfully, he stopped talking and went back to playing music. He pulled Macron up and started shouting his lyrics in the white man’s face. The tired, non-dancing president reluctantly began clapping.
The event was at its end as Asa, Youssou N’Dour and Angelique Kidjo stepped up to dance too. These were the real VIPs of musicians, each with a seat around the politicians. And it seemed rather fair that for all of her fame, Yemi Alade was not nearby.
Watching the scene, I thought this was a fine gathering of great African musicians. But why had it taken a white man in Africa to bring all of them together?
Please subscribe to my newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/2dd54326e9f8/oris-newsletter | https://catchoris.medium.com/would-fela-have-welcomed-french-president-macron-to-his-shrine-935a02808171 | ['Oris Aigbokhaevbolo'] | 2020-12-23 16:13:33.730000+00:00 | ['Fela', 'Macron', 'Culture', 'Africa', 'Music'] |
[ML UTD 22] Machine Learning Up-To-Date — Life With Data | As an industry, we’ve gotten exceptionally good at building large, complex software systems. We’re now starting to see the rise of massive, complex systems built around data — where the primary business value of the system comes from the analysis of data, rather than the software directly. We’re seeing quick-moving impacts of this trend across the industry, including the emergence of new roles, shifts in customer spending, and the emergence of new startups providing infrastructure and tooling around data.
In fact, many of today’s fastest growing infrastructure startups build products to manage data. These systems enable data-driven decision making ( analytic systems) and drive data-powered products, including with machine learning ( operational systems). They range from the pipes that carry data, to storage solutions that house data, to SQL engines that analyze data, to dashboards that make data easy to understand — from data science and machine learning libraries, to automated data pipelines, to data catalogs, and beyond.
And yet, despite all of this energy and momentum, we’ve found that there is still a tremendous amount of confusion around what technologies are on the leading end of this trend and how they are used in practice. In the last two years, we talked to hundreds of founders, corporate data leaders, and other experts — including interviewing 20+ practitioners on their current data stacks — in an attempt to codify emerging best practices and draw up a common vocabulary around data infrastructure. This post will begin to share the results of that work and showcase technologists pushing the industry forward.
… keep reading | https://medium.com/the-innovation/ml-utd-22-machine-learning-up-to-date-life-with-data-3976d2299635 | ['Anthony Agnone'] | 2020-11-12 17:53:18.147000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Exploring 16000 Frontiers in Neuroscience Articles | Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash
Recently I’ve been working a lot on voice apps. One thing that really sticks out for me is how natural a conversational interface is. If the technology advances enough it will allow us to complete tasks more effortlessly since we can simply say what it is we want to do. However, no matter how efficiently a device is surfacing information, your ability to digest information will always be limited by the rate at which you can read, listen, or watch.
This is what makes the idea of advanced Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) so great. They would allow people to learn, retain knowledge, and communicate more efficiently than ever before. Elon Musk has been talking about how his mysterious Neuralink startup is developing high bandwidth BCIs to connect humans and computers. The idea behind Neuralink is that if the brain can be both interpreted and manipulated in real time you could “extend” the brain. This could add a new layer of capability, understanding, and communication. People will be able to transfer ideas directly to another person without needing to communicate with written / verbal language. However, BCIs have been researched for a while now, with many applications focusing on helping people suffering from paralysis.
The recent hype behind Neuralink is the inspiration behind this analysis. I wanted to explore what are the some of the trends in brain computer interface research. So after setting my goals I got ready to spend the day battling Pandas and Matplotlib to see if I can glean out any interesting information from my dataset.
Preparing the Dataset
Frontiers Media is an academic publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals. They have numerous journals in science, technology, and medicine. For my analysis I used articles from the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series which contains some of the world’s top neuroscience journals in terms of influence and quality. Some of these journals include Frontiers in Neuroscience, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, and Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.
My first step was collecting the data. In this case I wrote a Python script to scrape all of the neuroscience articles. The web scraper saved the article’s text as well as their metadata. To collect the URLs of all the articles, I used a bit of regex to parse the sitemap.xml file for the URLs in the neuroscience series. Once my web scraper finish running, my dataset contained 15803 articles stored in a JSON format. These articles came with a rich array of metadata including publication countries, authors, citation dates, and keywords.
Converting the JSON dataset to a CSV is no problem with Pandas. You can simply use the normal dataframe constructor if the JSON object is flattened out (only one level of keys). However looking a bit closer reveals that there are empty dict objects in fields that were missing a value. Here’s a neat trick you can use to replace these empty dicts with NaN:
df = df.mask(df.applymap(str).eq(‘{}’))
Now that everything looks good, let’s call df.to_csv(), upload the dataset to Kaggle, and do some exploratory data analysis.
Check out the Kernel: https://www.kaggle.com/markoarezina/frontiers-in-neuroscience-article-eda
You can find the dataset on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/markoarezina/frontiers-in-neuroscience-articles
Getting to Know the Data
I wanted to get a feel of the types of articles in the dataset before taking a deep dive into BCI specific research. Apart from the journal text, the dataset also contained a wide range of interesting metadata. This included useful fields like the “citation_journal_title“ which specified the article’s specific neuroscience journal. For example, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. Since the metadata also contained the citation country, I thought a heat map of countries and neuroscience journals for number of articles might be a good way to get an overview of the the dataset.
From the heat map you can see some of the largest journals in the series are Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, and Frontiers in Neuroscience, and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Next, I wanted to explore some of the common themes in the articles. To do this I found the most common unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams of the citation abstracts. The following plot shows some common themes. | https://towardsdatascience.com/exploring-16000-frontiers-in-neuroscience-articles-7f362de76ba3 | ['Marko Arezina'] | 2019-06-15 14:05:27.023000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Neuroscience'] |
Paraguayan Cowboys and Deforestation | Can the Chaco region survive
Paraguayan gaucho, northern Chaco ©Richard Bailey
I love Paraguay and I love its people, but it has a problem.
We tend to look at Brazil and the terrible decimation of the Amazon rainforest, especially under the current President Jair Bolsonaro, but its neighbour Paraguay can also lay claim to one of the highest rates of forest loss in the world.
The Gran Chaco is a semi-arid region in the North West of the country, which was once dry forest and savanna, but since 1985 satellite imagery shows that roughly 55 thousand square miles of forest has been converted into farmland and grazing by the cattle ranches. That is an area about the size of New York state.
Paraguay ranks among the top ten beef exporting countries in the world, so cattle farming is very important to the countries economy and its politics…….which means that cattle expansion in the Chaco, with government approval, shows no sign of slowing.
Paraguay also has the highest inequality of land ownership in the world –about 85% of agricultural land is held by just 2.5% of owners.
The Chaco region is home to more than two dozen indigenous peoples as well as over 3,400 plant and 900 animal species, and at the current rate of expansion into the Chaco, the forest and other native vegetation is likely to disappear within decades.
Paraguayan gaucho, northern Chaco ©Richard Bailey
Something needs to be done and of course with the right political and corporate will, something could be done.
A new report by the Supply Change Initiative (SCI) has set out a way for the Paraguayan government and private industry to reduce land degradation in the chaco through better deforestation monitoring.
Paraguayan gaucho, northern Chaco ©Richard Bailey
And yet, I fear the ever growing demand for beef around the world will continue to be the largest cause of forest loss worldwide, adversely impacting the climate, biodiversity and people. So although Paraguay has every opportunity to shift toward large scale sustainable cattle production, which would greatly reduce deforestation….whether or not the government and the farmers can see the benefits of implementing these changes we will have to see…..
Paraguayan gaucho, northern Chaco ©Richard Bailey
Paraguayan gaucho, northern Chaco ©Richard Bailey
I spent a few months travelling around Paraguay in 1994. including on a ranch in the northern most part of the Chaco by the Bolivian border. It was a harsh area to work in, but the Gauchos who worked on the ranches were hardworking and incredibly skilled horsemen.
The portraits we made of the men who worked there could have been taken at anytime during the twentieth century and hark back to a time of the ‘wild west’ and last frontiers, whilst also showing their stoicism, true grit and coolness | https://medium.com/curious/paraguayan-cowboys-and-deforestation-b5ce30592cbd | ['Richard Bailey'] | 2020-09-18 16:11:07.733000+00:00 | ['Environmental Issues', 'Paraguay', 'Climate Change', 'Environment', 'Photography'] |
Ford’s Marketing Disaster in India | Ford’s Marketing Disaster in India
Poor timing and cultural insensitivity landed the automative company in hot water
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Even large, successful companies can make marketing errors.
In 2013, as movements against sexual harassment were gaining traction and spreading around the globe, Ford found themselves in hot water. The automative company — well-known for their advertisements involving trucks, sedans, and sports cars — committed an unforgivable breach.
To celebrate the release of the Ford Figo in India, a creative advertising team released a cartoon advertisement on Ford’s behalf.
The content was as bizarre as it is terrible: a drawing of three bound and gagged women in the trunk of the car.
It seems hard to believe that such an advertisement would be released, right?
But it was released, and it’s as bad as it sounds. One of the images depicted the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, who was then facing charges (and later convicted) of paying for sex with a minor.
The women pictured in the ad included two women who had made sexual assault claims against Berlusconi.
The advertisement, which I won’t show here, can be found in this article from USA Today.
If the image makes you shudder, the Ford Figo’s motto makes the advertisement even worse: “Leave your worries behind.”
And it doesn’t stop there. The marketing team released another cartoon advertisement, similarly drawn and with equally-poor taste. There is no need to show another crude image, as you likely understand now how bad the advertisements were.
These images aren’t meant to attract page views, and I don’t post the image sheerly for shock value. It’s important to understand, however, just how important safeguards are when running a marketing agency. | https://medium.com/the-intelligence-of-everything/fords-marketing-disaster-in-india-c3cee0cfe9b0 | ['Aaron Schnoor'] | 2020-12-17 13:01:15.972000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Money', 'Social Media'] |
When Students Leverage Social Media to Plan Events | When Students Leverage Social Media to Plan Events
April 4, 2017
The ISTE Standards for Students are goals that have been vetted through thousands of educators to set measurable outcomes that have been decided would best prepare today’s k-12 student for the use of technology in their future lives. There are 7 different broad concepts that are then broken down into subcategories. Standard #6 is listed below:
6. Creative Communicator
Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students:
choose the appropriate platforms and tools for meeting the desired objectives of their creation or communication.
create original works or responsibly repurpose or remix digital resources into new creations.
communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively by creating or using a variety of digital objects such as visualizations, models or simulations.
publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.
This week I had the privilege of seeing this standard in action. The AP and Advanced Art students in our high school were tasked by their instructors with advertising the opening reception for their Spring Art Collection at a local art gallery in Chattanooga. Early in the week I started seeing this graphic show up on Facebook. Then I was asked to join a page with more information. Later in the week I saw Snapchat stories about the event, I saw Instagram stories and posts about it. There was Twitter talk about it as well.
These students creatively used the medium of social media to communicate with the people in their lives. They shared, reshared, and creatively talked about the evening using the Internet. Creating the graphic of actual work in the collection was a teaser. The objective was to get people to come to opening night and boy did it work! When I walked into AVA Art Gallery it was packed. It wasn’t just the family members of these students present but the room was full of schoolmates of all interest groups. Athletes, scholars, teachers, grandparents, siblings, cousins, boyfriends, strangers, dramatic artists were all there to support this night and these students. Goal achieved. It was a great way to see students using social media as good digital citizens to share their learning in productive ways. | https://medium.com/voiceedu/when-students-leverage-social-media-to-plan-events-d0456aabc599 | ['Julie Daniel Davis'] | 2019-07-18 19:55:23.427000+00:00 | ['Snapchat', 'Instagram', 'Digital Citizenship', 'Facebook', 'Social Media'] |
A Call to the West | A Call to the West
How an 800-Year-Old Islamic Gospel Music Made Its Way to the States.
Brook Martinez has never been to Pakistan or India. He doesn’t speak a word of Urdu or Farsi. And he’ll quickly admit that he’s no scholar of Islam. Yet, Martinez has a unique bond with South Asians that most people from suburban Connecticut don’t share.
“Was I 100 percent comfortable taking a sacred music and playing it a non sacred context with no one who is even close to Sufi?,” said Martinez, recalling his initial doubts. “No.”
Brook Martinez (far right) playing at Barbes in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 2012.
Martinez is the leader of an 11-piece jazz band that covers the region’s popular genre of music called qawwali, or Islamic gospel. The spiritual tunes have been around for a while, almost 800 years, but it’s only in the last few decades that the the music has gained traction in the West.
“It was used as a way to attract people to Islam and started spreading from the very beginning with the Chistiya Sufis of Afghanistan and throughout Central Asia,” said Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology at UCLA.“And that’s carried into this century because of technology like the radio, television and more recently with the Internet.”
“It’s no longer exclusive.”
Qawwali, which is rooted from the Arabic word for “call,” remains a stronghold in South Asia, largely because of its ties to classical Hindustani music. The performances typically range from 15 to 30 minutes and start off very slow, building up to a trance-like chorus and rhythm well suited for meditation or prayer.
The Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Party performing at the University of Washington in 1993.
Today’s qawwali parties are made up of 6 to 10 members that include a lead singer; an accompanying singer, backup vocalists, a harmonium player and a tabla player. The music’s call-and-response rhythm, improvisations and thunderous choruses make it easy to get hooked.
However, it’s taken some time for the sacred songs to spread, largely because of the religious nature. The Sufi devotional music stems from the idea that one must pay remembrance to God, what’s referred to as zhikr, specifically samaa, an auditory form of prayer.
“The idea is the singing of one person or group actually leads to the religious experience or ecstasy of those who listen,” said Shazad Bashir, a religious studies professor at Stanford University. It’s why most qawwalis are about God, the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet’s cousin Ali and the folklore of various Sufi saints.
Traditionally, one would have to go into the depths of Pakistan and India to listen to a qawwali performance. “This kind of music was only accessible to people who made pilgrimages to Sufi tombs or shrines,” said Sakata, who spent time in Pakistan observing qawwali. “They would walk to these places to show their devotion to their Sufi saints.”
But that changed as qawwalis slowly started to play outside the shrine and on the radio all the while becoming intertwined with India’s Bollywood scene. Eventually, the Sabri Brothers, a popular qawwali troupe that still performs today, brought the music for the first time to Carnegie Hall in 1975.
“The audience was clapping and shouting deliriously, and one man went so beyond himself that he bloodied his head—banging it into the side of the stage,” wrote John Rockwell, a New York Times reporter who attended the concert.
“It was really a reaffirmation of the power of music, and an extreme extension of the very sort of ecstasy that Western music-lovers experience with their own music.”
It took a few more decades until the genre’s most famous singer made his way to the states. “It’s when people like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan started getting very serious in the West that qawwali reached a much greater celebratory status in places like Pakistan,” said Bashir, who specializes in Persianate Islamic societies.
Khan, who passed away in 1997 and would’ve turned 65 this Sunday, was an international superstar and is widely considered the most important singer in qawwali history. He was awarded the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Prize in 1995 and posthumously made it to TIME’s 60 Years of Asian History issue and NPR’s 50 Great Voices list.
It was Khan’s willingness to collaborate with western artists like Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder and Michael Brook that distinguishes him from other qawwals. And though he was often criticized by traditionalists, his ability to fuse the music’s old-school elements with new genres helped spread the religious theater to broader audiences.
“He was always conscious of trying to interest people in Islam through his music and was anxious in trying to attract young listeners,” said Sakata, who followed Khan in Pakistan and subsequently invited him as a visiting professor when she taught at the University of Washington.
It’s because of Khan and the exposure he brought to the genre that bands like Fanna-Fi-Allah, a northern Californian all-Caucasian qawwali band, exist.
Tahir Faridi (second from left) performing with his band in Santa Rosa in 2012.
“I’d say being white has been something that’s made it easier for us on a lot of levels because it’s been surprising and more interesting for people,” said Tahir Faridi, the leader of the band. “But capturing the hearts of Indians and Pakistanis has been the most challenging part because they think ‘Oh, they’re white and can’t probably sing and are just pretending.’ They end up being very impressed by our devotion, passion and study.”
Over the past decade, Faridi and his group have traveled extensively through Pakistan not only to learn the ancient art, but also to continue it. The group’s members have been invited into the living rooms of the genre’s biggest teachers, known culturally as Ustads, where they’ve spent countless hours in lesson and practice. That training ultimately paved the way for the group to play across the region’s sacred Sufi shrines and can be heard in their performances in the West.
“Our aspiration in performing qawwali is to play it as well as we can in hopes of paying respects to our teachers and what they’ve offered,” says Faridi. “Over the years, hopefully the band will be a source of religious and spiritual upliftment in the West that continues to give back to the tradition.”
While it’s rare to find a group like Fanna-Fi-Allah that has gone to Pakistan and back, there have been other instances of the sufi devotional music sprouting across the states. A group of South Asian Americans in Austin, Texas recently formed the Riyaaz Qawwali Party and perform traditional songs across the country.
And abroad, the fusion that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan started still continues—qawwali elements can be heard mixed with the likes of flamenco to dub step.
Hiromi Lorraine Sakata pictured with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan / Shantha Benegal
“It’s kind of a natural process where one hears something new, is excited about it and starts to use it and claim it as his own,” Sakata said. “This is the way traditions continue. It has to be vital. If no one is interested, or nobody uses it or listens to it or composes in that style, then it’s not going to continue.” | https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/a-call-to-the-west-5f554a8c5be7 | [] | 2015-08-28 20:13:04.579000+00:00 | ['Islam', 'Music', 'American Dream'] |
Should Schools Teach LGBT Tolerance? | In the UK, there is an ongoing debate as to whether schools should teach lessons on LGBT rights. In Birmingham, this debate recently came to a head with Parkland Community School announcing that it has suspended its lessons on LGBT rights. This essay will examine the controversial lesson in order to figure out why there is so much opposition. Following this, I will then explore the position put forward by Angela Leadsom MP and scrutinise her belief that parents should be allowed to remove their children from LGBT classes.
The lesson in question is called No Outsiders and is focussed on teaching tolerance for diverse groups, such as different genders, races, or sexual orientations. As a government education spokesperson has said:
We are making relationships education compulsory in all primary schools from 2020 to teach pupils the building blocks needed for positive and safe relationships of all kinds, starting with family and friends. The subject will teach children, in an age-appropriate way, about healthy relationships of all kinds and will help schools’ efforts to foster respect for other people and for difference.
This focus on tolerance was also supported by Hazel Pulley, chief executive officer of the trust that runs Parkland Community School:
We are not teaching children about same sex couples in the sense of sexual relationships, what we do teach our children is that there are different families and that there are families with two mummies, two daddies.
I can only speak from experience, but having a class focussed on LGBT rights would have been fantastic in my secondary school. I attended secondary school in a small, working class town in the north east of England. Small, working class towns are not known for their enthusiastic acceptance of gay culture. Consequently, as a teenager struggling to understand his bisexual identity, I was extremely confused. This confusion was not born from self-hatred, as I never believed being gay was inherently wrong or shameful, but it was difficult to understand that I could be attracted to both men and women. I did not have an understanding of myself that others did at the time. In addition to this, being gay was not welcomed by my peers. Gay was used as an insult with no hint of pride, so it felt unwise to confide in my schoolmates at the time. I wouldn’t be so bold to suggest that having classes on LGBT rights would have helped with my identity struggles, but it certainly would not have made it worse. The goal of these classes is not just to teach tolerance to allies, but to give pupils an understanding of these sexualities so they can avoid experiences like mine.
An Irrational Campaign
The campaign to ban the lessons had its roots, ‘shockingly’, in conservative religious communities, with the most prominent being Muslim parents. One of these parents, Fatima Shah, removed her 10-year-old from school as she believed:
It’s inappropriate, totally wrong… Children are being told it’s OK to be gay, yet 98% of children at this school are Muslim. It’s a Muslim community. He said all parents are on board with it, but the reality is, no parents are on board with it.
Shah’s reasons for pulling her child out of education are clearly homophobic and will only negatively impact her child’s future. Her child will be growing up in a country with liberal values that welcomes people regardless of their differences, not allowing her child to understand that these differences are acceptable is indefensible. This child will be starved of vital knowledge of the British community because of their parents’ views, leaving them at a disadvantage when interacting with the community (even more so if this child happens to be part of the LGBT community). Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett, a Muslim scholar, has also weighed into the debate and claimed that LGBT lessons are a ‘totalitarian endeavour to indoctrinate our children into sexual ideologies.’ However, the idea that these lessons are indoctrinating children into the LGBT community is nonsense. The No Outsiders lesson is not a ‘How to be Gay’ class, it teaches tolerance. Beliefs like those above are a result of centuries of LGBT erasure and hatred, in the interest of human rights the UK Government is obligated to continue these lessons. In a similar vein, BBC question time recently posed the question — is it morally right for five year old children to learn about LGBT issues in school? This question is inherently flawed. The question ought to be — is it morally right for five year old children to learn about respect and tolerance in school? Not only is it right, it is required. We should be teaching children the virtues of tolerance and respect from an early age. We should be teaching children to consider people by the content of their character rather than prejudicial, irrational bias. The way we tackle homophobia, like with any bigotry, is through education. We teach children early that every human being is deserving of respect, as the former chief of Ofsted has stated, religious people can hold their views, but they must understand that they are living in a ‘pluralistic society with liberal values, that strongly believes that people should be treated fairly and equally.’
Leadsom’s View
Perhaps the most prominent opinion on this topic was given by Conservative MP for South Northamptonshire, Angela Leadsom. In a recent LBC interview, Leadsom agreed with the government that relationships and sex education should be taught in schools, but still claimed ‘I also agree that it’s right that parents should be able to choose the moment at which their children become exposed to that information.’ It is worth mentioning that Leadsom’s comments are not as bigoted as some on the internet would have you believe. She claimed to have no issue with her children being taught about LGBT rights, adding ‘I would be entirely happy for my children to grow up finding that their LGBT classmates are exactly the same as them.’ Some could point to Leadsom’s voting record in parliament as evidence of her homophobia, but I’m willing to be charitable here and assume the best of her. Therefore, the focus will not be Leadsom’s possible homophobia, it will be her argument that parents should have a right to decide what lessons their children are being taught, or when they are ‘exposed’ to certain information. The only indication that Leadsom gives is that parents might consider it too early to learn about LGBT issues. This argument makes two distinct mistakes.
The first is that it assumes LGBT issues are R-Rated by implying that there is an age restriction on LGBT rights. Yet, as was established earlier in this essay, the lesson teaches tolerance. There is no mention of sex education in this lesson. This begs the question as to why you would assume a child is too young to learn the virtue of tolerance? Is there something inherently ‘adult’ about the LGBT community? According to the Guardian, books being read by the students include Mommy, Mama and Me and King & King. There is nothing fundamentally ‘adult’ about these stories, no more so than stories about a King and Queen.
The second issue with Leadsom’s argument is that she believes a parent should have the right to remove a child from class if they consider a subject matter ‘too soon’ for their child to learn. However, is it right that a parent should be able to remove their child from the class if they deem the subject matter ‘too soon’? I think this is a very vague and ill thought out belief. It would justify parents removing their children from any class. A parent might believe it is too soon for their teenager to learn the quadratic equation or play football. A parent should still have the right to question their child’s education, but this should not devolve into a carte blanche to remove the child.
Knowledge is indeed power, it is through knowledge and education that we gain positions in life (the common people anyway), it is through knowledge and critical thinking that we learn how to question the world around us and form opinions on our own. It is through rational thought rather than bias and inclination that we understand our moral obligations. To remove a child from education is to weaken that child. It is to pull your child into the warm embrace of your own echo chamber, a safe space in which you can deny facts about society and those who exist in it. It is to perpetuate intolerant and ignorant beliefs about people based on hearsay and myth. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/should-schools-teach-lgbt-tolerance-874cfc8f0303 | ['Samuel Hutchinson'] | 2019-03-30 14:23:26.239000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Education', 'LGBTQ', 'UK Politics', 'Society'] |
Come With Me If You Want to Like and Share | Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib
By The Nib
New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look | https://medium.com/the-nib/come-with-me-if-you-want-to-like-and-share-689aa911553d | ['The Nib'] | 2020-12-17 15:17:50.099000+00:00 | ['Russian Hacking', 'Privacy', 'Cambridge Analytica', 'Donald Trump', 'Facebook'] |
Ezinne Ukoha | Fast-forward two soul-draining corporate jobs, and Ezinne now lives in Los Angeles. She pours her opinions into her phone, laptop, or whatever device is within tapping distance. Ezinne notes, “I never wanted to be the race writer,” but she often found herself speaking up for her community. Writing about being a dark-skinned black woman, she waxes lyrical: “When the lights are out — and the white sheets soak our sweat, we shimmer just for the ones who see us glowing in competition with the moon.” Her words hit that rare bubble on the Venn diagram of internet expression — the one where personal, political, and poetic overlap.
Her stories travel quickly, igniting conversation and prompting digital head-nods. After unpacking Post-Obama Stress Disorder — and reflecting on her Nigerian-American Dream — readers reacted with a combination of recognition and gratitude. A story about lost girls of color triggered some much-needed wake-up calls. Ezinne’s words sometimes burn — or indict, or expose, or reveal — and people listen.
What keeps the ideas coming? It all goes back to 1980s Nigeria: “I’m more empowered to say what I have to say because I know what can happen when you live in a country where you can’t do that.” These stories are visceral, without pre-planned angles or hooks. Fueled by memories of censorship, Ezinne avoids anything that looks like a filter: editors, gatekeepers, even her own inner critic. “When it comes to the tone, my voice, what I’m trying to convey,” she admits, “I want it to be as naked as possible.”
Watch our short film for more on what keeps Ezinne hitting publish.
In a world where so many stories feel overproduced or pre-packaged, these words are raw, immediate, and undeniably real. And they’re having an impact. “I am definitely optimistic about the future,” Ezinne reflects. “I think all of it — artists, writers, singers, whatever it is — all of us are banding together and using our skills to enlighten, and it’s making a dent. A good dent. It’s definitely encouraging young voices, and it’s waking people up.”
Check out some of Ezinne’s most Noteworthy stories and series: | https://noteworthy.medium.com/ezinne-ukoha-98d48e512331 | ['Medium Staff'] | 2017-05-31 17:50:39.114000+00:00 | ['Noteworthy', 'Activism', 'Writers', 'Medium', 'Creativity'] |
The Day of Reckoning For Google+ — Or is it? | The Day of Reckoning For Google+ — Or is it?
Recently, Google has begun delivering notifications to users of the Google+ platform that the end is near for its classic user interface. While users were told long ago that that Google planned to force its user base to the new user interface, no one really knew when those permanent changes would begin to take place. The messages users have been receiving state, “The version you’re using will be replaced soon. Click here to switch to the new Google+ (shown in the graphic above).” The question is, how will this affect a platform that’s long suffered from poor leadership, bad decision making, and a dwindling user base?
For starters, I have to honor those who were willing to embrace the new Google+, despite the fact it looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, with all its quirkiness. One would have to ask, is this supposed to be a social network, or an experiment in abstract art?
But what about those who’ve made their voices clear, they do not care for the new Google+ at all, and many have vowed to ditch the platform if Google were to follow through with its planned changes. Without a doubt, the platform is suffering from its lowest levels of engagement yet, coupled with a strong lack of interest among the general public.
But, an even deeper question emerges, how does Google plan to move the Google+ platform forward when they’re too ignorant to listen to the concerns of their own users? Upon the initial announcement and introduction of the new G+ UI, the close to a half million users in our own communities came out in force to voice their opinions, and ultimate disgust with Google’s changes.
Knowing so many were unhappy with many of the proposed changes, and the fact we’re the public face for so many hundreds of thousands of users, we figured it would be a good idea to attempt to reach out to Google+ leadership and at least ask for some answers. To our dismay, no matter what person in a position of leadership for the platform we contacted, our questions and concerns appeared to be completely ignored. The really bad part about all of this was that, ignoring our concerns was the same as ignoring the concerns of the hundreds of thousands of users we represented.
At one point I attempted to contact Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of streams, photos, and sharing on the Google+ platform, only to realize the guy was nowhere to be found, and completely missing in action. Later, I attempted to contact one of their lead developers and product director, Luke Wroblewsky. The same guy who stated, “We’ve been listening”, who then proceeded to delete any comments on his posts from users who voiced concerns about the recent changes, including ours.
The fact is, despite all our attempts to mediate on behalf of the people who loved Google+ the most, Google was never once open to dialogue in any way, shape, or form. Their silence made their intentions clear, they do not care what their own users think.
This is where the whole house of cards came down for Google, and many of us who worked for years to build our brands on G+, and who helped Google build its platform to what we hoped it would be today.
The real failure of Google+ falls on the ignorance of its leaders, who’ve decided they know what’s best for all of us, and whatever concerns their users have are totally irrelevant. Rather than continue to fight, many users have simply just disappeared.
Brands on the platform are feeling the heat from all of this too. our own media organization now has zero faith in Google at all, and we’re actively searching for ways to develop our own social platform to hopefully pick up for the shortfalls of Google’s ignorant and self-entitled leadership that thinks it knows what people want. And, unlike every day social users, brands have a lot more to lose if Google’s platform were to fail.
This also brings to mind the issue with brand’s ultimate reliance on Google when it comes to gaining visibility on the web, something we may save for a later story.
While Google has made some effort to address many of the concerns surrounding the new Google+, the user interface still falls short in its ability to properly render on high resolution desktop monitors. This is despite repeated complaints from its user base that things just aren’t working. Whether Google likes it or not, its users don’t appreciate them attempting to turn their laptops and desktop monitors into mobile devices. Sorry to tell you Google, but I’m not rubbing my hands all over my laptop’s screen, as this isn’t a magic lamp, and laptop’s have a keyboard for a reason.
I’d reckon a 5 year old with crayons could have developed a more user friendly UI, rather than the abstract contraption we see today; that by the way violates every principal of user interface design, and continues to present accessibility concerns for those who’re visually impaired. Users of laptop and desktop devices are stuck with a user interface that portrays the tiniest fonts you’ll ever see, coupled with humongous posts that take up half the page. There’s really no logic in any of it, and it’s no wonder people hate it so much.
While I will admit I’ve had some harsh words for Google in this post, if they had only been a little more willing to listen, I can make a sure bet the Google+ platform wouldn’t be laying on its death bed and gasping for breath where it sits today.
Some may ask, who am I to criticize Google if I’ve presented nothing in terms of rectifying the problems that exist? The fact is, I and others definitely have presented a number potential solutions to the problems that persist with the Google+ platform; and each and every time they continue to fall on deaf ears.
As I mentioned in a earlier post last year, sometimes we just have to be willing to accept things for what they are; and in the case of Google+, I think many of us are willing to embrace it for what it is, despite Google’s complete and total ignorance, and lack of concern for its users thoughts and feelings.
In the end, I think it’s obvious that some of us take more pride and honor in the Google+ platform than Google does themselves. I guess for some of us, we feel it’s something worth fighting for. All being said, I still love the Google+ platform, even if it remains a total failure, and I can only hope it stands to last the test of time.
One last note: I decided on including the graphic portrayed above based on an interesting statement it makes. The graphic is of our social networking community, and if you click to enlarge the post you will notice there’s a post pinned at the top which honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and exhibits some incredible words from what many define as being our nation’s moral leader, in which it states, “ “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Written and published by Daniel Imbellino — Co-Founder of Strategic Social Networking and pctechauthority.com. Many thanks for reading. Be sure to check out Strategic Social Networking Community on Google+ to connect with tens of thousands of IT professionals and learn effective strategies to grow your social presence online. You’re also welcome to follow Strategic’s brand page on G+ for the latest social media and IT industry news. | https://medium.com/strategic-social-news-wire/the-day-of-reckoning-for-google-or-is-it-59fd1c3ded36 | ['Daniel Imbellino'] | 2017-01-28 15:28:01.176000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Social Media', 'Google', 'Google Plus'] |
A Business approach to Analysis of Data | A Business approach to Analysis of Data
What do you need to master Business Analytics and Decision Science?
There is a new buzz word in town these days. It is called Business Analytics. But what is it, and why is it important? Although every company and organization has a different meaning to what a Business Analyst does, but by university standards a business analytics course equips students with knowledge of data analysis and decision making for the business. I went through a lot of MOOCs and HarvardX courses to understand how a business analysis process is different from that of data analysis — and spoiler — it is not all that different. The only key difference is that a data analyst who can derive to decisions for his business from the analysis that is made is a business analyst. What I will do for you is, I will lay down all the major and minor details that a business analysis procedure follow and we will together build a better understanding of how data analysis done with the right goal in mind leads to successful outcomes. Let’s start with from the beginning of everything
Feasibility — Before diving deep into solving a problem, you need to have an extensive plan of the steps that are going to be followed to reach the decision. Most common blockers in this process will be the distribution of data sources and other requirements that are needed for the analysis. If you are lucky enough, then you might find all data sources in one place, say a data warehouse, in which case you need to extract all of the data from this source and perform your analysis. But in many cases, this might be distributed over web analytics data, BI reports, database servers and un-organized local data. It then becomes important to be able to find out whether this analysis is feasible or not. That is, the cost put in for this, will have a significant outcome or not. At the end of the day, both the timeline and the cost should justify the need for decision.
Information-Action Value Chain
Lets start with what a value chain is; it is a sequence of steps in any process where the end of every individual step adds a value to the overall system. Let us walkthrough how this chain is formed step-by-step:
First we start with data capturing and storing. In the real world when analyzing terabytes of data, the source of this data might not be a singular, and therefore we need to bring all data sources, data points and tools together. Generally, all this information is stored in a data warehouse. This is important as it saves a lot of time that will be spent in juggling through various files, folders and databases in the latter stages if all the information does not exist in one standardized location. Bringing the data together not only saves time, it is also useful in performing the initial steps of analysis: cleaning, establishing relationships, etc. Next in the value chain is extraction of data. Although, we have placed all of our data in a singular place, the location where data is stored will not have analysis capabilities every time. This step is important because it creates a path from the data source to the tool which is going to perform analysis operations, Relational Databases, like SQL Server Reporting Services (In DB analytics services), Python Data Libraries, etc. Next in the series comes the information that we would be concluding, the analysis itself. There are three major categories of data analytics that businesses tend to work with and I will walk through all of them briefly in the below sections.
Descriptive Analytics
How the environment works, or has historically been working. This information helps in understanding the system and therefore can help in developing insights on how to improve it. Descriptive Analytics can take the form of simple aggregations or cross tabulations of data, simple statistical measures like means, medians, and standard deviations. At times it can also be used with more sophisticated statistics like distributions, confidence intervals and test of hypotheses or advanced association or clustering algorithms. Take an example of a cellphone operator like Vodafone, a descriptive analytics scenario could be determining why customers are leaving a certain mobile data plan and switching to others.
Predictive Analytics
Predictions help in finding something that has not occurred yet but has a high probability of occurrence. It often uses advanced algorithms like linear or logistic regression, neural networks, simulation techniques and tree based algorithms like random forests to bring a conclusion. Considering the above example of why people cancelled a data plan, predictive analytics could be used on the historical data to find who could cancel in the future, or what factors lead to a plan cancellation. This information can further be used to take measures to stop these factors from coming up and hence lower the rate of drop in customers.
Prescriptive Analytics
This comes as the ending of the process and explicitly links the analysis to decision making by providing recommendations on what can be done from the analysis to reach a certain outcome. All the three are linked together as they form a lifecycle of analysis events. From the above set of examples imagine we already know from the predictions made, what customers are going to discontinue the cellular plans from Vodafone. Prescriptive analytics can be used to identify those customers from the predictions that can be reached out to, with an agenda of making them stop before they end the plan. This needs to be a targeted approach in order to maximize the return on investment.
University of Maryland describes Business Analytics as a collection of concepts like statistics for data operations and visualization of the data for communication
Analytical Tools and Technologies
Now that we are versed with the forms that analytics can take it now comes down to the tools that we could use to make the above happen.
Data Storage- Storage in the analysis phase can be put into 2 categories, one being the source where all of the data exists. The source mostly has a lot of data in tremendous details and we might not need all of it for analysis hence comes the second division where we move only the data that is required for analysis and leave the rest out. We have come across terms like OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). These are broad categories of what capacities data storage systems contain. Both these systems are optimized for their individual tasks. It is generally a bad idea to perform operations right in the place where raw data is stored.
Big Data and cloud are increasingly being called together, but both are not really the same. Cloud is more to do with the platform where the analysis occurs, and big data tools on the other hand are used to analyze large amounts of stored data, streaming data, etc. but yet both these technologies occur without each other.
This gives an overview of how the cloud infrastructure holds together all parts of the data analysis process. Each of the tools that exist on the infrastructure have a separate set of languages to work with.
Virtualization- When we mention storing data and making it available for analytics, we generally refer to what is called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) which as a process extracts data from one location, transforms the data in some way, and then loads the data into a new location. The general notion of analyzing data is that it is stored in a location (generally a disc storage) and is accessed from there for analysis, often leaving the portion that is not required behind in the disc. This has to do with the cost of computing resources, since ETL is a very processing intensive operation it is recommended that it be done in the background, in memory. Although if both the data access and processing could happen in memory things would be extremely fast, but there is a reason why your computer storage is in Terabytes and memory in Gigabytes and that is because memory is extremely costly. This is a concept that is manipulated by data virtualization where the sources of data are distant but it is made to look like all the data is in one place for access to the users, from one common interface. This gives an advantage that data need not be stored in two separate locations, one for storage and one for analysis. But again, if there is a requirement of high ETL processing, virtualization will not do the trick and it is advised to use the general old-school approach.
Data Federation- With data federation, not only do we make it look like data is in one place, but we actually fit that data into a common integrated data model. We perform all the same transformations and establish all the same relationships among data entities that we would do in a physical database, but we do it all virtually. That is, without ever actually moving the data. Of course, this comes at the cost of even more complex processing that can result in slower performance when data is accessed or extracted. Both data virtualization and data federation are usually accomplished using specialized software applications that connect to a variety of different source systems. While they eliminate the need to move data using ETL processes, they still require development and maintenance to establish those connections and present a unified view of data to users. It is somewhat similar to what we do with code in GIT. Both virtualization and federation are great when the amount of data and processing required is not very big. As the complexity of operations increases, both gradually become inefficient.
In-Memory and In-Database are options that will speed up the analytical operations and give results faster than the above mentioned options, but also they come with a higher cost of operation and management. Finally, a Relational Database is the most popular storage and analysis service used in the industry. An RDBMS application is used to manage these databases and they operate in a row-and-column approach with a strictly defined schema. Maintaining a schema has its advantages of keeping data intact, performing normalization that eliminates redundancy by ensuring that we store unique data only once versus multiple times.
Tools of a Data Analyst
I will bring this discussion to an end with the most exciting conversation — the analyst’s toolbox. Data Analysis is an evolving process and so are the tools we use day to day, they evolve every day and will continue to expand as the quantity of data increases. I have grouped these in 6 broad categories that will be a go-to for any analysis process. Let us see each one of these with brief details.
Database Systems: Create, maintain and extract data. Databases are primarily used for keeping an updated score of where and how the data is stored and to keep all of it located together. This embarks the start of any analysis journey. Examples could be SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL or some NoSQL systems like MongoDB. These are the skills you would need to start your analytical journey. Standard Reporting: These were the first ever reporting tools created. Stable repetitive use of data is presented using standardized reports and is meant for business stake holders. Automating generation of these reports periodically (monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, etc.) is something that a data analyst needs to know because many reports do not need specific tasks but just need updating, as and when new data arrives. These could include Power BI, Excel and others, although all of these tools are now much more advanced and can perform various complex tasks other than standard reporting. Dashboarding: It is a superset of standard reporting where from a large set of reports, the most important and relevant ones are pulled out, put into a visualization and then collectively presented on a web page or to a stake holder. This emphasizes on a concept called summary statistics where not everything is shown, but the most important parts are shown in a way that all the information is conveyed. Tools for Dashboarding are Tableau, Adobe Analytics (Report Builder), etc. Data Visualization: While we may or may not spend time developing reports or dashboards, the idea of data visualization is squarely within the domain of the data analyst. Visualization is the process of arranging data in such a way that we can more easily see what’s going on and draw conclusions based on what we see. It hides the complex algorithms running behind the scenes and shows data visually for building generalized conclusions. Some important skills to gather here are libraries in Python and R like Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, ggplot and some standalone tools like Tableau, Power BI, Excel. Data Exploration: Data exploration is an intelligent extension of the idea of data visualization. Data exploration tools seek to proactively guide the data analyst by automatically scanning data and providing cues or suggestions on what thing the data analyst might look at next. Statistical Modelling & Advanced Programming: The last class of tools we talk about are modelling and programming tools which are the backbone of a data scientist’s work. These tools are used to execute highly sophisticated analytical procedures on data, often using statistical techniques.
This image from University of Colorado, Boulder explains perfectly the landscape of tools that are used for the various portions of a data analysis lifecycle.
Understanding the above image will make the entire process extremely simple. On the horizontal are the subjects of analysis mentioned above and from this horizontal up are the tools used for each of the processes. As we go vertically up the ladder, the cost of the tools and its complexity increases. Also, some tools have a horizontal span of more than one aspect, this states that those given tools can perform all the horizontals that they cover. For example, Excel is capable of doing reporting tasks, dashboarding, visualization, exploration and modelling. Similarly Power BI and Tableau can be used for dashboarding, visualization and exploration.
Approaches and Options to Data Analysis
Based on what environment and methodology you use, there are various approaches an analyst can take to derive to decisions. I will be discussing a few important derivates here:
Intermediate File Approach- This method relies on a complete file being transferred from the data source to the analytical tools, where the analysis will occur. This is best suited for data that is static and will not change over time and where a one time analysis is required on a very large dataset, usually an offline data source.
This is a consideration where a file is exported from a data storage and moved to a tool that will perform the analysis and reporting
This approach will not be ideal for live streaming data or constantly evolving data since transferring files to analytical tools might overlay the operation execution time and hence delay the entire process.
Direct Connection Approach- Here the tool is directly integrated with the database management system using an API or an ODBC connection string. These connection strings basically create a route for the data to be fetched by the analytical service engine and hence as the data in the source refreshes, it would automatically reflect in the API. Therefore, it can be used for evolving data and reduces the step of an external file creation.
All integration services occur in the database system
Although, it would require a connection setup and extraction of data without the connection (offline analysis) will be difficult to execute.
Downstream Integration Approach- It is quite often the case in data analytics that the information we need is located in a bunch of different locations and formats. While it would be nice to have everything on one warehouse, it doesn’t always make sense to spend the time and energy to put everything there prior to analysis. Especially if we’re not entirely sure those sources will turn out to be important.
Integrations happen directly on the analysis tools — this is helpful when more than one data sources exist and the upstream data is in varied formats
In cases like this we form a broader set of API and ODBC connections to the tool which is going to perform the analysis and operate all of them concurrently. We then use additional functionality in the tool to integrate the data from sources and construct the required dataset for analysis. This of course requires a higher quality toolset and lot of code to get along. Take an example of a Python script which connects data from SQL, Excel and CSV files and then forms a new data frame to perform analysis.
The Final Cut
Data Analysis and Reporting is a never ending process just like any other development task. Requirements are created, then the product is delivered. But with time the requirements keep evolving and the product continues to improve. What I have mentioned in this entire article is an overview for someone who is recently moving into the data analysis space and wants to know how the business aspect of projects function. I hope this gives you a fair picture of how things look from a business perspective. I will continue to author more stories and articles in this series with an aim to equip all data aspirants to stay hand-in-hand with business. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/a-business-approach-to-analysis-of-data-c16ba7dd60bb | ['Rahulraj Singh'] | 2020-06-28 16:20:29.600000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Business', 'Strategy', 'Data Science', 'Storytelling'] |
No Fighting In This (Agile) Dojo with M. David Green | No Fighting In This (Agile) Dojo with M. David Green
Episode 46
How can we train teams to consistently produce quality code without negatively impacting productivity? In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest, M. David Green, discuss Agile Dojos and how they can make teams more effective. Dojos provide a six-week training ground where teams focus on recognizing and replicating value by pairing, mobbing, and swarming. Coaches like Green help them to hone their skills and go through rituals more effectively. The results will be more engaged team members, scrum masters, and a way of working that converts skeptics and naysayers into Agile evangelists.
Show Notes
What is an Agile Dojo? (00:53)
Recognizing value (6:09)
What kind of work are engineers actually doing in a six-week dojo? (10:05)
How David’s dojos differ from others (18:30)
Understanding extreme programming (XP) and why it’s valuable (23:41)
Engaged scrum masters are essential for long-term change (26:49)
Convincing skeptics to try a new system (32:12)
Defining “mobbing” and “swarming” (35:00)
Why pairing doesn’t negatively impact productivity (38:47)
Links
Dojo Consortium: https://dojoconsortium.org/
Extreme Programming: http://extremeprogramming.org
Hack the Process Podcast: https://www.hacktheprocess.com/
Scrum: Novice to Ninja: https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Novice-Methods-Powerful-Development/dp/0994346913
Programming Leadership Podcast: http://www.programmingleadership.com
Transcript
Announcer: Welcome to The Programming Leadership podcast, where we help great coders become skilled leaders, and build happy, high performing software teams.
Markus: Welcome to the episode. I am so pleased to have my new friend M. David Green join with me today and we are going to talk about Agile Dojos. How cool does that sound? David, welcome to the program.
David: Thank you, Marcus, it’s great to be here.
Markus: I was really looking forward to this episode because I recently watched the original Karate Kid and I was thinking about, Daniel-san, and the moves and the wax on, and I realize it’s silly, but I kind of like kung fu movies and stuff, but let’s be serious here for a minute. What is an Agile Dojo?
David: Well, you’ll excuse me if I don’t want to be serious, but will be sincere if that’s okay with you.
Markus: I think that’s wonderful. [laughing].
David: Sure. So, an Agile Dojo is an opportunity for a team that has an interest in developing their Agile skills to practice those skills under the supervision of a coach who can help them learn, and go through the rituals more effectively, and develop their skill around these things.
Markus: Can you give me an example. What kind of skills — if I go to a regular dojo, and one time I attended a karate class, even though it wasn’t a great experience — I remember there was lots of punching and kicking and sweating and some yelling and stuff like that. I’m guessing this is different. So, what kind of skills might one learn in an Agile Dojo?
David: You’re setting me up to tell you about all of the punching and kicking and screaming that happens in my dojos. [laughing]. But there isn’t really all that much. So, the concept of a dojo does come from the martial arts, it comes from Aikido. It’s the concept of a place for practice, the word “dojo” just means a place where you can practice. And in an Agile Dojo, typically a team comes together, either because there is a specific development skill that they want to practice, such as, for example, test-driven development, or perhaps they want to practice how they start and stop their programming sessions or how they pair program. There are a number of different engineering practices that you can work on in a dojo environment.
Markus: So, I’m thinking concretely because you mentioned some great examples. So, let’s take one of them, I think you said unit testing, is that right? Your test-driven development skills, if you want to get better, a company could create an Agile Dojo, and that might be a skill that people practice — a place of practice. Is it actually a different physical room? Is that a state of mind? What is the dojo?
David: People have had just a lot of discussions about whether or not a room is necessary. I found that a room is actually very useful, although when I started coaching I generally tended not to use a room and I tended to prefer to work with people in the workspace where they naturally work because the work that they’re doing inside the dojo then translates more easily back to the type of work that they normally do. But as I’ve started working with a set of practices, and in particular, I run a dojo around Extreme Programming, which combines together a number of Agile practices, I find that having a room where a team can isolate themselves from the distractions of the rest of the work floor, gives them the opportunity to focus in more on what they’re doing, without concern about being pulled away for other projects or about communicating with other people or closing themselves out from different distractions that might come from the floor. The factor of having a room isn’t necessarily something that all teams end up with, but I’ve noticed that at least a third of the teams that I’ve worked with, end up choosing, in the future, to find rooms, to reserve conference rooms or whatever, and in companies where they don’t normally have their own desk space in a private room so that the team can continue to work together in that isolation.
Markus: Okay, this sounds like — so I’m imagining a company who might be listening. Maybe you’re a software manager, and you say, “Man, I’ve been trying to get my developers to do TDD for years. And it’s so spotty, I’m not happy with it, they resisted. Maybe a dojo is right for me.” Is there some ways that a company, or a manager, or anybody can start to play or experiment with this idea?
David: Well, I think the first question I would ask a manager in that position is why do you want your engineers to do TDD? What is it that you really want to accomplish? Because that’s the beginning of the conversation that leads to the possibility of whether or not a dojo should be part of your plan. If you are just trying to implement TDD as part of what your organization does because you read somewhere in a board, or an expert told you, “If you’re not doing TDD, then you’re not doing it right,” they probably haven’t thought through the issues enough to really understand whether or not you want to try to bring people into a dojo and develop these practices. One of the reasons that I encourage people to go into a dojo is because it allows a team to recognize the value of what they’re delivering, not just change their practices. If you try to enforce TDD, for example, test-driven development, from the outside, it’s not going to stick. Most engineers know how to write tests, and if you tell them, write the test first, they know how to write the test first. Just because they can demonstrate to you the ability to write a test first doesn’t mean that that practice is going to become part of the culture of your company. The advantage of a dojo is it gives a team the opportunity to work with these practices for an extended period of time, often about six weeks. And once they’ve had a chance to experience, viscerally, the benefit of these practices, they’ll tend toward them when they’re appropriate, and often teams will tend to use them in preference for the way that they were working before.
Markus: So, what are some of those visceral experiences, these recognizing value, I think you said?
David: Yes, because basically you’ve gotten a team of engineers who might be thinking about how quickly they can deliver projects in order to evaluate how effective they are as engineers. And you might even have management looking at the engineers that way, as well. I’m of the opinion, and I think a lot of people in the industry would agree with me, that from an engineering perspective, the focus shouldn’t necessarily be on how quickly something is delivered, but rather how much quality is put into the process, how well the product is developed, how easy it is to maintain, how resilient it is, how robust it is, how easy the code is to read and understand. These are things that an engineer is qualified to work with and understand better than anybody else in the company. Whereas you might have people, say in the product organization, who might be better at focusing on the delivery speed and making sure that things meet customer expectations around deadlines and requirements. By delegating the responsibility for delivery off to product and letting the engineers focus on quality, you have the opportunity for the engineers to look at the work that they’re doing, not from the perspective of, if I don’t get this many things done by the end of the quarter, then I’m going to get a bad grade and a bad rating, but rather they look at, is everything that I’m doing of the highest quality? That is, is it maintainable? Is it not going to blow up in production? Is it going to work effectively? Is it understandable? And that’s really what an engineer is his best at.
Markus: You used a really interesting phrase there; the highest quality. And I have to say I think that most engineers really want to build high-quality products. I don’t know of any that would say, “My goal is to build low-quality products,” but sometimes the frames and the framing of quality can be different between management, product, and engineering. That is it can mean different things to different people. Do you have a useful definition that you encourage for the engineers around quality?
David: Well, you might have noticed that I was using a couple of metrics that you could include, to evaluate whether or not a software project — we’re talking software engineers — whether that project is being done with quality. And the maintainability of the code, the ability for the next engineer who looks at it six months later to read it and understand it, its robustness, the fact that it doesn’t fail easily in production, the fact that it has a lower number of bugs, or that it’s easier to restart when it does stop, or it’s easier to understand and fix when there’s something broken, the fact that it’s possible to toggle on and off features depending on the needs of a product organization. There are a number of different ways that engineers can look at their code and say, “This is higher quality and this is lower quality.” That said, as you said, the management might have different criteria for evaluating the value of the software that’s being delivered to the company, and product might have different metrics that they use for evaluating these things. When I talk about quality, I’m talking about the observable quality that an engineer would attribute to the code.
Markus: Okay. Do you find that most companies are having these conversations about different perspectives on quality?
David: I don’t think that most companies are as enlightened as you are about that point. [laughing].
Markus: Oh, I don’t know about that. [laughing]. [crosstalk 00:09:35]
David: [crosstalk 00:09:35] I’m of the opinion that most companies would prefer to use a word that they think everybody understands and just let that word apply universally rather than dig into the semantics of this particular person looks at it from this lens and this particular person looks at it from that lens. That said, I think that most companies would be willing to have that conversation, I just don’t think it’s occurred to everybody.
Markus: Hmm. Well, let’s talk about how the dojo might help that. So, in your dojo, it sounds like — do you create some explicit ideas about what quality looks like in the dojo?
David: So, what I do in my dojo is I have a conversation with the engineers. I tend to work with engineers who are working in a Scrum model, which means that they tend to work in sprints, usually about a two-week sprint, that’s typical of most of the companies that I’ve worked with, and the way that I introduce the concept of quality and what an engineer might look at in terms of evaluating the work that they’re doing is by having a dialogue with the engineers in which I introduce a number of different facets of code and of coding practices. And I ask the engineers to evaluate themselves, and to look at the work that they’ve been doing and think about whether or not this is objectively the way that they think the work should be done, and to rank themselves and to rate themselves. We have this conversation at the very beginning of a dojo. We have this conversation after the retrospective, after each sprint. And then we have the conversation again after the dojo is completed, to see if the engineers have continued the practices after they’ve graduated.
Markus: What kind of differences do you notice in the way they, maybe, rank themselves or the way they see their own work?
David: Well, one of the interesting things about rankings is as soon as you put a number in front of something, people are going to try to game it. And engineers, just like anybody else, they tend to try to give themselves the highest score that they possibly can around everything. What I’ve noticed is that the teams that I’ve worked with that have the greatest maturity by the time they finish the dojo are the ones who look at the ratings that they gave themselves the highest score on before, and they rank themselves lower by the end, and they say, we actually learned something about what this means, and now we’ve realized that probably there’s more room for us to grow around this.
Markus: Oh, wow. Okay, so you mentioned that when you had started, or it sounded like early on in your work as an Agile Coach, the dojo wasn’t so much of a room as it was you were in with — where the engineers currently were working. But now we have sort of the idea of, they’re in a room working, this has worked well for you. What are they working on? Are they just working on katas? Which I guess is another martial arts term, right? Or forms? Or are they — like what is the work that they’re actually doing during this six-week intensive dojo time?
David: [laughing]. I can tell you from my dojos, I prefer to have the teams working on whatever projects they were working on when they started. Wherever they were in their projects and whatever they were working on. I don’t like to take them away from the type of work they’re familiar with, or even the languages that they’re working with. I’m not there to teach them things that they don’t already know. I’m there to give them the opportunity to practice skills in the context of what they already know. That said, the concept of an Agile Dojo is usually more broadly applied, and often, it will be focused around building a specific skill. A lot of people who run dojos will do an entire dojo specifically on pairing, and they’ll teach pairing practices, and they’ll work on the logistics of pairing, and the rhythm of pairing and getting people familiar with that. Some people run dojos around test-driven development, and it’s about how do you run a test? How do you get into a cycle where you make sure that you’ve written a test before you write any code, you make sure that the test has failed, you make the test pass in the simplest way possible, and then, once you’ve got the test passing in the simplest way possible, you go in and you refactor your code before you start writing your next test, and you do your development around that cycle. Getting people familiar just building muscle memory around that; that has value and that can be done with either katas or with the code that a team is normally working on. For me, I prefer to work with the code that a team has already got. Whatever projects the team is working on, I bring in the Scrum Master, I bring in the Product Owner, I make sure that everybody’s on board with it, and that way we are building these skills in the context of something they can take away with them, so that they can continue in that way once they’ve left the dojo.
Markus: Now you brought up these other two roles. I’m curious, do they have a role to play, the Product Owner and the Scrum Master? Are they a part of the dojo, or kind of just incidental?
David: So, I’m working in a Scrum and XP model, and Scrum and XP have some similarities, but most of the engineering teams that I’ve worked with would say that they are following Scrum. Scrum uses the concept of a development team of a couple pizzas worth of engineers, enough engineers that it would take to eat two pizzas for lunch, plus one Scrum Master and one Product Owner. The Scrum Master is responsible for keeping the ceremonies going effectively for Scrum, and the Product Owner is responsible for representing the customer and helping to defend the team from work that would take them away from work that would support that particular customer. In my dojos, I look at those roles, the developers, the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, as all of the elements of a team, and I’m coaching the whole team at once.
Markus: Okay, so I’m now — I stammering around because I’m — my mind is sort of swirling. I’m imagining a TDD dojo, or an XP dojo — I guess, with an XP dojo, it does make sense that the Scrum Mast — the other roles are in there, but when I think about a pairing dojo, would that involve other kinds of roles, like non-coding roles?
David: So, I don’t do targeted dojos around one specific practice the way that I’ve described. As I said, other people do have katas around TDD, and they might spend, for example, two hours a day for five days a week specifically focused on that, and that would be what they would call their dojo, or they might pull the engineers off completely, and work exclusively for several weeks on certain practices. I work on Extreme Programming, which would involve bringing all of those practices together, but working with the entire team on whatever work they’re normally doing.
Markus: Okay, got it. All right, so it sounds like that even the term dojo has a lot of flavors. How did you get into this kind of work?
David: So, I was a developer myself, and I was a senior front end engineer, working at companies — I was working from Apple Computer, I was working at a bunch of startups in SoMa, but I also have an MBA in Organizational Behavior. So, I had a different perspective on things. I came to engineering rather late in my career. And as an engineer, having had the experience of working before that in other roles, I saw that the engineers I was working with were really suffering. I saw a lot of pain in the process in terms of how communication happens, how requirements are explained, and set, established, how deadlines are met and how they’re handled, a lot of things that made me uncomfortable with how engineers were experiencing their work, and I wanted to help with that. And I recognized Agile — probably about 10 years ago in my career — as something that promised to help with that, if it were properly implemented. And I was working at a couple of companies that said they were following an Agile process, and that gave us classes that taught us what Agile was supposed to represent, then I didn’t actually see that in practice. I wanted the opportunity to help with that.
And I made a transition in my own career. Went from being a platform developer to being a Scrum Master. I rather quickly went from being a Scrum Master to being a Program Manager, organizing Scrum Masters around the company that I happen to working at at the time. And I fell in love with it. I saw so much benefit to the people that I was working with. They brightened up, the work improved, the quality of what they were delivering improved, the communication improved, and I thought this is really what I want to be doing. I want to be helping people get more of this in their lives. So, I recognized that, in the time that I was working, and the term for that was Agile Coach, and I started transforming myself into an Agile Coach, started working with small companies, working with independent clients. Right now, I’m working with enterprise clients. It’s been a really wonderful ride.
Markus: So, if somebody’s listening, and they are really intrigued about how they might use an Agile Dojo where they work to build skill, to build collaboration, it sounds like maybe if they’re XP or Scrum, maybe the whole team can be in there and have something to learn. How would you suggest someone start?
David: Well, there are a number of coaches out there who work in the dojo model. I’m actually part of a consortium, called the Dojo Consortium, as a matter of fact, which people can go visit and find out about some recommended practices. Companies such as Target and Verizon and Delta and Walmart, there are some really big companies out there which have adopted the dojo model for their engineers and had great successes with it. I recommend people go to dojoconsortium.org for a quick look at how these different dojos are approached.
Markus: Nice. Okay, well, I want to dive into a couple of specific questions about dojos. And I understand that you do dojos differently than some other people do.
David: Mm-hm.
Markus: So, I’m curious, when I went to a dojo or a place where people were learning a martial art, there were some rules, and they had the rules on the wall, and they said take off your shoes, and you have to treat people in a certain way. What kind of rules, or guides, whatever you want to call them, might you like to see in a dojo?
David: Well, one of the things I tell people when they’re entering the dojo is, there’s this concept also from Aikido called Shuhari, which is about a progression of learning and practice. And the concept is that there are three stages of learning in a dojo, the Shu stage, where you are simply adopting traditional forms and following those traditional forms as closely as possible to get familiar with them, the Ha stage, where you have incorporated those forms, and you’re starting to practice them and work with them yourself independent of a coach, and then the Ri stage, where you might be able to transcend those forms and move beyond them. The entire dojo is handled in the Shu phase of the Shuhari. So, I come up with a set of practices that I encourage people to follow, and among them, I like the team to establish what their core hours are when they’re going to be available to work with each other. That’s important because I like the team to pair and mob on all of the work that they do, rather than work independently. No silos, no individuals working on a piece of code. If one person is working on something, everybody on the team should be aware of what it is and should ideally be able to step in and help with it. I like the team to be doing test-driven development around all of the code that they’re building so that they know how to do that test first process. I like them to use acceptance test-driven development, where the Product Owner can define the behavior of the end product, of the software as it’s supposed to be delivered, and then based on those definitions, the team can write acceptance tests, which also can fail and then be made to pass through the process of development.
I have the team sitting together in a room. That’s usually unusual for them. That’s not something that they’re familiar with, and often I find the first thing people say is “Why do we have to be locked in this room all day?” But by the time the dojo is over, I’ve yet to find a team that didn’t want to adopt the room and stay in there forever. And I sit with them. I sit with the developers for the whole time that they’re doing their development work, and I coach them as they go, and I try to be rather lightweight about it. But I’ll remind them if they start working on code without having first written a test, “Did you write a test for that first?” Just like asking the question, and not necessarily forcing them to do anything that they wouldn’t do, but if they recognize that there’s value to what I’m suggesting, they’ll pick it up and they’ll start doing it.
Markus: That’s a nice, gentle nudge towards what you’re looking for. So, I’m curious, have you found anyone who is using Agile, these Agile Dojos in a fully distributed team?
David: So, before I started doing dojos, myself, I actually was coaching teams that were fully distributed at one company. I worked at a company, it was a small startup, and they had no physical location at all. Everybody was spread all around the world. And for example, there was one team that had people from Portland to Pakistan. And —
Markus: Wow.
David: — it was challenging, for example, getting them to work around the concept of having a daily standup because getting a schedule that works for everybody was interesting. But finding a time when the teams could work together effectively was one of the big challenges there. We ended up encouraging a lot of pairing between the people who were in shared time zones. But remote pairing is definitely not a problem, as long as people are able to align their time effectively. I like working with distributed teams a lot because working in a distributed environment forces you to have the kind of transparency and documentation that keeps everybody on the same page at the same time.
Markus: Hmm. I like that answer. David, we’ve been using some terms like Extreme Programming, also known as XP or Scrum. And I know that for myself, I’ve been assuming that audience members just know what that means, as well as Agile, but you seem to have a particular affinity for this thing called Extreme Programming, which sounds pretty extreme. What is it? And why, in your mind, is it valuable?
David: Absolutely. Extreme Programming is something I’ve seen work for so many different teams. And one of the things that I noticed when I started getting into Agile, I was going into it because I was looking for ways to reduce the suffering and increase the joy that I saw in the teams. The teams that seemed to have the most joy were the ones that were following an Extreme Programming practice. And when I first heard of it, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, and I had a lot of fantasies about what it might be, but it’s a fairly simple concept. With Extreme Programming. There’s a set of fundamental practices, and I’ve mentioned a few of them along the way. Teams that are doing Extreme Programming pair or mob on all of the work that they’re doing. They do test-driven development for all of the coding that they’re doing. They use acceptance test-driven development to make sure that the stories that they’re working on from the Product Owner deliver real value and are framed around real customer needs. And another factor of Extreme Programming that I think Extreme Programming inherits from Agile is this concept of reflection, where you work in short iterations, and get the opportunity after each short iteration, to look at what you’ve done, and look at the way you’ve done it, and reflect on your process, and then improve the way that you might do things the next time.
Markus: So, this reflection thing. I’m keen on it because I’ve been thinking lately about how to build learning teams. Is reflection the same as just a retro? Everybody talks about doing a retro, but I don’t know if XP reflection is just their version of a retrospective.
David: I believe that it is, and that’s the way that I approach it. And in fact, because the teams that I work with tend to use a Scrum model as opposed to an Extreme Programming model when they start I tend to build the Extreme Programming practices inside of Scrum. I’m not a purist around this. So, if the team already has a set of ceremonies that they follow, and they have a person they call a Scrum Master and the person they call a Product Owner, that’s fine with me. That’s different from what Extreme Programming would require, which is a person called an XP Coach, and another person called a Customer with slightly different names for some of the ceremonies. For me, I don’t see that the differences are all that important. So, yes, the retrospective, from a Scrum perspective, with the important caveat that a lot of teams may not be doing their retrospectives or maybe passing them off too quickly, or may not be taking action items out of them. And I like to make sure that the teams I work with recognize the value of that reflection so that they can benefit and improve.
Markus: I’m starting to get kind of a picture here. You don’t have them do katas or forms. These people come into the place; they say we’re going to spend six weeks together. We’re going to be in a different kind of container where we’re kind of locked away. And we’re going to work together. But we’re going to work on what we were already working on. So, the product and the codebase and the tooling is very familiar, but now we’re also going to try and be more intentional about how we write, and who we write with, and how we know it’s correct, but also how we build in learning. And I think that last bit kind of lights me up because I do talk to so many companies and developers that tell me, “Oh, yeah, we have retros. Nothing really ever changes.” But in the dojo, how do you spur that on so that you create some change?
David: So, the dojo works best when there is an engaged Scrum Master, and this is really one of the places where a strong Scrum Master has the opportunity to shine. When I start a dojo with a team, sometimes a Scrum Master might think, “Are you criticizing the way that I’ve been doing things? Do you think that I haven’t been doing things right?” In fact, the Scrum Master is essential element to an effective dojo, and I consider the Scrum Master to be the coach that the team gets to keep when they graduate from the dojo. So, I empower that Scrum Master, and I offer techniques and tools and tips and opportunities. Usually, it’s a very collaborative process, and by bringing the Scrum Master into the process and making sure that the Scrum Master’s vote is part of every vote, and their ranking is a part of every ranking, it cements that person as part of the team and not just somebody off to the side who forces us to do ceremonies every now and then, whom we can otherwise ignore.
Markus: Yeah, I think I could imagine that the Scrum Master might feel like, “Well, this is happening because I wasn’t doing my job right.” Or, David’s here, “It must mean something’s wrong because we’ve been sent to the dojo.” I don’t know if people get sent to the dojo or if they sign up for it, but at some point they’re there. And I’m curious how other roles might react to being in this environment?
David: Well, it’s a funny thing, because the very first team that went through the dojo in my current engagements was very enthusiastic about going through, and that set the tone for the rest of the company honestly. Right now, I’ve got a waiting list of teams that are waiting to go through. They’re enthusiastic and anxious about the opportunity. And it’s not because they think that they’re going to be evaluated. It’s because they see that the teams that have gone through it before have gotten so much benefit out of it. There’s a lot of evangelism that comes from this process. And the developers evangelize it among the developers. The Scrum masters evangelize it among the Scrum Masters and the Product Owners evangelize it as well. The manager is evangelizing it because they’re seeing the benefit to the teams and their ability to work and deliver high-quality code.
Markus: So, individuals, it sounds like, come out after six weeks, changed. How do team dynamics change? Or maybe, how have you seen them change in that six weeks?
David: Yeah, it’s funny, because I don’t think so much about the individuals changing. I do coach the individuals as I see people who might have specific problems, but my focus is always on the team dynamics. It’s always about how the team works together as a whole. That’s one of the reasons why pairing and mobbing is so elemental what I’m doing. If everybody on the team isn’t fully engaged in the process all the time, then the team isn’t really working together effectively. That’s one of the reasons why I encourage teams to establish core hours that are maybe four or five hours a day at most, because it’s very intensive work when you’re pairing and mobbing with people, and you have to be engaged constantly in what’s going on. You need some downtime. You need time to answer your emails. You need time to take training courses, you need time to do personal development, but you also just cannot work that many hours a day doing that kind of thing.
Markus: I remember, I think it was about 2004, I picked up this wonderful little white book called Extreme Programming Explained, maybe or something like that it was Mr. Kent Beck —
David: By Ken Beck, yes.
Markus: Yeah, Mr. Kent Beck. And I remember getting so excited. So, excited. I read it on a business trip on a plane, I thought it was going to be the miracle that saved the company I was at — not saved it, but like — I love the — I want to go back to something you said. It might bring more joy because there was a lot of suffering, so much suffering. And I went to the developers, and I said, “Hey, what if you guys pair programmed everything together? Like, this book says it’s going to be great.” And they went, “No way.” And then I said, “Okay, well,” I went to my manager, and I said, “What if people pair programmed? It’s gonna be great.” And he said, “No way.” So, I found resistance on all sides. And, frankly, I just kept being told, “This is a really dumb idea.” And I’m curious because, David, clearly you are a better evangelist than I was, I could get no traction with these fine people who were suffering. But, how do you start to convince both the upper management — or any management who looks at people as, like, “Won’t that half our productivity if they’re working in pairs?” And the developers who say, “No, this is individual, I need to work with my headphones on.” How do you start to change both of those mindsets?
David: They’re very different discussions, honestly, but they do both come down to the same concept, which is this concept of quality that I mentioned early on. Once management has their head around the fact that engineers are not code monkeys trying to churn out code as fast as possible, which results in a lot of technical debt and a lot of failures down the road, and once engineers understand that their focus is on the art and the craft of what they’re doing — and they want to create something beautiful, and something that works, and something that’s understandable, and something that can be proud of — you can convince people to try something different because what they’ve been doing in the past has always resulted in the same bad experiences and the suffering —
Markus: The suffering, yeah. [laughing].
David: — the unpleasantness. [laughing]. If you give them the opportunity to try something new and say this is going to be just for a few weeks, we’re going to try this. Give it a try, see what you think of it. And then let them evangelize it themselves, if they liked what they got.
Markus: Do most of the teams that come out of the dojo continue with the pairing practice?
David: Most of them continue with it partially. Very few continue with it fully. And some teams adopt one or the other, either pairing or mobbing and they stick with that. I’ve had more teams actually stick with mobbing consistently than with pairing, which was a surprise to me because one of the first things that happens when the team does the dojo is they say, “Okay, we had five engineers, that meant we could work on five stories at once, so we got a lot of work done. Now you’re telling me that, first of all, we’re going to pair, which means we can only work on two stories at a time because we have two people in one pair and maybe three people in the other hour. Or maybe we’re only going to work on one story at a time because we’re going to mob all the time. How are we going to get all of our work done?” Once they get the experience of noticing, oh, with everybody’s brain engaged at the same time, and with the ability to rely on this person who was otherwise working on this thing that nobody knew about, and to bring that person’s brainpower into the process, and get everybody engaged, we’re getting such better quality that we’re producing. We’re improving the quality of the work that we’re doing, so we can work faster and we can work more effectively together and more efficiently. They start to notice the benefit of this and, as I say, I’ve had more teams stick with mobbing even though it has a lower work in progress limit, because they just find it so gratifying to work together that way.
Markus: Do a quick definition for me. What is mobbing? I hear mobbing and swarming as things that get talked about, so, tell us what mobbing is.
David: Sure. So, you’ve got the basic concept of pairing to start with, pairing being two engineers working together with one screen and one keyboard, and they’re both looking at the same code. One person is driving, that is the person that the keyboard, the other person is navigating, instructing that person on what to do, keeping track of things while the first person is typing.
Markus: Two people, one computer. This is fundamental. Not two computers side by side. One machine to humans.
David: One machine. Yeah, my teams will tease me because one of the things that I encourage them to do is to shut their laptops if they’re not the one who’s actually driving. And I will play games with that, but it’s important because if you’ve got somebody sitting across the table from you, even if that laptop is off, you don’t know that that laptop’s off. It looks like it’s open; it looks like it’s a distraction.
Markus: Okay.
David: And as soon as that laptop opens up, you’re going to be checking your email, you’re going to be getting instant messages, all sorts of things are going to come up. Very distracting. But yes, fundamentally, two people one computer. A driver on the computer, navigator looking at the screen and giving feedback on the process. Mobbing expands that so that you have one person on the keyboard, and then, perhaps, the entire team all looking at the screen at the same time, giving feedback, giving context. If there’s something that somebody doesn’t know, or that anybody doesn’t know, they can look it up on Google, right there on the shared screen together. It’s not like somebody has to open up their laptop, and look it up separately, and then report back. If there’s a resource or a piece of information that people cannot get on that one shared screen, that’s a liability to the team because if that person who had to look that up weren’t there, there’d be no other way to find that information. If it’s stuck in notes that that person wrote to herself on her own machine somewhere, and that person won the lottery and left the company, there’d be no way to get that information otherwise, and so that’s why would you encourage everybody to be looking at one screen together. So, the mobbing concept basically takes pairing and expands it out to the entire team. And you mentioned another term: swarming. I use the term swarming to mean what you might see when you have a roomful of engineers, all with their laptops, open all working on something independent, but working together on the same concept. Sometimes that’s useful in a programming environment. Sometimes, we want everybody to go off and research something for 15 minutes and then come back with a result. The key thing in that is that 15 minutes, so it doesn’t become the entire day. It just becomes, we have a specific objective and we’re going to swarm for the next 15 minutes in order to find this information. Everybody, open up your laptops. Everybody, go look out, look around, do research things. What you’ll find is people are often looking in the same place, they’re often looking at the same thing, they don’t know the person next to them is redundantly looking at the exact same thing, probably could have saved time by everybody looking together at the same screen, but they prefer to do it that way. It can be effective, as long as there’s a time box, it’s okay. So, swarming as something that the team can drop into occasionally, mobbing as a general practice, and pairing is the default. Ideally, a team should pair by default, which gives them the maximum benefit because they have the greatest number of stories in progress with two people working together at a time, but they have the benefit of having that shared information where it isn’t just in one person’s head.
Markus: How much — okay, I know what you’re going to say, I feel, but I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m imagining I’m a listener, and it was me so many years ago, and I heard about this and I might ask, “Well doesn’t productivity drop a whole lot? Statistically, can’t we measure that two people are just faster on two stories? And isn’t that the fundamental parallel processing idea? How does pairing effect, quote-unquote, “productivity?”
David: So, these practices actually do not impact productivity negatively. Because while you do have fewer channels of development happening simultaneously, each channel of development is much more robust and produces much higher quality code, so, there is less back-work, there’s less failure in the codebase. It’s easier to understand the code because it’s been written in such a way that more than one person can look at it and understand it. It’s been written to meet coding standards that the team has established mutually because they have to work together, so everybody has to be able to look at the code simultaneously. As a result, what’s actually produced and pushed out into production is much more stable and much stronger. So, the fact that there aren’t as many channels of development at the same time results in an equal amount of productivity, but with higher quality.
Markus: Okay, so we’re not going to see half the number of features, or stories, or whatever we’re counting, in theory. But, now when we think about —
David: But we might, honestly —
Markus: Oh?
David: — because if what we’ve been looking for is the concept of, let’s push the code out into production as quickly as possible, no matter how bad it is, and then work on the next feature, and then work on the next feature, and never fix the features that we’ve been putting out there, and building up technical debt at a rate like that? Yeah, we might see fewer features that are built like that going out into production.
Markus: I feel like you did a thing there where you redefined productivity. [laughing]. Well, let’s talk about mobbing then. I have questions, so many questions. So, the first one is, is there an effective limit of how many people can mob together?
David: So, I do like the concept of the two-pizza team: as many people as could eat two pizzas at a given lunch. I like a team that has ideally an even number of engineers, maybe between five and nine somewhere in there. But that seems to be about the sweet spot. Eight and nine is getting a little bit high for that, where the team might feel that it’s hard for everybody to stay fully engaged. The team might break into two mobs at that point.
Markus: I was actually gonna ask. I’m imagining six people swarming around — mobbing, let me get the words right — mobbing around one machine. And I’m imagining that it might be awfully tempting or I’m trying to think about how to say this, but just the idea that not everybody may be engaged. People are looking at their phone, they’re feeling like, “Well, I’m not in front of the keyboard, or it’s hard to see the screen so I’m not really a part of this.” Does that happen, and is mobbing a skill that one must learn over time?
David: It is a skill. But it’s not one that takes a long time to learn. It does take a team’s engagement, though. It forces the team to stay more fully engaged and to have permission to keep other people engaged in the process. There’s a concept that sometimes comes up early on when I’m working with a team, where somebody will turn into what I would call a Tesla, which is a self-driving driver, sitting there at the keyboard, not actually waiting for anybody to navigate and give feedback about the work that’s going on, but rather, sitting there at the keyboard and also coming up with what’s going to be coded and doing the coding at the same time. Basically, somebody’s working alone, but on a big screen in front of a team full of people who are just watching. That is a practice that I try to discourage, and I do that by actively encouraging people to speak anytime that I hear silence in the dojo. I want there to be a constant chatter, a constant discussion, and I like to make sure that every voice has the opportunity to be heard. Getting that practice over the course of a six-week dojo, I hope, encourages the team to carry that forward after the dojo completes, and it’s up to each team to figure out how they’re going to establish their norms so that people don’t feel left out.
Markus: That’s really cool. Is there a particular time when you encourage teams to move from pairing to mobbing? A particular type of problem, or is it just like, “Oh, it’s Thursday so we’ll mob.”
David: I like the teams to have experience with both modalities so that they can choose based on the specific type of project that they’re working on, whether or not this is something we’d like to pair on or something we’d like to mob on, and generally, teams will choose to mob on things that everybody on the team wants to learn about, and that everybody wants to be fully engaged in the process. They don’t want anybody else to feel left behind, so they’ll want everybody to be mobbing on that. And as I say, there are teams that choose to mob 100 percent of the time, which is just fine. It’s completely up to the team based on the way that they work.
Markus: Does management have a view, when they come out of the dojo, and they’re now five, six, eight people in front of one screen? Do they have a perception of or a feeling about this huddle and productivity or other things?
David: Management tends to be very supportive of this because it increases happiness on the teams, it increases engagement, it reduces the other problems that can come up for management, and it brings these things to the surface, so they have the opportunity to be discussed right away.
Markus: So, this has been just fantastic for me, I’ve learned a ton. So, a quick recap. So, if you’re listening and you’re interested in the concept of a dojo, David, remind us of the URL people go to to find out about the group that does and runs these dojos.
David: Yes, I’m part of a consortium called, and their URL is dojoconsortium.org.
Markus: Great, okay, so there is probably you can find more information, you could get in touch with these Agile Coaches that do this brilliant kind of work. And if you’re not playing — maybe this is my last question, David, if people aren’t yet playing with XP concepts, especially with how multiples of humans write software together, is there some resources you’d like to recommend for considering how pairing or mobbing might fit into the organization?
David: Well, you mentioned Kent Beck’s book. And there’s a series of books that he’s involved with that can all help with that. But, when we’re at direct people right away, if they just want an overview, and they want to start applying these things right away, I direct them to extremeprogramming.org, which is a website. It’s been around for years, and it encapsulates some of the basic concepts. It’s an opportunity to learn about how Extreme Programming was conceptualized, how it works, and it’s got the fundamentals there. You can really get started with just that.
Markus: Cool. David, where can people find you online, engage with you, and with your work?
David: Sure. Well, I’m M. David Green pretty much everywhere, so all of the social media. I have a podcast called Hack the Process, which you can also look at. I talk to people about various techniques that they can use to improve their productivity and to move mindfully past having an idea in your head to having something out there in the world that you’re proud of. And if you’re interested in my book on Scrum, I just wrote a book on Scrum called Scrum: Novice to Ninja, which you can also find out there.
Markus: Wonderful. Thank you so much for being on the show.
David: Thank you for having me. [laughing].
Announcer: Thank you for listening to Programming Leadership. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at www.programmingleadership.com and on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
The post No Fighting In This (Agile) Dojo with M. David Green appeared first on Marcus Blankenship. | https://medium.com/programming-leadership/no-fighting-in-this-agile-dojo-with-m-david-green-73a5018d8c65 | ['Marcus Blankenship'] | 2020-06-11 07:56:59.056000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Leadership', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Technology'] |
Being Queen’s Roadie was One Intense, Rewarding Job | Me? Peter Hince (aka Ratty), Fred’s and John’s roadie and head of Queen’s crew. I’m ignoring all this melodrama and ambling around the dressing room, being one of the few people allowed in during this pre-show period. Fred calms down a little as he ponders the tour manager’s words, passes the cigarette to somebody to extinguish, takes a drink of hot honey and lemon and, with a frown, huffily settles into a comfy chair. He says nothing, as the rest of Queen leave him to it and excitably begin asking the perennial questions of their tour manager, assistant or roadie:
‘What’s the sound like out front now the crowd is in? The show is completely sold out tonight — isn’t it? How are ticket sales for the rest of the tour going, are they sold out too? Is the new single number one yet? What time are we on? What time will we be off? Is it hot/cold out there? Has that nasty buzzing sound in the monitors gone? Is it really true Van Halen have more lights in their show than us? And what about the tour merchandise — how are the Queen toasted sandwich makers selling…?’
Queen’s dressing rooms varied in size and style, depending on the venue. Theatres had dedicated dressing rooms, but sports-arena and convention-centre-style venues had functional facilities that had to be ‘dressed’ before they could be deemed a dressing room worthy of Queen’s visit. Carpet and rugs were laid down on the cold concrete floors, bare walls draped with material or pictures, and furniture, lamps, flowers and ‘objets’ were introduced to make it more comfortable and relaxing for the visiting artistes. There were adjoining showers, makeup mirrors, areas for Queen’s wardrobe cases and a central space for relaxing, with tables of food and bins of iced drinks against the walls.
Meanwhile, beyond the comfort of the dressing room, the distant drone of the support band can be heard bashing away on stage. On occasion, when some of Queen were feeling tense or irritable, they would insist that the opening act turn down the volume so they could prepare in peace…
‘So then, Fred?’ I venture jovially, to one of the world’s greatest showmen.
‘Yes, dear, what is it?’ he replies with a little more verve.
He seems a bit better now.
‘Songs for this evening? Your choices?’
‘Ah. Yes, right.’
The silly old tart, for whom I held the utmost respect, admiration — and exasperation — has decided he will perform after all. I never really doubted he would let down the audience, the rest of the band or the crew — who have spent the last 12 hours or more sweating blood to put all this together, just so he can prance around in a few silly costumes for a while. As usual he would get through on his formidable willpower, self-belief and determination. In other words — professionalism.
Few people could approach Fred as he prepared for a show, but I would saunter over to him, while he was surrounded by ‘beautiful and important’ people, and ask, ‘Oi! What do you fancy playing tonight then, Fred?’
‘I don’t know — why don’t you guess?’
‘Guess?’
‘Yes, Ratty — guess!’ he would giggle, playing to his immediate audience, who would laugh rather superficially with him.
‘That’s not exactly helpful, is it?’
‘I’m not telling you then!’ he would state with camp authority — again playing to the gallery of his invited coterie.
‘Oh alright then,’ I would shrug, knowing this was just a game he wanted to play.
‘I’ll arm wrestle you for it!’ he said, pumping himself up and flexing his muscles.
‘What?’
‘Come on — I’ll take you on!’
Those not used to our rapport would be amazed that this dishevelled and irreverent roadie could hold the attention of one of the world’s biggest rock stars. Fred would then usually reply with a laugh, twirl his hands in the air and say dramatically, ‘OK then — you choose!’
This was quite flattering but not very constructive, so I would suggest a couple of Led Zeppelin songs, a Stones classic and ‘maybe you could even play some of your own songs, Fred?’
‘C***!’
Playfully whacking me with a towel or whatever was to hand, he would chase me out of the dressing room, screaming: ‘Same as the last fucking show!’
The voice certainly seems somewhat better now, Fred?
Puebla, Mexico in October 1981. Fred at the piano, which had a synthesiser on the top of it. Both keyboards are reflected in his mirrored sunglasses.
The set list was now set. The content of this sheet of paper was the burning question on the lips of the entourage as showtime approached; the final selection of songs always being down to Fred and how he and his voice felt. Sometimes he just wanted to mix things up a bit — to keep everybody on their toes. He occasionally referred to the Queen set as ‘our repertoire.’ Well, after all, Freddie Mercury was a very well spoken man and highly literate.
‘Scaramouche, and doing the fandango?’
He was extremely intelligent and well educated.
‘Thunderbolts and lightning, appeared to be very frightening!’
An eloquent man, who wrote songs of depth and intricacy — and full of meaning.
‘He wanted to ride his bicycle…’
Having been told to get on my bike by Fred, I now had to convey the set list to the relevant crew so they could adjust and make notes on their personal set lists, on which the song titles were always abbreviated: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ became ‘Bo Rhap’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ was simply ‘Champions,’ for example. Annotations were made in black felt-tip pen as songs were dropped or added.
Freddie during the mixing of the ‘Live Killers’ album in 1979
Cues for Queen and the crew were noted adjacent to song titles in code. Fat D, for example, was a reference for John to tune the low E string on his bass guitar down to D, prior to playing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. (Fag B was merely a cigarette break for John and me, as Fred would be off stage at that point and I didn’t have to constantly watch him.) The irreverent crew cheekily renamed the songs on set lists: ‘We Will Rock You’ — ‘We Will ROB You’, ‘Now I’m Here’ — ‘Now I’m Queer’, ‘I Want To Break Free’ — ‘I Want To Break Wind’, ‘Flash!’ — ‘Trash!’ And so on…
The set list taped to the top of Fred’s piano was the first piece of ‘inside information’ given to outsiders during the show set-up. His black nine-foot Steinway D concert grand was the first piece of band equipment to take the stage and, as it was lowered from its enormous flight case to await the graft of its third leg, the local crew would already be studying and making comments on Queen’s proposed show selection. Meanwhile, yours truly would be lying underneath one ton of wood, metal and imitation ivory, screaming at them to ‘lift the bloody thing’ so I could hammer the last leg in place.
With show time approaching, towels and drinks for the band’s refreshment on stage would now be strategically placed: water and beer for Fred, beer for Brian and Roger and the Backstage Bar for John, comprising water, beer, soft drinks, wine and whatever spirit or cocktail he fancied at the time: Southern Comfort, vodka or tequila. Added to John’s cocktail lounge were mixed nuts and chocolate M&M’s. All of this was located discreetly to the side of his electronics control rack, where he could simultaneously knock the volume up and a drink down. A copy of the set list was taped here for John, and others to refer to — along with opening hours.
Fred had champagne glasses on top of his grand piano to sip from. I kept these wrapped in an old towel in the bottom of a flight case, and before the show I would give them a wipe with the bottom of my T-shirt and fill them with local tap water.
It was never champagne. I did try using Perrier water in places where the water was a very dodgy colour as it came out of a backstage tap, but Fred cursed me — the bubbly water made him burp! After an incident where one of the champagne glasses caused a member of the audience to be injured, I was told I had to replace them with plastic champagne glasses. Fred was horrified when he saw these tacky items from a party shop and we switched to plain plastic cups and Evian or still mineral water, as our backstage catering became more sophisticated.
With show time very close, Brian would be escorted to the backstage tuning room to tune his guitars and warm his fingers up. He would invariably be in conversation with somebody as he did this, get carried away and forget which guitars had been tuned, which not — and have to start all over again.
Show time is imminent and Brian is fruitlessly trying to plug a ukulele into an electronic strobe tuner.
‘Brian, it’s an acoustic instrument!’
He grins and tunes it by ear.
Sound checking at Puebla, Mexico in October 1981
All of John’s and Fred’s guitars would be tuned by me on stage, prior to the show, being closest to the temperature and environment in which they would actually be used. In the early Queen silk and satin days I had to hang a triangle on John’s mic stand, so he could take and strike it once during ‘Killer Queen,’ then hand it back to me. Triangles? Not seen those since the days of my primary school band. Fortunately, I didn’t have to tune it.
A local piano tuner would be hired by the promoter to tune Fred’s Steinway before sound check, and touch up again in the early evening. The strobe tuners for all the guitars would take their calibration from the piano setting. Over the years I got to know many of the tuners personally; one excellent tuner and lovely man, who always did the shows in Boston, was Sal Corea — uncle of legendary jazz musician Chick Corea. Sal wasn’t blind, but several piano tuners were, and I once made the embarrassing mistake of offering a blind tuner ‘tickets to see the show?’
After the first few shows of a tour, Fred and John very rarely did any kind of sound check. They trusted all of their crew. It also meant they could sleep in much later.
Queen were confident individuals, but sometimes at huge outdoor shows or vast arenas in major or new cities, nerves could start to creep in. That was the time that irreverent crew banter would help to relax them and keep their spirits up. Queen could usually laugh at themselves and see the funny side of some of the pompous things they did, and it also helped keep their feet on the ground, as there were plenty of sycophants ready to assure them everything they did was wonderful and beyond reproach.
‘The audience is all in now, Fred.’
‘Good — how do they look?’
(How do they look? Keen? Smart? Angry?)
‘Well, they seem like a very nice couple to me.’
‘You bastard!’
‘Oh, by the way, the new album has just gone…’
‘Gold? Platinum? Double platinum?’ one of Queen would snappily interject.
‘No — vinyl.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘I’ve heard a woman in Slough bought a copy…’
‘Fuck off and die! Now let’s get on with it! When are we on?’
John with Kramer bass guitar on the set of the ‘Play the Game’ video in London, May 1980
With Queen itching to get on stage, the buzz increased, and you could feel the hyped nervous energy in the corridors backstage. With Access All Areas passes slung around their necks, crew members would wander the stage to check the equipment and check out any female ‘leisure potential’ in the front rows.
Meanwhile, Queen’s dressing room had been cleared of non-essential personnel as the band donned costume and regalia, preparing themselves for the daunting, yet exciting, ordeal to come. In order to exorcise nervous tension and warm up their voices, Fred and Roger would screech loudly at each other in high-pitched squeals, like a couple of late night tom cats. Roger would have a pair of drumsticks in hand, repeatedly tapping and hitting things — including his assistant and former roadie, Chris Taylor (aka Crystal — and no relation)
Queen were sometimes late appearing on stage but once, at a show in Spain, it was not their fault. Joe Trovato, Queen’s lighting designer at the time, had been partaking of the cheap and plentiful local wine, causing him to spend several sessions in a backstage lavatory. Forlornly sitting there, he lost track of time until there was a polite little knock on the door and a concerned, recognisable voice asked, ‘Are you alright in there?’ Joe opened the door to see Fred peering in, along with the rest of Queen — all ready to take the stage. With a grimace and an apology, he adjusted his attire and took off to the lighting console.
Now it’s show time — what today has been all about. The next couple of hours are all that matter. Shortly Queen will be on stage in your town playing for you — just for you, you privileged ticket holders. The four famous faces will be up there on stage — attached to their instruments, in moving, living person — and colour. They have travelled over land and sea and overcome obstacles and hangovers to give you this special personal experience. So be sure and enjoy it!
The stage is ready; everything taped down, the carpet vacuumed, all equipment powered and humming, everybody on standby at their assigned station. The crew are standing to attention — but not in uniform, despite attempts to get us to wear things to camouflage ourselves on stage. Influenced by their first visit to Japan, Queen gave the crew black ‘Happy Coats’: short kimonos, with Queen printed in red Japanese letters on the back. Very stylish, but not very practical loading-out attire and it would be hard to gain the respect of a six-foot-plus, 300-pound union teamster or truck loader while wearing a boudoir garment. All onstage spotlight operators wore fitted black overalls, but I found them restrictive, as I was constantly scuttling under, over and about during the show; so jeans and a T-shirt — preferably a Queen freebie, to show some mark of loyalty — were what I wore.
The final check of instruments was done in conjunction with a line check. Not that kind of line, but a check that all the instruments were placed back into the correct channels after use by the support act. That’s why you often hear chords crashing on guitars, drums banging and pianos tinkling before a band takes the stage. There is a distinct art and calculated procedure to these exercises; knowing too much is dangerous, but so is knowing too little.
Don’t play a recognisable riff (poseur) and, if it’s a Queen riff, you run the risk of getting a cheer from the audience, your 15 seconds of fame and enraging the band. It would also brand you as a total wanker to the rest of the crew. The middle path of single notes or chords was preferable. However, there was still an enormous temptation to crank the volume up and let rip with a couple of power chords…
It is very important to check instruments immediately prior to the show as things do change after the sound check. The positioning of speakers has to be exact and the acoustics can alter dramatically. The classic sound engineer’s excuse is ‘Don’t worry — it will sound fine when the audience are in.’ All types of radio transmitters can suddenly become operational, which affect the ‘wireless’ systems for guitars and mics. Temperature and humidity cause tuning problems, and with drums an awful booming feedback. The local cab company or radio station could now be broadcasting through Brian’s Vox AC30’s, or the building’s freight lifts could be on the same phase of electrical power as the sound system, and now transmitting a spluttering ‘motorboat’ noise. It’s guaranteed that all manner of unexplained electronic gremlins only come out of the darkest depths of Mordor to plague you two minutes before show time.
‘ONE — ONE — TWO — TWO.’ A familiar call shouted by onstage sound monitor engineer Jim Devenney, into Fred’s trademark silver Shure 565 SD microphone, as he wandered the stage with the famous ‘wand’: a custom-made chrome plated tube, like a section of microphone stand, which Fred used together with the mic as his stage prop. It could be a sword, guitar, machine gun, golf club, baseball bat or whatever Fred wanted to convey with it. Most commonly it was ‘My cock, darling.’
The stage manager, having checked that all was definitely ready, would call the dressing room by crackling walkie-talkie to bring the band up.
Having emptied their bladders, Queen, flanked by minders, wardrobe ‘mistress’ and assistants, were now bouncing on the balls of their feet in their hidden position and itching to get up on stage. A message was conveyed by headset to the house electrician to ‘kill the house lights’, and as the venue plunged into darkness, it created a huge adrenaline rush for both crew and audience. Queen would be swept by a combination of this energy and torch light on to the stage and into the Doll's House: a freestanding frame covered in black drapes, located in the back corner of stage right. This was where the band would rest, or hide from view when not active on stage.
Not even Access All Areas gained access into here.
The intro tape pumped through the PA and monitors, battling for level with the audience noise — as smoke machines hissed out an atmosphere for the lights to cut through as they came pulsing to life. No going back now. The hundreds of lamps in the rig flashed and flickered but remained tethered, not yet releasing their full power until the dormant metal monster slowly began to rise in the air, spitting light beams of multicolored fire. Awesome, but also quite scary…
Queen would take up their positions: Roger crouched low down on a drum stool, behind his gleaming kit; Brian, with his homemade ‘red special’ guitar plugged into its extended umbilical curly cord, concealed behind a large black monitor on stage left. I would put John’s Fender bass on him and he would pace nervously up and down behind his stacks of speaker cabinets like an expectant father in the corridor of a maternity ward — waiting for news of a new arrival.
Brian ‘resting’ with drumsticks — Munich, 1981
On cue with the intro tape, the trio would crash perfectly into the opening song as Brian and John bound on stage. Fractionally after the opening bars, Fred would glide out of the Dolls House like a cat, and swoop his wand mic from my hand as he effortlessly strode on stage. The initial roar for the band was pushed to another level as Fred took his place upfront, and when the overhead rig manoeuvred into its final position, blazing and scorching with light as the pyrotechnics exploded, the energy created was truly tremendous. Queen’s mantra of ‘Blind ’em and deafen ’em!’ worked every time.
Queen are here to entertain you! BIG show, BIG hits and right now — the BIGGEST band in the world! Queen may have played the venue before but, like secretly agreeing to meet an ex-lover, there is a certain expectation from both sides — how far will it go? The air is charged with energy and sexual tension — who will make the first move?
Fred. He would tease and cajole his audience like an experienced lover, using strength, stealth and power to take control. Drawing his conquests in closer, he would slow the pace to show his own vulnerability, before taking them back to the heights of excitement and final consummation.
Hence his announcement: ‘I’d like to fuck you all!’
A promise he did his best to keep. Having adjusted my eyes to the dimness of the blackout, my photoreceptors are now in overdrive. Here we go again, another day at the office. Most nights Queen were very good, and on occasion absolutely magnificent — or not quite so good. However, they were undoubtedly a great live band that were exciting to watch. The secret to this was simple: they could play. Musicians who had mastered and applied their instruments, firmly believing in quality in all they did. When Queen took to the road after a new album was released, they always strived to give their best to the paying public as these four guys unashamedly wanted to be The Biggest Band in the World.
The first song was naturally a little tense; was everything working OK? It was audible to me, but could the band hear themselves well enough? This was the point when you would catch each other’s eyes. The system of nods, winks and gestures between us would indicate their level of satisfaction. The discomfort of the smoke and showers of dust hailing down from the pyrotechnic explosions and building ceilings were brushed aside as concentration intensified. The first song seemed to speed by like lightning, and often lead directly into a second hi-tempo number without break or introduction. After the final chord crash of that song, Queen would bow and acknowledge the audience, Fred offering a shrill ‘Thank — YOU!’ before enquiring:
Montreal Forum in Canada, November 1981 — the concert for the ‘We Will Rock You’ movie. The view from upstage right, showing the band and the audience. The backstage bar and set list can be seen behind the piano speaker cabinets.
‘Are you ready to rock?’
YES!
‘Are you ready to roll?’
YES!
‘OK — let’s (fucking) do it.’
Another fast-paced rock ’n’ roll number would sometimes sustain the crowd’s excitement, followed by the first piano song, which gave Fred and the audience a brief rest, and him the chance to give me any relevant message.
‘Tell him he’s out of tune — how can I pitch my voice??!!’
‘Who would that be, Fred?’
‘You know! And that c*** can’t even pick the beat up!
What’s wrong with him?’
I would simply nod in agreement.
‘Never mind — never mind, how do I say Good Evening in Belgian?’ he would pant.
‘It’s written in pen on the back of your hand, Fred.’
‘I can’t see that in the fucking dark, can I!?’
Roadie: mind reader, whipping boy and infrared linguist?
‘No — and it’s now rubbed off — all that sweating you do.’
‘What then?’
‘Uuuuh — Guten Soir, senoras?’ I’d shrug.
‘Oh fuck ’em!’ Fred would splutter, then take the safe option — and use English.
The hand-over exchange I made with Fred was his microphone on a stick for a freshly made drink of hot honey and lemon. A sip was taken to ease the throat and he would sit down, shuffling himself to adjust to life at the piano. A major testing time — was Fred happy with how things were going? Was all well in his Mercurial world? As he gently tickled the keys, got comfortable and threw morsels of comment to his hungry public, I would be crouching at the end or in the curve of the black Steinway grand, focusing on him intently and trying to avoid the multi-coloured glare and hypnotic reflections from the highly polished piano lid.
This was my view every night — looking down the Steinway grand piano at Freddie singing ‘We Are the Champions.’ John is in silhouette and, with the swirling smoke and dramatic lighting, it’s an evocative image — one that I saw so many times and just had to capture. This particular photo was taken at the Budokan Arena in Tokyo in February 1981.
The rest of the band would take this opportunity to catch their breath, have a drink and give their instructions about the onstage sound. John’s instructions were minimal and usually about the snare drum and hi-hat in his floor monitor.
Fred’s first piano song was a crucial part of the show and, when I got the look, which was a series of nods, hand waves and expressions, I could tell if Fred wanted his vocal louder, the piano sound was too hard, if he was tired from the previous night’s escapades or even how he felt the rest of the c***s were playing… all from his facial contortions, finger twirls and head inclinations. One particular Mercurial twirl meant he was hot, and I would turn on a fan under the piano to cool him down. When Fred gave me an unscripted nod, wink or smile, it was like an older brother showing confidence and support. I admit, it gave me a glow, made me feel good, appreciated and special.
So what did I do in return? I took the piss by staging a glove puppet show at the end of the piano with Crystal or wearing a baseball cap given by a fan in Japan that had a giant pair of large clapping hands protruding from the front. I would pop up from the end of the piano, pull the string to operate the hands and applaud Fred along with the audience. He laughed. Fred laughed a lot. Then he chased me into the wings to administer a playful slap or punch. When Fred whacked me it was seen as part of the job and him releasing some fired up energy, and the strikes were just playful and didn’t hurt. And of course I was dead hard myself in those days!
The onstage crew could clearly see the audience as they were illuminated by the glow from the stage lights, but for the band, however, this was difficult as they were constantly being tracked by powerful spotlights focused directly into their eyes. A dozen or more could be on Fred alone, so he would gauge the crowd by audible response and feel, as he could rarely see further than the first few rows.
But that was enough.
Post-show, provincial U.S. town, Mr. Mercury comments:
‘Did you see those people at the front! Did you? They were all ugly! I will not have that at a Queen show!!’
So, are audiences to be vetted at a casting session before premium Queen concert tickets get released? Check with the promoter on that, will you…
It was always tempting to glance into the audience to see the reaction of the ‘ugly people’ or check out the ‘talent,’ but if Fred caught me straying, the glare I received across the stage or piano would freeze me. I was expected to watch him like a hawk and be prepared to scuttle urgently on stage, half crouching, to release him and his mic cable from any onstage obstacle, while attempting to avoid detection by the audience—like a Wimbledon tennis ball boy scampering on at speed to retrieve the ball, then returning to a kneeling sentry position. I bent over so much I looked like I had a permanent lumbar condition, so, between me and the front row ‘uglies,’ we could have made the perfect Quasimodo.
Nevertheless, Fred was very sharp and aware on stage, and could keep himself out of potentially embarrassing situations despite being caught up in his expressive creativity. Brian, however, would go charging back and forth across stage, oblivious to the surroundings and totally into his playing, a black curly umbilical cord thrashing in his black curly-haired wake. Fred would deftly sidestep so their cables didn’t cross, get tangled and inhibit each other’s movements. As Brian returned across stage, still on Planet May, Fred would even pass his ‘wand’ under Brian’s cord to avoid being locked together. When tangles did unavoidably happen, Fred would drop the mic, give me the eyebrows raised signal and take his spare mic set-up. Sometimes he’d sit on top of me and laugh while I was on my hands and knees unravelling the mess in the middle of the stage, then bounce up and down and chuckle. Fred, enough of that — people are beginning to talk…
July 1982. Brian playing Roger’s Fender Broadcaster guitar on the set of the ‘Back Chat’ video.
John was not involved in any tangled-cable fracas and usually kept upstage or on the steps of the drum riser; he didn’t use a cable for later Queen tours and utilized Nady radio transmitter packs on his bass guitars. John had an electronics degree — no fooling him if technical things went wrong!
However, an early experiment in the late 1970s using a radio pack on John’s bass was not quite successful. I was trying the then state-of-the-art Schaeffer system at sound check, and after trying different notes on the bass called over the PA system to Trip Khalaf, Queen’s sound engineer.
‘What’s it sound like — is there much compression?’
‘It’s like an alligator farting’ was the less-than-enthusiastic reply.
Back to the cable for now then…
Fred loved a microphone cable, using it as another prop on stage by gripping and twisting it with levels of intensity, cracking it like a whip or flicking it like a lasso. Only on the final Magic tour with its vast outdoor stages and walkways did he switch to using a wireless microphone:
‘Mmmmm — it’s very modern’ he exclaimed when shown the latest piece of expensive technology during rehearsals:
‘And quite horny as well!’
The phallic-shaped Sony mic was different than his classic Shure one; longer, fatter and matte black. It would not have looked out of place in a Soho sex shop.
Queen’s show continued with the medley — sections of old and new hits generally based around piano-oriented songs, which helped Fred pace himself. After an intense bout of rushing around stage, a spotlight picks him out, collapsed over the top of the piano. ‘I’M FUCKED!’ he would scream, and get a roar of approval from the crowd. This would inspire him to rise and thrust himself at the piano as if shagging it.
More audience appreciation followed.
Fred did not address the audience from the piano, just the occasional acknowledgement, thank you or reference; he liked to do it centre stage, on the extended catwalk with all the spotlights focused on him. This is where he would use his formidable presence to communicate. He was never predictable and surprised occasionally by asking the front rows: ‘Any requests?’
Somebody once asked for an old Queen song that was never included in the live show: ‘Play that? Hah! Yoooooou’ll be lucky!’ he replied in a shrill, camp, rising voice as he threw his head back and walked away. ‘Yoooooou’ll be lucky!’ became a Queen catchphrase that traversed many tours. And beyond.
Back at the piano, I’d hand Fred another soothing hot drink that he’d asked for.
‘How are we going down — how is it?’
‘Good, it’s going great, Fred.’
‘Good, that’s good — and so it fucking should be!’
However, occasionally the audience response would not be as expected, so in response Fred would force himself to work even harder to get the crowd on his side — as he had to for Queen’s first ever show in Madrid in 1979. One expects a Latin audience to be hot-blooded and excitable. No. The initial crowd response and light applause faded rapidly. This enraged Fred, so he strode to the edge of the catwalk and toasted the paying public with his champagne glass and a few limited local phrases. The response didn’t improve, so he threw the water over the front rows and snapped: ‘Take that! That’s for being Spanish!’ He then gestured to the sound engineer, and screamed: ‘TURN IT UP!’
The volume increased considerably, and Fred worked with fervour to get the Spanish going, and it inspired the rest of Queen too. It worked and from then on the show and crowd response was as Mr Mercury thought it should be. Fred always led by example. Returning to the piano in the blackout having won them over, and amid the screaming and calling that followed the applause, he banged his fist hard on the piano lid to emit a low hollow resonance through the speakers and pronounce loudly off mic: ‘That’s the way to (fucking) do it.’ Self-reassurance of the magnificent talent and unwavering belief that he held.
‘Is everything all right now, Fred?’
‘Yes — yes, but tell Brian to turn it down, I can’t hear myself fucking sing!’
And just how do you get a rock guitarist to play softer or slower?
Give him some sheet music. In the spoof rock band movie This Is Spinal Tap, the heavy metal guitarist is proud to show that his amplifiers don’t go to the standard volume of 10, they go to 11. Just that bit extra — for when you need it. Brian May had his volume go to 12 — and a half. And he always needed more…
The answer? Everybody else turned up.
QUEEN WERE DEAFENING ON STAGE.
Sorry, I said, ‘Queen were deafening on stage.’ My ears are testament to that. During a hearing test some years ago, I was asked if I had ever worked in a noisy environment.
I’ll probably have to put my few bits of Queen memorabilia into auction in order to buy a decent hearing aid for my old age.
When Queen were playing well live and really ‘cooking,’ there was a huge buzz and energy felt on stage, so that even a crew member could vicariously feel part of the band. On stage, the sound you heard varied according to where you were positioned. You didn’t hear the balanced mix of ‘out front,’ but whatever was coming from the closest monitor would dominate. The sides of the stage were good as most things in the mix could be heard, but standing behind the drumkit gave a strange perspective. You heard the real sound of the acoustic kit being hammered plus the amplified sound of it in the monitors, and then a boom and echo off the back wall or roof of the venue.
Behind the ‘back line’ of band gear you could close your eyes and — even with the loss of vision — still feel the energy and sensory bombardment. The odour of gels burning in hundreds of lights, a warm electronic whiff of humming amplifiers and the taste of smoke and dust biting in your throat. You felt the vibrations of speaker cabinets, and a kick in your chest as the bass drum was pumped.
You could reach out and touch it all: the rough edges of flight cases, the tough weave of the stage carpet, the chill of iced water in the drinks bins, the smooth and sensual contour of guitar bodies, and the burn of Fred’s rubber-coated mic cable as I pulled and coiled it tight. It was best to avoid being behind the drum area when Roger threw his head back — as he would then usually spit high in the air, purging his lungs from the exertion of drumming and Marlboro cigarettes. His poor roadie was tasked with mopping up the cymbals the next day…
The show moved on with various hits and new songs, until around halfway through the set there would be the solo spots, where Fred would chant and scream vocal scales at the audience, for them to respond back louder. This was when he showed his true stagecraft of taking thousands of people in the palm of his hand with just his voice and charisma. Usually the show included some form of (fortunately) short drum solo, where Roger turned into Animal from The Muppet Show, and the extended guitar solo that worked… some of the time. (I was a young man when Brian started his solos…)
Roger on the set of the ‘Somebody to Love’ video shoot at Wessex Studios in London, November 1976
Time to take a break: Roger would come down off his riser and into the Dolls House for a rest, a drink and maybe a hit of oxygen. Fred would be relaxing in there too, removing his shirt, towelling down, changing outfit, taking refreshment and then having a suck on a Strepsil antiseptic throat lozenge. John would stroll off, take the cigarette I had lit for him and go behind his speakers for a quick puff, pausing only to throw peanuts at Brian, who would be lost somewhere in his extended solo.
Next up, the acoustic interlude: time to sit on bar stools at the front of stage, and when Roger would sometimes come forward to play tambourine, bass drum and sing. This was the only opportunity the fans got to see RMT (Roger Meddows Taylor) clearly, apart from his bow of appreciation at the end of the show. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see them, as he had weak eyesight and needed to wear corrective lenses. Blind Melon Taylor he had been nicknamed in Montreux, when rehearsing a New Orleans ‘bluesy’ number. Roger had many nicknames, the most popular being Rainbow Man. The most fashion conscious in Queen, Rog was always buying clothes, the majority in bright, bold colours and worn in the most unlikely combinations. (He could have auditioned for the lead part in Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat.)
Some of the other members of Queens’ nicknames were:
Freddie: Kermit — after Muppet character Kermit the Frog. During Fred’s ‘ballet’ period in 1977, he took to wearing white leotards on stage and when exposed under green lights, his lithe body in the skin-tight costume made him look like the Muppet character — especially when he sat on the steps of the stage set. ‘Halfway up the stair?’ (Nobody dared to call him Kermit personally, I hasten to add.) After interviewing Fred during this period, the NME music paper ran the headline: IS THIS MAN A PRAT? As you can imagine, he was not happy — and a long taut relationship with the press followed.
Usually, he was referred to by the crew simply as Fred, but, if he was being difficult, he could become The Goofy Toothed Rascal or, if he was being very difficult, all manner of uncomplimentary names — including ‘Horsey.’ Nothing to do with Fred’s teeth, but his appreciation of Russian-born ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
‘Who?’ the crew asked. Didn’t he win a few horse races? Fred used this cited dancer of the early 20th century and his costumes, particularly the black and white patterned leotards, for inspiration in Queen’s live shows. Mary Austin, Fred’s girlfriend of many years, was still living with him in 1977, and had presented Freddie (she never called him Fred) with a glossy coffee-table book on Nijinsky as a gift. She had inscribed it to Freddie and added: ‘To the true artist that you are’.
And typically, like Fred, Nijinsky the racehorse was a thoroughbred and multi-award-winning champion.
Brian: Percy — after Percy Thrower, the original British TV gardener. Brian was very keen on nature and gardening, and in 1976, when I was delivering some equipment at night to his London house, he answered the door in ragged clothes, a torch in hand, with his mane of hair interwoven with twigs and leaves. He had been out in the dark attending to his beloved plants and trees. He immediately got an update to The Infrared Gardener, due to his academic degree in infrared astronomy.
John: Birdman or Deaky (self-explanatory). John had all his hair cropped off military-style at the start of the ’78 USA tour and looked like The Bird Man of Alcatraz. He received it in good spirits and wore the convict’s outfit adorned with black arrows the crew bought him for the show encore.
The gay contingent had their own unique way of giving nicknames by assigning girls’ names to all male members of the entourage and any other ‘friends.’ They would then refer to everybody as ‘she.’
Queen’s secondary nicknames:
Freddie Mercury: Melina (Melina Mercouri — Greek film star)
Brian May: Maggie (Maggie May — Rod Stewart song)
Roger Taylor: Elizabeth (actress Elizabeth Taylor)
John Deacon: Belisha (Belisha Beacon?)
I was called Helen. Don’t ask. The culmination of the acoustic interlude was Fred and Brian performing a simplified version of ‘Love of my Life.’ Time for audience participation and sing-along. It’s easy to become very cynical on the road and blasé towards the paying public, as the siege mentality sets in. However, to see and hear over 130,000 people in a stadium singing perfectly in a language not their own was really something special. It may sound like an old cliché but music does transcend all barriers.
By now, the show was steamrollered into the home stretch with big hits such as ‘I Want To Break Free,’ bang-your-head rockers like ‘Hammer To Fall’ and more audience participation ‘clap-your-hands’ with ‘Radio Ga Ga.’ While rehearsing ‘Ga Ga’ for the live show, Fred had substituted the word radio with the rhyming word fellatio. This caused the band to break down in fits of laughter. Fred liked to surprise and provoke, but above all he loved to perform and to perform well.
There was only one occasion where I was really disappointed with Fred’s live performance, as to me he was the consummate professional. It was at the only show the band ever played in New Zealand, an outdoor venue at Mount Smart Stadium in Auckland. New Zealand: beautiful country, but hardly a rock tour paradise with its severe lack of clubs, drugs and loose women; which inspired us to suggest that the authorities put a sign up at immigration stating: Check your genitals in here — you will not be requiring them during your visit. Unless you like sheep…?
When Fred came on stage, he was late and clearly drunk. Boredom or bad influences? Both. He was late, due to Tony Williams our wardrobe ‘mistress’, having dressed him with his trousers back to front, which had gone undetected until Fred began his long walk to the outdoor stage. Tony was invariably drunk himself and often had the shakes, asking: ‘Dear boy, could you help me thread this needle?’ Lovely man, who became Mr Hyde when he drank. At those times, just being his friend became a full-time job.
As the show started, Fred was giggling and forgetting words to songs, his timing was off and he even asked me what songs he had to play — and how did they go! The show was not a disaster, but Fred sporadically lost his grip and the rest of Queen suffered as a result. The encore was the classic Elvis Presley song ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and invited onstage to join in was Tony — not drunken ‘wardrobe’ Tony thinking he could have a sing-along, but Tony Hadley, singer and front man of Spandau Ballet. Tony, who was on a break from his own tour, is a great, unpretentious guy — but he didn’t know he words! A rock singer who doesn’t know the words to Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock?’
While crouched at the end of Fred’s piano watching him singing his heart out, I occasionally looked out at the audience and pondered on life, death and where I was going on my own personal journey. What would I do? What was this life all about? Why was I doing it? By my mid-twenties I had become a sub-Steinway Sage. ‘Is this the real life? Is this just Battersea?’ The penultimate line in Bohemian Rhapsody: ‘Nothing really matters…’ became poignant to me as I often reflected on the futility of all this ‘rock stuff’ and how easily jaded we could become on the road. However, as the song ended and all the lights came up, illuminating the thousands of people in raptures over ‘Bo Rhap,’ then I guess it did really matter to some people and was an important part of their lives at that time.
Queen taking their bows after the final encore in the Budokan arena in Tokyo in February 1981
Queen would then rip into the next rocking song and my introspection evaporated. Back to business… The final song of Queen’s set often climaxed with me setting off a chain of pyro explosions across the front of the stage — and singeing a few photographers and security guards in the process. Fair sport. Brian was the only other member of Queen to address the audience directly, and usually only once or twice. In the mid-1970s, before the final song of Queen’s set, Brian would announce: ‘We would like to leave you as we always leave you — In The Lap Of The Gods.’ (Crew version: ‘We’d like to leave you as we always leave you — bored and screaming for your money back!’)
Queen would exit the stage to tremendous applause, leaving us in the twilight zone before encores. All around were thousands of lit matches and lighters held aloft, sparkling in the air, thick with smoke, pyrotechnic dust, humidity and an energy-charged atmosphere. This became a common sight, but the first time I saw it in America I just wanted to stop, stare, absorb it all and see how long the lights could be sustained. Would you like one more? An encore? | https://medium.com/cuepoint/being-queen-s-roadie-was-one-intense-rewarding-job-a0fdd017e00d | ['Peter Hince'] | 2016-09-16 16:42:32.935000+00:00 | ['Rock', 'The Bookshelf', 'Music'] |
Timing | Salvador Dali — Atomicus
Rich listened to the man on the phone and then said, “Graven images? No sir. We are a photographic service, not a funeral home.” Rich wrote something on his pad. “Oh, I see. You are getting married but want no graven images? Got it. Well, here at Silva, we do photography.”
Rich gestured to Pete as if to say, ‘Where do these weirdos come from?’
Pete was waiting to discuss his first wedding shoot. It had been a huge break for him. He looked around the office. A large light table, for examining negatives, stood against one wall. Another wall was covered by a black and white mural of Salvador Dali flying through the air with cats and water.
Rich continued. “You want an artist to record the wedding? Like a painter? I see. As I said, we are photographic artists. If you contact the courts, they could recommend a court artist to help you…” Rich looked at his watch and then at Pete, who smiled.
“Of course. Mr. Charles? If I may? Should you decide you also want a photographer to cover your wedding or any other event, we have a team of talented men and women who will happily provide you with the best photographic service. Yes. Thank you.” Rich hung up the phone.
He rolled his eyes. “No graven images? How about holograms?” Pete laughed. “Now, Pete, where were we?”
“We were looking at the Crinoline wedding.”
Rich held up the folder. “Right. Got it here.” Rich shuffled through the prints. He murmured, sighed and leaned across his desk.
“What is this crap? This is a wedding shoot?”
Pete stammered. “Of course. I got some good stuff, Mr. Silva.”
Rich slid one of the photos across the desk to Pete. “Like this?” It featured one of the bride’s maids just after the bouquet toss. The bouquet soared over her head, out of reach. Her expression said it all.
Pete cleared his throat. “I thought she was going to get it. But it’s still a good shot. Kind of poignant.”
“Pete. Was this a wedding shot by Diane Arbus? No one pays for poignancy. Don’t you get it? Weddings are happy, happy, joy, joy, joy… Did I say happy? No one wants to be reminded of their sad, dreary lives. Ever wonder why no one hires us to cover their funerals?”
Rich let that sink in for a moment. He slid another picture to Pete.
“Pete, you don’t want them bursting into tears every time the wedding album comes out. What’s this?”
Pete glanced at it. “That’s the groom and the bride’s little brother.”
“The kid is sticking out his tongue.”
“He’s taking his big sister away. It’s cute.”
“I can just see that over their sofa. What about this?”
The picture showed three bride’s maids laughing together, standing in light streaming down from a stained glass window. In the shadows behind them, two groomsmen observed the young women.
Pete said, “It’s beautiful. Look at that light. It had to be taken.”
“If you want to do predators and prey, work for National Geographic. Don’t do weddings.”
Pete felt deflated. He lived to take pictures. His heroes were the legendary Weegee and Cartier-Bresson, masters of capturing ‘the moment’.
“I don’t know, Pete. Your stock group shots are alright. You have a good sense of light. Decent composition, but… I don’t know. Maybe you’re not ready.”
“Please don’t send me back to grade school portraits, Mr. Silva.” Pete blinked away a tear.
“Let me think about it… Oh, here. Who’s the gangster?”
“The bride’s father. The groom was late. He was waiting.” In the picture he stood, stone-faced, cigarette poised, searching the distance. The church edifice rose behind him.
“Was he packing heat?”
“You mean a gun? I don’t think so. The groom drove up right after I took that.”
“You know this was a wedding, right? He looks like he’s about to light a fuse with that cigarette. Look at the length of that ash.”
“I was getting coverage, Mr. Silva. You know, personality stuff.”
“Well, he’s got personality alright. Al Capone looked better in a monkey suit.”
“He’s really a nice guy. Once the groom showed, he mellowed out. Here look…”
Pete found a picture of the two fathers shaking hands. Their smiles looked genuine.
Silva shook his head. “What? They’re about to wrestle?”
“That was them playing… They’re friends…”
The phone buzzed. Silva hit a button. The receptionist spoke, “Do you have a moment? The Crinolines are here…”
“Send them in.” Rich looked at Pete. “Hey, hey! It’s showtime…”
The office door opened and a young couple entered. Pete and Silva stood to greet them.
Pete introduced them. “Carol and Don Crinoline, this is my boss, Rich Silva.” They all shook hands and sat.
Rich showed them the standard pictures of the family groupings and wedding participants. Carol took the lead over most of the choices. She would look at Don to make sure he was on board. They seemed happy with Pete’s work.
Carol looked at Pete. “Is that it? I saw you rushing around shooting all sorts of things.”
“Oh, well… there’s a few…”
Rich offered the Crinolines the folder he discussed with Pete.
Carol and Don flipped through a few. Carol burst into laughter.
“I can’t believe you got Billy sticking his tongue out at Donny.” She nudged Don with her elbow. “You started it, didn’t you?”
Don chuckled. “Good thing Pete was behind me. Wouldn’t look good for a grown man to be sticking his tongue out at a poor little kid.”
Carol looked at Rich. “That’s a game they always play with each other. So silly. We need to order that for Billy to keep.”
Pete and Rich stole looks at each other.
“And here’s Mary, missing the bouquet. I so wanted her to catch it. Her boyfriend just broke up with her.”
Don said, “One of the guys, Tom, asked her out. She’ll be okay.”
“Oh, that’s beautiful!” Carol held up the shot of the bride’s maids standing in the beam of light.
“That’s Tom over on the left. He’s a good guy.”
“We want one of those too.” They shuffled through some others.
“Oh, my God. Look at my father! I didn’t know he still smoked. What’s he doing?”
“I think he was wondering why I was late.”
“He looks so worried. He loves you so much.”
Donny looked at Pete and Rich with a laugh. “Or plotting my demise, if I didn’t show.”
Carol hit Don’s shoulder playfully. “Oh stop. Seriously, he never reveals so much emotion. I didn’t think he cared that much. Here’s your mother.”
Carol held the print up for Rich and Pete. Watching their vows, the woman clutched a handkerchief. Her face revealed a fretful past and hopes for the future in one brief instant.
“She’s so wonderful.” Don nodded. Carol continued, “You know, that day… We were the stars taking our vows, but really, it isn’t just about us two. What we do affects so many around us.” Carol took Don’s hand. They smiled and bumped shoulders in solidarity.
Carol returned to the folder. “I don’t want to take more of your time.”
Rich smiled. “This is why we are here. Take all the time you want.”
Don saw a picture and smiled. “Ahhh, you got it.”
Carol gasped, “I didn’t know you took that!” Carol held up a picture of Don holding her from behind in low light. In the image, their hands entwined. She smiles enigmatically as he whispers something to her.
Carol reacted to Pete in mock outrage. “You are nothing but a voyeur!” They all laughed. “How big can we make that? I want it framed in our room.”
Rich closed the deal. “So, you are happy with Pete’s work?”
“These are amazing! How did you get these? And so many!”
Pete beamed. “You all kept me pretty busy.”
Rich brought out the order form to sign. He talked nonstop, as they completed their order. Carol and Don left the office in high spirits.
Rich told Pete to sit. Pete looked hopeful.
“So, Pete… We have a few weddings booked. You up to taking on another?”
“You bet, Mr. Silva.”
“Like I said, keep pushing that little button. You’re bound to get something good.” | https://medium.com/lit-up/timing-709b7150d448 | ['John K Adams'] | 2019-12-14 13:52:14.214000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Customer Service', 'Creativity', 'Photography'] |
How to Build a Reporting Dashboard using Dash and Plotly | A method to select either a condensed data table or the complete data table.
One of the features that I wanted for the data table was the ability to show a “condensed” version of the table as well as the complete data table. Therefore, I included a radio button in the layouts.py file to select which version of the table to present:
Code Block 17: Radio Button in layouts.py
The callback for this functionality takes input from the radio button and outputs the columns to render in the data table:
Code Block 18: Callback for Radio Button in layouts.py File
This callback is a little bit more complicated since I am adding columns for conditional formatting (which I will go into below). Essentially, just as the callback below is changing the data presented in the data table based upon the dates selected using the callback statement, Output('datatable-paid-search', 'data' , this callback is changing the columns presented in the data table based upon the radio button selection using the callback statement, Output('datatable-paid-search', 'columns' .
Conditionally Color-Code Different Data Table cells
One of the features which the stakeholders wanted for the data table was the ability to have certain numbers or cells in the data table to be highlighted based upon a metric’s value; red for negative numbers for instance. However, conditional formatting of data table cells has three main issues.
There is lack of formatting functionality in Dash Data Tables at this time.
If a number is formatted prior to inclusion in a Dash Data Table (in pandas for instance), then data table functionality such as sorting and filtering does not work properly.
There is a bug in the Dash data table code in which conditional formatting does not work properly.
I ended up formatting the numbers in the data table in pandas despite the above limitations. I discovered that conditional formatting in Dash does not work properly for formatted numbers (numbers with commas, dollar signs, percent signs, etc.). Indeed, I found out that there is a bug with the method described in the Conditional Formatting — Highlighting Cells section of the Dash Data Table User Guide:
Code Block 19: Conditional Formatting — Highlighting Cells
The cell for New York City temperature shows up as green even though the value is less than 3.9.* I’ve tested this in other scenarios and it seems like the conditional formatting for numbers only uses the integer part of the condition (“3” but not “3.9”). The filter for Temperature used for conditional formatting somehow truncates the significant digits and only considers the integer part of a number. I posted to the Dash community forum about this bug, and it has since been fixed in a recent version of Dash.
*This has since been corrected in the Dash Documentation.
Conditional Formatting of Cells using Doppelganger Columns
Due to the above limitations with conditional formatting of cells, I came up with an alternative method in which I add “doppelganger” columns to both the pandas data frame and Dash data table. These doppelganger columns had either the value of the original column, or the value of the original column multiplied by 100 (to overcome the bug when the decimal portion of a value is not considered by conditional filtering). Then, the doppelganger columns can be added to the data table but are hidden from view with the following statements:
Code Block 20: Adding Doppelganger Columns
Then, the conditional cell formatting can be implemented using the following syntax:
Code Block 21: Conditional Cell Formatting
Essentially, the filter is applied on the “doppelganger” column, Revenue_YoY_percent_conditional (filtering cells in which the value is less than 0). However, the formatting is applied on the corresponding “real” column, Revenue YoY (%) . One can imagine other usages for this method of conditional formatting; for instance, highlighting outlier values.
The complete statement for the data table is below (with conditional formatting for odd and even rows, as well highlighting cells that are above a certain threshold using the doppelganger method):
Code Block 22: Data Table with Conditional Formatting
I describe the method to update the graphs using the selected rows in the data table below. | https://medium.com/p/4f4257c18a7f#0bbb | ['David Comfort'] | 2019-03-13 14:21:44.055000+00:00 | ['Dashboard', 'Dash', 'Towards Data Science', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
Former Google CEO Wants to Create a Government-Funded University to Train A.I. Coders | Former Google CEO Wants to Create a Government-Funded University to Train A.I. Coders
The Digital Service Academy would compete with Stanford and MIT
Photos: Ungureanu Vadim/EyeEm/Boston Globe/Photofusion/Getty Images
The U.S. government’s approach of letting Silicon Valley drive the country’s technological boom has left the government itself scrambling for tech talent.
Now, a federal commission led by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work wants to create a university to train new government coders.
The school would be called the U.S. Digital Service Academy, and it would be an accredited, degree-awarding university that trains students in digital skills like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. Students would get a traditional school year of coursework, with internships in the public and private sector during summers.
The Digital Service Academy would theoretically supply the United States with a fresh stream of young talent already ideologically invested in serving the federal government. However, it would compete with elite institutions like Stanford and MIT, where graduates often have their pick of private-sector work and can still go into the public sector if they choose.
“If the recruitment only happens where the roads are paved, you’ve missed a lot of opportunities and a lot of talent.”
The commission set to recommend the new institution, called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), unanimously voted to make the recommendation in an upcoming report to Congress during a publicly broadcast meeting on July 20.
NSCAI commissioner and former FCC head Mignon Clyburn raised the issue that whatever organization Congress created would have to make an effort to be inclusive in its recruitment.
“Talent comes in many forms and from many places,” Clyburn said. “If the recruitment only happens where the roads are paved, you’ve missed a lot of opportunities and a lot of talent.”
Congress created the NSCAI in 2018 as a response to China’s drastic investment into artificial intelligence. It taps industry and government veterans to rethink how the government funds and sanctions artificial intelligence efforts.
“As I speak, China and Russia are striving to overtake us. Neither of these nations shares our values, or our freedoms.”
“We are engaged in an epic race for A.I. supremacy,” Rick Perry, secretary of the Department of Energy, said at an NSCAI conference in 2019. “As I speak, China and Russia are striving to overtake us. Neither of these nations shares our values or our freedoms.”
This meeting is the first that has been publicly broadcast, a mandated improvement in transparency after a district court determined that the NSCAI was not complying with federal laws that required its meetings to be disclosed to the public. The Electronic Privacy Information Center brought the lawsuit that found the NSCAI to be acting illegally.
The commission also voted to recommend 10 other initiatives, like an expansion of the Scholarship for Service program, and to create a National Reserve Digital Corps. In the Digital Corps, volunteers would work 38 days a year for the government and receive access to educational funds in return. These volunteers would do everything from A.I. education to data acquisition to project consulting to networking between the public and private sector.
Other recommendations focus on federal policy, like export controls for technology and software leaving the United States, as well as more in-depth screening of foreign investment into American tech companies. | https://onezero.medium.com/former-google-ceo-wants-to-create-a-government-funded-university-to-train-a-i-coders-9a2df09c5bce | ['Dave Gershgorn'] | 2020-07-21 05:31:01.158000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Government', 'AI'] |
For Developers, Ego Is the Enemy | To Whatever You Aspire to, Ego Is Your Enemy
You may have a really good GPA, or many of your family members and close friends may have called you a prodigy.
In these cases, your ego tends to make you feel that the world owes you the success you want. That you must get employed and climb up the corporate ladder in record time. That you are supposed to be employed without needing to go through the formal recruiting stages.
You may think that you don’t need to have any repository on GitHub, as you have already surpassed your peers with your GPA. Your ego leads you to think that you don’t need to work hard.
If we look back in history, people who amaze us with the work that they have done are really hard workers.
WordPress is one of the most famous content management systems in the world: it powers-up more than 27% of the web. Its founder, Matt Mullenweg, slept only fours a day and worked really hard while developing WordPress.
The co-founder of Microsoft and the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, used to work every day. “I worked weekends, I didn’t really believe in vacations,” he recalls during an interview.
Img source: time.com
Back in the days when Mark Zuckerberg was a developer at Facebook, he had to work hard. “The last six years have been a lot of coding and focus and hard work. But maybe it would be fun to remember it as partying and all this crazy drama.”
During the time he used to be a software developer, the co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, worked from early morning until late evening, despite being considered as a prodigy. He now works up to 100 hours per week.
Img source: flickr.com
You should not overestimate your abilities and get trapped into thinking that you are a lot better than you actually are. You should be very committed and dedicate a lot of time and effort to programming if you really want to excel at it.
Your ego may even prevent you from collaborating with other people. It can make you feel that you are smart enough and sufficient in your own skills so that you don’t need to collaborate with other colleagues in your project. In reality, big projects that have made breakthroughs and have helped millions of users are usually developed as a result of collaborative work.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google together after meeting each other at the computer science department at Stanford. Bill Gates started Microsoft with Paul Allen, who came up with the name Micro-Soft. With his brother Kimbal, Elon Musk created his first IT company Zip2, which was acquired by AltaVista for $307 million in cash and $34 million in securities. Brian Acton collaborated with Jan Koum and founded WhatsApp.
Img source: Wikimedia
You should work really hard, be humble, and collaborate with others. You should not even think about starting and finishing something of a large scale on your own. You should be part of a team that you work with. | https://medium.com/better-programming/for-developers-ego-is-the-enemy-77d1550a50af | ['Fatos Morina'] | 2019-08-14 03:05:18.604000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Education', 'Productivity'] |
報道でデータビジュアリゼーションは必要なのか[最終回-2] — データジャーナリズムとは？ | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/tokyobeta-journal/%E5%A0%B1%E9%81%93%E3%81%A7%E3%83%87%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%83%93%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A5%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%BC%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%81%8C%E5%BF%85%E8%A6%81%E3%81%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%81%8B-%E6%9C%80%E7%B5%82%E5%9B%9E-2-%E3%83%87%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8A%E3%83%AA%E3%82%BA%E3%83%A0%E3%81%A8%E3%81%AF-d53924e3ed0d | ['Marika Katanuma'] | 2016-10-14 14:57:34.093000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Data Journalism', 'Data Visualization'] |
The DeVos Family Can GoFundThemselves | by Maggie Tomasek
A letter from Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan denying a heart transplant due to patient’s lack of funds, and explicitly advising patient to raise $10,000 for surgery.
Hey, here’s a fun fact: last year alone, Americans raised $650 million dollars for health care expenses through GoFundMe.
Wow! How inspiring! How amazing! How FUCKED UP IS THAT.
We may have hit a new level of “what the fuck” in the medical expense crowdfunding trend with this story: A couple weeks ago, a heart transplant patient in Michigan was rejected as a candidate because she couldn’t afford the follow-up care. And then, the hospital actually had the fucking audacity to recommend a “$10,000 fundraising effort” in their official “rejection” letter. I’m not kidding.
I guess instead of GoFundMe, they really should be calling it GoFuckYourself.
Maybe it should also come as no surprise that this letter came from the Spectrum Health Richard DeVos Heart and Lung Transplant Center — named for the billionaire father-in-law of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, a man who has been swindling people out of their money for years with Amway and pushing the idea that “if you’re not wealthy, then you’re just not working hard enough.” So yeah, very on brand.
By the way, I’ve been listening to this awesome podcast called “The Dream,” which is all about multi-level marketing companies like Amway, and hooboy, just when I thought I couldn’t be more disgusted by the DeVoses, I’ve been learning SO MUCH about the shady shit Richard DeVos and Amway have been doing for DECADES and how they’ve helped influence the laws in this country to allow MLMs, which are 100 percent actually pyramid schemes, to rip people off with zero consequences. Anyway, go check out that podcast, and then you can talk about everything you learned with your friend from high school that’s trying to sell you leggings on Facebook. Good times!
Anyhoozleby, this woman in Michigan can’t get a fucking heart transplant because she can’t afford the medication she’ll need afterward. And this hospital won’t even PUT HER ON THE TRANSPLANT WAITING LIST until she raises $10,000. Surgery is expensive enough, but the post-surgery care can REALLY get you too. All the follow-up appointments and tests and scans and medication that you could be on for weeks or months or the rest of your life.
So in essence, what the hospital is saying to this woman is, “Hey, you’re too poor to be worthy of having your life saved, so maybe you can ask strangers on Twitter to help you out and then we’ll re-consider if you’re worthy of having your life saved. Hope you have a lot of followers!” I mean, this scheme works for selling Amway products, so why not the health care system, amirite?
It’s no wonder that medical expenses are the №1 reason why Americans go bankrupt.
So, a little story about me. Two years ago this month, I got an ear infection, and then my ear drum ruptured. I went to the doctor, he gave me some ear drops and antibiotics, and sent me on my way. It was super painful and kept getting worse. I had a really high fever for 4 days, I was just sweating through my pajamas and sheets, and like sipping Pedialyte through a straw, with the worst headache of my life. I mean my god.
Now, if I didn’t have good health insurance, I might not have gone back to the doctor, I might have tried to wait it out. Like, oh the antibiotics just haven’t kicked in yet, this fever is gonna break any second now. But, I do have good health insurance, so I dragged my butt back to the doctor, and he took one look at me and said, “you need to go to the ER and get a CT scan. Right now.” Do you know how expensive an emergency room visit is?? And a CT scan? So, if I didn’t have good health insurance, I might have hesitated.
But I went to the ER and got the CT scan, and the scan showed that there was something in my skull that was pressing on my ear cavity and had reached the lining of my brain, and I needed to have emergency surgery immediately.
If I had waited, hesitated, what turned out to be a cyst the size of a golf ball in my head might have become even more infected, and that infection might have gone past my brain lining and into my brain. And I might be dead.
Spoiler alert: I lived. And I came away with a baller head scar to boot. Even better!
Now, if I didn’t have good health insurance, the ER visit; the CT scan; the ambulance ride to another hospital; the ICU admission; the overnight MRI; the four-hour emergency brain surgery with one of the best neurosurgeons in the country; the 5-day hospital stay; the visits from neurosurgeons, ENT surgeons, infectious disease doctors, ophthalmologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists; the prescriptions; the post-release MRI; missing 6 weeks of work, and ongoing follow-up appointments with all of the aforementioned doctors, plus months of physical therapy would have sent me into financial ruin.
And I’m not even talking about the logistics of going to all of these follow-up appointments and therapy. I don’t have to arrange for child care or beg my employer to switch my schedule around so I can take 4 hours off to get an MRI on a Monday morning. I also had to miss 6 weeks of work from this ordeal, so thank god my job has good short-term disability benefits. But that’s a whole OTHER issue for another day.
So I completely get why people don’t go to the doctor when they’re sick. You tell yourself, “oh it’s probably nothing, I’ll be fine,” because what you’re REALLY thinking is “what if I go to the doctor and it’s something serious, what the fuck happens then?” Not only because you might have to face your own mortality or whatever, but because you might not be able to pay for treatment to fix whatever is actually wrong with you.
People are literally dying because they’re being forced to make that decision, between their health and not going bankrupt. Because another fun fact, the majority of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, so even a minor medical emergency can be a monumental burden. And for the richest country on earth, that is an unbelievable travesty.
I know this is supposed to be a comedy show, y’all, but shit is dire.
So yes, it’s great that people are helping out their fellow citizens by supporting GoFundMe campaigns that pay for medical expenses. All I’m saying is, THAT SHOULDN’T BE OUR HEALTH CARE PLAN. And for fuck’s sake, ACTUAL HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS shouldn’t be telling people that’s their best or only course of action to get the care they need.
I know how privileged I am to have a good job with good, affordable health insurance, but it shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be a right. So, you know, make sure your representatives know that, and all that junk.
And finally, just to wrap up, I’d like to say go fuck yourself to Richard DeVos and his whole corrupt, immoral family of dipshits.
Maggie Tomasek is a writer, comic, runner and rapper, who spits rhymes as MagRock with She’s Crafty, Chicago’s all-female Beastie Boys tribute band.
This piece was presented at The Skewer’s live show, Wednesday, December 5th, 2018 at Cafe Mustache in Chicago. Listen to the whole show here: https://soundcloud.com/theskewer/the-skewer-35-december-2018?in=theskewer/sets/the-skewer-all-editions | https://medium.com/theskewer/the-devos-family-can-gofundthemselves-b4eae36718ae | ['The Skewer'] | 2018-12-10 19:03:29.748000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Gofundme', 'Devos', 'Health'] |
There Is No Value In Beauty | Do you want this image above? You can have it — free. I don’t care. Hi-res, all rights, whatever you want. Why? Because it’s just beautiful.
Beauty began losing value years ago, as soon as the effort required to achieve it starting dropping. And it dropped fast — sampled music let us have quality drum tracks, piano and guitar chords without needing the actual instruments. Target started carrying Michael Graves-designed household items. Everyone got a pretty nice camera. YouTube taught us all the tricks. Google offered up images that people used in their blog posts and articles with a simple search. Filters and editing apps have given us all an understanding of post work (a photographer recently showed me an exchange with a model where she showed him how she liked her face to be retouched). And now, images and video that once took tens of thousands of dollars to achieve are being grabbed on the cheap with camera technology that puts high-end production in the hands of the masses: gimbals, image stabilization, sliders, editing effects… anyone can do anything. It’s not hard, you just have to want to go get it.
So, in the end, a pretty shot of Los Angeles through palm trees is as easy as showing up to the right place at the right time. You’ve got all the tools you need in your hands to make it beautiful, right now. My advantage? I live in LA and I know where it is. It’s no wonder today’s Instagrammers don’t want to share their locations. Access is the last bastion of ownership. And that’s a thinning stronghold, too.
So, yes, the beautiful image is free. Is it right? Is it wrong? Everyone’s got an opinion, but regardless, that’s what’s happening.
How Free Are We Talking?
Image by Leio Mclaren
Unsplash, which carries a treasure trove of beautiful images from various photographers from around the world seems to be at the cutting edge of this phenomenon. Free images (like this one), that you can have with no worry about licensing. All the artists would like is credit, if you don’t mind. And it’s one of the fastest-growing stock photography sites in the world.
And there are plenty more places to nab beautiful images on the cheap.
Sure, there are people who feel it’s the destroyer of artists’ integrity, but they are outnumbered by actual artists, a thousand-to-one. Because most artists already know — our true value is not in the images, but in the making of them. And holding the image hostage, or behind a pay wall, no longer creates any benefit to the photographer — not when it’s so easy to get the image elsewhere. Or by yourself.
On the other hand, giving the image away under your name let’s the world know what you have access to.
Say, for example, I want that exact same beach, but instead of one person, I need a group of people running? I call Leio. And I pay him. Because he has the access.
In similar ways, music companies (practically) give away their off-the-shelf tracks, knowing that the real work is in composing something specific for you.
So easy is it to snap a beautiful photo, apps like Twenty20, ViewBug and 500px have turned the masses into stock photographers, offering contests and competitions for the chance to sell your work on the cheap.
It’s Free Because It’s Easy
You know it’s easy, you just most likely don’t want to look at it. But let’s take a little trip to a remote lake, somewhere in Germany, called Obersee. The following is simply a screen grab of top posts from that location on Instagram right now:
Behold the beauty, the perfect compositions, tones and composition. Any one of these could be used as an album cover, online ad, header image for an article or background for an inspirational social media post. What makes these photographers any different than you? They showed up, that’s it.
Think that’s the only location? There’s literally thousands, just in Germany.
Can’t get to Germany, or even down the street? It’s okay, showing up is not essential. Take a look at this popular Instagram feed from an artist who gathers her imagery exclusively from Google Street View… | https://joshrose.medium.com/there-is-no-value-in-beauty-7aa547bda7cd | ['The Art Of Photography'] | 2017-10-27 17:09:53.735000+00:00 | ['Beauty', 'Creativity', 'Photography'] |
What’s Your Personal Version of Success Look Like? | What’s Your Personal Version of Success Look Like?
We all want success in life — here’s how you can not stop yourself from attaining it
Photo by Julian Jagtenberg from Pexels
Success is one of the most misunderstood things in our culture. Our brains usually associate success with the kinds of advertising images that have been linked to success through anchoring, a testament to the advertising world we find ourselves immersed in just about twenty-four seven. We think success is money.
When I ask you to close your eyes and envision what success might look like, what do you see? Seriously, stop and picture it — what’s your future success look like?
For most people, the answer to this question conjures up men and women in business suits, people sitting around on mattresses stuffed to the brim with money, massive yachts and high-rise condos, and other tangible objects that we believe come along with success.
We’ve seen these images associated with people we were led to believe are successful for so long that we, being the visual creatures we are, file these objects away in our brains as sure-fire signs of success. We conflate the anchors with the actual process of becoming successful.
Making Excellence a Habit
This is fallacious thinking. It’s an appearance-manner fallacy, where we mistakenly assume that something is given its authenticity by how it looks rather than what it does.
As the old saying goes, “You are what you do.”
Philosophers as early as Aristotle noticed the habitual nature of life, with Aristotle himself saying:
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Excellence needs to become a habit before we can be excellent at something. And no matter what it is that’s important to us in life, how can we be successful if we aren’t excellent at it?
Success Takes Work
When asked to do the exercise above, very few people (and usually the people who end up successful) picture themselves working tirelessly. Most people don’t conjure up images of themselves or others looking disheveled and wearing yesterday’s clothes. We tend not to picture ourselves so immersed in work that we’re calling our friends to sigh as we cancel our plans because we’re so dedicated to what we’re trying to achieve in life that we’ve prioritized it.
But which of those two images do you think better aligns with reality? Is it the condos, the yachts, the fancy clothes, the wealth and the riches? Or is it the dedication, using your time to do something you truly love, making a difference in people’s lives, and getting paid for it?
A happy, healthy, secure marriage is a successful one, regardless of what it may look like. This is because what we think something might look like and what’s actually happening are often two different things. Looks can be deceiving. We commit an appearance-manner fallacy when we believe that the authenticity of something is based solely on its looking like we think that thing will look in our minds.
A successful musician has mastered his instrument to a degree that’s undeniable might not have all the wild parties we usually associate with insanely successful musicians. Oftentimes, these people are just down-to-earth people who love their families, stick to themselves, and spend most of their time writing more music. Their music is their passion, everything else is a distraction.
Everyone wants to sell us this image of quick and easy success, even if we all know that in reality, life doesn’t work that way.
But is quick and easy success really success? Or is it just a historical accident?
Anchoring the Proper Images
These images are anchors, they’re ideas that were implanted in us without our consent or often even our knowledge and they’re important. After all, how can you direct your course if you’re aiming for the wrong things in life?
Anchoring is also an error in thinking, a heuristic that we make to simplify life whereby we compare the incoming streams of information to previous experiences to try and assess probabilities. This is how we predict danger and pursue pleasure.
We reference our past at every single moment of our lives as we try to sum up the present and possible future. If things were painful in the past, we learn to avoid them. If things were pleasurable in the past, we learn to chase them.
But success is generally a lot of grueling hours of not-so-pleasurable experiences and it pays off in the long run. That’s the cost of success.
Success requires that we sacrifice now for pleasure later.
If we want to chase success, we want to find the people who are doing what we want to be doing well. We want to seek those images and those habits out so we can learn to master them.
After all, as French philosopher and thinker Rene Girard pointed out, an unbelievable amount of human behavior is conducted through mimetics. We see someone doing something, we want to do what they’re doing, and we copy that behavior in hopes we get the same result. In the end, because we learn from others mostly by imitation, we’re all a lot more similar than we think we are. As Girard said:
“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.”
So How Do I Escape This Trap?
It’s safe to say, we have a tendency to conflate success, which is a state of being, with the objects that we falsely believe signify a successful person. We conflate a mode of Being within ourselves with objects that surround us in the world.
It’s a mistake in thinking to believe that if we can just obtain the objects of success, we’ve actually obtained success. What about someone who inherited all these things? Does putting on a certain outfit make you into someone else? I think not.
We have to envision the behaviors that can be expected of us on our path. Don’t know what those behaviors are? The best thing you can do is go and find people who are already doing it.
So many people end up making this mistake in life and chasing the objects and not success itself. That’s the first mistake they make on the road to success, not realizing that success is the accomplishing of goals. Success is our own personal growth and transformation as we master certain aspects of our lives that we wanted to.
We can avoid this pitfall by finding the people who are successful at what we want to be successful in ourselves. The next step is to mimic their behaviors, their attitudes, the things they do, the effort they put in, the work they accomplish, and much more — all until we get it right and habituate it ourselves.
Once all of these things become habits, we’ll be well on our way to success in whatever field we desire. | https://medium.com/flux-magazine/whats-your-personal-version-of-success-look-like-2107131d598f | ['Joe Duncan'] | 2020-10-27 10:17:30.810000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Philosophy', 'Growth', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
The Tragic Truth of K.K. Slider | The Tragic Truth of K.K. Slider
A wild, insomnia-fueled theory about father and son
Do you remember the oddly creepy-yet-calm 4AM music from Animal Crossing: New Leaf? Because I do. Vividly.
It is, I think, the most fitting video game music ever composed — and I’m aware that this is a controversial opinion. After all, video game soundtracks are beautiful.
PCMag compiled a list of the 20 best video game soundtracks ever, and Animal Crossing — any iteration of it — does not appear once on that list. To be fair, they have The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Breath of the Wild on there alongside Journey and Final Fantasy VI, so I can’t exactly argue with their choices. Maybe Animal Crossing would have been #21. Who knows?
The point is, the music in Animal Crossing is criminally underrated, and I’m not just talking about the background instrumentals. While “4AM” perfectly captures the feeling that, well, four in the morning gives off — a calming sense of unease as the rest of the world is asleep and you, for some reason riddled with an incredibly anxious mind that won’t shut up and go to bed, boot up your 3DS to distract yourself from the ghost in your mirror, the monster under your bed, or the creepy face outside your window — it does not befit me as both a fan of the series and a lover of music to ignore the masterclass catalog of K.K. Slider.
K.K. Slider performs at The Roost. Source: Nintendo.
Have you heard this mix of “K.K. Soul” from Nintendo composer Toru Minegishi? That thing slaps, dude.
Let us not forget, either, the infinite number of videos on YouTube of villagers in New Horizons gathered together in town square to sing another K.K. smash hit: Bubblegum K.K.:
By now, it’s pretty undeniable that K.K. Slider is a songwriting genius who should be touted as a master alongside the likes of Pharrell and Jack Antonoff, but what if I told you there was more to K.K. Slider than meets the eye? Perhaps, a tragic backstory?
The Tragic Tale of Totakeke Slider
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: K. K. is not Mr. Slider’s real name. It is a stage name, a variation of his real name: Totakeke. He reveals this information to the player in the original Animal Crossing on the GameCube.
When originally introduced to us, Totakeke is a laid-back, chill, hippie-esque musician who says that the “fat cats” in charge of record labels are trying to sell his music, which he believes should be free. Okay, K.K., I can get behind this.
Well, that is until New Leaf launched on the Nintendo 3DS. Just as our simple villager moves up in life to the status of mayor, so too does our beloved K.K. Slider take on a new role — a new role as DJ KK.
DJ K.K. in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
New Leaf was also the first instance of players having the option to buy records of K.K. Slider’s music. You know, for (in-game) money.
I never thought I’d see the day that K.K. Slider became a sellout, but I guess you never really know a guy, huh?
It’s like if your favorite rebellious pop-punk band, I don’t know, staged a Broadway musical based off of their anti-capitalist early-2000s rock album. You just don’t plan for these things.
But let’s cut K.K. some slack, okay(kay)? After all, the guy couldn’t even afford clothing. K.K., I have too many clothes and I haven’t fully upgraded my house, so please take a shirt or something. The world is a tough place, and a guy’s gotta make a living, right?
It raises the question, though: in a world where we pay our loans off to a tanuki with the most lackadaisical approach to debt-collection I’ve ever seen and can sell turnips for millions of dollars, what could drive K.K. Slider to turn his back on his core values? Could there, perhaps, be a clue in his music?
The Lamentation of K.K. Slider
“K.K. Lament.” Oh, you thought K.K. Slider only wrote funky pop bangers? Well, guess again. K.K.’s got angst, folks.
Lament: a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. Not exactly fitting for a game about cute animals, is it? We’ll never know exactly what it is that caused K.K. to write this song — after all, the game doesn’t provide us with any actual lyrics.
Or does it?
To the un-trained ear, K.K.’s words might sound like mere gibberish, but to a master such as myself, the truth shan’t escape. Listen closely. What do you hear?
Something along the lines of, “Oh me oh way me, me me nah me na, oh. Nah me nah, nah me oh.”
Have we ever considered, however, that these syllables aren’t simply meaningless gibberish meant to avoid lyrical complexity in a children’s game about adorable animals, but instead a hidden code for something much more somber? Perhaps, K.K. isn’t saying gibberish at all, but instead singing a song to “mi hijo:” my son.
That’s right, K.K. Slider has a son.
“But Austin,” I hear you say. “K.K. Slider doesn’t have a son.” And to that I say:
You’re wrong.
Source: TheBigOReview on YouTube.
You see, we’ve only been assuming DJ KK and K.K. Slider are the same person because, well, they look alike and perform music. But K.K. Slider would never ditch his guitar to spin records at a busy club on a Saturday night — he’s way too chill for that! Besides, if he’d given up on his old path, why would he return to us in fully-nude excellence in New Horizons, once again a free-loving acoustic guitar-playing, nude dog in the nude?
DJ KK and K.K. Slider are not the same person. DJ KK is K.K. Slider’s son who decided to, sort of, follow in his father’s footsteps, but unlike his old man, DJ KK is a greedy, money-hungry sellout. K.K. Slider, disappointed in his son’s path in life, expresses his feelings in the song “K.K. Lament.” What does he lament? The broken bond between father and son, of course!
Still don’t believe me? Well, luckily musicians and foreign language interpreters Jay Andromeda and Rekcahdam have taken it upon themselves to translate the works of K.K. Slider into plain ol’ English, so that we may further understand and appreciate his great body of work.
Their lyrics to “K.K. Lament” are as follows:
Never will I see | That smile on your face
Never will I feel | The warmth of your embrace
Only can I dwell | In what’s taken their place
Since the day that you said goodbye. You said that the pain | Wouldn’t last very long
You said that the tears | They would dry on their own
You said that my heart | Would find love if I’m strong
On the day that you said goodbye.
The “fat cats” K.K. Slider so adamantly disagreed with early on teamed up with his son, DJ KK, after a falling out between father and son, to sell K.K. Slider’s body of work to the public and reap a profit, prompting K.K. Slider to travel the world a nude, homeless, nude dog who visits my island every Saturday to share the music that was stolen with him for free while in the nude.
This is why he sneaks a bootleg copy of his music into your pocket after every set — his music is meant to be free.
It’s like the oppposite of when Art Alexakis re-recorded a bunch of Everclear songs on 2009’s In a Different Light because Capitol Records had already released Everclear’s greatest hits record and he wasn’t profiting from that.
The Future of K.K. Slider
So, you’re probably wondering, “Why did you write all of this?” And the simplest answer is that I’m a believer of the truth.
I also couldn’t sleep and was listening to songs from Animal Crossing to help calm my anxiety. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what music in Animal Crossing is really, truly good at: being chill, laid-back, and groovy.
It deserves some recognition for that. | https://medium.com/super-jump/the-tragic-truth-of-k-k-slider-e1cf16b81285 | ['Austin Harvey'] | 2020-12-12 00:54:36.435000+00:00 | ['Features', 'Gaming', 'Humor', 'Culture', 'Music'] |
So You Want to Try Anal Play | Anal sex is something that nearly anyone can enjoy, and there are lot of reasons people like it. So if you want to try anal play, here’s some places to start.
Read next: 9 Ways to Pleasure an Anus | https://medium.com/sexedplus/so-you-want-to-try-anal-play-854eb05b1aac | ['Sexedplus Dan'] | 2018-11-02 17:51:01.178000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Sexuality', 'Health', 'Comics', 'Lifestyle'] |
How to refactor critical code with a heavy usage in production | How to refactor critical code with a heavy usage in production Mélanie Godard Follow Nov 30 · 6 min read
In this article, you’ll learn how we refactor critical code used daily by millions of users.
Every month, 10 millions of people are planning their day to day health appointments using Doctolib. In order to allow our users to find the right practitioner and book an appointment with them, we have implemented a structure which we call “the booking funnel”. Up until now, we have continuously improved this funnel to handle multiple features (document sharing, patient referral or extra informations).
In the end, this booking funnel was becoming more and more complex to allow all these scenarios to unfold correctly for our millions of users everyday.
Until last year, most of this funnel was coded with a client side view in React, except for one step. For this specific view, we had an enormous piece of code handling every possible use case and redirecting the user to a templated html code developed in slim.
As time passed and the company grew, this view grew as well… in complexity. It became difficult to read and new joiners struggled to grasp this part of the codebase. We also had more and more colleagues experienced in React that were wondering why this view stayed this way.
In an effort to tackle this legacy code, separate the different use-cases into different components and improve the overall experience of our users, we decided to migrate this code into React.
And that’s when our problems started
We started refactoring the code little by little and we were happy with where it was going. But the more we worked on it, the more complex our first pull request was becoming. Several problems appeared:
other teams were working on this view so the code kept changing
we had to handle a lot of complex cases and it was difficult to tackle all of them at once
since we have a huge test suite at Doctolib (around 10 000 tests at the time), changing even a little the UX of this funnel meant adapting a lot of these tests
at the time), changing even a little the UX of this funnel meant adapting a lot of these tests we didn’t want to impact our current users, so it had to be retro-compatible and work even without users refreshing their page
in the end, the pull request was so big that our coworkers were getting very worried
It was time to find a strategy to ensure the migration would happen in a smoother way.
Let’s draw
It is always a good idea to get a visual image of what your code will look like. It’s also a good way for your coworkers to understand what’s going on. Especially when your pull request gets too big too fast.
And that’s what we started with. It was quick, easy and allowed us to merge our pull request quicker.
Two different funnels
As our pull request kept growing, it became obvious we could not tackle everything at once. But at the same time, the features implemented in this view were so intertwined, we could not rewrite them all one by one.
We didn’t want to spend weeks, even months, re-coding the whole view without ever being able to test it on real users.
What we wanted was a first version of a common use case of the booking funnel, so that we could see if it worked in production before iterating on it.
We decided to start with the most common one: allowing someone to simply take an appointment for themselves or for a relative, and to redirect all the others cases to the old funnel.
All we had to do was introduce a completely separate view.
Old view in slim vs new view in ReactJS
For example, if we didn’t implement the custom fields in this version yet, which means that all the people taking an appointment with a practitioner in need of additional information from the patient would see the old view. In the meantime, all the users taking an appointment for another practitioner who does not need these additional informations would see the new view.
This means that our old code would still be present for several months and would still work with all the features already developed at this time.
Feature switch your new version
At Doctolib, when we introduce new features, we often decide to hide it in production until we are sure it’s working properly.
We also have the possibility to show the new feature to a certain percentage of users.
At first, we weren’t very confident so we selected several medical practitioners with only a few appointments taken per day and activated the new funnel for the users booking an appointment from their profile page.
After being reassured by this first test, we activated the feature for 1% of all users, which was already a pretty good chunk of people (as a reminder, around 10 millions of people go through our funnel to take an appointment each month).
of people go through our funnel to take an appointment each month). Then, after fixing a few errors that popped up, we progressively activated it for everyone in a couple of days.
This system is also a good way to quickly hide a feature in case of a suspicious error. We would use it to deactivate the new version from time to time to work on some issues without worrying about blocking our users.
Keep an eye on potential errors
Since we have two completely different views, we can easily track our users with NewRelic to know the number of people using the new or the old version of the booking funnel.
Number of users using the old version (in blue) and the new version (in yellow) of the booking funnel after activating the first iteration of our work
Another example of how this kind of monitoring helped us is that we could easily spot bugs on this view and their severity. If too many users were affected by this bug all we had to do was to switch off the feature or revert the last iteration.
We quickly deactivated the new version when we saw this curve
Have an easy way to know when to remove the old code
As soon as the percentage of people using our new view dropped to 0% (or so, with a margin of error), we could be sure the old code was not used anymore and remove it instantly.
This booking funnel refactoring has not been an easy journey and there were several surprises along the way. Maybe some of the steps we took could help you too:
Have a concrete plan to rollout your refactoring
Monitor the usage and the potential bugs produced by your new code
And most important of all, communicate as much as possible on your progress with the people and teams working on the same scope
Did you like this article? Go subscribe to our tech newsletter for more! | https://medium.com/doctolib/how-to-migrate-critical-code-with-a-heavy-usage-in-production-4be2fda0481f | ['Mélanie Godard'] | 2020-12-07 17:14:08.423000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Monitoring', 'Legacy Code', 'Refactoring'] |
Meet Daniela Raffel, Associate at Dawn | I sat down with Daniela from our team to find out a bit more about what she enjoys at, and away from, work.
Why B2B software VC?
There is so much variety and activity in the B2B software market alone — you could easily spend a lifetime and some on it! I have great respect for investors who can do B2B + B2C, but I find I work best when I can narrow down my scope and really focus.
The added advantage of focusing on B2B is that you learn about things that you never would have known were complex, interesting, or needed fixing. If you’d told me before I joined Dawn that procurement was sexy, I’d have laughed. Now I nod vigorously.
Most exciting moment at Dawn?
Roaming (running) around Berlin from founder meeting to founder meeting. It wasn’t just the fact that they were face-to-face meetings which, as we all well know, Zoom really doesn’t compare to, but realising that my job means I get to meet interesting people, and learn from them, all day every day.
What do you think is the most interesting trend in the industry, and why?
I think the enablers of any trend are the most interesting. AI and ML are the buzziest of buzzwords, but it’s the software that checks that a system isn’t going to fail, or the software that helps people prepare the data for these models that really fascinate me.
And the quick-fire round!
Netflix series you most recently binged on and would recommend
Have just discovered VEEP (It’s not new but I’m not very good at TV). It’s hilarious and dances on the fantastic line between being witty, entertaining, and easy to enjoy.
Favourite SaaS metric and why
Magic Number. A) the name is great and b) it’s fantastic for understanding the efficiency of growth. Naturally, this efficiency evolves as the company scales but it’s a good thing to track as it holds you accountable to whether the investments you’re making in sales are paying off.
Best book for a much-needed holiday
Harry Potter. I confess to having queued for the books as well as having them on audiobook and listening to them in times of stress — there’s nothing quite as soothing as Stephen Fry telling me about adventures at Hogwarts.
Best and worst thing to see in a deck
Best: numbers. ultimately, there is always going to be interest in traction to date, whether you measure it in revenue or not, at the Series A+ stage. To not include this in a deck makes it more difficult to understand where on the development stage a company is, and therefore how to understand other maturity markers, like sales.
Worst: honestly, if you think it’s important to share then I want to understand why. So I guess the worst thing is a slide that says nothing, or is skipped over in a pitch.
Recipe for the perfect evening/weekend?
A lockdown hangover is bread baking. I got experimental the other weekend and made crumpets — delicious. I am pro-yeast, anti-sourdough. Both make great bread; one is efficient and predictable, the other is not. I don’t know what that says about my personality, but probably a lot.
If you could build one company right now, what would it be?
Is it a cop out to say I’m an investor not a founder… If it were easy, anyone could do it — and I know that it’s not easy.
Best piece of advice you have given or received?
“No one cares as much as you.” I can agonise over details, and sometimes it’s important to remember that if you’ve already given it so much thought, then it is probably in a good place!
The flip side of that is another great piece of advice I have received: “if you have tried as hard as you can, then you need to be satisfied with the outcome, whatever it is.”
Naturally, it’s hard to find a healthy balance between the two! | https://medium.com/dawn-capital/meet-daniela-raffel-associate-at-dawn-e04d14cd347 | ['Josh Bell'] | 2020-12-14 18:11:42.452000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'SaaS', 'Investment'] |
Blockchain — A Musician’s best friend? | Musicians for the past couple of decades, have seen a huge decline in their net revenue from album sales, the most basic reason for the same have been the high constituting margins of record companies and production houses.
This disrupted the state of musicians throughout the world, leaving them with striking low income for their talent.
While there have been numerable amounts of attempts to lower the existence of such middlemen none have achieved a margin higher than 20 percent to the musicians.
In 1999, Napster a company launched with the aim to create an environment to directly connect the fans with the musicians by use of a real time peer-to-peer file sharing system had given the world the first blood. Napster was later shut down due to alleged copyright infringements as well as a bankruptcy order of the courts.
Today, blockchain environment accomplishing newer heights has made it possible to again create an immutable environment to direct connect the musicians to their fans.
The biggest consideration while creation of such an environment is management of all the Intellectual Properties(IP) which was the only area where Napster lagged being as well the reason for its downfall.
In the current era blockchain being the supreme ruler of immutable database, can certainly avoid infringement of rights by creation of a public blockchain acting as a registry for every IP.
This can as well be a concrete evidence to the right and ownership. This will ensure that the Peer-to-peer model is free from unauthorized use of the network by not letting a node to add files to the database without ownership to the requisite IP.
Keeping the above basic mechanism in mind MYCELIA and UJOMUSIC are some amongst the startups who can successfully found a decentralized IP maintaining mechanism for the musicians.
They use smart contracts to solve licensing issues and catalog songs with their respective creators. They have added an additional “promote” feature where the fans can promote their respective artists by paying them.
Blockchain technology on the whole is emerging as viable new way for many industries to dis-intermediate and add transparency without losing on security.
The same is for the whole entertainment industry.
Street Musician by stoppaz
Moving away from the entertainment industry, which I chose for the purposes of simplicity, imagine for a minute freelance journalists, ethical hackers, coders, designers, each with their own I.P.
Move on to whole organizations conducting billion dollar I.P. deals, in sectors like asset-management, software, and A.I.
When IP rights holders register their works to a blockchain, the rights holders can ultimately end up with concrete evidence of ownership, which is free from tampering, because once a work has been registered to a blockchain, that information cannot ever be lost or changed.
Do you get the chills a bit?
Can you think of a world where I.P fraud is eliminated with one public blockchain governing millions of dollars in protected rights?
To elaborate my point further, here’s excerpts from IPWatchdog’s interview with with Aaron Swerdlow and Banu Naraghi, to discuss why digital currency offers a new way to scrutinize IP.
According to Naraghi -
Blockchain specifically is critical to the securitization of IP because it guarantees the validity of a transaction by recording the transaction on a main centralized register as well as a connected publicly distributed system of registers.
If you deeply understand the basic premise of blockchain, the very fact that private data, contained on a publically accessible database, confirmed and updated every transaction, is the peak of data transparency and fraud-prevention.
Naraghi continues -
One of the most common applications of blockchain technology is the use of it as a registry of IP rights, to catalogue and store original works.
Blockchain Beyond Fintech
Blockchain’s use-cases are seemingly on the rise, with the technology increasingly gaining traction beyond its fintech use.
Companies like VeChain and Ambrosus offer their own blockchains, and track the supply model of food and medical products, to prevent counterfeit goods from being circulated in credible stores.
In short, blockchain can be applied to to many, many I.P. sensitive areas, such as pharma, luxury, automobile, and basic customer goods.
Diving into the technical points —
I.P includes all kinds of legal applications, inclusive of government regulations, financial laws, and data privacy. I.P. transfer still remains a paper-heavy industry, marked with slow administration and poor I.P. protection. I.P. on the blockchain includes — and is not limited to — evidence of ownership, authentication, of rights to be sold. Tracking and controlling the sold rights until the two parties are rightfully incentivized. And finally, establishing and enforcing IP agreements.
This includes when a trademark was first applied for, registered, first used in trade; when a design, trademark or patent was licensed, assigned, and so on.
LEXIT is an Estonian-based, blockchain centered firm that focuses on selling I.P, and even whole companies, via the use of their system.
By providing users with the tools to easily track the entire life cycle of a patent, a right, or an I.P, Lexit makes the paper-heavy, time-consuming process look like a definite breeze.
Check out the project for yourself ?
Site — https://www.lexit.co
TG — https://t.me/LEXITco/
Twitter — https://twitter.com/LEXITco
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/LEXITofficial/ | https://medium.com/hackernoon/blockchain-a-musicians-best-friend-8ea9ad1621b4 | ['Joe Stanley'] | 2018-06-23 17:21:01.380000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Music', 'Future Of Music', 'Musician', 'Music'] |
Why Is China the Source of So Many Pandemics? | With the recent world catastrophe that is Covid-19 dominating people’s minds, it is timely to examine the central role China has played as the source of pandemics over time.
Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash
The Hard Facts
While it is sometimes hard to tell, particularly as we go back in time, the following pandemics are deemed to have started in China:
Plague in the 6th Century
Bubonic Plague in the 14th Century
Plague in the 19th Century
Influenza pandemic of 1918–19
Asian Flu pandemic of 1957–59
Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968
Russian Flu of 1977
SARS Coronavirus pandemic of 2002–03
Avian influenza bird pandemic of 2013-present
The present coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic is related to the SARS Coronavirus of 2002, and originated in China in 2020.
Causes
So you might ask why does China play such a role in so many pandemics?
There are many factors that have placed China as the origin of some many pandemics. Let’s examine them.
For much of recorded history China has played a central role in international trade. The silk route from China to the west is believed to be the path of dispersion of the first three pandemics. Today’s place of China is similar, and rapid air travel, the growing ability of normal Chinese to travel internationally for holidays and the routing of so much international cargo from and through China presents so many opportunities for dispersion.
Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash
China has also often provided large amounts of labour overseas. This is believed to have been the origin of the 1918 Influenza pandemic and how it arrived in Europe.
China’s population density is also very clearly a factor. With the world’s largest population at present and significant concentration of population in large cities, there is huge potential risk as a result of overcrowding.
Photo by Natalie Ng on Unsplash
The preference of many Chinese for freshly killed meat rather than frozen or refrigerated means there are live markets where a variety of live animals of different species are kept in close proximity. This brings many species, including exotic ones like bats which carry many diseases, into close proximity with other animals and with people.
Related to this is the Chinese preference for pork. Since pigs bear many similarities to people (which is why organ transplant from pigs into humans is possible), they form a possible quick vector for animal diseases to jump to humans. Similarly the close proximity of people with live birds provides another likely vector. This close proximity of people and animals has been the direct cause of many of the recent pandemics.
Pollution, the dumping of toxic and possibly mutagenic substances in the environment and human encroachment on wildlife environments all exaggerate the potential for new diseases to emerge.
Another major issue in recent times has been the tendency of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to attempt to cover up disease outbreaks in a misguided attempt to eliminate any perception of incompetency in the CCP. The Chinese coverup attempts for Covid-19 are well documented, and shows that no lessons had been learned from earlier pandemics. China did the same thing with SARS in 2002. And they tried the same in 2013 with the avian flu.
What Needs to Happen
China has demonstrated over and over again that it cannot be trusted to handle and properly notify international authorities of potential disease outbreaks early enough. While we can’t directly force the CCP to behave, we can recognise that this issue is not likely to go away until the CCP changes or there is a change of government, and take action. All travellers from China (not just Chinese citizens) should be health screened before getting on international flights and shipping, and on arrival at their next stop. Arrivals information needs to be easily computer cross-checked with health records so that possible outbreaks can be identified early. The use of AI in analysing disease information may allow for the early flagging of trends.
The CCP needs to recognise that they look more incompetent and less legitimate the more they try to cover these things up. Openness would demonstrate that they are responsible.
China also has a lot to lose by not being responsible. Already as a result of Covid-19 many businesses and governments are questioning how wise it is to have so many supply chains linked to China. This is leading to a shift in focus from China to countries like India. The CCP’s social contract with its people is dependent on them continuing to deliver improvements in standards of living. Suffocating surveillance and control can only get them so far should they fail to deliver, a lesson they should have learned from their own history and that of the Soviet Union.
Apart from openness in reporting, China needs to finally deal with the wet markets, enforce proper livestock health and care standards and confront the issues of exotic animal consumption for largely superstitious and appearance reasons.
Conclusion
All the above changes could happen. If China acted properly, then the testing of travellers from and through China could be avoided. But until they do the testing of travellers should be put in place as international travel opens back up. Based on history, the next pandemic is highly likely to originate in China. The rest of the world cannot be the victim of Chinese government inaction again. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/why-is-china-the-source-of-so-many-pandemics-c4b05f0e391a | ['Dr. Wayne J. Cosshall'] | 2020-10-05 17:17:03.481000+00:00 | ['Trade', 'Society', 'Politics', 'Pandemic', 'China'] |
Write Your Own HTTP Server (Part 1) | The Basics
Before we dive into implementing our own server, let’s take some time and understand what an HTTP server actually is.
When we talk about client-server architecture, the server is an application that has access to a resource. The resource may be a file, a database, some compute logic, etc. The client wants access to that resource. Hence the client needs to first connect with the server and then make a request for that resource. During this process, it might also need to authenticate itself, and the server might also check whether this client has the authorization to access the requested resource or not. Also, the server needs to check whether the requested resource is even available. If not, it needs to inform the client.
Hence the client and server need to agree on two things:
How the client will connect to the server
What the format of the requests and responses will be
As long as they agree on these and they have a way to reach each other (like the internet), they can talk. Let’s deal with both of these, one by one.
Transport
For two applications to communicate, they must be able to send bytes of data to one another. The data may be anything and is application dependant. But there must be a way to take data from one application process to another. That’s the job of the transport. There are a lot of different ways of transporting data, and which ones can be used depends on where the server and client processes reside relative to each other.
For example, if both the client and server processes are running on the same machine, then they can use a file as the transport. The client might write requests to one file and the server might write responses to another. We can even use files when the processes are not running on the same machine, but then both the processes need to have access to the same file somehow. This is possible if there is a network filesystem like NFS. While using a file might not be the best way to orchestrate this kind of communication, it’s important to realize that it is entirely doable.
Another way for two processes on the same machine to communicate is through Pipes or Unix sockets. Another option might be shared memory. Basically any IPC mechanism works.
But when we want processes on different machines to communicate, we need to involve the network somehow. And hence we need to use a network-based transport. There are a lot of network-based transport protocols, but the most popular, reliable transport for IP-based networks is the Transmission Control Protocol or TCP. TCP is used by all the browsers to connect to the servers of various websites. Hence if you want to talk to a client that is a browser, your choices are pretty much limited to TCP. Even when a browser is not involved, TCP is the protocol of choice for reliable communication.
Message format
Now that we know how to reach the other process, we need to decide on the message format that we’ll use for communication. Let’s see what data needs to be sent from the client to the server, and vice versa, to be able to request and provide a resource.
One, the client needs to somehow recognise the resource it wants access to. It might also need to provide some more metadata, like authentication details. Also, it might need to pass other information to the server, such as whether it can accept compressed data.
The server, on the other hand, needs to be able to send the actual resource in a way that the client knows its beginning and end. The server should also communicate other metadata, such as whether the content is compressed, and the client should uncompress it before consumption. It also needs to communicate if there was an error because either the client is not permitted to access the resource, the client asked for a resource that doesn’t exist, or there was a fault on the server.
This is where HTTP comes in. HTTP is an application-layer protocol. That means it is the format that applications use to interpret the message from their remote peer. While HTTP is not the only application-layer protocol, it’s the one that browsers use to access a website. Hence any web application that needs to be reachable by a browser needs to talk HTTP. If the application will only be accessed by other applications, they can choose to talk via whatever protocol they wish.
HTTP has URLs that are used to identify resources. It has methods/verbs that can be used to represent the action one wants to take on a resource. It has headers for all kinds of metadata. There is status code to represent the success/error scenarios. And finally, there is the body that can hold the actual data represented by the resource. | https://medium.com/better-programming/writing-your-own-http-server-introduction-b2f94581268b | ['Vaibhav Sinha'] | 2020-02-04 09:06:33.845000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'API', 'Software Development', 'Python', 'Web Development'] |
How to Successfully Pivot in Business | Being a new business, I needed to get my business listed in some website directories. It is one of those SEO tasks that build links and helps potential customers find you. In the UK one of the most popular directories is the yellow pages or Yell.com as they are known these days.
After registering my details, I received a call from one of their account managers asking to confirm a few details with me. He then proceeded to ask some pointed questions in a manner that didn’t encourage me to want to answer them.
But, his manner aside, I was curious as to why he was asking me these questions? After all, Yell.com was just a directory business, right?
A bit of online searching highlighted that yell.com wasn’t just a directory business. They were a digital marketing company that provided website design and hosting services.
It struck me that was quite a pivot, and one worth looking at in more detail. How strategy is used in business is of deep interest to me, so I decided to investigate. Here is my analysis of the Yellow Pages and their transformation in more detail.
Yellow Pages and their business background
Yellow Pages
The Yellow pages found themselves in an unenviable position in 2013. They were burdened with huge debts and under increasing pressure from their creditors they faced potential disaster, how had they ended up in this position?
Back in 2001, they had been sold by BT for a staggering £2.1 billion to a venture capitalist group. They were then floated on the stock exchange turning them into a huge business.
After the successful floatation of the business in 2003, the business set about a succession of acquisitions. These acquisitions were of other print directory businesses across various countries increasing their dominant position in the market. Worldwide sales exceeded £2 billion lifting their share price in 2007 to 600p a share.
Things were looking great for Yell Group PLC, but the group’s competitive advantage was about to be removed by the advent of technology. This was to prove an early example of how technology would disrupt established businesses.
Yell Group PLC
The internet quickly created the opportunity for any business to reach its customers in a quicker and cheaper way. Certainly, cheaper than being listed in a telephone directory. Furthermore, with technology and the internet, it enabled consumers to use the world-wide-web to search and find information. Business information, once the domain of the telephone directory was now easily found on the internet.
From 1995 through to 2007 the internet became faster and easier to access through broadband and then Wi-Fi. The introduction of faster internet connections and then smartphones made access to these services even easier. The competitive advantage Yellow Pages held through their dominance of the telephone directory business was being significantly undermined.
To be fair to Yell Group PLC, they had seen this coming. Although I think it’s fair to say that they hadn’t appreciated the speed or the scale of the disruption that was coming. They started to change their business strategy as first the internet, and then Google start to become an issue for them.
The first indications of a change in strategy were quite tentative. It was the introduction of Yell.com in 1996 and the creation of an online telephone directory. This created a new revenue stream as a result.
The Yellow Pages Pivot
From the late 1990’s it was clear that the Yellow pages competitive advantage was being taken apart. The business was going to need to change to as its core business was being taken apart. As a result, they start looking for a pivot.
At first, they tried to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo by building their own online directory. As the years progressed, Google started to become a major force and in 2005 they had seen that this wasn’t a fight they were going to win. One competitive advantage they had been the database of businesses. So, they started building a partnership with Google by agreeing to share with them this business directory data.
The pivot came from a realisation that if they could have their own website then they could build websites for customers and offer other digital services. In 2009 this moved further forward with an agreement with Google to sell ad-words through Yell.com.
More restructuring was done to move the business into the digital marketing space, primarily through management change in 2011. This gave the business the leadership experience to move more deeply into website design, app development and digital advertising management. All of that though couldn’t prevent the business from nearly collapsing in 2013.
The impact on business revenues from the pivot
As I have already touched upon the business very nearly collapsed in 2013. Arguably if it hadn’t been a PLC it would have gone bust over the debt it was carrying. Of course, the debt was accrued as a result of its acquisition policy and the disaster that followed.
Thankfully for the business, and its employee’s the business was able to be privatised in exchange for the debt. The loss of revenue as a result of leaving the print directory business has been significant for the UK operation. You can see this very clearly in the revenue table seen below.
Yell.com Revenue 2006–2018
The impact of the internet is clear for all to see. The pivot I have talked about was the introduction of digital marketing services. Without it, the business wouldn’t be trading today.
In just ten years, from 2006 to 2016 print revenues in the UK fell from £639million to £59 million. This was a decline of over 90%. The decline continued from 2016 to 2018 with revenue from print media falling by more than half again to just £24 million.
It’s of no surprise to read that in January 2019 will the last printed Yellow pages distributed in the UK.
What lessons can we take from this business strategy example?
My analysis of the pivot that yell.com went through has revealed a lot more than I had anticipated. The business has been through a rollercoaster of highs and lows in the last 20 years. With the lows bringing the business to the verge of bankruptcy and disaster. The debt swap to private ownership financed the continued trading of the business. It created the capacity to let the pivot work.
Why?
The introduction of digital services through yell.com brought a new revenue stream to the business. One that was growing and profitable and gave investors the confidence to keep the business trading.
It’s clear looking back at the figures that without the pivot the business was dead and buried.
There are other lessons though. From the moment the business became a PLC, it went on an acquisition hunt to grow the revenue. The motive to increase the share price and the value of the business. This acquisition hunt helped grow the parent company Yell Group PLC (renamed Hibu) revenue to over £2 billion.
The cost though was significant, revenues plunged from 2008 and by 2013 the business was heavily laden with debt to the point that it collapsed.
It is hard to argue against the damage this acquisition hunt caused. It was a short-term tactic that increased the value of the Yell Group in the short-term. Without this drive, the business would have been more sustainable and probably wouldn’t have collapsed.
Business strategy example — Pivots
The business strategy example of Yellow pages and their pivot is one that makes for a fascinating study. It demonstrates the challenge that comes from being a PLC and the ‘need’ to create shareholder returns. Looking to increase share prices and the value of a business often come at the cost of something. Normally it’s the long-term output, and that was certainly the case with Yellow Pages.
However, that aside, the pivot worked. It enabled Yell.com to transition from print directories to digital media and it gave the business a future. Could they have moved quicker? Maybe, but with any disruptive element, at the time it’s difficult to see how it could evolve.
For me, 2007/8 was when the knockout blow came to print directories. The advent of the iPhone and who had the foresight to see that coming, let alone the effect it would have…
What other business strategy pivots have you come across? | https://darrenmatthews.medium.com/how-to-successfully-pivot-in-business-964d4fd837eb | ['Darren Matthews'] | 2019-03-28 10:05:54.240000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Business Strategy', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Tech'] |
A walk through blockchain — 24 hours using blockchain technology — Part 2 | Welcome back to Part II!
Reminder : This story follows a young man living in a fully decentralized world through an hypothetical 24 hour-scenario using solely current projects based on blockchain technology.
For a better experience — read Part I first.
01:00 PM
This morning of decentralized hard work and Colombian coffee have made me hungry. I am supposed to meet John and Elisa for lunch but we haven’t yet decided where to go. They are from America and are currently visiting France. I have taught them french on Ntok, a blockchain-based online learning platform connecting tutors and students where everyone can teach something.
I want to show them how good the homemade French cuisine is but I am a terrible chef myself… Luckily there is Feedchain. Feedchain is a decentralized mobile and web application platform on which people can use their houses as home-based restaurants. My American friends don’t really use it (I guess no one cooks wonderful French cuisine in America) but that doesn’t matter. They use Essentia, a modular decentralised interoperability and data management framework that allows them to seamlessly grant Feedcoin permission to their data stored on Medibloc, a decentralized healthcare information system where patients can save time and money by having easier access to their health data. They also share their location to Feedcoin blockchain using Foam, a decentralized protocol for Proof of Location. Proof of Location allows users to privately record authenticated location data at times of their choosing, and then reveal it at their discretion.
Essentia’s features as presented on their website
Thanks to this data interoperability, Feedchain only shows me home-based restaurants that suit Elisa’s and John’s nutritive preferences and allergies restrictions without me knowing those and without the need for them to be regular users of Feedchain service. It also shows me places near us so that no one gets fooled with the distance. I decide to go to Paulette’s place. She seems to be a very charming host, with a high reputation level and a wonderful boeuf bourguignon.
Well, as there is no need of decentralization and blockchain to eat and enjoy a lovely boeuf bourguignon, I won’t detail the lunch. But it was fantastic.
02:30 PM
The afternoon is dedicated to my passions. I’ve always been a big fan of soccer and I am now fully living this passion. I’ve been a sports content creator and investor for a while now. Thanks to Sportyco, a blockchain-based sports crowdfunding platform, connecting those with an active need for funding with contributing crowds on a micro level, I can invest in clubs or players in order to help them achieve their projects. If they actually reach success, I will be rewarded consequently, thanks to smart investment contracts. Here is what I can pretend to get:
a share of the future athletes’ image rights
a share of future sponsorship proceeds
commercial rights relationships
a share of transfer rights
other athletes’ economic rights.
For example, I have helped Marcus, a 15 years-old young player from Albania, financing his trip through Europe to train and find a professional training club. He has been recruited by one of the french top teams, Olympique Lyonnais, and is now a regular first-team substitute. My investment provided me great returns and I have helped a young player fulfilling his dream.
I also help local players getting noticed by national and international clubs by creating contents for them on a regular basis: videos, interviews, articles etc. This afternoon I am editing a video for Theo, a 15 years-old talented player from my hometown club in order to help him finance a private coach on Lympo platform (refer to Part 1) and improve his skills. I’ll be rewarded if an investment is done.
I dedicate the rest of my time to my other passion: art. I use Maecenas, a decentralized marketplace that allows art lovers like me to buy shares in famous paintings. For just a 2% fee, I can invest in any of the pieces in the gallery. And because I do not need to buy the entire piece of art, I do not have to spend thousands of dollars each time I want to support an artist I love. Today, one of my favorite galleries is planning on investing to expand its street art exhibition. I will help it fund this investment so that I can enjoy new pieces of art next time I visit the gallery.
06:00 PM
It’s time to buy some groceries. I have never been a big fan of supermarkets. I always lose myself and end up buying things I shouldn’t… Luckily I don’t have to go to supermarkets anymore. I can just go to the INS platform, a decentralized ecosystem that connects me directly with local and global grocery manufacturers. The INS platform is using Storj decentralized file storage network so that it allows me to browse through thousands of products. It also helps manufacturers to do cross-marketing and promote each other, based on the similar preferences of their customers, thus enabling them to compete with large retailers by forming their own ecosystem. The manufacturers share all the sensitive data about their products: origin, composition, supply chain information… There is no hidden information. Consumers can directly rate manufacturers in a private way so that the ones that are not transparent are penalized by the network. I select the groceries from my favorite manufacturers. They will be delivered tomorrow. I have saved 30% compared to when I used to go to supermarkets.
How the INS ecosystem works
As I told you earlier, I am not a great chef myself. I decide to order some food to be delivered on the Blockfood network, a decentralized food ordering & delivery platform. Unlike centralized platforms, revenue is distributed fairly between restaurants, ambassadors and couriers. I can still feel the weight of Paulette’s boeuf bourguignon so I’ll just have a salad for tonight.
07:30 PM
I am back at home. It’s time to relax and have some fun. My favorite blockchain-based game is Decentraland. Decentraland is a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications. It is completely owned by its users. I have always been a big fan of campsites but I have never been able to own one. In Decentraland, I created my own campsite located near the river. Users can come and enjoy a relaxing atmosphere. I am rewarded based on how many visitors I have. I also enjoy visiting creations of other people. Today I am learning the fundamentals of mechanics within Mickael’s virtual garage. Mickael has reproduced hundreds of historical cars and motorbikes virtually and owns one of the most finest garages in Decentraland. It’s great to be able to keep learning at home in a completely different environment.
It’s almost 09:00 PM and an important soccer game is about to start. Time flies when you’re learning while playing.
I just have time to order my tickets for Kendrick Lamar’s next show on Guts, a ticketing platform that uses blockchain technology to create a transparent ticketing ecosystem, enabling artists and managers to get the revenue from both the primary and secondary market and consumers like me to avoid fraud. I’ll be able to sell them easily if I cannot make it to the show!
09:00 PM
My salad has arrived and I can now enjoy today’s game. This game is very important for me. First of all Marcus, the young player I invested in a couple years ago, is playing. Moreover I have placed a small bet on Wagerr. Wagerr uses distributed blockchain technology to execute betting contracts. It allows peer-to-peer betting: once the event is completed, the Oracle Masternode network records the performance result on the blockchain, triggering a payout to the winner. My favorite team, Olympique Lyonnais, is playing against Newcastle. I hope they will win, otherwise I will lose my bet against Eric, my British friend.
I watch the game on the Theta network. Theta is a decentralized video-streaming platform powered by users and blockchain. Theta Tokens are used as an incentive to encourage individual users to share their redundant computing and bandwidth resources as caching nodes for video streams. That allows solving the problem of bandwidth consumption that existed with centralized services such as Netflix and Youtube. On Theta, viewers can earn tokens from advertisers as engagement rewards, and can donate to their favorite influencers and content creators.
I have subscribed to a few decentralized entertainment networks on the platform. By doing so, I allocate tokens into incentive contracts which get parsed out between the content owners and the streaming/bandwidth providers. Theta’s decentralized streaming platform has allowed lowering the price of sports streaming. I can watch more games for less and keep on living my passion. | https://medium.com/crypto-writing-agency/a-walk-through-blockchain-24-hours-using-blockchain-technology-part-2-8d1d7fc0772f | ['Florent Moulin'] | 2018-10-08 12:46:46.009000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Future', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Understand zip() — A Hidden Gem in Python | zip() built-in function
Python has many hidden gems and zip() is one of them. It’s able to solve the same problem in a cleaner way. We all like clean code, don’t we?
From the official Python documentation, zip(*iterables) makes an iterator that aggregates elements from each of the iterators.
Recap on unpacking operator(*)
The single asterisk (*) means it unpacks the iterators. For example, if you have two lists list1=["a1","a2"] and list2=["b1","b2"] , you don’t have to create a new list of arguments and pass it to the function like zip([list1,list2]) , but instead, you can just do zip(list1, list2) .
Unpacking operator (*) can be used when you don’t know the number of arguments of your function. For example, you can calculate the sum of an unknown number of arguments.
Another unpacking operator is (**). The two asterisks unpack dictionaries. It means that each argument must have a key, that’s why you normally see **kwargs (keyword arguments) as the input name. Just to be clear, you can give any name to it like **nums .
If you want to know more about *args and **kwargs , I would recommend you to read Python args and kwargs: Demystified from Real Python.
zip() vs. zip_longest()
Let’s talk about zip() again. We’ve understood that the input of zip(*iterables) is a number of iterators. The iterator can be a str, list, tuple, set, or dictionary. Internally, zip() loops over all the iterators multiple rounds. In each round, it calls next() function to each iterator and puts the value in a tuple and yield the tuple at the end of the round. Then it continues with the next round. The loop will be over if any of the iterators is exhausted. Maybe it’s easier to read the code. Python documentation gives the following code to help readers understand how zip() works under the hood.
Then let’s solve the previous problem with zip() . It yields a tuple each time. An advantage of using yield is to save RAM usage because we don’t need to store the entire result sequence in memory.
The default zip() follows Cannikin Law which means the length of the merged result is dependent on the shortest input iterable. That’s why in the previous example, you don’t see country X in the output.
Cannikin Law (source: blog)
However, if you want the merged result to align with the longest input iterator, you can use itertools.zip_longest . In that case, the missing value will be filled with fillvalue defined by the user.
unzip
Since we can “zip” 2 iterators, we must be able to “unzip” it as well. The logic is unzipped = zip(*zip(*iterables)) . In the example code, both zipped and unzipped objects have class zip , and they are not readable. We can convert them to a list or a tuple.
Edge cases
There is no constraint on the number of input iterators. It can be 0, 1, or more. The cases where you have 0 or 1 input iterator are not very common, but it’s still possible to do that.
Dictionary in zip()
What would be the result of the following code? Think for a moment before reading further.
The answer is ("city", "city", "city") and (“country”, “country”, “country”) . Why do we only get keys?
According to what we’ve seen previously, internally zip() performs iter() to each input argument. So the question is what’s the output of iter(nl) ? If we execute print(iter(nl)) , we will get <dict_keyiterator object at 0x10e1e3f50> . That’s why we only receive keys in the result.
A better way is to use nl.items() as the input. In that case, we are able to receive both key and value in the loop.
Mixed type in zip()
There is no constraint on the type of iterators either. In the following code, we use mixed types as input arguments. What would be the result? Think for a moment. This example is just for an educational purpose. It shouldn’t be the best code you’ve ever seen. 🙂
Alright, the answer is:
('w', 'Amsterdam', ('key1', 'Netherlands'))
('o', 'Berlin', ('key2', 'Germany'))
('r', 'Chongqing', ('key3', 'China'))
Each ele is a tuple of 3 elements that coming from 3 input arguments. The length of string should be considered as 5, not 1. Each loop will return 1 character. In total, the program loops 3 times because the shortest length of inputs is 3.
If you are able to answer this question and explain the reasons behind it, then you’ve mastered this chapter. | https://towardsdatascience.com/understand-zip-a-hidden-gem-in-python-9488a255f45d | ['Xiaoxu Gao'] | 2020-06-07 18:00:21.088000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Development', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Towards Data Science'] |
Productivity Stinks: Get Ahead By Doing Nothing | The Delayer
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus — Picture By Schurl50 [Public domain] Via Wikipedia Creative Commons
It’s the year 217 BC and Rome has a major problem. The living version of the terminator has killed a Consul (president), crushing two Roman armies and is running loose on Italian soil. Hannibal Barca from Carthage had been raised from a child to lead a military and hate Romans. He managed to take an army with elephants across the mountains. It seems there was nothing he couldn’t do.
In a panic, Rome elects a dictator to harness their resources and respond to the threat. They chose Quintus Fabius. His choice of actions is to sit and do nothing. He knows that Hannibal is far from home and his supplies lines. If the Romans sit back and wait, the mountain climbing menace might burn himself out.
Fabius would avoid engaging in direct battles. He’d use his soldiers to harass Hannibal’s forces whenever they were sent out to look for supplies. This not only aggravated the enemy forces, but it also drove the citizens of Rome into an uproar. Fabius was put in charge to do ‘something’, not hide and let an enemy army destroy the countryside.
He’d have challenges to his power, both of which would result in disaster. An underling would lead an army against Hannibal and have to be saved by Fabius. After his term as dictator was up, two Roman consuls would be elected and attack Hannibal again.
In the Battle of Cannae, the Romans would lose between 55,000 to 70,000 men in one of the biggest disasters in their history. Only after this massive slaughter would the Romans adopt Fabius’ strategy again. He was no longer looked at as a coward. He’d be given a title that would stick with him through history — Cunctator or “the delayer”. Eventually, the strategy would work, saving the Romans. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/productivity-stinks-get-ahead-by-doing-nothing-34b650bb0bf4 | ['Erik Brown'] | 2019-10-25 21:01:02.029000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Business', 'History', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity'] |
Learning From Your Mistakes: What Works For Leadership Developer & LMFT Rebecca Ching | The Nitty-Gritty:
How Potentia Therapy founder Rebecca Ching learned from key mistakes she made bringing her vision to life
What she does differently today when she’s finding the right people for her team
Why learning to lead has made her less lonely as a business owner
The process of self-reflection that allowed her to stop debating her own worthiness despite her setbacks
If there’s one constant in business and entrepreneurship, it’s that stuff happens.
Things go wrong.
We make bad choices.
The market shifts.
An employee leaves.
The big client gives notice that they’re terminating your contract.
We can’t always prepare for what’s going to go wrong — but we can work on becoming more resilient when bad things do inevitably happen.
This month, we’ve been sharing conversations all around the topic of resilience.
We’ve looked at why we don’t push through to our goals and finish the projects we start. We’ve explored the natural and not-so-natural pivots that happen over time. We’ve examined how expectations can get out of hand and what it looks like to coach yourself through 2 decades of business ownership.
Today, as we close things out, we’re going to take a good, long look at actually learning from our mistakes.
I spoke with one of my oldest business friends, Rebecca Ching, about some of the mistakes she made when she took a huge leap forward in her therapy business and opened a multidisciplinary brick & mortar practice. Today, Rebecca is both the founder of Potentia Therapy and an Integrated Leadership Coach helping entrepreneurs and leaders navigate the complexities of leadership today.
Rebecca shares both the errors in her execution and the errors in her thinking that led to some difficult years.
She also gets into some deep reflection around her personal identity and sense of worthiness that really resonated with me. For many of us self-described “achievers,” making a mistake or failing at a venture isn’t just a setback — it rocks us to our core.
If that’s you too, I think you’ll especially appreciate this conversation.
And if you’ve appreciated this deep dive we’ve spent on resilience this month, I’d love for you to leave What Works a rating & review on Apple Podcasts. Your kind words mean the world to me.
Now, let’s find out what works for Rebecca Ching! | https://medium.com/help-yourself/learning-from-your-mistakes-what-works-for-leadership-developer-lmft-rebecca-ching-d270a218b250 | ['Tara Mcmullin'] | 2019-10-29 14:22:48.385000+00:00 | ['Small Business', 'Resilience', 'Podcast', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business'] |
Lives of the Poor in Archaic Greece | Lives of the Poor in Archaic Greece
Civilization, built on the backs of nameless workers
Written by Andrew Thornebrooke
In the centuries occupying Greek history form the Late Bronze Age and so called Dark Ages until the Archaic Age of the Aegean, some large strides in innovation were made both in technology and communication. However, despite this overall advancement of weaponry, arts, and writing systems, the life of a Greek peasant not only did not see any rise in quality of life, but in all probability grew drastically worse.
During the Late Bronze Age on the island of Crete, Minoan civilization had grown into a stable and regimented structure. Common villagers lived relatively close to economic and religious centers which occupied the most important parts of the surrounding territory. Though well taxed and living an arduous life of manual agricultural labor, this effort was not without some rewards. Namely, through an apparently complex and multi-ethnic economic system utilizing the written language of the time (now known simply as Linear A) the opulent heads of government saw fit to redistribute some modicum of food to the people of the area, protecting them from out and out starvation, as guarantees of defense against military threats from the outside.
Linear B tablets offer invaluable insight to the governmental structure of proto-Greek civilizations
Surviving takeover first from the Mycenaeans and later by an unknown group of Greeks, the language of government changed and the titles of the ruling class most likely shifted from favoring the old Chiefs to a more monarchical system. The life of a peasant remained the same, though. They continued to pay taxes (albeit to a different ruler) and reside in small mud brick homes, feeding themselves with food they grew after giving an precisely exacted amount in tax to the ruler.
Following a period of intense violence, the complicated relationship of intercultural economic influence fell apart and whole societies found themselves much more secluded. Real change in the daily life of the poor was slow in coming. Despite the shift to Linear B writing and the decrease in export goods, no real break in the types of crafts being made or crops being sown was had. Life remained familiar for the peasant in this new Dark Age.
The popularity of Homer’s heroes did little to reinforce empathy for the lower classes
Towards the end of the age, with societies becoming small, close-knit villages who espoused the values of Homeric epic, life finally began to take a turn for the lower class. A turn for the worse. Those without much property quickly found themselves downcast in a society which worshiped the heroes of Homer, who had no qualms about hurtling crushing abuse at those wretched and weak enough not to wield power. The nonchalant slaughter and rape of those without value or means to protect themselves became common, and the appropriation of fertile soil by wealthy elites an every-day occurrence.
Eventually, increased contact with the east was renewed and, borrowing from the Phoenicians, Greek language and culture was born and flourished. This literary milestone on the cusp of the Archaic Age, however, did little to increase the quality of life for the poor. By the time of the Archaic Poleis, possibly as much as 80 percent of the population found themselves in dire straits, with no means of gaining land and no wealth with which to emigrate, the poor were slowly lowered into a class of Thetes: Workers forced to labor on the land for the elite, earning only enough food for their own subsistence.
During this structuring of the Greek Poleis, the implementation of exclusive citizenship ensured that the poor had no means of becoming well off members of the city, or even having any chance at social worth. This would become an entrenched state of affairs until the introduction of different styles of government, particularly democracy, in the 6th century BCE. Though even this would not see a radical shift in the power wielded by peasants for centuries to come.
As a whole, the life of a peasant on the Aegean was always one of hard work and little reward. Over the course of centuries however, through the advancement of Homeric ideals, the widening of class barriers, and the implementation of formal citizenship, life for the lower class Greeks grew excessively harsher in the years between the Dark and Archaic ages, and it would prove to be a long term affair, seeing the near slavish subjugation of lower class Greeks until the turn of the millennium. | https://medium.com/rearguard/lives-of-the-poor-in-archaic-greece-5764172fae3d | ['Andrew Thornebrooke'] | 2020-02-29 17:39:24.224000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Politics', 'History'] |
The Impact Of AI Chatbots on Procurement | Bots are already a reality for some Procurement organizations. Indeed, bots are becoming mainstream for most large international companies especially when dealing with the customer.
However, developers have found that it can be really useful for Procurement specialists. With the advancement in AI, bots that were once considered as limited and quite stupid will soon be equipped with more logic and brain-like capabilities.
There are two types of modern bots:
- Current bots that rely on a simple set of data and follow rules in order to respond to specific demands;
- Advanced bots that use Natural Language Processing, or AI. The second are the most advanced and the most versatile — as natural language processing enables them to mimic human conversational patterns.
Procurement and AI chatbots… a perfect match
Procurement specialists are surrounded with data and it becomes quite easy to spend too much time looking for an information rather than using it. We can envision that AI chatbots will enable procurement specialists to converse with their AI-powered procurement software.
It is safe to assume that through Machine Learning (ML), the bot or should I say “your new colleague” will be able learn about your preferences and your organization’s policies and procedures.
By 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. –Gartner
Machine Learning combined with NLP techniques will provide your team with the required information and exclusive recommendations based on the data.
Let’s take for example contracts management. Making sure contracts are reviewed properly is an important task for Procurement specialists. Through NLP techniques, we can extract and gather in one place all the important information related to a contract and compare with them with our organizations past contracts, current business goals and policy. The AI could
highlight key information that require human attention and flag potential issues.
The AI chatbot could answer questions such as “When will the contract with … was signed”. Through an AI chatbot, the procurement team will no longer spend too much time on contracts analysis and rather focus on added-value tasks.
Currently, our goal is to improve the learning process of such AI bots, we need to have access to a lot of data to further improve the technology and especially the recommendation systems. The more we know about your organization, Procurement as a whole and the industry, the better we can impact Procurement teams.
Let’s talk about query management. A chatbot can become the single point of contact for internal and external queries about purchase orders, invoices, and much more. No need to search through your database anymore, just ask! Several companies are already successfully using such capabilities in their Procurement portals to provide quick answers to a vast amount of queries, which leaves their teams with time to focus on more complex requests and value-adding tasks.
Limitations
Non-technical limits
AI chatbots can be used in two basic ways:
- Assisted, in which a person must a human must be involved at some point in the process;
- Unassisted, in which the bot autonomously executes an activity with no human intervention.
This difference is essential in the selection of your first AI chatbot. Based on the task you want to automate; the AI will be very different.
Based on the task, sensitive information might be involved and I am pretty sure you want to have a human at some point of the process. In this case, human intervention may be needed because the company requires an audit trail that indicates the appropriate person reviewed and signed off on the request.
Indeed, most organizations have a set of internally defined policies and procedures designed to provide a level of control over procurement activities. During my last experience in Procurement, only a C-level executive could approve a purchase over $100,000… The idea is that before using a bot, you must make sure your policies and processes are ready for it.
More effort could be required to double check bots’ work, which would eliminate the productivity improvements that were bots’ biggest selling point. And you could miss out on opportunities to effectively use bots to improve processes.
Technical limits
Voice-based conversations are the most natural ones and are also the most challenging from a technological perspective, especially in a B2B context. This is due, in part, to the international nature of business. For example, names of people or companies are not familiar words that a chatbot can quickly recognize, and to make things worse, they are often not in the same language as the one used to converse with the bot.
It is actually quite tricky to make sure all names and ways of pronouncing words are well understood by a machine.In addition to technical challenges like these, there is a more human challenge: the conversational paradox. It is the number one issue slowing down bot’s adoption rate. The paradox is that something very natural (a conversation) is done with another unusual
counterpart (a machine), which turns the experience into a very unnatural one.
How hard is it to build a chatbot?
From gathering enough data to build a solid data set to making the chatbot context-aware to
building the personality of the chatbot, there are many challenges involved in the development. I’ll focus on two main issues:
Context integration
To understand a question, you need to have an idea about the context. Well, same thing for machines. In order to add linguistic context, conversations are embedded into a vector. While integrating contextual data, location, time, date or details about users and other such data
must be integrated with the chatbot.
Coherent responses
The AI chatbot must be powered to answer consistently to inputs that are semantically similar. For instance, an intelligent chatbot must provide the same answer to queries like ‘Where are you from’ and ‘where do you reside’. The secret is to train the chatbot to produce semantically consistent answers.
Once again, the need of data is crucial. As we have seen, AI chatbots will happen in Procurement. The real challenge is how will organizations integrate them in their existing digital strategy. An AI chatbot requires some
adaptation on both sides. However, the benefits far exceed the potential implementation issues. I expect SaaS solutions to provide both the software/decision-making tool and an AI chatbot so that the procurement professionals can interact with it. | https://medium.com/into-advanced-procurement/procurement-and-ai-chatbots-bots-are-already-a-reality-for-some-procurement-organizations-fb499af1fef | ['Gaurav Gurkhe'] | 2019-02-08 09:53:16.895000+00:00 | ['Supply Chain', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data', 'Procurement', 'Machine Learning'] |
Burlington County Health Department offers free lead testing | Burlington County Health Department offers free lead testing
The first screening will be held Jan. 8 starting at 12:30 p.m.
To address the low rates of childhood lead screenings in Burlington County, the Burlington County Health Department and Virtua Community Nursing Services will be conducting lead screening for children ages 13 months to less than 72 months each week during the month of January at the Burlington County Health Department.
“We are encouraging parents to bring their children to come out and get tested, and learn more about what you can do to protect your family against lead,” said Burlington County Health Department Director and Health Officer Holly Funkhouser Cucuzzella. “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood lead poisoning is considered the most preventable environmental disease among young children. That is why are working with our partner Virtua to offer additional dates and times for lead screenings in an effort to screen more children.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there are approximately 500,000 children with high levels of lead in their bodies. The primary exposure to lead in children in the United States is through lead-based paint, but unknown to many, lead is also in many products, such as makeup, toys, jewelry, zippers and imported ceramics (plates, bowls, mugs).
Lead exposure in a child’s body can cause learning and behavior problems. It can slow down growth and development; damage hearing and speech and make it hard to pay attention and learn.
The child lead screenings will take place at the Burlington County Health Department, 15 Pioneer Blvd. in Westampton. The remaining dates and times for the walk-in January 2019 screenings are as follows:
· Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
· Monday, Jan. 14, 2019 from 9:00 a.m. to noon.
· Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
· Monday, Jan. 28, 2019 from 9:00 a.m. to noon.
· Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
For questions about lead in the home, call the national hotline 1–800–424-LEAD (5323).
Other resources include the Southern Regional Lead and Healthy Homes Coalition at (856) 665–6000, the Burlington County Health Department Lead Program at (609)265–5515, and the state of New Jersey Lead Safe program at https://www.nj.gov/dca/divisions/dhcr/offices/leadsafe.html. | https://medium.com/the-medford-sun/burlington-county-health-department-offers-free-lead-testing-6e7149866853 | ['Melissa Riker'] | 2019-01-07 17:50:39.011000+00:00 | ['New Jersey', 'Children', 'Health'] |
The Shifting Definition of Newsworthiness | The Politics of Intolerance
So, what was the Times covering in 2015? What was it covering then that it isn’t now, and what is it covering now that it wasn’t then?
We can look at this in a few ways. In this piece I’m going to look at the geography of coverage (at least, what I could find from some simple text mining), but some others include text analysis of both headlines and keywords, or looking at bylines and representation at the Times in more detail.
Technical notes
I’ve generated the data under analysis by parsing bylines in archived articles. This is, as far as I can tell, the easiest way to get geography from historical articles. The Times does offer a wire service that includes geographical information, but what I’m interested in here is historical data, not incoming stories.
The script I use to parse geography relies on the journalistic convention of the dateline — something like KABUL, Afghanistan; LONDON; or, as in one recent article, CENTER OF THE WORLD, Ohio (in an article about Ohio State football). Given the available data, this seemed like the best (/only) way to get the information we’re interested in.
A few caveats to this approach: articles that have a dateline like this are less and less common, not only at the Times but elsewhere in the news media as well. In many cases, we also miss out on geographic information from the dateline because there’s no geographic focus to the article — think opinion pieces, magazine posts, podcasts and other multimedia posts, as well as “geographically diffuse” stories about things like the coronavirus, or Biden’s VP pick.
More specifically, if we look at the number of articles with extractable geographic information by year, we have the following:
Not surprising, given that we know the number of stories overall is decreasing. But the same is true if we look at these kinds of stories as a percentage of all stories published, we get a clearer picture:
Looks like the percentage of stories with identifiable geography in the byline has remained roughly constant with a dip in 2018.
This suggests a few things: first, that there may have been a shift to more named places after Trump’s election (2017 has the highest percentage of “geographic” bylines at 28.5%) but it wasn’t major (the average was 26% of bylines containing geographic information). Second, though we’ve seen the Times drop the overall number of articles, they don’t seem to have shifted significantly away from “locatable” stories.
There’s one more thing we should look at with these aggregate measures: which sections are the most “diverse?” By “diversity” here I mean place diversity, without reference to the subjects or authors of the pieces in question (that material should be saved for a future analysis). I’m going to exclude foreign desk coverage here—it’s natural that a desk with a remit to cover stories from all over the world would feature articles from… all over the world—and focus on domestic stories. So, what does the diversity by news desk look like?
And finally, what is the count of unique places by year?
(Note that the 2020 number is low because we’re only halfway through the year. On a pro-rated basis, 451 places would translate to about 770 locations, putting 2020 in line with 2019.) It would seem that the Weiss was wrong about the Times’ direction (or at least, her hire didn’t exactly presage a new era of geographic diversity in their pages). | https://medium.com/swlh/the-shifting-definition-of-newsworthiness-1566c0430a14 | [] | 2020-08-31 15:57:26.471000+00:00 | ['Python', 'News', 'Analytics', 'Data Visualization', 'New York Times'] |
A Chinese Supplier of Dog Products Just Offered Me Face Masks | A Chinese Supplier of Dog Products Just Offered Me Face Masks
And that’s an incredibly positive sign
Photo by Michael Amadeus on Unsplash
Starting in 2016, I developed a popular pet product on Amazon. Called the Crusty Comb, it was a special flea comb designed to clean the faces of long-haired dogs like my Bichon Frises. Developing the product required working with a factory in China. They created custom bags for me, attached labels, and shipped them to my company here in the United States.
Today I received a message from the same supplier pitching a new product: face masks.
As COVID-19 has spread worldwide and begun to seriously impact the United States, shortages of essential goods have made a bad situation much worse. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m living under a general lockdown and shelter-in-place order, which restricts all but essential travel.
With supply chains strained, staff reduced and alleged panic buying, stores have been out of products like paper towels, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, gloves and surgical masks for over a week. On a visit to CVS pharmacy yesterday, the manager told me that they received a shipment of new supplies (including hand sanitizer) in the morning, and there were lines out the door.
By the time I arrived in the afternoon, the supplies were long gone. They won’t receive another shipment for a week. The situation was the same throughout the East Bay — I visited six stores seeking essential goods, and none had sanitizer, masks or other basic supplies in stock. Even the availability of many foods was patchy — although this does seem to be improving.
Sanitizer, masks and gloves and other basic medical supplies, though, are likely to be unavailable for a while. And even if masks were in stock, I don’t know that I’d buy any. Authorities say that they have limited efficacy at protecting against the virus, unless they have an N95 certification, which means that they filter out 95% of particles down to .3 microns.
And they’re urgently needed in other places. Consumer pharmacies aren’t the only places lacking masks — hospitals are facing a major shortage as well, leading some workers in hard-hit places like Washington State to make masks out of office supplies in an attempt to protect themselves and patients. On a recent visit to UCSF in San Francisco, signs warned that masks would only be provided to patients with respiratory symptoms. Normally, during cold and flu season, they’re handed out liberally at stands throughout the hospital.
At UCSF in San Francisco, N95 masks were restricted to selected patients. Credit: Gado Images.
There’s an obvious reason why masks and other essential medical supplies are barely available here in the United States. Like many products in the modern economy, they rely on a global supply chain that ultimately terminates in mainland China. And until recently, China wasn’t sharing.
Amid its own major outbreak of COVID-19, China’s normally export-focused economy stalled. And what production capacity remained was turned inwards. Even during the peak of China’s initial crisis, the country turned out 200 million face masks per day.
But that’s barely enough to meet the country’s intense internal demand. China (and other countries like Singapore) have issued masks to all citizens. While they may not protect the wearer very much, masks do help to protect others from the coughs and sneezes of the infected, potentially contributing to reducing community spread. As a result of massive internal demand, exports sank, and shortages in the United States and other Western countries grew.
It’s a story which will likely apply to many other products we’ve come to rely on. Face masks are an obvious example, because demand for them has spiked. Reserves were quickly depleted, and so we in the West are feeling the effects of limited supply. As reserves of other made-in-China products are depleted, we’ll likely see shortages in other categories. It’s a byproduct of a supply chain which — especially in technology — has become increasingly serpentine and globalized.
Masks are a bit like the canary in the supply chain coalmine. Shortages here are an immediate indicator of supply problems in China. But other supply challenges will abound as the COVID-19 crisis worsens, and affects larger swatches of the world economy.
Ultimately, though, there is good news (at least when it comes to masks). Through draconian quarantine measures and the mass control of its population, China appears to have gotten the virus’ spread in check — at least for now. As more Chinese return to work, factory capacity is increasing. And factories are increasingly turning their production capacity away from consumer goods and towards essential products.
According to NPR, thousands of Chinese factories have turned to making masks and other COVID-19 related supplies, in a literal “army” of production. Factories are working at 110% capacity, and have brought in new equipment and workers to meet demand. As the virus has abated domestically, demand within the country has dropped. As a result, exports have begun — tentatively — to resume.
This is very good news for countries like the United States, where the virus is just beginning to ramp up. The delay between China’s outbreak and our own has given us crucial time — time for China’s world-leading manufacturing capacity to come back online, and time for authorities and others in the United States to arrange imports of essential goods.
The fact that suppliers are offering shipments of masks to even tiny, lowly importers like me is a very positive sign. It means that production capacity is resuming, and Chinese companies are actively seeking customers for their products outside the country again.
The fact that a former supplier of plastic bags is now offering me masks is also encouraging, and a bit concerning. According to NPR, masks are surprisingly challenging to make. Not just any factory can produce them properly — especially the more complex masks that can achieve an N95 certification. The country has already confiscated over 31 million counterfeit masks that don’t meet standards.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that my dog product manufacturer isn’t actually making the masks they’re selling. It’s a common practice — and was before the pandemic — for Chinese factories to offer their customers products sourced from other local suppliers, which may or may not be marketed under their own brand. When in 2017 I asked my bag supplier about also supplying flea combs, they quickly responded with a variety of options, likely sourced from a local peer.
There’s also the question of whether imports can happen fast enough. Even with courier delivery and rush production, my supplier quoted me a lead time of 15–19 days to receive a shipment of masks. If Italy is any indication, the United States may not have that kind of time.
As factories in China turn their production capacity to pandemic essentials, it’s likely that supplies of other products will experience shocks. Of course, demand for these products is already likely to be lower to begin with. No one is much concerned with buying a dog flea comb in the midst of a global pandemic (and I have exited that market anyway).
Despite production challenges, quality issues and longer lead times, the restarting of global supply chains is a very good sign. Experts are divided on whether China can maintain control of COVID-19 as more Chinese return to work. But if they can — or even if they can maintain rates of infection at reasonable levels — having their production capacity back online will likely have a major impact outside the country.
Today’s globalized supply chains lead to weaknesses, like the inability to receive exports of essential products when local demand surges and production turns inwards. But it also provides strength, in that China can continue to make and sell essential products to the United States, even as our own infections mount and our internal production capacity stalls.
Would I trust a face mask potentially made by a former supplier of dog products? At the moment, that’s not really the question. The question is whether I’d trust it over a homespun alternative made from the lining of surgical trays, or vinyl bought from Home Depot (both of which are in use in Seattle hospitals today). Or if I’d prefer it to no mask at all.
For essential medical supplies, quality assurance is still essential. I’d likely wear an untested mask, if no other alternatives were available. But would I use an untested ventilator? If I worked as a doctor, would I trust an untested respirator to keep me safe while treating a known infected person?
Again, much of this may be a moot point. If Chinese companies are offering these products to people like me, they’re presumably offering more complex medical supplies to the major distributors with the capacity to do their own quality assurance and other testing.
Ultimately, China’s capacity to keep the virus in check, the delays between their outbreak and our own (helped along by quarantine measures here), and a herculean effort to increase production may mean an increase in the supply of essential products just as the West needs them. And it may ultimately save thousands or millions of lives. | https://medium.com/bay-area-covid-19-quarantine-log/a-chinese-supplier-of-dog-products-just-offered-me-face-masks-7fdb6c537a4a | ['Thomas Smith'] | 2020-03-24 19:34:28.137000+00:00 | ['Supply Chain', 'Business', 'Coronavirus', 'Masks', 'China'] |
Trump Pardons Are Peak GOP | Trump’s Pardons Are Peak GOP
“The party of law and order” is a brutal myth
If there’s one thing we have learned the past four years, it’s that the modern Republican Party is often the exact opposite of what its leaders claim to be.
Lowering the deficit and national debt? Spend trillions on COVID-19 relief. Invest in our national infrastructure? We’re still waiting for infrastructure week. Responsible governance? Use national security briefings to adjust your investment strategy for personal self-enrichment. Claim you’re standing strong against a foreign regime? Refuse to help the victims of said regime:
Rampant Republican hypocrisy existed long before Donald Trump seized control over the party. The past four years have enhanced these absurdities, bringing into crisp focus the foggier parts of what the GOP has become.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the Republican Party constantly claiming they stand for “law and order.” 2020 especially showed us how untrue this is. As I’ve mentioned previously:
In a disastrous New York Times op-ed, Tom Cotton called for the military to be unleashed on mostly peaceful protesters. Mike Lee believes — wrongly — that a non-Republican majority will lead to tyranny, so democracy has to be bad and we can’t have one. Mitch McConnell refused to allow hundreds of bills passed by the House to even see the light of day on the Senate floor.
Calling for U.S. troops to commit mass atrocities against America citizens and refusing to allow laws to be put up for a vote is the exact of opposite of being pro law and order.
Over the past few days, Trump has taken this hypocrisy to its logical conclusion, issuing pardon after pardon to a wide array of people, including loyalists and U.S. military contractors who committed war crimes. All this does is further clarify what we already knew.
These pardons claim that corruption is fine, as long as you’re a Republican or worship Trump
Controversial pardons are nothing new, but the ones Trump is doling out are especially shameful. As the New York Times notes, over half of the pardons don’t even meet the Justice Department’s guidelines for consideration.
This is the GOP’s law and order hypocrisy taken to the extremes. People who broke laws that led to a meltdown in order are being given a pass. Outside of Trump following through on his own suggestion that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it can’t get more outrageous than this.
A large majority of congressional Republicans were thrilled to stand by Trump’s attempts to steal the election. Now they are mostly silent as the power of the pardon is being used to further erode law and order.
Trump will soon be out of office, but it’s doubtful he will exit public life. He will still be around — hovering loudly in the background like a drunk wedding guest ruining the reception — reminding congressional Republicans that committing crimes and embracing corruption are just fine, as long as it’s to their benefit.
Set against the backdrop of our broader political landscape, this is one more sign that our country’s challenges are not centered around right versus left. They revolve around the very idea of democracy itself, and if we should remain one. That reality shows how far off the rails the GOP has gone.
All that’s left to do is roll up our sleeves and get to work against it. | https://medium.com/bigger-picture/trumps-pardons-are-peak-gop-7e40b26c8223 | ['Mark C. Hackett'] | 2020-12-26 15:06:43.242000+00:00 | ['Republican Party', 'Society', 'Politics', 'Government', '2020'] |
My New Piano | Spiralbound
Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman. | https://medium.com/spiralbound/my-new-piano-b2622b9bf3 | ['Molly Cassity'] | 2018-04-04 13:01:02.433000+00:00 | ['Piano', 'Molly Cassity', 'Music', 'Comics'] |
Facebook removes inauthentic assets connected to Georgian far-right group Alt-Info | On October 23, 2020, Facebook removed 130 assets linked to Alt-Info, a Georgian far-right group that used the platform to distribute partisan and anti-Western content. The DFRLab’s analysis of these assets showed that Alt-Info was using an inauthentic network of Facebook accounts, groups, and pages to disseminate its content. Facebook previously removed Alt-Info assets in 2019, but, despite the setback, Alt-Info created new Facebook pages and expanded this distribution network.
The latest Facebook takedown took place one week before the October 31 parliamentary elections in Georgia in which several far-right parties ran for seats in the next parliament. The ruling Georgian Dream party claimed victory, with the Central Election Commission determining that it had received 48.07 percent of the votes, well above the 27.12 percent given to the United National Movement, the largest opposition party. The results, however, triggered protests and led the eight opposition parties to declare that they would boycott the parliament.
In its announcement, Facebook stated:
This network used fake accounts to post and comment on their own content to make it appear more popular than it was, and manage Pages, some of which posed as independent from one another. Some of these Pages have gone through significant admin changes and appear to have been purchased. This network focused primarily on amplifying and engaging with Alt-Info’s Page and its content, and commenting on local news media Pages. This network posted primarily in Georgian about news and current events in the country including EU and Russian politics, Georgian parliamentary election in 2020, political figures, criticism of local media and liberal politicians such as representatives of European Georgia party, immigrants, minorities and LGBTQ communities. Some of this activity included posting hate speech and information rated false by independent fact-checkers in Georgia.
Background
In November 2018, Alt-Info announced the creation of an internet television channel to oppose “liberal propaganda” in Georgia by providing a conservative viewpoint about ongoing events in the country.
Georgian fact-checking organizations have reported many times that Alt-Info spreads manipulative information and promotes biased viewpoints; it also disseminates false information. Alt-Info pushes anti-Western messages and frequently promotes anti-immigration discourse. On top of this, it frequently puts forward pro-Russian narratives that are fully in line with the Kremlin’s strategic goals toward Georgia.
The DFRLab previously reported that Alt-Info tried to fuel anti-LGBT sentiments in Georgia in the context of 2019’s Tbilisi Pride event. Alt-Info TV presenter Zurab Makharadze argued that his organization is openly spreading anti-liberal, anti-immigration, and anti-LGBT narratives because it is an official position of Alt-Info as a conservative group that has nothing to hide.
In August 2020, ISFED published a report about Facebook assets spreading Alt-Info content. After ISFED’s report, Radio Free Europe’s Georgian bureau contacted Makharadze to ask whether the assets were linked to Alt-Info. Makharadze confirmed that some of the Facebook pages were run by Alt-Info, but others identified were unrelated but supportive of Alt-Info.
LTD Alt-Info and Alternative for Georgia
The legal entity behind Alt-Info is LTD Alt-Info, which registered with Georgia’s National Agency of Public Registry on January 28, 2019. LTD Alt-Info is owned equally by Shota Martinenko and Tsiala Morgoshia. Martinenko is a board member of “Alternative for Georgia,” a non-commercial legal entity connected to Alt-Info.
Zurab Makharadze is also a board member of Alternative for Georgia board, along with Konstantine Morgoshia, Shota Martinenko, Irakli Kizilashvili, and Giorgi Kardava. Morgoshia’s investment company, the Konstantine Investment Group, has a logo featured prominently on the Alt-info.com website. Morgoshia was previously a member of pro-Kremlin Alliance of Patriots of Georgia party and was also affiliated with extremist pro-Russian Georgian March party members. Other members of Alternative for Georgia were presenters on Alt-Info’s TV channel. Facebook removed individual accounts of all these individuals as well as their accounts on Instagram. | https://medium.com/dfrlab/facebook-removes-inauthentic-assets-connected-to-georgian-far-right-group-alt-info-f560f5c121a1 | [] | 2020-11-06 06:03:25.074000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Facebook', 'Government', 'Georgia', 'Social Media'] |
Financing Round: Dilution, Timing, & Terms | 🌿 Series-A
💧 Expected dilution? 20–30%
⌚ How long to raise? 3–6 months.
🏃🏽 Runway? 18–36 months
💵 Who invests? VC funds, your previous investors, HNWIs
📆 When? Product-market fit has been found, 1M+ ARR (or on track to), growth phase.
📜 Paperwork? Contracts get more complicated, more warranties & representations, more control given to the Board.
📜 Paperwork? Probably done through a Capital Increase (straight equity) but can also be a convertible note.
🔎 Due Diligence? Deeper, business model, financials, tech, HR
🤼 Team Compensation? If no ESOP has been implemented from the start, investors will ask for one to incentivise managers and key employees (long-run ESOP target size: ~20%)
🎯 Founders’ objective? Find investors who are willing to take you to the next step (B, C,…) and, eventually, to the end.
🎯 Founders’ objective? Find investors who will be ready to follow-on and support through your next financing rounds.
💺 Board of Directors? At this stage, you will have to give up Board Seats. However, don’t see it as negative.
💺 Board of Directors? When smart, professional investors come in, their presence at the Board table will help your company tremendously.
🌳 Series-B and beyond
💧 Expected dilution? 20–30% per round (less if you achieve amazing growth and can command a high valuation)
⌚ How long to raise? 3–9 months.
🏃🏽 Runway? 24–36 months
💵 Who invests? VC funds, PE funds, Banks, Large corporations
📆 When? Expanding internationally, on track to go from a few M+ ARR to 10M+ ARR in 2 years (if you follow the T2D3 model)
📜Paperwork? Contracts get more complicated. Probably done through a Capital Increase, may include warrants, options, anti-dilution clauses,…
🔎 Due Diligence? Full-on. Business model, financials, tech, HR, legal, health & safety, policy, regulation, corporate governance,…
🤼 Team Compensation? ESOP will be topped up to plan for a large expansion of the workforce.
🎯 Founders’ objective? Investors are coming in to set you (and them) upon the path for a profitable exit or IPO. Find people who will help you reach these goals.
💺 Board of Directors? In the future, your Board will look totally different.
💺 Board of Directors? There will be a strong expectation of professional corporate governance which means more non-executive board members and more oversight. | https://medium.com/pitchdecks/financing-round-dilution-timing-terms-22026e904f45 | ['Nicolas Carteron'] | 2020-11-24 13:02:31.565000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Startup', 'Fundraising Advice', 'Fundraising', 'Venture Capital'] |
At least now I have a plan. | First, I have to address my conservative friends who may not understand why I have not called them, blocked them on Facebook, or otherwise ignored their sympathetic and (sometimes) sincere advances to tell me it’s going to be ok. I have not been willing to listen. I cannot stand their smugness. They think this election was about politics — that I am angry about policy differences. Ha! I would pay thousands of dollars to have had Romney or even G.W. Bush elected instead. I could write a short novel on how they are wrong. The people who voted for Donald Trump may not be racist, misogynistic, or hateful, but they were ok voting for someone who is. They are enablers, and the true, tragic cost of this election is not in having a different party in the White House but in the different way I see my fellow Americans. I had such faith in us before this election, and that faith has now been thoroughly dashed.
And so, I am conflicted. I vacillate between listing all the people and groups that should eat a dick and then turn to the understanding that we need to do better for a broader swath of people in this country. There is blame enough to share. It isn’t as simple as pitting rural vs city, but that notion can serve in effigy for my purposes.
But for all the moments of anguish and hours of depression — for every Facebook argument sure to be won with the right fact — there were just as many times when I just wanted to feel better and to not to feel what approached hate. It ate at me.
However powerless I felt about Trump, the incoming Congress, the Supreme Court nominees to be, or the countless other calamities that have or soon will befall the United States, I know I need to make things better for myself.
No amount of Schadenfreude can help. Even though it can feel good, it’s simply a redirection of those same feelings that are only hurting me. I need to enact a plan of action. So here it is:
1. Understand and articulate the things about which I care most so that I know where to focus my energy. There are a lot of things I care about, but when I look at it, those about which I care most deeply can be broken down into three broad categories:
Ensuring Equal Human Rights (equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness)
Protecting the Environment
Reforming Campaign Finance and Improving Elections
When I take myself out of the picture (we progressives are great at advocating for others), I realize that none of these will really affect me much in the short or long-term. I’m a well-educated, white male. I have skills that are applicable to several aspects of a vibrant sector of the economy, and I have been fortunate with past technology startup experiences. I’ll be fine. And in the really long run, I’ll be dead. I don’t have children. I don’t believe I’ll be reincarnated. So anything after, say 2075, won’t really affect me in any way.
Progressive causes have a tendency to, well, progress. And that won’t change. Sure there may be reactionary steps back from time to time, but these will tend to be short and corrected. People won’t get fewer rights over time. We aren’t going backward for long.
Let’s be clear: the environment is screwed. But it is probably not so screwed that it won’t sustain my life for the next 58 years. If I live that long, I could likely have what’s left of my consciousness uploaded to whatever the cloud is called then. What’s left of the environment after that time won’t really matter to me.
Campaign and election reform: I am unsure how we can compel the powerful and rich to give up some of their power and wealth, but something has to give. We have never witnessed disparity on this scale. I don’t know how we can vote people into office who will choose to diminish themselves, but if we should succeed we will speed progress on issues of equality and slow the decline of the environment. I’m inherently impatient, so this seems like the place where I can at least make a mark while I’m here.
2. Meet more of my fellow Americans. It’s trendy and also awful to talk about breaking our bubbles. I dislike the language but believe that good things happen when we know more about others — their hopes, and challenges, and lives. I’ll use these encounters to learn and adapt. I’ll seek to make myself better by knowing more and adjusting my views. Sure there will be the occasion where I attempt to share a different perspective or change someone’s mind but I’ll do that differently too.
Which brings me to…
3. Be kinder to people. I’m going to try to treat people how I would like to be treated. I’ll offer courtesy and respect. I’ll withhold judgment. I’ll be tested when I meet folks who don’t seek truth and resist facts, but I’ll try to come up with tactics for handling those situations too. I’ll extend this commitment to my online interactions. I’ll resist snark and instead be considerate and compassionate. I’ll look at things from the other’s point of view.
To be fair, I don’t know if I’ll wholly succeed. But I do know that alternating between reading Trump’s tweets and deliberately ignoring the difficult years ahead isn’t working for me. At least now I have a three-pronged approach directing my energies — reforming who gets elected and how in order to best serve all the people with whom I meet and with whom have nice civil conversations. | https://medium.com/alttext/at-least-now-i-have-a-plan-4d6768edfbac | ['Ben Edwards'] | 2017-06-11 14:08:56.356000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Politics', 'Trump', 'Society'] |
How Music Changed My Life in a Year! | Originally written by Pratiti Jain.
Music! This last one year of musical experience has changed me for better. Now, music has become an inseparable part of my life. It is like an escape from reality, from this otherwise boring life, where you do what you love. Yes, it makes me happy. Well, I am still a newbie and there is a lot to learn.
This is a story of finding my love for music in the midst of a regular life.
A still from my recent music video.
The introduction
It all started when I was in school. My mother and school teachers always told me that I can sing well and asked me to join vocal classes. As a result, I completed my first year in classical music (vocal). Just like any other maths student, went to Kota for JEE preparation. I discontinued the classes after one year for no solid reason.
Realization:
Right before the board exams, I realized, sitting in a single room with FM radio that singing is the one thing that I loved the most. Then, I started recording my own voice after listening to the songs. At that point, I decided that I want to take this further.
The later and the better part
I joined the college with a hope. I wished for more like-minded people who could help me to learn and grow together. I was amazed to meet many talented people in the college, this small group gave me the opportunity to be heard.
In the very first event, I got that stage which I was in search of. I sang for the first time in college and got a little recognition. There onwards I participated in every college event. This year our club secured the first position in an inter-college competition at DAIICT (Gandhinagar). As a reward, our club got a chance to record a song in a recording studio!
What I’ve learned?
Practice; this is all it takes to stick to your interest. People with the similar interest, a stage, and opportunities act as a catalyst in the process.
I have learned and experienced a lot of new things and I am looking forward to more such interesting events to come and eventually keeping growing as music is something that makes me smile.
Cheers!
Our our first music video by the Music Club of IIITV — | https://medium.com/hapramp/how-music-changed-my-life-in-a-year-bf624d3827fb | ['Rajat Dangi'] | 2017-11-26 14:01:54.955000+00:00 | ['Stories', 'Music', 'Hobbies', 'Singing', 'Storyofmylife'] |
Why We’re Not Your Average Creative Agency | For those shopping around for marketing services, you will probably start with some interviewing to get to know what your options are.
What is interesting and difficult at the same time about shopping for creative work is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
No matter who you hire, there will be slight variances among the creative process and results, depending on the agency and project at hand.
It’s kind of like choosing a companion in life, more or less. When shopping for creative work, the match between the client and agency must work well for both parties.
My agency recently published our manifesto in attempt to share who we are with the world.
Want to know what distinguishes us from other creative agencies? Read on.
We’re Small… Yet Mighty!
Our close-knit team masterfully combines brilliant and functional ideas into unified solutions to ensure communication is controlled and consistent throughout every component of your branding.
As a couple adventuring through life together, we have mastered open communication with each other. This benefits us working together professionally and gives us an advantage compared to other teams that are less intimate.
When we’re hired for a project, our client receives the undivided attention of two minds (which are better than one — and arguably better than any more than two).
Our critical and creative minds brainstorm well together and we work through problems very smoothly as a team. Compared to most agencies — both small and large — we offer more personalized one-on-one attention to ensure everyone involved is on the same page at all times.
We get to know our clients very well throughout a project and become an integral extension of their teams.
We’re Experienced
As the co-founders of Couple of Creatives, LLC, we each have a decade of entrepreneurial experience managing our prior freelance businesses.
We are a well-balanced duo that understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses — and have designated roles that compliment the areas at which we excel. Together, we divide and conquer.
I’m our account director fulfilling the role of a business savvy consultant specializing in brand development, while my partner is a brilliant technical director bringing ideas to life.
My background includes a Master of Arts degree in Strategic Communication and Leadership as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic Design and Public Relations.
My partner is an SEO expert and user experience designer with extensive knowledge of web programming languages. He is the creator of Web Crunch — an online magazine all about web design and development — and has written 2 ebooks (and counting), one on how to develop your own custom Tumblr theme and one on user experience design.
Part of what makes our team so cohesive is our solid individuality. We work separately on our appointed duties very well, which helps us to be more productive as we can tackle more tasks at once.
We’re Strategic
We are very organized and meticulous. Together, we have the capacity to focus on the broad scope while working out the fine details.
We’re Creative
Hence our name, we are an exceptionally versatile creative duo.
Creativity is a way of life for us. We’re artists, illustrators, designers, developers, writers, philosophers, musicians — and marketers.
We don’t have a limited niche, per se. We are a dynamic team that works with clients from various industries looking to promote their products and services all throughout the world wide web.
The more diverse our clientele and projects, the more we learn and grow as creative professionals — and we like it that way.
We’re Business Savvy
We analyze communication processes and provide advising for improvement as well as cutting-edge integration with technology.
Not only are we artsy farts, we are also very serious businesspeople on a mission to create desirable results for our clients.
We’re Fun
We’re a fun couple that likes to mix business with pleasure.
Spending our days fulfilling our dreams is as fun as it sounds and we’re grateful for every project we get.
We remain open to inspiration in unexpected ways allowing brilliant ideas to flow into our lives on the regular.
Since our team lives together, we are able to bounce ideas off each other 24/7, unlike most teams that only collaborate for a small portion of the day.
We love learning new things and meeting new people. We rejoice having opportunities to work with diverse people from all over the globe.
We Like To Show Off
We are passionate about our intellectual property. We work diligently on the advancement of our skills so we can create innovative solutions to our clients’ problems. We aim to showcase excellence throughout our portfolio but more importantly in our clients’ success rate.
We’re Loyal To Your Future Success
It makes us look good to make our clients look good. We are motivated to uphold our repute for providing a valuable return on investment.
We are flexible and will go above and beyond to ensure all objectives are accomplished as to achieve the end goal and results.
Our Mission Benefits All Involved
Our mission is to improve communication transmitted from our clients’ businesses to their consumers. We are here to help businesses engage their customers — which becomes a win-win situation for all involved.
We Promise Satisfaction Guaranteed
We keep our clients updated on project status at all times. Our process is designed to ensure our direction for the project is clear every step of the way. We work directly with our clients to be certain their precise goals are reached and expectations are met, if not exceeded. | https://medium.com/couple-of-creatives/why-were-not-your-average-creative-agency-8ee1d0b29562 | ['Alyssa Leverenz'] | 2016-09-16 13:31:22.368000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Marketing', 'Relationships', 'Business', 'Digital Marketing'] |
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