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Does Using a Pen Name Make You a Scaredy Cat? | Does Using a Pen Name Make You a Scaredy Cat?
Being called out for protecting our safety online as sex writers
Photo by Jeffrey Buchbinder on Unsplash
I recently came across an article that called out sex writers who use pen names as being “pussies.”
Okay…
The author invited others to share their thoughts, and I have a few. No, I don’t owe anyone an explanation (or my real name), but I’m happy to give several. (Explanations, I mean, not names.)
I’m passionate about the writing biz, and the decision to use a pen name or not is a fascinating and personal one. I love to study people and why they do what they do, and I won’t judge a writer whether they use a pseudonym or not.
Let’s, for the moment, put a pin in the fact that the author, a woman, is using the word “pussy” in a derogatory way. Like, pussies are cowardly or inauthentic.
I love pussies. They’re beautiful. So I really don’t mind being called one. Except in this case, I know the connotation is negative.
We Are Our Words
I write honestly and with vulnerability about my views on sex, relationships, abuse, mental health, and parenting — so you get my deepest and darkest secrets.
If you really want to get to know me, the best way to do that is not by learning my legal name (which has changed a couple times after being married and divorced anyway), but by reading everything I’ve published on my blog.
You’ll learn my age and my educational background. You’ll learn the intimate details about my experiences being sexually assaulted, abused, loved, neglected. You’ll learn that my ex-husband gave me an STI, my first blow job was actually rape, and even though I was brought up to have a lot of shame and embarrassment around my sexual development, I’ve worked through a lot and I love to have a kinky good time.
You can read my work and learn of my successes and my failures, both. These experiences are my own, no matter what name I use to publish them. I think some writer, somewhere, said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Well, rest assured. This pussy smells pretty darn sweet.
Badass Sex Writers With Powerful Pen Names
A large part of why I write is for me — I love to do it, and it’s therapeutic. I also love to talk about real and important things that happen and share them with others who might benefit from what I’ve learned, or maybe just feel a little less alone knowing someone out there has experienced something similar.
But not only do I bare my soul in my writing. I also have a podcast, so I give my voice. I like to take erotic photos of myself and share them online, so I give my tits, a little peek of my vulva, my ass — and even parts of my face and hair here and there.
But I don’t give full-body images. And I don’t give my real name. That may change in the future, but right now, those things are hard limits for me.
And let me tell you something about hard limits in this supportive and accepting sex-positive community I’ve come to discover and enjoy and fall in love with: hard limits are respected. Hard limits are not mocked as being cowardly.
Some of the most talented and successful sex bloggers I know use pen names.
There’s Kayla Lords — one of the first sex writers I came to know and love. She’s always been open about her use of a pen name:
“Having a pen name may allow you to get into character or a different mindset. You can shed your non-sexual, “vanilla” self, and write about sex more freely. I know my name does for me. I am Kayla Lords, and yet under my real name, I’m different. As Kayla, I’m freer, less inhibited, and down to discuss all kinds of kinky fuckery. Under my given name, I’m much more reserved.”
I have never related to someone’s explanation of using a pen name more than hers. Only, in my every-day life, I’m only slightly more reserved.
Kayla goes on to make the very true point that choosing whether or not to use a pen name when you write about sex is up to you. It’s about what works for the writer. It’s not to be judged or bashed. It’s simply a personal choice.
Then there’s Girl on the Net. That’s not even a name at all! It’s a phrase! And she’s one of the best around.
And don’t forget Meaghan Ward, Emma Austin, Demeter deLune, Bradlee Bryant, and countless others here who are shifting the narrative.
Notable Reasons For A Nom de Plume
1. Safety
Internet dangers are real. Some people get attached. Some people want more from you than your writing. They want to steal your money, or stalk you online. Maybe even pay you a visit in person.
These things aren’t typical, but they do happen. A pseudonym is a form of protection. Kind of like wearing a mask during the pandemic. We put all the safety measures we can in place to protect our identity from crazed fans who think all we want to do is bang them. Or from people who think we make money. Or maybe people who want to out us.
I’ve spoken with moms going through custody battles or nasty divorces, and if their sex writing got out, it could definitely be used against them. There are still those out there who, unfairly, hold a prejudice against women who write explicit sex and erotica.
2. Branding Reasons
My real name isn’t remotely sexy or even a little bit playful. It just doesn’t fit with my niche. Many professional writers will use a pseudonym that sounds like a character in their own genre or one that reflects the topics they’re passionate about.
It gives our work a little razzle-dazzle. And, a pen name is just one more opportunity to make our writing shine and stand out in a competitive and oversaturated space.
Or, once a writer is established in one niche or genre, they may opt to use a pen name to branch out into other areas they’re passionate about. Agatha Christie, for instance, is synonymous with mystery. So when she wanted to start writing romance, she picked a new moniker: Mary Westmacott.
Also, no one can see my maiden name on paper or the screen and pronounce it correctly. Absolutely no one. It doesn’t help if you want people to share your work via word of mouth. To all the Herb Ertlinger’s out there, I feel you.
“Come taste the difference good fruit can make in your wine. You’ll remember the experience and you’ll remember the name. Herb Erfling … ger. Burt Herngeif. Irv Herb-blinger. Bing Livehaanger. Liveling. Burt Herkurn. Ban bingo ling-fucker!” — Moira Rose
3. Professional Reasons
Some of us want to keep our options open, career-wise. Maybe we don’t want to always or only blog about sex. Maybe we write about sex because it’s our passion, but we would also like to find more steady work and apply for a job with another individual or company.
Maybe writing about sex or humor or any honest topic about our personal lives could keep us from getting that job. If potential employers can Google our real name and see everything we put out there, they can form judgments based on our opinions. It’s not fair, but it can and does happen.
I myself have a full-time job as a corporate writer. I have health insurance, retirement, paid time off, benefits, room to grow, an incredible team of women colleagues, and a decent salary that comes whether I’m busy at work or not. I also have incredible fulfillment there because I get to exercise my passion for journalism, conduct interviews, and create stories.
I realize this is an incredible privilege. One I worked my ass off to get after 10 years as a kitchen cook and daycare employee, being paid $9 per hour while I was a single mom on food stamps, finishing my degree part-time.
I don’t think I’d want to give up my day job even if my blogging takes off. And I can’t emphasize how much my sex blogger brand does not vibe with my corporate world. If this stuff was out there under my real name before I applied, I don’t think I would have gotten the gig.
4. Protecting Others
Because I write my real-life experiences, which do happen to involve other people from time to time, I also use a pen name as a way to protect the innocent (or, in many cases, the not-so-innocent).
These people in my life did not consent to my giving out their intimate details. But I do share the details when they involve my journey and my story. So, I protect everyone by changing names so that people who know them don’t stumble upon my stories online.
I also want to protect my partner in crime, my hubby, who so generously allows me to write about him because he supports what I do. But also, because I’m anonymous.
When I write about his sexuality and his sexual attraction to men, something he’s not fully “out” with, it’s not for me to out him. Other men have written to me, asking me questions because they are dealing with similar situations. I’m grateful to be of help in any way, and it’s a pen name that has allowed me to do it.
Lastly, I want to protect my family from reading titillating tales about what I get up to sexually. No, my mom and dad don’t need all the erotic details. Neither does my teenage son. YIKES, right?
There are even more reasons. Some simple, some more complicated. Maybe someone out there in the blogosphere happens to have your same name and is already well known. Maybe you need a fresh start. Maybe you’re known for putting out some really rough work, and now that you’ve brushed up on your skills, you want to shed the old reputation.
Whatever your niche, whatever your genre, whatever your reason to use a real name or a pen name — it’s valid.
We Own Our Work — And Our Creative Name
Yes, we’re proud of our work. We’re proud to be sex-positive and to help normalize fun and difficult conversations about sex. But just because we have a stage name, that doesn’t make us own our words any less. It’s about the craft of writing and using it to connect with the world. It’s about the real stories we tell.
Our names do not affect our opinions. We all have voices, and we all have the right to use them, anonymous or not.
If using a pen name makes me a “pussy,” then you can call me the biggest damn pussy around.
Pussies are, after all, incredibly lovely. | https://medium.com/sexography/does-using-a-pen-name-make-you-a-scaredy-cat-bbe2c78db31b | ['Holly Bradshaw'] | 2020-12-24 17:19:18.136000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Women', 'Writing', 'Sex', 'Culture'] |
Why aren’t we talking about the bridge that fell in Miami? | Why aren’t we obsessed with the story about the 174-foot bridge that literally buckled and collapsed with no warning in mid-March of this year? It was a frightening news report and the images were even more horrific — as the remnants of crushed cars — containing the deceased bodies of drivers and passengers — peaked out from the massive rubble that took almost a whole week to extract.
President Trump has had very little to say about this national tragedy — which sets the tone for media outlets to guiltlessly drop the ball by continuing the non-stop coverage about his past and present sexual activities — and how those results will determine the temperature of a relentlessly toxic administration.
If this was 1981 — there would be no way in hell that something as dramatic as a falling bridge in the middle of a vibrant city would just get the basic treatment.
Reporters would continue their quest for answers with nightly updates and investigative programs that aim to figure out how something this reckless and deadly can happen in broad daylight — and what can be done to ensure that it never happens again.
The pedestrian bridge that was built to connect Florida International University and the city of Sweetwater gave way in the middle of the afternoon — at a very busy time of day — and the accident claimed the lives of six people — ranging in age from 57–18 and seriously wounded dozens more.
One of the injured — a male student at the university — shakily recounted the minutes prior to the bridge crashing down — as his best friend — Alexa Duran — 18 — manned the steering wheel and brought them to a halt as they waited for the signal to move. They discussed plans for the next day and other stuff that college friends tend to converse about during lunch breaks.
Suddenly he hears a weird cackling sound and before he can make eye contact with his buddy — tons of concrete hit them all at once and with such force that when the dust clears — all that remains of his dear friend is her dark brown long hair — hanging from the smashed interior.
He calls for her — but she’s quiet.
This is the only first-account from a survivor that was shared and recorded and it paints the picture of an anguished victim who will be emotionally paralyzed for life.
That brings us back to the dilemma of calculating how a bridge that was built and completed five days prior — could possibly disintegrate in such a manner. According to The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) — one of the engineers that had been commissioned to erect the bridge — called and left a message— noting that there was “a crack that appeared on the structure” and seemed to want to discuss further — even though there wasn’t an indication that it should be a cause for concern.
FDOT also seems to be putting all the responsibility squarely on Florida International University by stating that the institution had been tasked with ensuring that the concrete structure met all safety requirements.
The university has vowed to comply with the regulations set forth by the National Transportation Safety Board — as the investigation into what caused the frightening collapse is initiated — and investigators begin to gather evidence at the crash site — including pieces of the bridge — blueprint of the bridge’s design and construction as well as other supporting documents.
When “breaking news” of the crippled bridge with smashed cars and scattered debris hijacked the news cycle — it was like being transported to one of those shithole countries we hear so much about — that supposedly don’t give a fuck about their already woefully vulnerable citizens.
The chaotic scene seemed unreal — like something out of a crowded movie set with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson serving as the unwilling hero with the daunting task of single-handedly “saving the day” despite the odds against him.
I often imagine that we’ve become so disconnected from the human experience due to the convenience of being effortlessly social — that we are having a difficult time recognizing human suffering — even when the content is disturbingly hard to absorb.
As a human being with blood running through my veins and the unrelenting capability of being able to simulate the “before and after” — there was no way of hiding from the moments of impact — and hoping that the creator of all things was merciful enough to remove the spirits of the victims — before the threshold of pain overcame their senses.
Then your thoughts turn to the past trips to that same area and how you and those around you — weren’t in any position to fathom that the cab that whisked all of you from the airport — could become crushed metal in a matter of minutes.
That’s when the rage becomes visible — as you imagine the audacity of something like this happening and how we accept it as “one of those things” — as if those who died earned their punishment — or perhaps we are almost certain that we will never pay the ultimate price for the shitty ways in which this country demonstrates its growing hatred towards its own.
Trump touted his grand scheme of #MAGA and those who bought the lie can’t ever share their grief in public — but in private we know that we are unraveling at the seams — and the only thing that can save us is already being coded for our destruction.
Why aren’t we talking about the bridge that fell in Miami?
We aren’t talking about it because we’re too busy clicking through the pending pile that has to be addressed in order to keep us active. The art of following up on stories that affect us or potentially wreck our world if we ever become the main characters — is officially dead and buried.
The only leads that matter are the ones that come in shiny packages that light up when action is taken.
There’s no desire to give Americans who were fatally removed from their business of living for reasons that shouldn’t ever add up — the respect of noting their absence and following that honor with the promise of ensuring that imposing structures that are built to last — never crumble under the duress of greed and inefficiency.
There is so much trouble in the world and there’s also quite a bit of it in The White House and ignoring that fact would be ludicrous — but it’s almost criminal to function in a society that vehemently ignores the spreading virus of gross negligence.
Reporters prefer to tend to the consistency of headlines that never quite deviate from the formula that has become direly stagnant.
We can talk about Stormy Daniels, Cardi B’s pregnancy and the falling bridge all at the same time.
That’s how we roll. So — lets get to it. | https://nilegirl.medium.com/why-arent-we-talking-about-the-bridge-that-fell-in-miami-46394155f674 | ['Ezinne Ukoha'] | 2018-04-19 11:15:25.396000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Politics', 'News', 'Architecture', 'Media'] |
Crypto Funds Medium List | Crypto Funds Medium List
The first list of 120+ Medium accounts of funds that currently invest in early-stage crypto projects (equity & token sales)
At the Crypto Writing Agency, we are currently building the most comprehensive list of funds that invest in Blockchain. Our list will be online in a couple weeks and will include 1000+ funds, their investments, their social media accounts, adresses etc…
If you are looking to raise funds, launch an ICO, or if you are just curious about what crypto funds are posting here is a preview of our final list with the first Medium list of funds that invest in early-stage crypto projects.
This list includes:
https://medium.com/@NewAlchemyCap
https://medium.com/@suna_said
Feel free to clap and share if you enjoy this list! | https://medium.com/crypto-writing-agency/crypto-fund-medium-list-7065c3844c1a | ['Florent Moulin'] | 2018-10-19 15:53:41.631000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Venture Capital', 'Marketing', 'ICO'] |
Everything you need to know about Blockchain: Part Two | The currently popular blockchain networks, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, use a proof-of-work method to verify a transaction as genuine. A huge amount of computational effort is needed to solve puzzles to add a new set of verified transactions or blocks to the network (blockchain). In return for that work or computational effort, the entity that executes the work stands a chance of being awarded additional tokens on the network, ether in the case of Ethereum and bitcoins in the case of Bitcoin.
An entity receives new bitcoins or ether only if it correctly solves the puzzle. Solving these puzzles correctly takes so much computational power that the “miners” don’t have the computing power to try to influence the result of the network to birth the blocks most advantageous to any particular miner. Rather, they have to focus on solving the puzzle as fast as possible to increase the chances of getting the next block and so capturing the network’s reward. It gets more and more difficult and energy-intensive to generate the next block, as each new block generates. In practice, this, unfortunately, leads to scaling problems over two dimensions: speed and energy use. The Ethereum and Bitcoin networks together consume more electricity than a few countries like Iceland, Jordan, and Syria.
Further, the puzzles miners need to solve get harder as nodes in the network use more computing power to generate new blocks. This way more and more computing power is consumed by the network. However, no new benefits are generated as miners work harder. The power is being consumed to stop individual miners from influencing the network for their own advantage and recording those transactions that will be most beneficial to anyone miner as the next block on the chain. However, the computational power consumed by the network will not generate any independent value.
Proof-of-work system to a roof-of-stake system.
The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has proposed transitioning Ethereum to a proof-of-stake system from a proof-of-work system. In a proof-of-stake system, entities can choose to stake a portion of their tokens in the system on any new block. The block added to the blockchain, is the one with the most stake behind it. The network that chooses to validate the latest block the network adds to the blockchain, is rewarded with network tokens given to a random sampling of nodes. To stand a chance of getting a reward once you’ve validated the genuine block, all participants on the network are persuaded to validate the genuine version of the network. Theoretically, proof-of-stake networks shouldn’t see increasing energy needs as miners compete for cryptocurrency using computational resources, that could make it more scalable. Nevertheless, transitioning from one system to another isn’t a straightforward process.
For Ethereum to move from a proof-of-work system to a proof-of-stake system, the network’s code will have to be updated by a group of Ethereum developers that are centralized. Then the users on the Ethereum network will choose whether they want to continue to use the old version or shift to the newer version of Ethereum. If some decide to use the old version and some the new, then the chain undergoes a split or a hard fork, and both versions of Ethereum are available. The Bitcoin protocol is extremely difficult to change, but this summer, the Bitcoin network became too crowded to process all of the demands on the network. To aid the Bitcoin network’s ability to process further transactions, updating the Bitcoin protocol led to a hard fork and Bitcoin split into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin.
So where are we going from here?
Picture all the value captured currently by centralized authorities, from the networks of music rights holder to the banking industry to the judicial system. If it’s possible to share this value with participants from the dominating blockchain, then how much will the tokens underlying the dominant blockchain be worth?
The blockchain is going to become increasingly more normalized as the gold standard for at least, security. However, it will face some challenges as a base for currency. But many big banks today have departments that are specialized in cryptocurrencies. Few are even thinking of building their own private blockchains. A few countries are, too. In fact, some states in the U.S. are reportedly thinking of a pilot scheme involving moving voting onto the blockchain.
There’s still a long way to go. But eventually, bitcoin will become the main source of money. Blockchain will be used to capture identity and secure contracts. It will become so prevalent that we won’t even notice it but use it nevertheless. That could be a long way off. Meanwhile, bitcoin’s value could continue to increase , or it might plummet the day after, sending the market crashing, forcing regulators to react. The future is bright for the blockchain , but getting there might prove to be a bumpy ride. | https://medium.com/swlh/everything-you-need-to-know-about-blockchain-part-two-e8c3563c6056 | ['Amit Ashwini'] | 2019-11-12 11:23:40.433000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Prioritisation is overlooked. Here’s how the next 20 years could look for economists | Scarcity. A word that is at the heart of our pursuit of economic enlightenment, the idea of which sharpens the blurred lines that we construct between the discipline of economics and neighbouring psychology and political science. Economic thought has often been shepherded by the age-old problem of organising limited resources in a world where economic agents have their own agendas in fulfilling wants and needs which is, and always will be, at the heart of any relevant economic problem.
As we venture into the new decade, scarcity has again reared its inexorable head. It is hardly a polemic idea that scarcity and social problems exists around us, but a much more contentious topic is prioritising urgent and critical economic problems. So much so, that the prioritisation of research can absolutely be an urgent and critical economic problem itself! To establish an order of the most crucial problems economists have to solve within the next 20 years, evaluations of the urgency, scale, and relevancy (to economics) of the problem would be conducted. Utilising this composite metric, three clear economic problems can be identified: The disruptive nature of AI, climate change, and finally, with more of an introspective theme, the systemic flaws in modern economics.
In the midst of an age dubbed the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ by Charles Schwab in his book of the same name, it is arduous to not be overwhelmed by the pace of technological advancement. Harder still, is to analyse the complex relations technology has with society, and to predict its implications. This conundrum has increased the complexity of socio-economic problems, such as the concerns of privacy arising from the internet of things. Thankfully, it is often the case that complex problems have more potential for solutions. Enter artificial intelligence, a technology so revolutionary, that “it has the potential to incrementally add 16 percent by 2030” to global economic output, a number equivocal to the current GDP of China. In the next 20 years, AI has the potential to slash the costs of prediction (Agrawal, 2018) improving productivity (and potentially relieving some social problems). For economists, (narrow) AI’s capabilities are able, to put it simply, precisely model positive economics and predict trends. After 20 years, however, AI has the potential to be so much more. AGI, or artificial general intelligence is predicted by most AI experts to appear after 2040 (Mueller and Bostrom, 2014).
By far the most significant problem in the next 20 years is dealing with the disruption AI is inevitably going to cause. The scale of its implications are immense – AI could potentially automate 47% of jobs and the digitised economy could lead to unequal development as the less technologically literate are excluded, including the 4 billion people still offline(Manyika, 2017). Moreover, artificial intelligence has the potential to empower certain groups of individuals. Brynjolfsson argues that “technology-driven economy greatly favours a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck”. As wealthier individuals become the ones who can afford the education to achieve mastery of technology, which in turn gives them greater career opportunities, we can observe technology’s role in magnifying wealth inequalities. At the same time, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that AI could render many people unemployed, as it could automate analytic and predictive jobs. Harari, author of the bestselling Homo Deus, argues that AI will outperform our cognition, which is what makes humans distinct from any known entity. He recognises there have been similar threats before, but the dawn of AGI, he proposes, will eclipse any other human function. As employment opportunities are taken away, livelihoods are lost and some areas never recover. The workers of the rust belt areas of the US are ill-equipped for other kinds of work, and the dissent, bred by unemployment, has burst out to the political sphere, a factor that some attribute to the populist phenomenon. Due to the unpredictable nature of AI, it is difficult to pinpoint when AI can replace humans. Recursive self-improvement is the ability for intelligent beings to exponentially increase their knowledge. As beings get smarter, they can learn quicker. This would eventually result in what Irving John Good dubbed the “intelligence explosion”, a point in time where the the intellectual gains made by AI would be incomprehensible. If the median experts’ estimate is to be trusted, and AGI becomes a reality in 20 years, it is imperative for economists to analyse and overcome the challenges, as the alternative is chillingly unthinkable.
The rise of environmental movements, such as the extinction rebellion, signify a shift in public attitude towards the negative externalities of production. No longer are the social spillover effects ignored by a generation that are more likely to be outspoken on such issues. The scale of the issue is clear and the science is well-known. From an economic perspective, it cost North America 415 billion in the last 3 years, and is set to increase. It also impacts poorer communities disproportionately. A study conducted by Nature revealed that climate change reduces average income in the poorest countries by 75%, while some wealthier countries gain income. This is due to the fact that agriculture is the industry most affected by climate change as unpredictable weather decreases crop yields, crippling agricultural economies, which tend to be LEDCs. They also do not have the infrastructure, or the capital to invest in infrastructure allowing them to adapt to our changing climate. Without flood walls, or weather-resistant crops, it is a herculean task for these communities to face climate change alone. The central issue of scarcity here, is the fact that resources become more scarce, as the cost of production increases through the realisation of negative externalities. Moreover, these negative externalities only have a minute effect on the producer, and it is often the case that the people who benefit the least from climate-changing activity. This raises the question: How do we incentivise climate-changing actors to give up their private gains for an altruistic purpose? The fact that scarcity is central to the climate change problem makes it very much a relevant economic issue. How can we allocate resources to prevent, or reduce the effects of inevitable climate change? How do we support LEDCs, who are disproportionately affected by climate change? How do we encourage sustainable development? Climate change remains undeniably an economic problem.
Whilst it is certain that disruptive technologies leave social scientists unable to adapt to relentless technological progress by perhaps challenging our traditional axioms of economics, the failure of our discipline to resolve certain social issues owes to the systemic flaws in modern economics itself. For example, Anderson, in ‘The fate of economics and the role of economists’ argued that “economists have become more partisan and mathematical in their training”. Consequently, they produce “quantitative partisan perspectives” which are manipulated by political agents with agendas, leading to disingenuous ‘truths’. Instead, he argued, that we should focus on multi-disciplinary approaches, which adds subjectivity and context to a discipline that demands it, imputable to the complex nature of the subject. The criticisms do not end there. One quick google search would yield thousands of calls to end the current monetary policies, or articles spilling the beans on the realities of neoliberalism. There is some truth to these claims. Social issues such as inequality, or housing crises, is, to a substantial extent caused by systemic flaws in the discipline. Naturally, this is a divisive topic amongst economists. On one hand, libertarian thinkers such as the Cato Institute argue that wealth inequality is caused by cronyism. They argue that “businesses gained privileges from the government that undermined the public interest” which generates inequality. On the other, some argue that firms hold too much power, and taxes are needed to redistribute wealth. Nonetheless, both sides imply that the reason for inequality are previous economists’ failure to produce and apply good economics.
Likewise, artificial intelligence, if not applied properly, could not only be ineffective in solving our current issues, but could create more problems than it solves – the accuracy of AI predictions are, crucially, subject to the way economists use this powerful tool. This is an undeniable threat, shown through the claims by alarmed experts in the previous paragraphs. These are internal problems, problems that are symptomatic of systemic flaws (rather than external factors of science and politics) which is too large of a problem that infects, and simultaneously is made worse by external problems.
In this seminal epoch of history, it is paramount that economists remember their purpose in society, which, ultimately, is to “improve the living conditions of people in their everyday lives”(Samuelson and Nordhaus, 1998). Whilst we should wholeheartedly celebrate the successes of economics in advising global development, we must accept that it is yet an incomplete science, and not to treat is as a paragon of social organisation. To attend to the aforementioned problems is an imperative matter, but this can only be achieved by revising our practice of the discipline.
Citations
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Tavani, Daniele. “Artificial Intelligence, the Future of Work, and Inequality.”
Phys.org, Phys.org, 31 May 2019, phys.org/news/2019-05-artificial-intelligence-future-inequality.html.
Urban, Tim, and Tim Urban →. “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2.” Wait But Why, 15 Nov. 2019, waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html. | https://augustinhk.medium.com/which-problems-will-economists-need-to-solve-within-the-next-20-years-and-will-artificial-f1241c8e508c | ['Augustin Tsang'] | 2020-07-10 19:49:09.916000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Climate', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Partisanship'] |
Very simple Python script for extracting most common words from a story | Very simple Python script for extracting most common words from a story
Simple Python script without the use of heavy text processing libraries to extract most common words from a corpus.
What is the most used word in all of Shakespeare plays? Was ‘king’ more often used than ‘Lord’ or vice versa?
To answer these type of fun questions, one often needs to quickly examine and plot most frequent words in a text file (often downloaded from open source portals such as Project Gutenberg). However, if you search on the web or on Stackoverflow, you will most probably see examples of nltk and use of CountVectorizer. While they are incredibly powerful and fun to use, the matter of the fact is, you don’t need them if the only thing you want is to extract most common words appearing in a single text corpus.
Below, I am showing a very simple Python 3 code snippet to do just that — using only a dictionary and simple string manipulation methods.
Feel free to copy the code and use your own stopwords to make it better!
import collections
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline # Read input file, note the encoding is specified here
# It may be different in your text file
file = open('PrideandPrejudice.txt', encoding="utf8")
a= file.read() # Stopwords
stopwords = set(line.strip() for line in open('stopwords.txt'))
stopwords = stopwords.union(set(['mr','mrs','one','two','said'])) # Instantiate a dictionary, and for every word in the file,
# Add to the dictionary if it doesn't exist. If it does, increase the count.
wordcount = {} # To eliminate duplicates, remember to split by punctuation, and use case demiliters.
for word in a.lower().split():
word = word.replace(".","")
word = word.replace(",","")
word = word.replace(":","")
word = word.replace("\"","")
word = word.replace("!","")
word = word.replace("“","")
word = word.replace("‘","")
word = word.replace("*","")
if word not in stopwords:
if word not in wordcount:
wordcount[word] = 1
else:
wordcount[word] += 1 # Print most common word
n_print = int(input("How many most common words to print: "))
print("
OK. The {} most common words are as follows
".format(n_print))
word_counter = collections.Counter(wordcount)
for word, count in word_counter.most_common(n_print):
print(word, ": ", count) # Close the file
file.close() # Create a data frame of the most common words
# Draw a bar chart
lst = word_counter.most_common(n_print)
df = pd.DataFrame(lst, columns = ['Word', 'Count'])
df.plot.bar(x='Word',y='Count')
An example of the code output and plot of the 10 most frequently used words in the corpus. The text is ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and you can see the familiar names of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy! :) | https://towardsdatascience.com/very-simple-python-script-for-extracting-most-common-words-from-a-story-1e3570d0b9d0 | ['Tirthajyoti Sarkar'] | 2017-11-28 01:00:37.014000+00:00 | ['NLP', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Text Analytics'] |
Enchanted Stream | Free-Verse Poetry
Enchanted Stream
You are never the same
Sitting
at your side
I hear your song
but never
the same song.
I see you
freely flowing
but never
with the same water.
Ripples
crashing on the rocks
but never
the same ripples
and never
the same rocks.
You are
in the same place
but you are
never the same.
You enchant
with your marvel
you bring
joy to my soul.
I will treasure
this moment
my enchanted
stream. | https://medium.com/blueinsight/enchanted-stream-15b01316ee84 | ['Ivette Cruz'] | 2020-12-28 15:11:42.411000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Blue Insights', 'Poetry', 'Nature', 'Motivation'] |
How Much Do You Know About Your Data And Is Your Product Ready To Benefit From Data Science? | How Much Do You Know About Your Data And Is Your Product Ready To Benefit From Data Science? Wilson Wong Follow Jun 19 · 12 min read
This is the second part of a 3-part article on the four hurdles to creating value from data. In the first part, we gave an overview of the four hurdles. We posited that the main challenges in extracting value from investments into all things data boil down to who (and to a lesser extent what) the businesses invest in and the order in which they happen. In this second part, we will discuss in detail the first two hurdles (of the four in total) that organisations need to overcome in order to get data working for them:
Lack of appreciation of the different types of data and what each entail
Products, data assets and budgets that are not ready
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
There is more to data than you might think
It is often a good idea to develop a deeper understanding of the things that you have to deal with before you actually start dealing with them and data are definitely one of them. Do you know that there are many types of data out there? And by type, I do not mean things like int, float and char in Computer Programming 101, or categorical, ordinal, etc in Statistics. Instead, we are discussing about data in the context of their roles in building data solutions at the enterprise level. There could be as few or as many depending on who you ask. It is one of those things that even the people with their skin in the game cannot agree on. Some say there are the magic number 13 (unholy, yes I know) while others posited that there are 7 (then revised to 11) types. The discussion here is not so much about the exact number as it is about what they stand for which has implications on how they are managed and used, and the ensuing challenges. I have always related rather well to the distinction of “things” vs “activities”, which has also been covered elsewhere. In other words, there are only two types of data in the context of this discussion, and it is data about things and data about their activities.
Data about things can be referred to in a few ways. The more widely known one is master data from the master data management discipline. This type of data is used to represent the key entities or objects that underpin the business’ operations, e.g., customers, products, users, reviews, places. This type of data also covers reference data, which is further data to classify and categorise the things with which they are associated. Reference data can exist as predefined flat lists such as product types (e.g., free, premium) or it can also be richer in the form of a taxonomy or ontology. For instance, each user in the master data record can have a job title or topics of interest, which further contextualise or describe the entities beyond the 4 walls of the enterprise. This type of reference data give more in-depth and advanced organisation and understanding of the master data in ways that otherwise would not be possible. Take the example of a subset of the users who have “iOS Developer” as their job titles and the other subset with “Android Developer”. Through the rich reference data in the form of a job title ontology, we can infer that these two groups of users are essentially related through a parent “Mobile App Developer”.
The other type of data is data about the activities by the things. In more main streams terms, these cover the more traditional transaction data, e.g., this customer buys that product, as well as the more modern day ones such as this user likes that review or this user is in this place where customers, products, users, reviews and places are all things. The term “big data” is typically reserved and used to describe the latter which takes the form of continuous streams of events from large online marketplaces, products and services that exist purely online and internet of things devices. As one would expect, across both traditional and big activities data, timestamps, some numeric values to qualify the transactions, and references in the form of unique identifiers to the things that are involved with the activities. For the purpose of this discussion, excuse my casual use of “small” data to refer to everything else besides big data.
Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash
While most businesses are rather familiar and capable with the managing of their data about things and the more traditional data about activities, the challenge is often appreciating the drastically different mindset and infrastructure needed to cater for big data. This is where most organisations that struggle to get value from their investment into big data trip over. This is where the race ends for such businesses even before it begins. Many of the opportunities for innovation using data rest with big data that are thoughtfully fused with everything else that organisations already have. I have seen organisations that expect value from big data before they have even invested in the right technology and more importantly bring big data together with small data in a way that can be worked on. Please do not fall into that trap. Why?
Firstly, big data need an entirely different set of tools to deal with compared to when you only have to manage small data — starting from the point when they get captured and being stored through to the different processing steps that take place to make them ready for use by data professionals. There is a whole raft of concepts and technologies that you would need to wrap your head around such as Kafka to deal with messaging between large number of data producers and consumers, S3, HDFS and Cassandra to deal with cloud or distributed storage of large volume of structured or unstructured data, and Spark and MapReduce to access and process the data, amongst others.
Secondly, having specialised infrastructure to deal with big data is not enough if you have not designed and built it with consideration for how both data big and small would interact. They are both critical to building the “data moat” for your business. Treating them separately could introduce serious gaps in the potentials of the data that your data professionals are trying to work with. An example would be, say you have 5 million events flowing through every day about users interacting with pets advertisements on your marketplace. These are activities data in huge volume. If your data infrastructure does not help resolve the users and the pets back to who they really are using your data about things, then your big data is as useful as a spade for your drilling task. This is when concepts such as transformation and enrichment of your big data supplemented with small data are critical.
Thirdly, we need to give small data the much needed attention as they are often overlooked in the middle of the big data hype. As discussed earlier, there is more to small data than just the usual data about the explicit aspects of things such as names, email addresses and phone numbers of customers and users. More and more so data scientists who attempt to build smarter AI solutions to problems are beginning to realise that the power of big data can be greatly amplified with small data — more specifically taxonomies and ontologies that supplement the otherwise flat lists of reference data. For instance, knowing that a user is an Android developer is useful but what would be 10x more valuable is knowing how a subset of developers are connected to another subset of users through the sheer fact that they are both mobile app developers. This piece of knowledge would only come through ontological assets.
The availability of open or proprietary carefully curated and managed data assets enables better intent recognition and better understanding of the semantics of content for semantic search. [src]
In short, before you venture any further into investing into data technology and infrastructure, let alone building out teams of data professionals and expecting products to be improved instantaneously, the awareness of the different types of data, what they stand for and how they should be managed are critical. If you are not data savvy, make sure you have someone alongside you who are empowered to strategise and make the calls on data investment to advice you.
Are your products, data assets and budgets ready?
Having the biggest big data in the world will not fix a broken product or one that you do not quite understand the market fit. This is especially true if you do not yet have the infrastructure to help you make the raw data useful or are not tracking the right data. It goes without saying that data professionals such as analyst and scientists need meaningful data in usable forms for them to work with. In the previous section, we discussed a lot about the more nuanced aspects of data and the need to factor them into any investment decisions on technology and tooling. In addition to the data infrastructure aspects of readiness, the state that your product is in is also important. This is the case of before building big teams of data professionals and investing too much in the relevant data technology, you have to make sure that your product managers are doing their job. Let us dissect what I mean by that.
Data science requires data to science, and most companies don’t have much data on day one. [src]
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Assume you are the product manager of the search product in Company Pets4U. Your job is to make that sure that there is high volume of activities and transactions using the search engine. The product was built without much user research or any understanding their jobs to be done. However, what you do know is that data are important so you plug in something that you are familiar with, say Google Analytics. It provides you with metrics about how many visitors you get, how many searches each perform, the top keywords, perhaps even conversion from clicks on the results to successful pet adoption. You then get some dashboards to monitor how your search product is going and the numbers tell you that the search volume is low, less than a tenth of your user base perform searches, and if they search, they do so infrequently, and the conversion is abysmal. You were alarmed and thought about getting some data science help to make your search better. You put forward a case, got a junior data scientist and tasked the poor fellow to fix the problems. Please do not fall into that trap. Why?
Firstly, as the product manager for the search engine, you have to ask yourself this — are users using it the way you intended for them to solve whatever problems they are trying to solve. Many things can cause poor level of user activities and conversion, and for a number of them, data science cannot solve. If the product that you have built do not quite help the users with what they need to do, your tracked data are unlikely to tell you that without potentially trying to connect dots that do not exist. You need to first go back to the basics of user research and other ways of validation that could involve data but not the kind that data science deals with. It could be the case that the users do not need a search engine. Instead they need a recommendation product that emails them with suggestions of pets for adoption. In other words, you could potentially be giving the users a shovel when they need a drill. If such is the case, then you may be doing everything right by the data tracking and infrastructure book but the usefulness of the data is questionable. This is the case of the product not being ready for data scientists to work on.
Secondly, even if we assume that the poor adoption of your product or dissatisfaction of your users are caused by things that can be solved with data science, in the scenario above it is unlikely that your product has collected enough data or data in a way that is suitable for data science solutions. Often with off-the-shelf tracking solutions, they are designed and marketed for product analytics purposes. What this means is that you are unlikely to get the level of granularity in data that data scientists need to work with to produce machine learning models, etc. In this case, you might know that your product is not performing well but your data scientists would not have the data prerequisites to try to dissect further and actually solve it. All the discussions in the previous section about the different types of data and how they need to be considered in the choice of technology and infrastructure have to be put into practice here. The inability to do that well will greatly hamper the readiness of the data assets that get produced for data professionals to work on. In addition to that, involving the right people who will actually be working with the data earlier on to define the requirements is often a good idea.
Thirdly, on the point of budget, I know that a junior data scientist costs much less to your business than say a senior or lead level person. But as we have all heard of the saying, you get what you pay for. The issue here is not so much about the technical abilities of the junior person filling the role. Rather it is the person’s ability to find the solution that is just right for the problem you are trying to solve given all the constraints that you face without going overboard or entirely missing the mark. This takes years of grooming and practice in the right environments to build up the experience. This is especially bad if the expectation is that the junior data scientists are to work independently with very little guidance. Often my suggestion is that if you are starting out, hiring few experienced ones is ideal instead of many junior roles. In addition to being able to work on your problems with the right solutions more independently, the more senior people are also more likely to be “full stack”. In other words, they have wider range of experience and knowledge and able to perform greater range of tasks that traditionally would not fall into the realm of data science such as data engineering, deployment of models, etc. Do not get me wrong, junior data scientists are great but almost always only after you have a team of more experienced data professionals.
In short, it is perfectly OK for your organisations and your products not to have embraced data yet to solve your problems if you are not ready, for reasons discuss above. As they say, do not put the horse before the cart. It is perfectly OK to spend the early days focusing on the strategy and the market, and validating your products with small data and verbatim feedback. It is also likely that initially, you will find yourself doing a lot of grunt work to prepare whatever data needed to power your new products once you have found a spot in the market for what you are doing and collecting the right data for the future. Data professionals cannot work with data that do not exist. At the same time, once your products and data assets are ready, make sure you hire right. If your business is in its early stages and you can afford it, start with more experienced individuals to work on the data to maximise the chances of getting the outcomes you want.
The last part of the 3-part article is:
If you need to refer back to the first part, it is here:
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/four-hurdles-to-creating-value-from-data-part-2-of-3-e0e1d74f625b | ['Wilson Wong'] | 2020-10-19 05:01:43.511000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Innovation Management', 'Return On Investment', 'Data Strategy', 'Data Science'] |
How To Use Social Media To Drive New Business | Originally published at coupleofcreatives.com on May 9, 2017.
Since becoming a business owner I’ve noticed the massive amount of ways an entrepreneur can prospect to drive new business. Social media has made it easier than ever to drive new business and reach greater distances and its no wonder why.
The age old tactics of marketing such as cold-calling, drop-ins, print ads and more still apply today but are quickly taking a back seat to new digital providers such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and Social Media networks alike.
Being a business owner yourself, you probably don’t have a ton of experience in marketing and if you do you might not be able to keep up with the latest trends. This is all perfectly ok. New digital advertising providers make it easy for anyone to promote their business or purpose but I’m here to tell you that to start gaining new prospects you don’t immediately need to take out ad space.
Start for free with social media.
Why social media?
Picture this. I can share a blog post sitting at my home in the midwestern United States only to notice someone on Twitter from Russia retweeted it. That’s pretty amazing when you sit back and think about how far we’ve come.
Assuming the content you share is quality stuff, you may also see a bit of a chain reaction take place. The community (facebook, twitter, etc..) might be fond of your share and share it themselves. This later compounds with their own peers and you suddenly become the hype for a bit. This is powerful stuff.
Not everything you share people will find interesting. In fact, starting out it will seem like no one gives a crap about you. This is normal.
The best method you can do is simply test the waters. Be sure to target the niche your business is in and start sharing relevant content. The content you share can be a mixture of your own content and other peoples. At the end of the day, you want to build trust with your followers and also offer something they need or want. That is good business after all, right?
Setting Your Business Socials Up For Success
You want to be sure your presence is consistent to the public. Before sharing anything on social media stop what you are doing and make sure to do the following:
Make every social profile you plan to utilize have consistent branding
Gather content that’s relevant and high quality. Don’t post randomness.
Create branded assets you can apply to your shares. For example, If you are marketing a specific product you can create images that relate and include your company’s branding or messaging. Assuming you have no copywriting constraints you can do this to a lot of media today to make your marketing efforts more impressionable.
Be open to sharing different types of content (video, blog posts, downloads, resources). People resonate with being “real”. If you market lies and doesn’t deliver whatever it is you are marketing you are doing it wrong.
Set aside some time to interact with those that interact with whatever it is you share. Show your followers you actually care about them! This could be replying to comments, reaching out to them individually via email, or even following their social profiles.
This could be replying to comments, reaching out to them individually via email, or even following their social profiles. Realize that nothing happens over night. Make an effort to be strict with your content publishing schedule. Be consistent no matter what. It all takes a ton of time and effort.
Social Media Marketing For Free
We have a pretty balanced sharing schedule at Couple of Creatives. A big part of our marketing is utilizing the content on our blog to generate inbound traffic to our website.
Once a user lands on our site we have various call to actions for them to get in touch with us. Before anyone visits our website we first need to broadcast the new content that gets produced weekly.
To do this we share across Facebook, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. All of these social media networks collectively allow our followers to keep up to speed with what we are working on as well as show our colleagues and prospects that we mean business.
*Pro Tip
If you decide to start sharing and want to across similar channels as us we make use of a nifty tool called Buffer. This tool allows you to post across all of these channels at once as well as schedule your shares for each. It’s very powerful and is a massive time saver. Be sure to check it out!
The Chain Starts With Social Media
For your own business, you can take a similar approach. I can’t recommend enough the importance of having a blog. The benefits are two-fold but most importantly you give a new place for new readers to visit and learn more about you. This is done by sharing across all the social media networks you utilize. Over time, if your content is top quality more visitors will show and take notice of your efforts.
Through this increase in visitors, you can begin to capture more information such as an email address and name of a visitor. From there you can take to email marketing and offer incentives or rewards to loyal followers who might make a great customer of yours going forward.
As you can see it all starts with social media assuming you are using it as your main marketing channel. Through the links and content, you share you can create new traffic to your own website. From there you might get conversions who could potentially be new customers.
The Power of Consistency
Sharing simply isn’t enough. Apart from also creating great content, you need to be doing so consistently. Quantity doesn’t matter so much as it’s consistent. Obviously, if you think sharing a blog post every six months is going to work you might guess again.
At Couple of Creatives, we try our hardest to deliver a new blog post once per week all year long. This number only goes up from there if we decide to ramp up the authoring calendar. By doing this, and then sharing it across all our channels we see feedback in a consistent manner as well. We hope long term exposure to both our written content and interactive content will prove to be valuable to future visitors and clients.
Action Items For New Business
So you’ve gotten this far. You’re still in the dark about how to leverage social media successfully.
Get access to a FREE 7-step guide to help drive new business using social media. | https://medium.com/couple-of-creatives/how-to-use-social-media-to-drive-new-business-50c8a348515b | ['Andy Leverenz'] | 2017-05-09 23:53:06.527000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Small Business Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Small Business', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
#DrewsViews: Tips for Finding a Queer-Friendly Therapist | It’s no surprise that 2020 has been a really difficult year for a lot of people. With all of the curveballs we’ve been thrown, I have no doubt that a lot of people have been struggling with their mental health, and have looked into seeing a therapist, counselor, or other mental health or support professional. While a lot of therapists are really great, there are some who might be biased in one way or another, including being transphobic, or just not know a whole lot about LGBTQ+ issues. As someone who started going to therapy in 2020, here are my 4 tips for finding a queer-friendly therapist!
Look for what you want
This sounds simple enough, but oftentimes people forget that there are a lot of options for people seeking mental health help. When looking up the counselors available to you, try using search terms such as “lgbtq,” “transgender,” or “queer friendly” to find people who publicize themselves as safe for LGBTQ+ people. You can also look into resources online, like databases that specialize in keeping track of available LGBTQ+ friendly counselors.
See what your local LGBTQ+ centers and universities have
My university has free short term counseling that is available for all of their students, and a lot of schools have programs like that. LGBTQ+ community centers, like The Center in Orlando, and JASMYN in Jacksonville, have counselors on staff who can help you. If not, they will know other counselors in your area and be able to connect you with resources.
Consider online therapy as an option
Studies show that it works just as well as in person therapy, and in this digital age, a lot of counseling has been done online. My therapy has been entirely online, and I have had a really good experience. Zoom therapy does have its limitations though, as certain therapy practices, like EMDR, do work better in person, but your online therapist can help you find an in person therapist if needed.
Ask around
A lot of times the best way to find a queer friendly therapist is to ask other queer people. Unfortunately, LGBTQ+ people have a high rate of mental health problems. While that isn’t good, it does mean that we tend to go to therapy. Try asking people in your community who they go to, or who they have heard good things about!
2020 has been a hard year, but therapy has been great for me, and therapy can make your 2021 a little easier. Happy holidays everyone! | https://medium.com/matthews-place/drewsviews-tips-for-finding-a-queer-friendly-therapist-b0a82ae276a3 | [] | 2020-12-09 18:06:20.015000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Therapist', 'Therapy', 'Mental Health', 'LGBTQ'] |
The 9,000 Pound Something | My favorite thing about living in Utah from a sociological perspective is how much power the Mormon Church has and how many members try to simultaneously downplay this power as well as use it when it suits their needs.
Before I’m accused of being a bitter former-Mormon, let me state that my interest in this topic is purely anthropological. It is a fascinating study of human dynamics. There is a hegemony here. To deny that is an extreme expression of denial and ignorance. It’s how humans here treat and respond to this hegemony that fascinates. It’s not necessarily the beliefs or the practices of those beliefs, but the cultural implications of a homogenous society. There is no separation of Church and State in Utah. The Mormon Church is too powerful a lobby to let that happen. The membership is vocal. Even in the most segregated neighborhoods in urban centers, I can’t think of anywhere else in the United States where an organization/creed/religion has such a reaching political and social power with it’s constituency. Perhaps within the African American community or maybe in the South or the Jewish community in Los Angeles? Either way, there is no other State in the Union whose government is made up of such a majority.
Also, many friends who are practicing Mormons are more open than those portrayed in the media. Just like any other subculture, there is a stereotype. One sees it daily, but my closest Mormon friends have a relaxed vibe that isn’t the stereotypically uptight, stoic and conservative used in sound bites and stories the world over. I’m not trying to disrespect anybody, but rather point to this cultural uniqueness and observe.
There is an almost passive-aggressive quality to the power, from both the membership and the leadership of the church. Issues have a way of being made larger and taking on an evangelical nature. Just read these stories (hopefully, the links will stay active longer than a day or two)…
It’s true that if one lives in Utah, no matter what your belief system, or lack thereof, you can’t ignore the Mormon cultural impact. One is affected always. It is utterly compelling to observe. | https://medium.com/blurb-o-mat/the-9-000-pound-something-b779593d4291 | ['Jon Armstrong'] | 2016-06-20 00:52:24.813000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Utah', 'Culture', 'Politics'] |
Looking At Sasha | I now consider it bad form to center my life around someone. It is a sort of embarrassment to think of Sasha when I think of my days as a teenager; like sisters or married people we were with each other constantly. This is another thing I remember very clearly, sitting in Sasha’s parents’ house when we were seventeen, Sasha standing at the stove stirring a stick of butter into a pot of rice. Sasha made the simplest foods, white rice and chicken, pilaf and brownies, no dishes without small mountains of salt heaped atop them. At home she wore corduroys and t-shirts she had gotten for free at fundraisers and community service events. She had parents from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Her family was the type that covered their refrigerator door in photos, the table was large enough only for four, her mother always left small bowls of M&Ms out in the theme of the season — red and green at Christmas, and pink at Valentine’s. Her mother didn’t like me, or didn’t like that Sasha had a boyfriend but liked me better than him.
My dailiness with Sasha: it was this bodily feeling of the whirlpool, the sense that my body knew itself to belong to her, and beside it the whisper of fear. The fear is why it is so strange to think of Sasha in my car after Tasty Burger, the smell of French fries and salt, the house she no longer lives in, and my voice, why now? After prom night we had a party in my mother’s barn. Back then we lived on a farm on the west side of town; the horses were sleeping on the bottom floor, and we nestled into the attic. She had found out whatever there was about me to find out, it had to do with the look I gave her in that moment on the golf course when she was about to swing, the compact muscles of her back, her bare arms. It wasn’t something I felt I could tell Sasha — Sasha who had brought me with her to the country club for golf, Sasha who led food drives and organized the annual antique car show in the center of town in the summertime. I didn’t mean to tell her but she knew, and after prom we were so pretty and bright and slick with our own hopes that she could not help but look it in the eye.
Then we were tired and lost in the barn attic. Looking at each other like new animals, raw skin, half-blind eyes. She went outside on the grass by the paddocks. She wore her boyfriend’s tuxedo shoes below her pajamas, enormous boats of shoes, walking back and forth on the low wooden walls my mother had put up around the vegetable garden to keep out the rabbits. It was bluer than it was dark.
In the diary entry I wrote after prom night it’s hardly anything like I remember it. When she pulled the butter out of the fridge I wanted to say “I love you,” when she cracked the eggs I wanted to say “I love you,” when she flipped the pancakes I wanted to say “I love you,” when Evan put his arms around her I wanted to say “I LOVE YOU.” I wanted to say, “you look beautiful.” I wanted to say, “please.” After breakfast when everyone had gone she threw her phone at me and left the barn while I cried and my lip bled. | https://medium.com/little-fiction-big-truths/looking-at-sasha-4435ebeb1e64 | ['Little Fiction'] | 2017-08-07 20:42:09.372000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'Relationships', 'LGBTQ'] |
6 must-reads for new technical leaders | 3. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work — by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
It doesn’t have to be crazy at work is that one book among our suggested list that will go against everything you will read and learn from the other resources.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of Basecamp, argue that a successful, profitable company shouldn’t require it’s employees to work crazy hours, forfeit holidays, and live in constant stress. They argue that there’s a calmer way of running a business, where you sacrifice insane short-term growth in favour of sustainable, continuous long-term growth.
If there’s anyone who can talk about sustainable growth, it’s these two. Basecamp has been around 21 years (yes — Basecamp was founded in 1999!) and it had $25m in revenue this year, with $0 outside investment and 63 employees.
One important takeaway from the book is that there’s currently a lot of buzz on social media about the crazy attitude and sacrifices needed to build a successful company. There are slogans in support of this, like “Extreme talent isn’t necessary, but extreme commitment is!” The book recounts a tale about Charles Darwin, the legendary evolutionary scientist, who wrote 19 books during his lifetime and is said to have never worked more than four and a half hours a day. The authors think that the solution to this craziness is “pacifism”: focusing on your own business, not the competition.
As a fresh technical lead, it’s your responsibility that your employees have a healthy life-work balance, that their stress levels are not constantly insane (let’s be honest, there’s no entirely stress-free technical job, but the stress can be managed). Your main goal is to protect your employees’ time. “No meetings that can be replaced with an email” is a great rule of thumb for achieving this. | https://medium.com/better-programming/6-must-read-books-for-new-technical-leads-99e9737b8630 | ['Catalin Ionescu'] | 2020-12-17 10:29:16.231000+00:00 | ['Technical Leadership', 'Management', 'Technology', 'Books', 'Programming'] |
Managing Running Container Lifetimes with the Docker Python SDK | I began building a service recently that will, upon user request, create a container (to provide said service, not a Container-as-a-Service-style workload), and then after 1–3 hours, terminate the container (taking the user’s session and local data away with it). The process for this required that I:
Retrieve the container’s StartedAt timestamp Compare that timestamp to see if it’s been more than however long I’d like to limit a session to. If a container is over that limit, it is queued for being Stopped and then ultimate the image pruned (in a separate task)
The setup for the script looks something like:
from datetime import datetime
import docker, dateparser
and then initializing a string for comparison, normalized to look like the Docker API-provided timestamp (these get converted further down, this is just for readability in stdout and, while debugging, I can visually inspect the timestamps):
STARTING_TIME = str(datetime.now()).split(" ")[0]+ "T" + str(datetime.now()).split(" ")[1] + "Z"
then, before we do anything else, setup the Docker client:
client = docker.APIClient(base_url='unix://var/run/docker.sock')
In the SDK, stopping a container requires the use of the Low level API functionality, so unless you require these features, you can leave the client set to docker.from_env() without any further arguments.
def compare_time(run_time,container_started_at): dt = dateparser.parse(container_started_at).timestamp() mt = dateparser.parse(run_time).timestamp() interval = mt - dt return interval
This function will take two arguments: the STARTING_TIME above (when the script started running) and the timestamp the container was created, and converts them to seconds, and returns that time in seconds.
def eval_interval(interval): eval = (interval / 60 ) / 60 if eval > 2.0: return True else: return False
then we are checking if that difference in time exceeds, in this case, 2 hours. If it does, it returns True , which in the next function, indicates a running container is safe to terminate:
def check_containers(): to_delete = [] for c in client.containers.list(): start_at = c.attrs['State']['StartedAt'] interval = compare_time(STARTING_TIME,start_at) deleteable = eval_interval(interval) print(c.name + " (" + c.id + ") " + str(c.image) + " " + str(deleteable)) if deleteable == True: to_delete.append({"id": c.id, "name": c.name}) else: continue return to_delete
The to_delete list this returns is a list of dictionaries that contains the id and name of the containers it detected a deletable value of True , with that in hand, it is handed to a function to delete, or handle:
def delete_containers(to_delete): failed_deletions = [] for c in to_delete: try: running_container = str(c['id']) print("Deleting: " + running_container) print(client.stop(container=running_container)) except: failed_deletions.append(c) print("Failed to delete: " + c.id)
continue return failed_deletions
This ingests the list of deletable containers, and then creates its own list of new containers that could not be deleted (and then optionally, I can handle this however I want in retry behavior later, but for now, it just throws an exception before continuing).
All of this is executed via a main function:
def main(): to_delete = check_containers() delete_expired = delete_containers(to_delete) return delete_expired if __name__ == "__main__": main()
For more about the packages I used: | https://jmarhee.medium.com/managing-running-container-lifetimes-with-the-docker-python-sdk-71b58fb05465 | ['Joseph D. Marhee'] | 2020-11-29 09:10:27.829000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Python', 'Container Orchestration', 'Docker', 'Automation'] |
The Best of AI: New Articles Published This Month (November 2019) | Welcome to the November edition of our best and favorite articles in AI that were published this month. We are a Paris-based company that does Agile data development.
This month, we spotted articles about AI that can identify who wrote each scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, and teach non-native speakers how to pronounce English words! Let’s start, as usual, with the comic of the month:
1 — Predict Impact of a Song on our emotions
Machine Learning, Music and Emotions
Man playing guitar near trees and and body of water — Priscilla Du Preez
In a recent article researchers describe how they trained machine-learning algorithms to predict what features in a song would impact people’s emotional responses.
They predicted brain and heart activities as well as physiological response using features based on music dynamics such as timbre, harmony, etc…
This work helps to understand how music affects human experience and has applications in music emotion recognition and neuroscience.
2 — A Mobile App to Improve English Pronunciation of Non-Native Speakers
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
How to improve your English pronunciation if — like me — you do not always understand why your sentence is wrongly enunciated? A startup used machine learning to tackle this challenge! Blue Canoe created a mobile app directing its users to repeat sentence prompts. Speech-recognition technology then analyzes the recordings and uses machine-learning models to point out the differences. When users spend 10 minutes per day on the app, personalized feedback informs students precisely how they mispronounced words. The startup started by digitizing a 20-year-old methodology called the Color Vowel System. Then, they hired linguists to listen to users’ recordings and tag the problems. Recordings are then used to improve machine-learning models.
3 — Drones to spot missing people
Flying a drone at dusk in the city — Goh Rhy Yan
While California was last month the third state to frame Police use of facial recognition softwares, Police Scotland unveiled this month a new drone using computer vision to search missing and vulnerable people reported BBC. Its recognition software is lightweight enough to be used on a smartphone and uses an optical camera and a sensor detecting heat. Police Scotland’s air support unit detailed aspects of its drone to argue it will not be used to spy citizens: ”We’ll comply fully with all the human rights legislation — in fact a data protection impact assessment has been carried out and we review that yearly. Also, before we deploy we’ll use social media to tell the public this is what we’re doing. ”In addition, its blue light and the sound of its rotors are supposed to alert people of its presence, believes BBC.
4 — Video recognition by Facebook
Facebook’s SlowFast classifying a video. Image Credit: Facebook
PySlowFast — Facebook’s video recognition system — is now available on GitHub and its mechanisms explained in a preprint paper. The main intuition of this system is to reproduce primate’s eye cells. These cells are either functioning at low frequency and focusing on fine details either responding to swift changes. Transposed to this video’s recognition system: the video is treated at a low and at a higher temporal rate. The lower to recognize static areas and the higher to recognize dynamic areas. This model has been confronted to two popular datasets: DeepMind’s Kinetics-400 and Google’s AVA and achieved state-of-the-art results on both.
5 — Full Release of Controversial GPT-2 Text Generating AI
Last November 5, OpenAi finally released the largest version of its controversial model GPT-2, claiming they have not found “strong evidence of misuse so far”. GPT-2 is a deep learning model able to output credible text from a minimal prompt (demo here). This full version was not originally released last February because OpenAi was concerned it could be used to automatically produce Fake News (summary of the debate here). They motivated this late release by the following arguments:
this model version has only a marginally greater “credibility score” compared to already released version (according to a survey by Cornell University).
they acknowledge that “GPT-2 can be fine-tuned for misuse” but argue that “despite having low detection accuracy on synthetic outputs, ML-based detection methods can give experts reasonable suspicion that an actor is generating synthetic text”
they conducted in-house detection research and developed a that has detection rates of ~95% for detecting 1.5B GPT-2-generated text. By releasing this version they aim “to aid the study of research into the detection of synthetic text, although this does let adversaries with access better evade detection”.
6 — French BERT (CamemBERT) now available!
The French version of BERT has been released on huggingface/transformers repo! BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers is a method based on pre-training language representations which obtained state-of-the-art results on a wide array of Natural Language Processing tasks (Google explanations here). This French version has been trained on 138 GB of French text and is available both in Pytorch and Tensorflow 2. This release is the achievement of a collaboration between Facebook AI, INRIA and Sorbonne Université.
7 — Recommending Apps in Google Play Store
In an interesting blog post, Deepmind explained its approaches implementing recommendation algorithms for Google Play Store, in order to “help users discover personalized apps”. The first approach using LSTM (Neural Network used to treat sequences) has been replaced by Transformers, which improved the model performance, but also increased the training cost. Third and final solution was to implement “an efficient additive attention model that works for any combination of sequence features, while incurring low computational cost”. In addition, the blog post introduced recommendation bias problem and how they deal with it: “For instance, if app A is shown in the Play Store 10 times more than app B, it’s more likely to be installed by the user, and thus more likely to be recommended by our model”. They detailed refinements they introduced in re-ranking recommendations and optimizing for multiple objective, such as relevance, popularity, or personal preferences.
8 — Determine Who Wrote each Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Scenes
A new approach on a century-lasting debate!
Theater, Kuala Lumpur — Gwen Ong
Some literary analysts believe that Shakespeare did not write his play Henry VIII alone but has been helped by John Fletcher, the writer who replaced him as playwright of the King’s Men after his dead. In the mid-nineteenth century, literary analyst James Spedding already proposed a division based on the use of eleven-syllable lines. In 1962, an influential analyst divided the play between Shakespeare and Fletcher based on their distinctive word choices, for example Fletcher’s uses of ye for you and ’em for them. And last month, Petr Plecháč of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague claimed he has studied the problem using machine learning to identify the authorship at a more accurate level (not only attributing scenes): “Our results highly support the canonical division of the play between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher proposed by James Spedding”.
9 — Increase Solar Panel Energy Production
Solar Panels — Andreas Gucklhorn
A startup named Heliogen aims to increase solar panel energy production by using advanced computer vision software. Such technology’s impact should not be limited to increase energy production. By accurately aligning mirrors Heliogen expects to be able to reach temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius. Such high temperatures could be used for the industrial applications that currently account for roughly 75 percent of the energy demand through fossil fuel production. In addition, this technology could ultimately provide an alternative to gasoline for powering automobiles by “spliting carbon dioxide and water molecules to produce clean-burning fuels like hydrogen”, the article explains. This AI-backed technology could therefore be a step to successfully use solar energy in fields where still dependent to fossil fuel.
10 — Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification
In an article submitted last November 11, three researchers explained how they obtained 87.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 1.0% better than the state-of-the-art model that requires 3.5B weakly labeled Instagram images. ImageNet is a famous image database often used to measure the performance of image classification neural networks. To achieve this result, they first trained an EfficientNet on labeled ImageNet images and use it to label 300M unlabeled images (it creates pseudo-labels, as these labels are not the ground-truth but a prediction). This first EfficientNet is called the Teacher. Then they trained a larger EfficientNet — called the student — learning to classify both ImageNet and newly labeled images. They iterate this process by using the larger EfficientNet as Teacher, i.e to re-label the dataset of 300M unlabeled images. During the learning of the student, they injected noise such as data augmentation, dropout, stochastic depth to the student so that the student neural network is forced to learn harder from the pseudo labels. But during the pseudo-labelling of the 300M unlabelled images, the teacher is not noised so that the pseudo labels are as good as possible. These researchers stressed that the “main difference between [their] work and prior works is that [they] identify the importance of noise, and aggressively inject noise to make the student better”. The following results show this impact of noise on the network’s results: | https://medium.com/sicara/the-best-of-ai-new-articles-published-this-month-november-2019-5f9699ff26f6 | [] | 2019-12-12 13:17:33.368000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Articles', 'Best Of', 'Data Science'] |
How to (Actually) Use Reddit to Get More Views | Born January 1st, 1984 I’m an early millennial. As such, I have been using social media sites obsessively since I was a kid, I’ve even been wildly unsuccessful at building a few myself.
I’m not proud of the fact that for the last 10 years I’ve used Frindster, MySpace, then Digg, Facebook, moved to Reddit and now Hacker News on a daily basis. Choosing to get my dopamine fix by watching imaginary internet points increase in fits and starts rather than the typical human-to-human way.
Laurène Boglio
Recently I was inspired by posts like these that claim to help you use social media sites like Reddit to increase your traffic or get more users but they are mostly bunk or common sense. Now I may be giving away the secret sauce here but I’ve benefited enough from the following tricks and am ready to move on and share what I’ve learned.
Here is ACTUALLY how to use Reddit to get more users.
I) The Landscape:
1. The number one thing to know is that the VAST majority of people do not interact with the sites they visit AT ALL. Using tools like SmartLook that let me watch users on my sites in real time this was a HUGE revelation for me. Most people open the site, scroll up and down, too fast to actually read what they are looking at, then close it. At best, they will click the first most predominant link or two but that’s it. Only a TINY minority will vote and even fewer, maybe 1 in 1,000 with actually use a social media site as intended, to comment or share their own material.
The BIG lesson to learn from the way people use websites. If your content in not at the top, most people will never see it.
2. The 0.1% of users that do interact will do nothing more than upvote the already top post or comments. People like to think of themselves as expressive but after scrutinizing 100’s of hours of user’s interactions I can tell you that most people are just going with the flow. They upvote what is already at the top. It is why, as the Reddit founders say, the hardest thing about getting Reddit right was the sorting algorithm. A simple list sorted by votes will essentially never change as the top posts just get more and more votes, most people will never see past the first 10 posts let alone the second page.
The BIG lesson to learn from the way people vote on websites. If your content in not at the top, most people will not vote for it.
3. A great mini-study done a few years ago showed the difference in posts that got 1 initial upvote compared to none. Same content posted several days apart, the only difference was one extra initial vote. The outcome, ALL un-upvoted posts failed to get even a single one more, ~25% of those with an extra vote made the front page. I’ve gotten hundreds of posts to the front page leading to millions of page views but not a single one of those came from “organic” growth.
The BIG lesson to learn from what gets to the “front page”. If your post doesn't have any votes, most people will not vote for it.
II) Psychology:
1.Provide the right content to the right people. Confirmation bias is by far the most powerful and important psychological trick for the “grey hat” social media user. Give the people what they want and you’ll be praised as a genius but go against their interest and you will be shunned and ignored. This is why Reddit is perfect for marketers while so destructive for society as a whole. Reddit has presorted people based on their beliefs, all you have to do is cater to the lowest common denominator. Just search “reddit subreddits {your topic}” and you should find several on any given topic. Then given them what they want.
2.Don’t “self-promote”. Make sure you are posting on your friend’s behalf, a “cousin” whatever. People are viscerally attracted to people doing something for someone else and equally turned off by people working for their own betterment.
3. Add “value”. Framing is important and the best way to sell your content is that you have recently learned or discovered something that might benefit others. Again, people (and Reddit especially) hate anything that smells of self promotion so frame your content as a discovery.
III) Boosting Your Posts:
Finally, if you’ve correctly targeted your content to the right audience for nearly guaranteed success all you will need to do is kick it off with at least 5 upvotes. Here is an ideal workflow:
1.Option 1 is using multiple accounts. For this you will need two things, a VPN and extremely good op-sec. Reddit has gotten very good and very strict about banning accounts logged in from the same IP. A VPN will cost you at least $10 a month and if its a good one you will get a nearly infinite list of IPs to use. If you ever accidentally log into more than one account from the same IP you risk getting both accounts banned. You can spend an endless amount of time building karma and making accounts to get them all banned after a single slip up, a frustrating endeavor.
2. Option 2 is to pay for votes. It is safer, faster and if you have the money is by far the way to go. You will end up paying about $1 per upvote. If you want to remain anonymous for most you can pay with Bitcoin or PayPal. Here is a short list of the best ones:
IV) In Closing:
Buying votes is no more unethical than paying for ads on these platforms. My take, these social media sites in and of themselves are unethical and using them to get your content out there is perfectly fair. Some people seem to think that users owe it to these sites like Facebook or Reddit to use them only as intended but that is nonsense. Reddit is abusing their users while selling them crap. They are playing with people’s emotions and it is downright disgusting what “social media” has become. Don’t fall for their non-sense and lies, most have become nothing more than advertising platforms for big business and politics and they need to die off as soon as possible. But as long as they are still around you might as well take advantage. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-actually-use-reddit-to-get-more-views-1ade54acc7d2 | ['Kyle Benzle'] | 2020-11-27 16:02:03.186000+00:00 | ['Reddit', 'Social Media', 'Social Media Marketing', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Marketing'] |
Why Color Matters in Design | The first thing I notice when I visit myBucknell is this extremely long and blaring red banner.
I immediately feel like I’ve done something wrong.
Further investigation shows that these banners are maintenance alerts warning me that the site will be down at some point. Great. I didn’t break anything. But I also haven’t done anything besides open up the website. So why do I feel this way?
As mentioned before, color can evoke reactions in users. This is why color choice is so important when it comes to design. There are certain colors that are actionable, like green or red. Green is usually a calming color that is used to indicate safety or success. Red, on the other hand, is a very hot color used to show warning, danger, or error.
We have been conditioned by society to think this way. Think about a traffic light. Green means go, yellow means slow down (or to some speed up), and red means stop.
The same can be seen with technology. Battery icons are always green when fully charged and red when low. Closing out websites and deleting posts are almost always done by clicking a red icon. When users see such dialogs the red color encourages them to think twice before making the final decision.
Certain colors are engraved in our brains to make us behave a certain way.
Jakob’s Law
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
If we are used to websites having red as a danger/delete button, then we wouldn’t want to use red as a color for positive actions like creating a post, submitting an assignment, or completing a payment. Thus, design should follow what we know and are used to.
A simple fix.
In my example above, myBucknell grabbed my attention away from my original task and instead, had me focused on the bright red banner. To me, the color red naturally gave me pause due to its connotations. It delivered the message that something went wrong at a glance. Although the alert is important, I do not believe it warrants the powerful red color. With a simple change to the color of the banner, the alert is still eye-catching without causing stress to the user. | https://medium.com/grayandr/why-color-matters-in-design-a161ee570658 | ['Andrew Gray'] | 2019-05-02 20:28:14.834000+00:00 | ['Design', 'UX', 'Design Thinking', 'Colors', 'Bad Design'] |
The Powerful Advantage of Writing on Paper | No Distraction
There is no disturbance. That’s the clearest reason I’ve ever returned to paper. The most embarrassing thing about writing on a computer is the ‘touch of temptation’. Just by connecting Wi-Fi, you will be connected to a fantastic Internet world. It looks like five minutes have passed, but thirty minutes have passed. The Internet connection is so time-revolutionary.
I thought computer writing was fast and efficient, but in conclusion, it took longer. Even if I turn off the Wi-Fi and start working, I am connected to the Internet from time to time. The moment the writing is blocked is dangerous. YouTube is fun, and social media, which was not interested in it. But this simple act certainly has some effect on you. It takes not only Internet access time, but also brain warm-up time, time to think about whether to enter or not, and time to focus on work again. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-powerful-advantage-of-writing-on-paper-461894d087e0 | ['Na Young'] | 2020-10-02 22:27:22.875000+00:00 | ['Habits', 'Writing', 'Analog', 'Paper', 'Draft'] |
The Rebel Poets Society | A Rebel’s Prompt: Two Faced Bitches
She Came Through The Window
Calm as a sneaky cat puss purr hear her growl kiss me delight boy can she make you mad rave uppity lady fox bitch on heat game for anything but that’s where she falls over tripping on her own lies dawning hinder foxtrot lovers dawning on her shoulders now red in the neck I could strangle that two-faced CATPISS FUCK LADY who dragged my name through the muddy banks of the yarra indeed the very same one I threw myself over ten over years ago universal force forthright and cunning that’s me I know her every step I am one ahead don’t let it fool you I ain't taken so easily like that bitch a-rollin in it be it dirt well I got shit on my toe I’m rolling around horny wedges between my open sprawling legs sexy slumber radius 50 degrees daylight here she comes slit open with jaws knife split headache trammer boiling brat I fight for my life freedom of grime dust pretty peach butter melts in the mouth of whores get outta mah way chil’ I’m here to stay
Mimi Bordeaux | https://medium.com/the-rebel-poets-society/pictures-of-trotsky-66d9ec0b2925 | ['Mimi Bordeaux'] | 2020-11-19 02:28:37.219000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Storytelling', 'Sex', 'Prompt', 'Kiss'] |
Flutter Community Submission Guidelines | Greetings!
We want you to write great articles, and we know you want to write great articles.
To that end, we’d like to offer a few tips to help make sure you write the kind of great articles we can publish here at Flutter Community.
Submission
If you would like to have your article featured, please feel free to email or reach out to our Editors on Twitter to let us know. Please do not email us the article. Just let us know that you would like to be added as a writer so that Medium will give you the option to submit the article to the Flutter Community publication.
Note: When submitting articles, please do so in draft mode.
Email: community@flutter.zone
Twitter:
Nash — (@Nash0x7E2)
Simon — (@devangelslondon)
Scott — (@scottstoll2017)
Do’s:
Be informative. People are reading your article because they think you have something to tell them they don’t already know.
Make it a reasonable length. A technical article really should be at least four minutes. Anything shorter than four minutes isn’t really telling people very much and is probably too light in content for us to publish. In the other direction, anything over a nine-minute read tends to make the brain itch. If you’re getting close to nine, see if there’s a place you can break it into parts.
Use a header image in at the top of your article. It may not seem necessary when you’re on your article’s page but when it’s listed with other articles in a list, not having an image is going to make a bad impression. The image isn’t necessarily for those reading your article, it’s for people who are browsing the list on the front page.
Provide a place to pause. When an article is just a wall of text then people don’t absorb it very well. This is why experienced writers break an article up into chunks and have a header for each chunk, like the word “Do’s” over this chunk. It’s not just easier to read, it also provides a place for the reader to stop if they need to talk to someone else, chase their child or save the robot vacuum from the cat.
Add some humor. Make it fun. Toss in a gif of a cat… on a robot vacuum.
Even if you’re not being funny, use images… but make sure they make sense in the context of your article.
If you’re writing a new article that you want to publish in Flutter Community, please submit it to F.C. as a draft and don’t publish it to your own page until we publish it here. For one thing, we catch a ton of errors and you don’t want to put your article out there without first having someone go over it carefully. Second, it really does create some strange problems for us on the backend if you publish first and then submit it. Of course, if you’re submitting an article you published a long time ago, ignore all of this.
Are you talking about code? Then use a gist. Medium doesn’t work with the embed link but you can paste the HTML link from you gist in here and it’ll work just fine.
Be different. If you submit an article about how to parse JSON then we’re probably just going to send you to the links to all the other articles we’ve published about parsing JSON, like this awesome one by Pooja that already has over 3500 claps.
USE THE FREE VERSION OF GRAMMARLY. Unless you’re someone with poor English skills who is writing a fantastic technical article that takes on a topic in a great way, we’re not going to rewrite it for you. If an article is technically outstanding and written by someone who is trying their best to write in English, then we will invest three to five hours to rewrite it for them. We have a number of incredible Arab writers for whom English is not easy and, in the past, we’ve sometimes spent an entire day reworking the English in their articles because the articles were so great, they were worth it.
But if English is clearly your first language and you have spelling errors or can’t get “they’re”, “there” and “their” straight; your submission is going to get bounced back to you.
The last is something that applies to me, personally. I go back and reread every one of my articles about an hour after I publish, again two days after I publish and then again a week after I publish. Every single time I end up in a panic, yelling “WTF WAS I THINKING?!?!” while I frantically try to fix five or six embarrassing errors before anyone else might read the article.
You laugh… try it sometime.
Don’ts
Don’t send in “empty articles”. This means don’t send us pieces that tell the reader nothing they didn’t already know. Don’t send in an article that is just your opinion from start to finish, or that doesn’t contain anything the reader can use.
Don’t write three paragraphs about how you’re going to explain something and then copy the doc comments from the source code and try to pass it off as an article. It’s been tried. It won’t get published.
Don’t put installation instructions for a plugin or package in an article. People reading your article aren’t installing it; they’re reading your article because they’re trying to figure out if they want to install it. Besides, the installation instructions are right there in the Readme, we don’t need another copy of them here.
Don’t send us advertisements disguised as articles. “This is the greatest package ever! It’s so awesome, it’s the most awesomest awesome in the history of awesome!” Then we click on the link and see the article was written by the person who made the package.
Let me try to act shocked and surprised… … … … Nope, can’t do it.
Don’t thank your own repo for being so awesome. Yes, it actually happened…
Don’t spam us with a bunch of tiny articles that are all two to three minutes each, or even less, and don’t have much information in them. Especially when it’s nothing but a link to some package and a cut/paste of the Readme about how to install it. It’s pretty obvious when someone is spamming low-quality articles just because they want to be able to say they’ve written a bunch of published articles.
Don’t send us an article if we’ve already published a bunch of good articles on that topic unless the SDK has changed and you’re writing to tell people how to handle the new version, including how it differs from the way things were done before.
If a change in the SDK results in any existing article being wrong, then please let us know. We’ll pull the old one and start actively looking for a replacement. That’s going to happen quite a bit over the next couple of years; so if you’re looking for an opportunity to break into writing, then keep your eyes open. There will be plenty.
In Summary
We want you to write great stuff that we can post. The more great content people can find at Flutter Community, the better it is for everyone. But, at the same time, we can’t just fill up space with things that will leave people feeling like being here was a waste of time, or like they were being spammed with ads disguised as articles.
So remember… Be different, be informative, use Grammarly, don’t advertise and for goodness sake, don’t forget the most important thing:
Cat gifs get claps. | https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-community-submission-guidelines-acf359177d51 | ['Scott Stoll'] | 2019-09-08 15:44:21.529000+00:00 | ['Guidelines', 'Writing'] |
The Amazon Burning Inside Us | Last night I woke up suffocating and gasping for air. Congested from a cold, I work up to a world of burning rainforests, cries for help, witnessing destruction at its worst. I made an effort to awaken from the nightmare, but remembered that I was fully awake, living the world’s biggest nightmare. I tried to calm myself down, but the breath, my only tool for reassuring my body, was failing. In that moment, the Amazon was inside of me, and we were burning together, breathless.
Overtaken by the oppressive forces of far right extremism and greedy capitalism, our planet is burning down, drowning, dying right in front of our eyes. Dominated by the egocentric aggressive powers, devoid of empathy and compassion, our current world order has a tight grip on us, guiding us into straight into an abyss. We all ask ourselves: What has happened? How have we come to this? We blame those in power, and juxtapose ourselves with those ´monstrous´ forces, idealizing the pure intentions in our fight for a better world. Yet deep inside we know that what we see in the outer world, in politics, in the economy, in our social fabric has deep root in each and every one of us. The dark forces we so vehemently condemn in the outer world are choking us from within. And unless we transform the inner world, the outer destruction will continue.
Every time we chose routine over passion, work over purpose, each time we ignore an extended hand or fail to look up from our cell phone screen, every time we find something more ´important´ than being with our children and loved ones, we fail. Each time we buy something we don’t need, each time we pollute our body with poisonous food and our mind with senseless information, each time we chose not to listen, we slowly strangle hopes for a loving compassionate world.
Let’s wake up. Lets stop this senseless fight between the right and left, because at the core we have to first address the struggle between the right and left inside. The chaos in the outer world is fueled by our imbalance between our female and male energies inside. Yin and Yang in Taoism represent the energies of the Tao, the way of the nature, the order of the universe. Water and fire, introversion and extroversion, feeling and speaking, action and rest, they work together to create wholeness. When one overpowers the other, even by a small margin, an imbalance and disease rein in the body, nature, and the universe.
After centuries of patriarchal oppression, authoritarian models of education, rein of knowledge over emotional wellbeing, suppression of desire, female yin energies have dwindled to its lowest levels in all aspects of our existence, individual and societal alike. Our world order, economic and leadership models, organization of society, individual growth and educational/parenting paradigms are all fueled by exaggerated masculine energies raging inside of us: competition, oppression, power struggles, endless action, consumerism, aggression, and dominance.
We now find ourselves come to an impasse, where male energy has completely overtaken all things living, creating gross imbalances, threatening existence itself. The fires in the Amazon, the powerful female force of our planet earth, are warning us of the detriments of allowing unchecked competitive growth to continue.
The values we have come to exaggerate for centuries, the male energy qualities, powerful and extremely valuable when in balance with the yin, are now raging like the fire itself, unstoppable and destructive. It’s no wonder that the subjugation of women’s liberty and the obsession with her body is paralleled with an assault on nature and the greed for extracting from our mother earth without allowing and respecting her need for repose, restorative healing. A woman’s body is an extension of nature, of mother earth, cyclical, nurturing, creative, perfectly in balance, and inviting; resilient when allowed time for repose. Female Yin energy is our way back to balance.
If we are to win this battle, both women and men need to reconnect to their nurturing powerful internal force that lies inside, dormant. Once we rekindle the yin energy of nurturance, love, compassion, rest, flow, letting go, play, and sensuality on an individual level, our organization will inevitably start transforming, one structure at a time. Cut-throat competition will give way to creative and cooperative economy, need for legal action will give way to non-violent communication, leadership models will focus on empathy rather than dominance, corporations will be replaced by conscientious companies, focusing on social entrepreneurship and sustainability in lieu of maximizing profit at all cost, and governments will at last be there to maximize social welfare, providing high quality education, healthcare, and social services for all. But most importantly, empathy and loving will melt away aggression and emptiness, restoring our individual balance, allowing us to be whole again.
The Amazon is burning away because of our collective greed for more. If we are to stop the fires and restore our ecosystems, we as individuals need to look inside, quieten our minds. When we reconnect to our internal flow, when we start following the way that nature intended, when we listen to our bodies, we will welcome back the loving and nurturing forces and know exactly what to do to save our mother-earth. All it will take is stepping out of her way and allowing her to bloom again. Awakening to the present moment, giving love and accepting care, listening rather than proving your point, is the way to reconnect to the Self, to nature, and to become part of the bigger whole once again. Let’s put an end to the fires of our internal Amazon one person at time to allow for our higher consciousness to blossom again and to allow nature to take its course. | https://bellabablumian.medium.com/the-amazon-burning-inside-us-3b5184e7e978 | ['Bella B'] | 2019-08-22 21:28:56.928000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Social Change', 'Amazon'] |
Poet’s Heart | Poet’s Heart
Haibun inspired by haibun a heart prompt
Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash
the date was somewhere in October. I could see the flickering stars in the sky. The night was quiet. The moon looked lonely not an unusual sight for a poet. I collected the stars and emptied them on the page. The poem rhymed with the quietness of the night and I felt elated.
to leave night empty
and ignore the stars you need
to rid poet’s heart. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/poets-heart-f39d50382f45 | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-11-02 11:22:40.784000+00:00 | ['Haibun', 'Heartwork', 'Challenge', 'Writing', 'Community'] |
Debugging Bias: Questioning The Ethics Of Digital | There was once an idyllic time for us nerds. It was a good gig we had going. That lovable group of misfits, the brilliant but misunderstood nerds had a lot of slack cut our way. The scope of our mistakes used to be much smaller; a botched release or a malicious program could only do so much damage in a world where smartphones were novel and high-speed internet was a luxury. But the genie slipped the bottle. Now tech nerds are catching heat from all directions. Like it or not, we have a lot to answer for these days.
Interest groups, journalists, industry insiders, and others started paying attention to our alarming lack of diversity. They started noticing when algorithms priced things based on what neighborhood you live in. When police facial recognition databases are full of errors, filter bubbles reinforce your cognitive biases, chatbots learn racial hostility they can’t unlearn, and social networks become unfilterable propaganda machines, it’s hard to defend the notion that the tech industry is benign and well-intentioned. The threat potential that tech wields is no longer abstract.
When you dream about using technology to create a better, fairer, more just world, it’s uncomfortable to face up to this reality — that our code is unintentionally racist.
Clearing Misconceptions: Intentional Vs. Unintentional Racism
Two common threads bind the current themes in news media. One is that innocuous, highbrow algorithms, trained by real-world data, are producing provably racist outcomes. The other is that the nerds behind it all should not be let off the hook: “Artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators.”
Before we begin to even fix the problem of reckless use of technology, it is important to differentiate the unintended biases that can find their way into tech products or services and using technological platforms for racism.
People see algorithms as racist agents and assume that they were made to be so. As citizens of free world, we have a rational fear of racially unjust systems of power, and it’s already colliding with our terrifying fear of autonomous inhuman overlords.
However, programming anything that works is hard; modeling a concept as complex and culturally endemic as racism into a predictable yet dynamic algorithm is a mind-bending task. It would indeed be ethically monstrous to pursue it.
These algorithms don’t model behavior that way. Instead, a well-known machine learning algorithm is trained with historical data to produce a predictive model, which would then go on to make predictions about new data. Algorithms similar to this are probably suggesting search results and traffic routes for you right now.
How do biases find their way into tech? There are some hard questions we need to ask:
1. Why do we all look the same?
It really doesn’t help that it’s mostly well-paid, mostly white, and mostly men behind the scenes. So why does it matter that white guys are holding the cards? Plenty of ink has been spilled on this, but here’s my take: We don’t know enough people who aren’t like us. We’re unlikely to, for example, have lots of black friends whose pictures we can use to train our robots. We may not perceive as much injustice in the world. We don’t need to think about it.
It’s not the algorithm that’s racist, but rather the data we collect. From a nerd’s perspective, it’s a hard technical reality that “machine learning” isn’t really “learning” — it’s pattern discovery over data. It’s useful for making predictions about the future if you expect the future to be a lot like the past, but garbage in, garbage out; it does not imbue the system with the intuition, judgement, or prudence we attribute to “intelligence.” We have blind spots, and our work reflects it.
2. Why don’t we care what the boss is up to?
The business of digital gives you a feeling of distance from accountability: many programmers feel a separation between the engineering world and what their bosses are up to. Because software is hard, and the world is complex, it’s necessary to narrowly focus on getting your code to work. You can build a comfortable wall to isolate your work from the outside and focus on solving the most challenging problems without stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.
3. Where’s our Code Of Ethics?
Is the problem of separation between creator and enabler unique to programming? No. Many age-old professions have, for various reasons, learned that a code of ethics is necessary to bridge the gap and uphold the profession’s integrity. Doctors and lawyers are bound to pretty specific codes of ethics, and breaking them could make you unemployable. Engineering professionals learned, through bridge collapses, mining disasters, and other catastrophes, that their work could endanger the public welfare and should be bound to some kind of ethical standards.
The fact that there is an organization that recommends ethical guidelines for software development is probably news to a lot of programmers. It was to me. The Association For Computing Machinery is not a name that rings loudly through dev circles, but they publish a code of ethics for software development. It’s mostly concerned with the conduct of the individual developer, in particular with respect to standards and testing, but it does recommend that developers do not “approve” software unless it “does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good.” For example, does it serve the public good to build a system that helps make sentencing recommendations? What if it recommended harsher penalties for blacks? The digital world has failed at that ethical standard long enough to draw attention.
It’s a lot to unpack, but imperative to address for the continual success of the developer community. In future installments of this series, we will explore why it’s hard to act ethically in tech, find out who’s already working to make software more equitable, and dive into specific ethical encounters you’ll have if you’re a working developer today, including what we’re doing as HYFN to chart an ethical path through the tech landscape. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/ethics-in-programming-questions-we-need-to-ask-230dd4335bc1 | [] | 2018-10-15 20:46:48.875000+00:00 | ['Algorithms', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Diversity In Tech', 'Filter Bubble', 'Ethics'] |
Purplebricks Are Exiting The Australian Property Market After Just 2.5 Years — What Went Wrong? | It has only been two and a half years since online real estate company Purplebricks entered Australia’s property industry, but yesterday they made the big announcement that they are being forced to exit the market, suggesting their global expansion was …
“too rapid and as a result, the quality of execution has suffered.”
Head to Moment to find out more. | https://medium.com/moworks/purplebricks-are-exiting-the-australian-property-market-after-just-2-5-years-what-went-wrong-ff985c380880 | ['Mo Works'] | 2019-05-09 00:12:30.445000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Property', 'Australia', 'Global Expansion', 'Development'] |
Microsoft Excel user? Consider these 5 Productivity Hacks! | Anyone who uses Excel everyday spends a LOT of time doing the same repetitive tasks. For example:
Customizing worksheet preferences (formatting, printing setup, etc.)
Seeking toolbar ribbon items to perform specific tasks
Analyzing basic datasets
Using the mouse for task-specific items, when keyboard shortcuts are dramatically faster
Keying in data to develop analysis
The presentation below highlights 5 tools for consideration that will fundamentally change how you work with Excel. Yes, behavior change is required (and that is generally not easy), but it will result in much more effective use of Excel.
“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
The five productivity hacks are:
ASAP Utilities add-in — “The tools from ASAP Utilities add new functionality to Excel and are guaranteed to save you time and speed up your work.”
Quick Access Toolbar (“QAT”)
Pivot Tables for Data Analysis
Excel template workbook and worksheet
Using a Personal Macro Workbook
Download the presentation here (includes numerous helpful links!) | https://medium.com/lets-excel/microsoft-excel-user-consider-these-5-productivity-hacks-2e42809a4884 | ['Don Tomoff'] | 2017-04-26 15:38:15.148000+00:00 | ['Microsoft Office', 'Top 10 Post', 'Excel', 'Automation', 'Productivity'] |
We are all biased, so how can we make journalism more inclusive? | It’s time to accept newsroom diversity efforts have failed. Despite decades of making a case for more inclusion and representation in journalism, despite numerous dedicated studies and initiatives, most newsrooms are still not an accurate mirror of the society they seek to capture and inform.
Wherever you look, the numbers are grim. In Germany, where the European Journalism Centre held its last News Impact Summit of 2019, one in four citizens have a migrant background, but only two to three per cent of journalists are from migrant families, according to one study. The journalism industry in the UK is 94% white and 86% university-educated.
That minorities and people of colour cannot find themselves reflected in those writing the news naturally leads to trust in the media remaining low. This hits journalists where it hurts. It is difficult for newsrooms to cast themselves as champions of truth if they are so homogeneous. At a time when media companies are increasingly turning to subscription or membership models for revenue, it is unlikely that audiences will pay for content that neither represents them nor reflects their concerns.
During our Summit in Munich, we went through the latest developments on this pressing challenge. Here are eight learnings from our discussions:
1.Become an ally for inclusion
“I am not sure I am the right person to be up here,” noted Charlotte Haunhorst, the managing editor of JETZT, a young cross-media magazine by national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). Charlotte is what most people would see as quintessentially German, but recognises JETZT needs to reflect greater diversity. Based in Munich, Charlotte has made it one of her key goals, as a young woman in a legacy media organisation, to push for diversity outside the Berlin media bubble.
Charlotte Haunhorst, the managing editor of JETZT, shares the strategies put in place in order to make the newsroom and the content of the magazine more diverse.
“I guess sometimes you just need to be brave,” she said, explaining how JETZT decided to go against the tide and convinced management at SZ to take active steps toward inclusion. As a result, the magazine adopted more inclusive language and updated its content with a dedicated column for LGBTQI issues.
Lara Joannides from the BBC showed what men can do to advance gender balance in the newsroom. Lara leads the 50:50 project, the BBC’s biggest collective initiative to increase female representation in its content. The project was actually created by a man, Ros Atkins, who during a four-hour drive listening to the BBC realised that only male voices had been on air. He got his team to monitor the number of women on air in order to produce more balanced stories.
2. The problem comes from the top
Many journalists in Dutch newsrooms still turn their heads around when they see a female journalist with a headscarf entering the door, said Hadjar Benmiloud, creator of Vileine Academy. The platform started out as a feminist magazine until Hadjar realised that no matter how popular the content was, it was still hard getting funds to sustain the project. That is how Vileine became an academy to train aspiring female journalists.
This approach is paying off as 80% of Vileine’s students have secured jobs in newsrooms. But Hadjar’s plans have also pivoted to consultancy and media partnerships. “Selling diverse talent is not enough. There is no diversity success without inclusive management,” she said. This is why Vileine Academy wants its collaboration with newsrooms to have a real purpose, not simply be seen as a PR stunt. “Newsrooms need to look at the top to see power imbalances, blind spots, and lack of feedback mechanisms that trickle down to the rest of the workplace,” she said. Yet, not all of them are ready for such introspection.
Part of the problem is that diversity is simply not a priority. While some improvements have been made, such as ensuring diversity through paid internships or making editorial meetings more participatory, in most cases, top management continues to be overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.
Edith Heitkämper, from non-profit ProQuote Medien, talks with Lara Joannides, who leads the BBC Project 50:50 and Marverine Cole, a journalist and lecturer at Birmingham City University on how to improve gender balance in the newsroom.
3. Data can drive diversity
“We’re so used to seeing a dominance of men in the media that we actually think it’s balanced, but data is key to understanding the actual balance,” explained Lara Joannides from the BBC. The numbers provided by the 50:50 project were key to making other team managers understand how one-sided, and therefore, inaccurate, their reporting was due to the lack of women’s voices in the stories.
And what role do women play in the decision-making process? In 100 regional newspapers in Germany, only 7.4 per cent of editors-in-chief are female, according to a study on gender distribution in leadership positions.
Gender representation is one of the challenges of the wider issue of diversity. “Migrants are barely a respected audience in Germany, neither adequately represented in newsrooms or broadcasting councils,” confirmed Christine Horz, a researcher at the Institute of Media Studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum, who is currently running a study on the participation of people with migration backgrounds in German newsrooms. “There is a lack of awareness of the necessity of diversity in newsrooms. We need a top-down strategy, otherwise, it will not work. That is why we focus on raising awareness among chief editors and politicians,” said Christine, recalling that the media, public opinion, and policymaking all influence each other. | https://medium.com/we-are-the-european-journalism-centre/we-are-all-biased-so-how-can-we-make-journalism-more-inclusive-23c814833119 | ['Vera Penêda'] | 2019-12-19 13:02:49.689000+00:00 | ['Inclusion', 'Insights', 'Diversity', 'Journalism', 'Media'] |
The Best Comedians Do Something You Don’t | What about writing then?
As writers, we should be acutely aware of how detailed our preparation should be. I know that almost every other article on here tells us to ‘edit edit edit’, but it’s true. I’m not suggesting for a minute that we should spend a year in preparation for every article. There would be a lot more starving and penniless writers if that was the case but we should take the time to perfect what we’re putting onto the page as far as possible.
The first draft of ideas that flows onto the blank page should be just that. I know that when I’ve written a first draft of an article, it is more important to get the word and ideas down onto the screen than for them to be spelt correctly. When I come to edit, what is on the page bears only a passing resemblance to English. Then we go back and remove excess words, refine the sentence structure, get a feel for the rhythm of the language. We know what sounds right and, like the comics, when we step out onto the stage that first time with a page of untried material then we should be prepared to get shot down.
We need to be our own worst hecklers. If a sentence doesn't work or the word order sounds wrong, give yourself hell over it. Call it out.
How boring a show would be if a comic stood and talked at the same rate and pace for the whole show. But they vary their speed, sentence length and intonation. Sometimes a joke is funnier if the emphasis is placed on a different word. Your sentences are the same. Change sentence lengths, change emphasis, be brutal with your work and see what works best for you.
It’s easy to spot a writer who is at ease with their style and one who is trying too hard. Read anything by Tim Denning and you’ll see a casual, friendly style almost as if he’s having a chat with you over a drink.
That’s no mistake. It has taken many years of trial and error to arrive at that level of skill.
All we can do is do our best to try and find a voice that suits us and the only way we can do that is by writing down our initial ideas like a comedian, taking those ideas and fashioning them into sentences and paragraphs that our readers will love. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-best-comedians-do-something-you-dont-8f5688ad8e55 | ['Glyn Bawden'] | 2020-12-26 16:32:43.171000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Editing', 'Writing Tips', 'Review', 'Writing'] |
Recreating W.E.B Du Bois’s Data Portraits | The code and output are tracked with git, and hosted on github. As progress is made (editing and tweaking, or adding a new plate), the code and visuals are committed. Interested parties may follow the progress and even file issues.
$ git add color.dsh
$ git commit -m 'added color tweak'
$ git push origin master
Design, Then and Now
It’s interesting to compare the tools and techniques used in 1900 with those employed today. Paper, pen, ink, paint, compass, and ruler vs. laptops, text editors, programming languages, source code management, and the Internet.
Also consider the physical layout of the exhibition. As illustrated below, the displays were fairly large physical objects measuring 22 x 28 inches. The re-creations preserve this aspect ratio, yet the overall experience is different: browsing poster-sized displays vs. viewing online or projected on a screen.
Exhibition Layout: Note the display sizes above the bookcase
In general, the re-creation approach is to reconstruct each plate into its component parts (titles, charts, annotations, etc), understand and define the relationships between the components on the canvas, and use built-in chart types from dchart where applicable.
Each plate is re-created to preserve the wording, terminology, layout, and colors of the originals. This included using ALL CAPS for titles and labels and preserving the aspect ratio. There is some variation in the originals hand-drawn type, so I chose Public Sans Bold for titles with the regular weight in gray for subordinate text. In the cases where a serif font was used, I chose the font Charter.
The originals in the book and in the Library of Congress collection documenting the exhibition have a manilla-colored background. I assumed this was due to aging of the original views, so I maintained a white background for the re-creations.
A characteristic of the original visuals is the bold use of the few colors: red, green, black, and yellow are used throughout. In Plate 50, combined with proportions, the Pan-African color scheme is used to great effect: the red boldly declaring the move from slavery to land and homeownership, the green showing the move from laborers to tenants. | https://medium.com/nightingale/recreating-w-e-b-du-boiss-data-portraits-87dd36096f34 | ['Anthony Starks'] | 2019-08-21 16:14:48.866000+00:00 | ['Github', 'Design', 'Data Visualization', 'Coding', 'Dvhistory'] |
The Carrot and the Stick — Reinforcement Learning | Here’s a reward. Here’s a punishment. These phrases and the broader technique that accompanies them are called reinforcement learning (RL). Computer scientists used it to program artificial intelligences (AI’s) that can beat humans at complex games like Chess and Go. In this article, I will outline some of the basics of reinforcement learning and look at its many applications.
Good AI. Bad AI. — Rewards and Punishments
At its core, reinforcement learning is about letting an AI learn from its own mistakes and successes, much like humans learn. Obviously, you can’t give an AI a carrot or admonish it with a stick. But what you can do is define a reward function and a cost function for your AI that allows it to rate its own performance and adjust accordingly.
Once these two functions are defined, the goal of the AI is to maximize the reward function and minimize the cost function. The AI starts by taking some random action or move within the scope of the environment that is defined for it, and for every action it takes, it learns how that move affected the two functions. If the action gets the AI towards its goal, the AI is more likely to repeat it in the future, and vice-versa.
Benefits of Reinforcement Learning
You won’t be Picasso by painting by coloring inside the lines
The advantages of allowing an AI to make and learn from its own mistakes are twofold. First, this means that our agent can get better at a given task than humans. Other methods of machine learning always limit AI’s to the capabilities of the best human, because those AI’s are learning from the moves humans make. It’s similar to how you can’t become a better painter just by completing paint by numbers kits designed by other people, rather, you have to be creative and make your own paintings.
Second, the AI doesn’t need any initial data set. Most learning involves feeding an agent a set of data and having the agent use that data to draw certain conclusions. As an example, let’s look at an AI that makes winning moves at Chess. Other algorithms would need vast swaths of data about how given moves have historically helped or hurt a players chances at winning a game.
However, the magic of reinforcement learning is that it conducts its own research. In the chess example, instead of looking at previous master games, all our agent needs to do is be taught how to play chess and compete against itself millions of times to figure out what moves maximized its chance of victory. This ability to generate data on its own is crucial because data is not always available. Sure, there are terabytes of historical chess games around, but what about problems that no one has solved yet? Similarly, a model to suggest solutions to climate change can’t base its recommendations off of past human successes. These sorts of problems where a machine has no past successes to learn from are where RL is particularly handy.
X’s and O’s
Let’s go deep with an example about a program that plays tic-tac-toe against itself to become a perfect player. This will allow us to explore the how and why of reinforcement learning. We essentially have do two things for the machine:
First, define a cost and reward function. This is relatively easy for tic-tac-to, so easy in fact that we only need a reward function, as in zero sum games a reward is directly equivalent to not incurring a cost. The reward function breaks down like this: our AI gets a reward of 1 for winning and a reward of 0 for losing.
Let’s look at tic-tac-toe as an example
Tying is a little bit more complex, because we as programmers need to decide how valuable a tie is in comparison to a win and a loss. To illustrate, if we think that our program should win at all costs and a draw is not desirable, a tie should give a relatively small reward, perhaps 0.1 or 0.2. If, on the other hand, we see a tie as almost as valuable as a win, the reward for a tie would be closer to 1. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll say that a tie is worth 0.2. Ties are so common in tic-tac-toe that our machine needs to disproportionately inflate the value of a win or it will likely tie every single time. We want our AI to win.
The second thing our machine needs from us is an explanation of how to play the game. This is called defining the environment in which our AI operates. This is again pretty simple, we just have to lay out the rules of tic-tac-toe:
There are nine squares
On your turn you place an X in one of the squares
On your opponent’s turn they place an O in one of the remaining squares
This process repeats until one player has three in a row or all the squares are filled
If a player got three in a row, they win
If all the squares are filled and no one has three in a row, it is a tie.
Our AI now has all the information it needs to become a perfect tic-tac-toe player. It will go through the following motions using what was listed above to achieve its goal:
Play a random game
If the moves in this game led to a reward, make those moves more often proportionally to how much of a reward it received
If these moves did not receive a reward (i.e. were punished in a zero sum game), don’t make those moves again
We now have a perfect tic-tac-toe player. This obviously has some more complex code involved, but really the code is just semantics. The key concepts outlined in this example are the fundamentals of RL.
Other Applications
Tic-tac-toe is cool and all, but most of us had it mastered by fifth grade. Let’s briefly move beyond the space of one on one games and look at some real world applications of reinforcement learning.
Can RL allocate energy more effectively?
One place where this unique brand of AI can make a huge difference is energy consumption. Right now, our use of energy is super inefficient. However by explaining to an AI that we want to maximize the amount of energy used (our reward function) and minimize its costs (our cost function) we can have it tell us the best way to use our energy. Better resource allocation is important to solving many issues, including hunger and climate change. A 2019 paper on allocating energy using RL within high density networks found:
High-density communications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) demand for new approaches to meet stringent energy and spectrum requirements. We turn to reinforcement learning, a prominent method in artificial intelligence, to design an energy-preserving MAC [Media Access Control] protocol, with the aim to extend the network lifetime.
Another interesting real life application of RL comes from the world of online user interface. Again here, we see that there is a market inefficiency. Recommendations to users are not as useful as they could be. Reinforcement learning offers to solve this problem and save people valuable time much better than any human predictor of behavior can.
Such an application consists of developing an algorithm to maximize clicks on suggested products (a reward function) and minimize time spent on a website (a cost function). Websites can employ an RL model that runs millions of alpha-beta tests (the model would learn how to do these tests in the environment definition phase) and figures out which tests best adhere to those two functions. Such an algorithm to streamline the online shopping process was developed by researchers at Alibaba.
These sorts of applications independently make RL so interesting. But beyond that, they highlight its versatility. The ability of reinforcement learning to be molded to so many tasks is another one of its attributes that makes it such an exciting technology.
Key Takeaways
Reinforcement Learning (RL) allows a computer to teach itself how to accomplish various tasks
An AI using RL tries to maximize a reward function and minimize a cost function within some environment
RL doesn’t require any input data and thus can outperform humans at certain tasks i n a way that input driven AI’s can’t
data and thus can at certain tasks i RL can be applied in countless places from search suggestions to resource rationing
Further Reading
If you want to learn more, there are loads of resources online. This video is excellent and this book is a great in depth exploration of the subject. All the sources cited here are also quite helpful. If you want to follow up with me, have a conversation, or have further questions, here is my contact info:
Email | Linkedin | Github
And please subscribe to my newsletter! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/the-carrot-and-the-stick-reinforcement-learning-e0b2e1e67348 | ['Yaman Habip'] | 2020-11-24 23:55:53.292000+00:00 | ['Reinforcement Learning', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine'] |
Do Not Use Decision Tree Like This | Do Not Use Decision Tree Like This
Demonstrate the Limitation of Information Gain in ID3 and the Benefits of using C4.5
As one of the most popular classic machine learning algorithm, the Decision Tree is much more intuitive than the others for its explainability. In one of my previous article, I have introduced the basic idea and mechanism of a Decision Tree model. It demonstrated this machine learning model using an algorithm called ID3, which is one of the most classic ones for training a Decision Tree classification model.
If you are not that familiar with Decision Tree, it is highly recommended to check out the above article before reading into this one.
To intuitively understand Decision Trees, it is indeed good to start with ID3. However, it is probably not a good idea to use it in practice. In this article, I’ll introduce a commonly used algorithm to build Decision Tree models — C4.5.
Drawbacks of Classic ID3 Algorithm
Photo by aitoff on Pixabay
Before we can demonstrate the major drawbacks of the ID3 algorithm, let’s have a look at what are the major building blocks of it. Basically, the important is the Entropy and Information Gain.
Recap of Entropy
Here is the formula of Entropy:
The set “X” is everything in the set of the node, and “xᵢ” refers to the specific decision of each sample. Therefore, “P(xᵢ)” is the probability of the set to be made with a certain decision.
Let’s use the same training dataset as an example. Suppose that we have an internal node in our decision tree with “weather = rainy”. It is can be seen that the final decisions are both “No”. Then, we can easily calculate the entropy of this node as follows:
Basically, the probability of being “No” is 2/2 = 1, whereas the probability of being “Yes” is 0/2 = 0.
Recap of Information Gain
On top of the concept of Entropy, we can calculate the Information Gain, which is the basic criterion to decide whether a feature should be used as a node to be split.
For example, we have three features: “Weather”, “Temperature” and “Wind Level”. When we start to build our Decision Tree using ID3, how can we decide which one of them should be used as the root node?
ID3 makes use Information Gain as the criterion. The rule is that, select the feature with the maximum Information Gain among all of them. Here is the formula of calculating Information Gain:
where
“T” is the parent node and “a” is the set of attributes of “T”
The notation “|T|” means the size of the set
Using the same example, when we calculating the Information Gain for “Weather = Rainy”, we also need to take its child nodes’ Entropy into account. Specific derivation and calculating progress can be found in the article that was shared in the introduction.
Major Drawbacks of Using Information Gain
The major drawbacks of using Information Gain as the criterion for determining which feature to be used as the root/next node is that it tends to use the feature that has more unique values.
But why? Let me demonstrate it using an extreme scenario. Let’s say, we have got the training set with one more feature: “Date”.
You might say that the feature “Date” should not be considered in this case because it intuitively will not be helpful to decide whether we should go out for running or not. Yes, you’re right. However, practically, we may have much more complicated dataset to be classified, and we may not be able to understand all the features. So, we may not always be able to determine whether a feature does make sense or not. In here, I will just use “Date” as an example.
Now, let’s calculate the Information Gain for “Date”. We can start to calculate the entropy for one of the dates, such as “2020–01–01”.
Since there is only 1 row for each date, the final decision must be either “Yes” or “No”. So, the entropy must be 0! In terms of the information theory, it is equivalent to say:
The date tells us nothing, because the result is just one, which is certain. So, there is no “uncertainty” at all.
Similarly, for all the other dates, their entropies are 0, too.
Now, let’s calculate the entropy for the date itself.
WoW, that is a pretty large number compared to the other features. So, we can calculate the Information Gain of “Date” now. | https://towardsdatascience.com/do-not-use-decision-tree-like-this-369769d6104d | ['Christopher Tao'] | 2020-09-06 18:29:22.539000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Decision Tree'] |
Back on the snake-oil standard? | Back on the snake-oil standard?
Pass the green tea, dark chocolates, and muscadine grapes…
“Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.” — Kurt Vonnegut (2005)
In Joe Nickell’s taxonomy, Miller’s Antiseptic Oil of 1916 was a “type 4” snake oil — a liniment “Known as Snake Oil” until it was restyled in 1929 with a paper label reading “Miller’s Anti-Pain Oil,” which also acknowledged that it was “For Years Called Snake Oil But Does Not Contain Snake Oil.” Miller’s Snake Oil was widely advertised in the United States during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic as providing “almost certain protection” against influenza, pneumonia and colds “for a few cents” (up to 49 by 1934). Whatever it was, you were supposed to rub the patent medicine liberally on your throat and chest and inhale through your nostrils to prevent la grippe.
Snip: Durham Morning Herald (29 NOV 1918) — via Newspapers.com.
And…treat “rheumatism, neuralgia, lumbago, stiff and swolen [sic] joints, corns, bunions or whatever the pain may be,” as well as “burns, bruises, sore throat and croup,” according to a “five-inch advertisement” in the Durham Morning Herald — which, interestingly enough, didn’t mention influenza when it ran during the second wave of the 1918 influenza epidemic in Durham, North Carolina. An editorial comment on the same page, presumably written by my distant cousin, read:
“Just why some patent medicine concerns continue to think that a five-inch advertisement can buy editorial support is hard for some editors to understand.” — Frank Keener
In that vein, let’s take a look at our state’s journalistic and editorial response to a recent press release from N. C. State University about a study done there which purportedly shows how chemical compounds in green tea, dark chocolate, and muscadine grapes block a certain protease in the SARS-CoV-2 virus in computer simulations and in vitro. I’m not a plant biologist, but I’ll take the authors at their word. So what?
“Eat grapes, drink green tea — and enjoy chocolate.” — Rick Smith, WRAL TechWire
Of course, why didn’t I think of that? But wait, maybe we should talk to another expert? Like Ann Jacks at Berrybrook Farm in Charlotte, who “has been in the natural health field for 30 years” and sells “Alkaline/Ionized Antioxidant Water” at “$1.96 per gallon (a fraction of the cost of many bottled waters).” Since the pandemic started Jacks has seen a “flood of customers” who are “looking for natural ways to boost their immune system,” according to Glenn Counts at WSOC TV (Channel 9 in Charlotte). “I think it’s great,” Jacks said, “I wish I would have known when the study was coming out, so we could have stocked more green tea.”
Well, that’s really helpful. I just can’t imagine why the plant biologist who published this study is still “struggling to find a doctor who would like to collaborate with us to perform clinical trials and provide green tea and muscadine extracts to test their therapeutic efficacy to treat COVID-19.” After all, he’s just a short drive away from one of the best medical schools in the country! Screw lab rats. As long as it works in petri dishes, we should clearly jump directly to human trials!
And, your diet! “Recommendation to you and your family: Stay with green tea for safety!” the author of the paper told Smith at WRAL TechWire. Of course, “these methods are not a substitute of any other therapeutics, particularly vaccines.” So, you can just ignore what was said about approved vaccines not being preventive. That was from August and “cannot be used for the present time.”
On the other hand some people are still talking about the hydroxy, and I believe bleach and colloidal silver also kill COVID in vitro? Don’t Ben Carson and the “My Pillow” guy have a lot of good things to say about oleander? I heard the Tonic Therapeutic Herb Shop & Elixir Bar of Shepherdstown, West Virginia was selling honeysuckle, elderberry, licorice, and chickweed to “help prevent infection and reduce the severity of symptoms” with COVID-19 before the deep state shut them down on behalf of Big Pharma, Bill Gates, and George Soros. It’s so confusing.
If only there was some way to make sense of it all, something we could do to protect ourselves and our communities. In the meantime, I guess we’ll just have to pass the green tea, dark chocolates, and muscadine grapes and hope for the best? Perhaps we should consult an engineer? Or maybe a frozen meat company? What would we do without these essential businesses? | https://medium.com/k%C3%BChner-kommentar/back-on-the-snake-oil-standard-70368db16094 | ['Wilhelm Kühner'] | 2020-12-04 20:33:26.747000+00:00 | ['History', 'Satire', 'Snake Oil', 'Epistemology', 'Journalism'] |
57 Lessons I’ve Learned After 5 Years of Freelance Writing | 1. A lot of people want to become a freelance writer. But not many make it.
2. Good writing is a good starting point to become a freelance writer, but it’s not enough.
3. You don’t need a P.h.D (or even a Master) in writing to start a freelance business.
4. No matter who you are, an English native speaker or not, you can become a freelancer as long as you have good writing. Six years ago, I couldn’t even write an English sentence, but I learned.
5. Know how to price your services, so you don’t undervalue or overvalue yourself.
6. Create a website. You need it to show your portfolio and attract new leads.
7. Set goals. How much do you want to make this month? How many clients? How many briefs? Write down all of them, and you know what you need to achieve.
8. Develop your work process. Clients will ask for it all the time.
9. Be flexible with your services. Every client has a different need.
10. Find your competitive advantage. In other words, what makes you different from other freelance writers. Give your clients a convincing reason why they should choose you over another.
11. Read your client’s writing guidelines carefully. Read it first before working on the assignment.
12. Know when you should increase your rate.
13. Don’t reluctantly take a low-paid gig unless you actually need work. Otherwise, it’ll make you groan soon.
14. Watch out for scams. If you feel a well-paid gig is too good to be true, avoid at all costs.
15. Clarify the payment method in advance. In the first year of freelancing, I didn’t know this and ended up losing some money. I couldn’t receive payment because clients only paid via Stripe.
16. You deserve the rate you’re charging. Don’t cheapen yourself.
17. Be nice with all clients, even those who say no when you approach them. You don’t know if they’ll reach out to you in the future.
18. Create a freelance contract and always show it to clients.
19. Never work for free, unless you intend to offer guest blogging.
20. Don’t be afraid to fire a client if they set unrealistic expectations, delay paying you, or ask you to do a lot of work out of the contract.
21. Prevent being sued by clients. Always read the contract, so you know the do’s and don’ts.
22. Don’t wait for work to come to you. You have to look for it.
23. Never work for a client who doesn’t value you and what you bring to the table.
24. Document everything. Your journey. Your process. Your work. Your clients. Your payment. Put them together, and you’ve got yourself a playbook. It can help you make a ton of money later by selling it as a book.
25. Keep hustling. Don’t stop marketing yourself even when you have clients.
26. Never stop learning. If you want to have a successful freelance writing career, you need to be a lifelong learner.
27. Build your productivity system.
28. Not everyone will understand what you’re doing, even your spouse and your parents.
29. There are times when you have money, and times when you don’t. Be familiar with that.
30. You’re running a business, so put your customers first.
31. Don’t focus on how much others earn. Instead, focus on doing your best work, and the money will come to you.
32. Be honest about what you can do and deliver it. Don’t overpromise.
33. Don’t take assignments more than you can handle. Doing that helps you be accountable and create the highest-quality work.
34. Identify your niche and focus on it. You’ll become an expert.
35. It’s good to try new areas, especially if they’re relevant to your niche.
36. Connect with other freelance writers. They’ll give you valuable and straightforward advice you can’t find anywhere else. They also encourage you when you have doubts.
37. Impostor syndrome isn’t uncommon.
38. Don’t sacrifice your health and your family.
39. You don’t need fancy gadgets. One laptop can be enough.
40. Learn to negotiate as soon as possible.
41. Complete your draft at least one day before the deadline.
42. Nothing’s wrong with asking for help from clients.
43. Celebrate small wins. A new client, the first payment, a compliment — they all count.
44. Diversify your income. Never put all eggs into one basket — I know, it’s cliche, but it’s true.
45. Learn about taxes so you won’t be surprised when you receive the first payment.
46. Get insurance. You have to take care of yourself.
47. Track your expenses. Seriously.
48. Plan your work, so you don’t feel overwhelmed.
49. It’s okay to say no. Not all clients will fit you, and vice versa. Declining gigs doesn’t mean the world ends.
50. Expand your skills. Design. Editing. Transcribing. Anything that can upgrade your service.
51. Learn how to write professional emails. Again, you’re dealing with businesses.
52. Continue to sharpen your writing skills.
53. Help other freelance writers. Share what you know.
54. Sometimes you’ll want to come back to a full-time job. It makes sense, though.
55. Freelance writing 101: Don’t miss deadlines.
56. Your years of writing experience doesn’t mean every client will hire you.
57. Expect rough times and be prepared for them, especially in the beginning. | https://medium.com/illumination/57-lessons-ive-learned-after-5-years-of-freelance-writing-b15d1e2a5d7b | ['Lavender Nguyen'] | 2020-09-14 19:38:14.100000+00:00 | ['Skills', 'Freelance', 'Lessons Learned', 'Writing', 'Work'] |
PCA Clearly Explained -When, Why, How To Use It and Feature Importance: A Guide in Python | 1. Introduction & Background
Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is a well-known unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique that constructs relevant features/variables through linear (linear PCA) or non-linear (kernel PCA) combinations of the original variables (features). In this post, we will only focus on the famous and widely used linear PCA method.
The construction of relevant features is achieved by linearly transforming correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated variables. This is done by projecting (dot product) the original data into the reduced PCA space using the eigenvectors of the covariance/correlation matrix aka the principal components (PCs).
The resulting projected data are essentially linear combinations of the original data capturing most of the variance in the data (Jolliffe 2002).
In summary, PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the data into a series of uncorrelated data living in the reduced PCA space such that the first component explains the most variance in the data with each subsequent component explaining less.
2. When/Why to use PCA
PCA technique is particularly useful in processing data where multi - colinearity exists between the features / variables .
- exists between the / . PCA can be used when the dimensions of the input features are high (e.g. a lot of variables).
(e.g. a lot of variables). PCA can be also used for denoising and data compression.
3. Core of the PCA method
Let X be a matrix containing the original data with shape [n_samples, n_features] .
Briefly, the PCA analysis consists of the following steps:
First, the original input variables stored in X are z-scored such each original variable (column of X ) has zero mean and unit standard deviation.
are such each original variable (column of ) has zero mean and unit standard deviation. The next step involves the construction and eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix Cx= (1/n)X'X (in case of z-scored data the covariance is equal to the correlation matrix since the standard deviation of all features is 1).
of the matrix (in case of z-scored data the covariance is equal to the correlation matrix since the standard deviation of all features is 1). Eigenvalues are then sorted in a decreasing order representing decreasing variance in the data (the eigenvalues are equal to the variance — I will prove this below using Python in Paragraph 6).
are then in a order representing decreasing variance in the data (the eigenvalues are equal to the variance — I will prove this below using Python in Paragraph 6). Finally, the projection (transformation) of the original normalized data onto the reduced PCA space is obtained by multiplying (dot product) the originally normalized data by the leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix i.e. the PCs.
(transformation) of the onto the is obtained by (dot product) by the of the covariance matrix i.e. the PCs. The new reduced PCA space maximizes the variance of the original data. To visualize the projected data as well as the contribution of the original variables, in a joint plot, we can use the biplot.
4. The maximum number of meaningful components
There is an upper bound of the meaningful components that can be extracted using PCA. This is related to the rank of the covariance/correlation matrix ( Cx ). Having a data matrix X with shape [n_samples, n_features/n_variables] , the covariance/correlation matrix would be [n_features, n_features] with maximum rank equal to min(n_samples, n_features) .
Thus, we can have at most min(n_samples, n_features) meaningful PC components/dimensions due to the maximum rank of the covariance/correlation matrix.
5. Python example using scikit-learn and the Iris dataset
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
plt.style.use('ggplot') # Load the data
iris = datasets.load_iris()
X = iris.data
y = iris.target # Z-score the features
scaler = StandardScaler()
scaler.fit(X)
X = scaler.transform(X) # The PCA model
pca = PCA(n_components=2) # estimate only 2 PCs
X_new = pca.fit_transform(X) # project the original data into the PCA space
Let’s plot the data before and after the PCA transform and also color code each point (sample) using the corresponding class of the flower (y) .
fig, axes = plt.subplots(1,2) axes[0].scatter(X[:,0], X[:,1], c=y)
axes[0].set_xlabel('x1')
axes[0].set_ylabel('x2')
axes[0].set_title('Before PCA') axes[1].scatter(X_new[:,0], X_new[:,1], c=y)
axes[1].set_xlabel('PC1')
axes[1].set_ylabel('PC2')
axes[1].set_title('After PCA') plt.show()
PCA output of the above code.
We can see that in the PCA space, the variance is maximized along PC1 (explains 73% of the variance) and PC2 (explains 22% of the variance). Together, they explain 95%.
print(pca.explained_variance_ratio_)
# array([0.72962445, 0.22850762])
6. Proof of eigenvalues of original covariance matrix being equal to the variances of the reduced space
Mathematical formulation & proof
Assuming that the original input variables stored in X are z-scored such each original variable (column of X ) has zero mean and unit standard deviation, we have:
Latex code written by the author.
Λ matrix above stores the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the original space/dataset.
Verify using Python
The maximum variance proof can be also seen by estimating the covariance matrix of the reduced space:
np.cov(X_new.T) array([[2.93808505e+00, 4.83198016e-16],
[4.83198016e-16, 9.20164904e-01]])
We observe that these values (on the diagonal we have the variances) are equal to the actual eigenvalues of the covariance stored in pca.explained_variance_ :
pca.explained_variance_
array([2.93808505, 0.9201649 ])
7. Feature importance
The importance of each feature is reflected by the magnitude of the corresponding values in the eigenvectors (higher magnitude — higher importance).
Let’s find the most important features:
print(abs( pca.components_ )) [[0.52106591 0.26934744 0.5804131 0.56485654]
[0.37741762 0.92329566 0.02449161 0.06694199]]
Here, pca.components_ has shape [n_components, n_features] Thus, by looking at the PC1 (first Principal Component) which is the first row
[[0.52106591 0.26934744 0.5804131 0.56485654]
we can conclude that feature 1, 3 and 4 are the most important for PC1. Similarly, we can state that feature 2 and then 1 are the most important for PC2.
To sum up, we look at the absolute values of the eigenvectors’ components corresponding to the k largest eigenvalues. In sklearn the components are sorted by explained variance. The larger they are these absolute values, the more a specific feature contributes to that principal component.
8. The biplot
The biplot is the best way to visualize all-in-one following a PCA analysis.
There is an implementation in R but there is no standard implementation in python so I decided to write my own function for that:
def biplot(score, coeff , y):
'''
Author: Serafeim Loukas, serafeim.loukas@epfl.ch
Inputs:
score: the projected data
coeff: the eigenvectors (PCs)
y: the class labels
''' xs = score[:,0] # projection on PC1
ys = score[:,1] # projection on PC2
n = coeff.shape[0] # number of variables
plt.figure(figsize=(10,8), dpi=100)
classes = np.unique(y)
colors = ['g','r','y']
markers=['o','^','x']
for s,l in enumerate(classes):
plt.scatter(xs[y==l],ys[y==l], c = colors[s], marker=markers[s]) # color based on group
for i in range(n):
#plot as arrows the variable scores (each variable has a score for PC1 and one for PC2)
plt.arrow(0, 0, coeff[i,0], coeff[i,1], color = 'k', alpha = 0.9,linestyle = '-',linewidth = 1.5, overhang=0.2)
plt.text(coeff[i,0]* 1.15, coeff[i,1] * 1.15, "Var"+str(i+1), color = 'k', ha = 'center', va = 'center',fontsize=10)
plt.xlabel("PC{}".format(1), size=14)
plt.ylabel("PC{}".format(2), size=14)
limx= int(xs.max()) + 1
limy= int(ys.max()) + 1
plt.xlim([-limx,limx])
plt.ylim([-limy,limy])
plt.grid()
plt.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', labelsize=14)
Call the function (make sure to run first the initial blocks of code where we load the iris data and perform the PCA analysis):
import matplotlib as mpl
mpl.rcParams.update(mpl.rcParamsDefault) # reset ggplot style # Call the biplot function for only the first 2 PCs
biplot(X_new[:,0:2], np.transpose(pca.components_[0:2, :]), y)
plt.show()
The PCA biplot using my custom function.
We can again verify visually that a) the variance is maximized and b) that feature 1, 3 and 4 are the most important for PC1. Similarly, feature 2 and then 1 are the most important for PC2.
Furthermore, arrows (variables/features) that point into the same direction indicate correlation between the variables that they represent whereas, the arrows heading in opposite directions indicate a contrast between the variables they represent.
Verify the above using code:
# Var 3 and Var 4 are extremely positively correlated
np.corrcoef(X[:,2], X[:,3])[1,0]
0.9628654314027957 # Var 2and Var 3 are negatively correlated
np.corrcoef(X[:,1], X[:,2])[1,0]
-0.42844010433054014
That’s all folks! Hope you liked this article! | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/pca-clearly-explained-when-why-how-to-use-it-and-feature-importance-a-guide-in-python-56b3da72d9d1 | ['Serafeim Loukas'] | 2020-12-26 01:02:29.574000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Linear Algebra', 'Data Science', 'Principal Component', 'Dimensionality Reduction'] |
AI: Leading the way in open banking | In the past few years the term “artificial intelligence” gained more recognition as it infiltrated itself in the collective mind. Humans became relatively used to this idea of computer-intelligence and its applications, as we enjoy personal assistants, such as Siri or Alexa, we’re used to chatbots and we rely on Google to anticipate the next words when writing a document or an email. By now, we are not even surprised that Netflix is customizing its services, that it manages to predict our specific preferences and presents us different thumbnails of movies/series according to past choices. But there is much more to AI and its applications than we realize.
But what exactly is AI?
Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a computer system to comprehend data, learn patterns and respond accordingly to different situations, issues and questions. Thanks to AI, machines can interact with us, humans, and with the environment, in a natural manner. It’s safe to say that it is the most complex field in computer science we've seen so far, one that utilizes a mix of machine learning like deep learning and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) with the goal of interpreting data and achieving certain tasks.
Still, AI’s applications expand far more than we realise, from aviation—the commonly-known auto-pilot—to agriculture, education, medicine, hospitality, marketing, e-commerce and almost any domain of activity we can think of. But our attention is on one industry that is in full bloom, one that we can actually observe closely during its changes and everyday evolution—open banking.
Benefits of using AI in open banking
According to Deloitte’s report, the open banking industry has a number of competitive advantages. Through the implementation of AI applications, they’d have access to valuable insights that were never before available and especially, so easy to access. Some of these insights that could change the game are:
Customer insights. A wider view of customers' profiles can be extremely helpful in the long-term because it will reveal useful data about their spending habits, behavior, budget limits, or location. These details can not only help when it comes to cross-selling, but it's especially valuable for client risk profiling. Not to mention the fact that the more you know about the target audience, the better you'll be able to serve them, which means you'll increase the chances of exceeding their expectations and boosting client retention.
A wider view of customers' profiles can be extremely helpful in the long-term because it will reveal useful data about their spending habits, behavior, budget limits, or location. These details can not only help when it comes to cross-selling, but it's especially valuable for client risk profiling. Not to mention the fact that the more you know about the target audience, the better you'll be able to serve them, which means you'll increase the chances of exceeding their expectations and boosting client retention. Rate of attrition. A better understanding of churn : one of the biggest advantages is knowing before any decision is made, that your client is considering moving on with a competitor. People are driven by acquisition drivers. In banking, some of the most important are—comparison of fees and rates, variety of services, protection of information, existence of a mobile app to ease processes, provider’s reputation and convenience of enrollment. AI gives access to the specific reason one person decides to switch to a different provider. Therefore, you can take advantage of the information and act accordingly, possibly in due time.
A better understanding of : one of the biggest advantages is knowing before any decision is made, that your client is considering moving on with a competitor. People are driven by acquisition drivers. In banking, some of the most important are—comparison of fees and rates, variety of services, protection of information, existence of a mobile app to ease processes, provider’s reputation and convenience of enrollment. AI gives access to the specific reason one person decides to switch to a different provider. Therefore, you can take advantage of the information and act accordingly, possibly in due time. Market insights . Precious data about the part of the market owned by your competitors—such as product rates and fees experience from competitors, FinTechs and banks. This data enables a much more rapid benchmark of the market.
. Precious data about the part of the market owned by your competitors—such as product rates and fees experience from competitors, FinTechs and banks. This data enables a much more rapid benchmark of the market. Understanding the “pipeline”. This refers to the customers that have gone through your offer, assessed the possibilities and decided to move on with another product or service. By getting insight into their reason why, you can rethink your customer acquisition models and avoid going through the “lost pipeline”.
Disrupting old patterns
During the 2018 World Economic Forum, leaders of the industry have composed an exhaustive paper that addresses directly the effects of AI in the financial ecosystem. In this piece of documentation, the traditional financial services are compared to existing ones, and therefore the dominant institutions of the past put next to the future, the disruptive technologies that change the way we perceive traditional banking.
If in the past the focus was on scale of assets, mass production, exclusivity of relationships, high switching costs and dependence of human ingenuity, now the perspective is shifting completely. Integrating AI into the financial systems provokes a switch to scale of data. This is mainly because as Deloitte put it, AI drives operational efficiency, economies of scale alone will not sustain cost advantages. In this case, the focus moves to a more tailored experience. If, in the more traditional ways, the consumer had to fit into a prescribed criteria to access certain services or perform certain actions, now AI facilitates a personalized, human-like interaction and favors the scale distribution of highly personalized products.
Moreover, instead of the exclusive relationships that were longed for between customers and different markets and investors, in a digitalized era of communication, AI is also helping in optimizing the best fit between all parties involved. At the same time, switching between providers implied financial costs, as high as it made people give up the idea. Whilst now, AI driven services offer huge benefits—this being the main reason the non-traditional institutions have better customer retention.
And lastly, traditional services required more labour and the hands of working people. On one side, this is a benefit from the job creation perspective, but on the other hand, it does not promote growing and persevering. While on the contrary, AI is promoting an interplay of strengths between humans and technology which leaves enough room for advancement on both ends.
What does the future hold?
AI is driving the industry forward into a so-called “self driven finance” stage, in which, with the help of artificial intelligence, consumers receive personalized advice on how to manage their finances, save up more money and become more responsible. These suggestions come based on patterns and data well beyond the traditional transaction history that regular advisors use.
Looking at all the data available regarding the subject of AI in the financial game, we can safely say that banks need to incorporate AI into their strategies in order to have the capability of creating competitive products and services. In an ever changing world and industry, adaptability in the face of disruptive technology and newcomers is indeed key. | https://medium.com/salt-pepper/ai-leading-the-way-in-open-banking-78fa056df58e | ['Flavia Mocan'] | 2020-07-15 08:40:57.274000+00:00 | ['NLP', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Fintech', 'Computer Science'] |
Win-win: Reality or fantasy? | Even when we seemingly have created a win-win scenario for all, we may have only scratched the surface.
When it comes to business, win-win thinking is an entrenched cliché. We strive to create win-win scenarios for companies and clients, for companies and suppliers, and when it relates to sustainability, for companies, the environment and the communities they interact with.
Win-win thinking is often used as way to motivate or legitimize sustainable business, with good reason. Taking steps towards reducing production waste or increasing energy efficiency, for example, are clear cases of a win-win for both the environment and a company’s bottom line. Certain product lines, such as solar lamps providing emission-free light to areas where a lack of electricity prohibits children from studying after dark, provide environmental, social and economic benefits for the stakeholders involved.
Defined by its name alone, it’s easy to think that there are no downsides to win-win scenarios. However, the problem with this type of thinking is that it only gets us to an acceptable point.
Sometimes acceptable is fine — but in business, will you settle when your profits are just acceptable?
Win-wins may actually inhibit us from reaching the best possible net outcome. In their 2010 article “Trade-Offs in Corporate Sustainability: You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It”, Tobias Hahn and his fellow researchers outline different dimensions and levels where trade-offs are made both on the corporate and societal levels in developing sustainable solutions. The article argues that focusing on win-win ignores the full range of possible corporate trade-offs, in turn limiting the role corporations can play in sustainable development.
To examine this a bit further, let’s take a step back and consider what a win-win truly means. A sustainable win-win would entail the best, most desired outcome for environment, social and economic factors alike. A truly sustainable, win-win solution would be one that beats out other solutions in comparison on every metric.
But how often is this truly the case?
Even when we seemingly have created a win-win scenario for all, we may have only scratched the surface. For example, a disposable product produced sustainably, like biodegradable trash bags, may be able to tout a win-win for environment and bottom line alike, while representing only an incremental improvement on both scales. But even with biodegradable bags, there will still be food waste that needs to be collected, stored, and processed. Where things can get really exciting is if the same company were to develop a business model to tackle the real issue, household waste, in a novel way, rather than focusing on a win-win scenario for current business models.
The future belongs to the companies that aren’t afraid to innovate themselves out.
In the most extreme case, the most environmentally beneficial solution for a product might be for it to not exist — not exactly a win-win for economics, and depending on the product, society either. In these cases, in order to ensure longevity of the business, a company might want to take a page out of the Australian company Seabin’s book, and operate with the goal of strategically innovating themselves out of the game. In Seabin’s case, they explicitly say that their goal is to create a world where their product, a bin that collects sea rubbish, is no longer needed. This type of creative trade-off and clear-eyed sense of vision can create a mentality that will carry a company much further than any one product line ever will.
These problems with win-win thinking highlight why sustainability is so difficult to manage, and more importantly, to get right. In the real world, win-win solutions are far and few between. More likely are ‘better-better’, ‘win-acceptable’, or ‘we can live with this-win’ solutions. Finding the right balance and the right trade-offs requires deep reflection on the real problem, the business model, the stakeholders involved, and your company values. | https://medium.com/pure-growth-innovations/win-win-reality-or-fantasy-1ce76bb5e99f | ['Anna Pakkala'] | 2017-10-09 19:27:16.351000+00:00 | ['Sustainable Business', 'Sustainability', 'Business Strategy', 'Corporate Innovation'] |
Apache Airflow for the confused | A Metaphor
It’s helpful to think of Airflow like an air traffic controller.
An air traffic controller manages a finite amount of resources (airspace and runways), orchestrating sequences of tasks (flight paths, takeoffs, landings, and taxiing) that depend on whether other tasks have completed successfully.
Airflow, like an air traffic controller, keeps detailed logs of each of these sequences: what command was given, how that command was executed, and how long it took. And if, tragically, there is an error, it knows if it needs to try again, or to notify someone else for help.
We’ll come back to this metaphor later.
Airflow Terms
Airflow uses several terms that can be unclear or jargony to new users but are actually straightforward concepts. The words can be strange at first, but we’ll flesh them out.
The four key terms to understand are: a DAG, an Operator, a DAG Run, and a Task Instance.
Let’s continue with our air traffic metaphor.
Air France flight 11 between New York and Paris is a flight route defined by Air France. It is, in essence, a sequence of tasks that gets an airplane from JFK to CDG. Air France defines how often this sequence should be run. In the case of AF11, it’s run daily.
A flight route made up of waypoints.
A flight route is made up of many different tasks: taxiing to a runway, taking off, raising the landing gear, navigating to waypoints, etc. Some of these tasks can be run in parallel, some in sequence, and some depend on others before happening.
An Airflow DAG is like a flight route. It defines a sequence of operations and how often they should be run.
In Airflow, a DAG is made up of Operators. Operators define the individual tasks that need to be done. They can trigger bash commands, run SQL on a database, transfer data between systems, listen for changes on a server, or even send an email or Slack message. Airflow comes packaged with several built-in Operators and even more are available through open source libraries.
To recap: a DAG is made up of Operators, and together they form the blueprint of a work flow. The DAG defines the sequence and schedule of operations, the Operators define discrete tasks that need to take place within this sequence.
So what happens when a DAG is executed? It becomes a DAG Run.
AF11 on September 25, 2017. A successful DAG Run.
A DAG Run is what Airflow calls an executed instance of a DAG. Airflow triggers this execution based on the schedule defined in the DAG (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.). Once triggered, Airflow orchestrates the execution of the Operators in the correct order, assigning available computing power to any outstanding tasks that need to be completed.
Airflow calls an executed Operator a Task Instance. (This is an example of where Airflow’s naming conventions could be much clearer). A Task Instance is the most granular concept in Airflow. It represents an attempted operation at a certain time, with certain parameters.
Returning to our air traffic controller metaphor, Air France Flight 11 on Monday, September 25, 2017 took off at 10:05pm EDT and landed in Paris the next day. This flight followed a sequence of operations defined by the airline to get a plane from JFK to CDG. AF11 on Sept 25 is the DAG Run to the daily AF11 flight route’s DAG.
Four core Airflow concepts.
Recap
The four core concepts in Airflow are:
An Airflow DAG is a defined sequence of operations. An Airflow DAG is a Python script that defines what should be run, how often, in what order (in sequence or in parallel), and what to do if an error might occur. (If you’re interest in the maths behind DAGs, they’ve been showing up a lot these days).
Operators are the blueprints for individual operations. A DAG is made up of one or many operators. These define the individual tasks that make up a DAG. Airflow defines three types of Operators–actions, transfers, and sensors–and provides many built-in operator classes to interact with common databases and other systems.
A DAG Run, is an executed run of tasks defined by a DAG. A DAG Run is logged, including when the run began, exited, and if any errors occurred along the way.
A Task Instance is an executed Operator. It’s log contains the exact command that was given to a server, at what time, and the detailed output of what occurred.
Why Airflow
Airflow’s primary strength is that it is language and technology agnostic.
It doesn’t care what you trigger. This means you can have scripts written in whatever languages make the most sense for your workflow. All that matters is that these scripts are granular (they only do one thing) and that they return a success or failure.
Another strength is Airflow’s configuration as code.
Because Airflow’s task definitions–DAGs and Operators–are just Python, it gives tremendous flexibility in how to define a workflow. For example, it allows a DAG to dynamically add new Operators based on files in a directory. This makes it possible to define a DAG that dynamically creates new tasks when additional scripts are added to a folder, or for several DAGs to import a collection of Operators defined in another Python file. | https://medium.com/nyc-planning-digital/apache-airflow-for-the-confused-b588935669df | ['Jonathan Pichot'] | 2018-06-27 15:07:32.248000+00:00 | ['Data', 'Airflow', 'Data Engineering', 'Open Data'] |
Real Estate Consulting Data Project | Modeling a single zip code
Before we can iterate through all of our zip codes and produce a model for each, we need a good way to quickly generate a well-fit model for a single zip code. Statsmodels gives us great functionality with SARIMAX models, but it does not contain a method to determine the optimal orders for such a model. Grid searching using loops and comparing AIC scores is painfully slow, especially if one wants to consider lags up to, say, 5 or 6 for the AR and MA terms. Luckily, the forecast package for R has an auto.arima function which can quickly find optimal orders and coefficients given a time series. With this, we have the option of either taking the suggested orders and have statsmodels estimate the coefficients, or we could smooth a statsmodels SARIMAX of the suggested order with the given coefficients. It was found during this study that the coefficients estimated by the auto.arima function consistently produced lower AIC scores than those estimated using statsmodels, so we will make our models using the former. To see how we will do this, we first need to look at how we can call an R function from Python using rpy2. We will start by importing the necessary items.
We can now use functions from the forecast package in our Python workflow, but making use of the outputs will take a bit of tinkering. The coefficients and their names are available in vectors attached to the returned object, but the orders are not stored in such a convenient way. Let’s see what a printout of the return from the auto.arima function looks like, using the first zip code in our data set for the test. Note that we must cast the time series as a FloatVector so it is compatible with the R function. Also, take note of how the time series is accessed from the pandas GroubBy object, by getting a group by its name (zip code), setting the date column as the index, then taking the value column. Also note that Python drops the first zeros in these “lower” zip codes because they are numeric values, but we know it is really a 5 digit zip code with a zero on the front. In financial time series analysis, it is general practice to model the returns of a series, rather than the prices, because this gives us a common scale on which to compare all of our zip codes. For mathematical convenience, the log returns are generally favored over percentage increases, since they can be cumulatively summed over time. These are generated by taking the differenced log values of a series. This produces a NaN value on the first date of the series which we will drop. Also, the frequency ‘MS’ is assigned to the resulting returns series as this tells pandas that the data are monthly.
Here we can see the return stream of the first zip code. We can see that the series has trends, and the variance is not constant, meaning it is not stationary. The trends can be removed by another order of differencing, but the heteroscedasticity will remain, invariably leading to heteroscedastic errors in our model. Although the residuals will be heteroscedastic, as long as the errors are centered around zero across time, with a roughly normal distribution, and not serially correlated, the model will be mostly effective. The model will estimate parameters based on the log likelihood of the data given the estimated parameters, so what will be affected by the inconsistent volatility will be the estimate of sigma2 (variance) for the model, which will find a happy medium between the lower variance of the early years and the higher variance after around 2009. This is mostly important in our forecasting considerations because the model will generate confidence intervals based on an estimate of variance which is somewhat biased to an outdated market regime with lower variance, leading to narrower confidence bands than might actually be appropriate.
However, despite this issue with forecasted confidence intervals, when comparing the models of many zip codes which are experiencing different degrees of variance swings during and after the crash, there is an advantage to using the entire time series to estimate model parameters, even with heteroscedasticity present, because periods of more intense volatility during the crash will lead to higher estimates of variance in the models fit to zip codes which did not handle the crash well. This means that once all of the models are generated, those with more optimistic outlooks for future variance will be those which were fed data that did not have as large of spikes in volatility; in other words, those that showed resilience during the crash, meaning that the comparisons of the models will still work in our favor to find what we are looking for. One could adjust for the biased sigma2 estimate for forecasting after the fact, changing just this parameter in the smoothing step to a value which is more reflective of the variance in recent years before performing forecasts, but since this is a hypothetical project with plenty to cover already, I will leave this out.
The traditional method for finding the orders for ARMA models is the Box-Jenkins method which uses the ACF and PACF to visually find spikes in autocorrelation. We will be using a more modern approach with the auto.arima function, but it would be interesting to take a look at the ACF and PACF for our first zip code for a visual reference along with the suggested orders. Remember the returns will need an order of differencing, so we apply this before looking at the autocorrelation to be modeled, and drop the leading NaN value.
We can see there certainly is some serial correlation in the series, but it is difficult to tell exactly what orders would best model it. It looks like the yearly seasonality is evident at 12 lags, and there is some strong autocorrelation up to lag 5. Let’s see what the object returned from the auto.arima call looks like. Note that when making the time series object using the ts function in R, the frequency is given as 12 to indicate monthly data.
Series: structure(c(-0.00265604405811537, -0.00177462335836864, -0.00266785396119396, -0.00178253166628295, -0.00178571476023492, -0.000894054596880522, -0.000894854645842713, 0, 0.00178890924272324, 0.00178571476023492, 0.00178253166628295, 0.0017793599000786, 0.002663117419484, 0.0017714796483812, 0.0026513493216207, 0.00264433825308963, 0.00263736416608573, 0.00263042676877312, 0.00262352577238545, 0.00261666089117085, 0.0034782643763247, 0.00346620797648711, 0.0025917941074276, 0.00258509407210461, 0.00171969087952739, 0.00171673861905397, 0.000857265376119187, 0.000856531101616653, 0.000855798083895465, 0.0017094021256483, 0.00170648505575954, 0.00170357792478271, 0.00254993763327249, 0.004235499766855, 0.00337553063128126, 0.00336417474563255, 0.00335289501031077, 0.00417537141048108, 0.00332779009267448, 0.00414422474602638, 0.00330305832925681, 0.00329218404347742, 0.00328138112317689, 0.00408664238545242, 0.00407000968829685, 0.00567032706008774, 0.00483482005458313, 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0.00102040825180616, 0.00508648095637376, 0.00455581653586101, 0.00654419652421367, 0.00899106955985651, 0.00496032763096999, 0.000989119764124524, 0.00148184764088199, 0.000493461643371162, -0.000493461643371162, 0.00639608576582695, 0.0102464912091715, 0.0106229873912866, 0.0109864969415678, 0.00945633524203515, 0.00656662772389005, 0.00837993730674924, 0.0115235200038608, 0.00866991513344573, 0.00453309933098467, 0.00271002875886417, 0, 0, 0.00450045764105589, 0.00403316701762257), .Tsp = c(1, 22.9166666666667, 12), class = "ts")
ARIMA(3,1,1)(0,0,2)[12]
Coefficients:
ar1 ar2 ar3 ma1 sma1 sma2
-0.5119 0.0622 -0.3987 0.9257 -0.4116 -0.3586
s.e. 0.0611 0.0649 0.0578 0.0259 0.0666 0.0703
sigma^2 estimated as 2.524e-06: log likelihood=1320.17
AIC=-2626.35 AICc=-2625.91 BIC=-2601.34
We can see this is a bit of a mess, but everything we need is there. The parameter estimates and their names, as stated before, are conveniently attached to the object as vectors which can be easily accessed. The orders, however, are not conveniently stored, and will be extracted by converting this output into a string and indexing it to get the desired information. Below are two functions, one which can extract the parameters and another which can extract the orders from this object.
Now we have helper functions to extract the information we want from our auto.arima output. There is one snag left to manage, which is that when the auto.arima output has a constant, we need to provide an exogenous variable to the statsmodels SARIMAX object in the form of a vector of ones which the coefficient will be assigned to. Also, creating our auto.arima response object could be much simpler. Rather than generating these each time, we can create yet another helper function to give us everything we need for the creation of our statsmodels SARIMAX model in one step, as below:
We now have everything we need to quickly generate an appropriate model to a time series. Let’s try this on our first zip code’s log returns, to see if it worked:
We can see this model has some issues but that it is fairly effective. The residuals are heteroscedastic, as expected, and there is some mild autocorrelation in the residuals at lag 5, which is not ideal. However, the residuals are centered around zero, and although the leptokurtocity (excess kurtosis, meaning a slender peak, being caused by the volatility clustering) is causing the JB test null hypothesis of normally distributed residuals to be rejected, they are not too far off, having reasonable skew and kurtosis. Testing this process on a few other zip codes shows that the models generated tend not to have autocorrelated residuals in general, and close-to but not normally distributed residuals, with heteroscedasticity following the same general pattern of increasing volatility over time, and the resulting leptokurtocity. There is much discussion centered on the fact that having perfect SARIMAX model fit for financial time series is not common, and these models are fairly solid considering this domain, especially considering the rapidity with which they are being generated. | https://towardsdatascience.com/real-estate-consulting-data-project-44c904480290 | ['Nate Cibik'] | 2020-12-05 02:46:41.056000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Python', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Real Estate Investments', 'Flatiron School'] |
How to Avoid Going Insane As A Writer | How to Avoid Going Insane As A Writer
And have sharp-looking shirts while you’re at it
Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash
Today I spent a very satisfying half-hour ironing sheets. I never dreamed I would find solace in ironing, but I have. I was raised by an ironer; my mother ironed everything, including our underwear. But from as early as I can remember, I railed against ironing and told my mother how pointless it seemed to me. I chose clothes that were meant to be drapey rather than crisp, and anything that was meant to be crisp I redefined as wrinkly. I vowed I would never spend a minute of my life bent over an ironing board pressing out a sleeve when the sleeve was just going to get wrinkled anyway. I wouldn’t waste my time on such futile things.
I spend my time instead trying to perfect the imperfectible. I spend my time trying to craft the perfect sentence, trying to choose just the right word, trying to find every last detail, trying to build the perfectly structured story or book. Often the pursuit is exhilarating. But it can also be stupendously frustrating, because, of course, there is no perfect sentence or word or story. In writing, the ultimate is never achievable. If I work hard and the words feel right I might be satisfied, but I can never feel completely content. How could I? Writing is not an absolute. At your best, you hit close to the mark, but it’s not science; it never adds up to 100, no matter how good a job you’ve done.
This isn’t to say that writing is constant torture, not at all. But the sensation of complete satisfaction isn’t part of the deal. Unless you’re arrogant or a fool, you know there’s always something more that could be done to make something you’ve written better. That’s not to say you should never let go of a story. You have to learn how to know when you’ve done as good a job as you can do plus ten percent more than that, and then you can release the writing to the world, humbled by knowing it’s not, nor will it ever be, perfect.
What I discovered, though, is that ironing can be perfect. After years of sleeping on sheets that looked like accordions and scoffing when my mother raised her eyebrows at my puckered shirts, I finally bought myself an iron, just for the hell of it. I ran the thing down the edge of a pillowcase, and had the sudden, blissful sensation of complete satisfaction. The fabric flattened and eased. I kept ironing. It was hypnotic, predictable, finite; apply iron to wrinkled fabric, press hard, achieve perfect results. There were no choices to make and there was an absolute to strive for. Is this what Zen feels like? Maybe. Writing stimulated my brain and my soul, but this was something that felt complete.
I don’t advocate that everyone run out and get a steam iron for therapeutic purposes (although think of those nice crisp sheets!). But I’ve realized that it’s important for me to have something to do regularly that is concrete and satisfying, to contrast with the abstractness, the impossibility, of writing perfectly. I feel very lucky to have a job that doesn’t include monotony, and doesn’t have a performance grid that I must match, but it sure feels good to do something every day or so that has a simple reachable goal. | https://susanorlean.medium.com/how-to-avoid-going-crazy-as-a-writer-8b6789cde6b2 | ['Susan Orlean'] | 2020-11-10 01:12:34.629000+00:00 | ['Writing Tips', 'Writing', 'First Person', 'Home'] |
So you want to build an ABM strategy? | Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Account-Based Marketing as a concept and strategy has been around since the 1990s in one shape or another (far longer than I have been a B2B marketer).
Despite the explosion of marketing and sales technology solving any need you could dream up and then some, many B2B marketing teams don’t align themselves with sales (and their business) around the common language spoken: CAC, ARR, LTV, Funnel Velocity, etc. at the account level. This creates dissonance, inefficiency, and ultimately isn’t what’s best for the customer experience.
Marketers love people. We love to talk about the humans we market to, we geek out over personalizing interactions with our buyer personas across our integrated channels and LOOK AT THIS CAMPAIGN I DREAMT UP ISN’T IT CLEVER?! We pour over our data (and there’s a lot of data) to understand buyer behavior; we talk to customers to try to find patterns of influence, we rack our brains trying to rationalize and scale a complex emotional process.
I keep encountering dissonance among marketing, sales and business leadership despite our best intentions and shared purpose. As a SaaS company, if we use design thinking to build excellent user experiences at the product level, our marketing, sales development and sales UX needs to use the same principles.
According to SalesHacker:
“In an account based world, landing the biggest, highest-value accounts can only be achieved when all revenue-generating disciplines are closely aligned. Specifically, we’re going to examine the almighty sales and marketing alignment framework.
Let’s get real — silos don’t work. Sure, they’re easy, but they don’t work. Sales and marketing have historically operated in their own way, with their own goals, culture and values.
We all know that buyers are now in control. That means our businesses have to follow suit and move beyond this old-school infrastructure. In truth, disconnected sales and marketing operations only lead to inefficiencies, broken systems and problems at every level.”
I’m fortunate enough to work at a company (Ansarada) and in a region (the good ol’ USA) and an office (Chicago) where marketing and sales have good relationships and rapport with each other.
While we have little brand awareness in the US, we have LOTS of brand awareness in Australia, where our HQ is. Our job as a marketing, SDR and sales team in the US is to build brand awareness and convert interested accounts into ARR.
When there are disagreements in quality or quantity of leads or how sales are working those leads, we resolve them and work together to do what’s best for our customers.
However.
We’re still speaking different languages. The marketing team speaks in top of funnel (campaign and website metrics) first and down-funnel metrics second.
Sales and business leaders care about down-funnel metrics first and top of funnel metrics second, and barely, at least on a macro level.
When we take a step back, we need to understand how everything is working together. How do you make strategic marketing decisions that will help scale your business quickly? I’m really understating this when I say it can be incredibly hard to measure marketing attribution and influence.
From a write up on TOPO’s ABM report (from 2016 — bit old, but the insights still ring true):
“The MQL is not marketing’s ultimate milestone.” The study found that the top ABM metric is Pipeline — 4x more ABM marketers focus on pipeline compared to MQL or MQA [Marketing Qualified Accounts]. It’s a total shift in focus to down-funnel metrics. When your ABM focuses on the opportunity stage (pipeline), you are able to manage your resources and optimize for the metrics that really matter. In addition to pipeline, metrics like velocity, win rates, ACV, and LTV are all down-funnel and related to the opportunity stage.”
It takes what, something like 86 touchpoints¹ to convert a lead to a sale? It takes your entire marketing technology stack to influence the average 5.4 decision-makers involved in a buying cycle and then you’re still wondering which levers work the best so you can turn up the volume. Marketing efficiency is a huge problem: limited budget and a mandate to grow exponentially.
In an ideal brand awareness + pipeline building strategy (ie. inbound inquiries are few):
Marketing and sales use predictive tools to intelligently identify accounts that are showing buying intent — no more ‘gut feel’ or ‘Forbes 100 and Inc 5000’.
Marketing intelligently engages the account to cut through the noise.
SDRs reach out to specific people (you can call them ‘leads’) at engaged accounts and creates opportunities for Sales to work. SDRs are the only team who should be owning the lead conversation.
Sales works the account until it becomes a customer. (Marketing helps with funnel velocity nurturing, too.)
Customer success serves the entire account to ensure they’re successful, reduce churn, and upsell (with the help of Sales).
Customer marketing markets specifically to accounts.
etc. (Do you see where I’m going?)
We still use segmentation. We still use all of our marketing channels and tactics. But what sits on top of everything — what guides decision-making, is the account lens. ABM provides a common language and unifies all of our efforts around an account list. It’s efficient. It’s smart. It makes sense.
For example:
Traditional SEM: Serve ads to lookalike campaigns based on buyer personas — spray and pray.
ABM SEM: Serve ads only to buyer personas at target accounts we know are showing buying intent signals.
Marketing, SDR teams, Sales — we all want to know which tactics/channels/strategies work so we can do smarter things to hit our goals, build the business, and cut through all of the damn noise to build relationships with humans and the companies they work for.
I’m not saying I know the magical answer for b2b teams — but I have a hunch
I work at a company where I have the freedom to explore this hunch. Where I’ve been trusted to build an Account-Based Marketing pilot to prove the concept and then scale the strategy.
The point of this writing (and subsequent writings after) is to document the process and journey I’m embarking on as a US-based marketer building a program that includes stakeholders from multiple departments across 3 (or more) time zones.
I recently attended Demandbase’s Advanced ABM training and found it excellent and chock full of information for a relative ABM newbie. As helpful as it and many resources are — I learn kinetically. By rolling up my sleeves and figuring things out.
I’ll take what best-in-class SaaS companies have done and apply it to Ansarada because reinventing the wheel when others have done exactly what you’re trying to do is stupid. We’re still our own unique flavor — with just over 200 people globally and only 25 of those in the US. We just raised our Series B with sights on an IPO. It’s time to GROW.
The Brief
Hypothesis
If we use Account-Based Marketing as a focused marketing strategy then we will see increased engagement from our ideal customer profile at target accounts, reduce operational waste and increase efficiency over time.
Why are we doing this?
Best-in-class SaaS companies use ABM as a strategy in their marketing mix. ABM reduces waste and promotes focus around target accounts, providing increased ROI and operational efficiency that compounds over time the longer the strategy is in place. This pilot is to prove the concept and build the business case and processes to scale.
Pilot goal
25% lift (18 accounts) in website engagement from 75 target accounts in the US and 75 target accounts in UK.
(I’ll explain why these numbers for the pilot in a subsequent post. There’s methodology behind it.)
Moonshot goal
5 Opportunities
Ideal Customer Profile
Tech Leader — Middle Market CEO & CFO
Risks
This is a project that will require collaboration across stakeholders from multiple departments across 3 time zones. It includes bringing people along a journey and selling the value internally through limited face to face interaction.
This project includes adding a new technology into our marketing mix and unforeseen potential problems that can arise with it.
Measurement
Tying everything together will be Domo ingesting data from Salesforce, the Demandbase platform, Google Analytics, Pardot, qualitative debriefs from SDRs and Sales, etc.
How
Next time
I’ll talk you through the process of how I went from “Hey boss, I have this idea…” to “stage 0” or creating something from almost nothing.
What are your thoughts about ABM? Hate it? Love it? Does it guide your entire sales/marketing strategy, or is it just a part of your marketing mix? | https://medium.com/ansarada-thinking/so-you-want-to-build-an-abm-strategy-a250de39ba95 | ['Phoebe Claire Conybeare'] | 2018-10-09 18:39:22.544000+00:00 | ['Marketing Strategies', 'Strategy', 'Marketing Technology', 'Sales', 'Marketing'] |
A Non-Partisan Voter’s Guide for Christians (No, Really) | A Non-Partisan Voter’s Guide for Christians (No, Really)
A review of David Platt’s church & politics primer, *Before You Vote: Seven Questions Every Christian Should Ask*
The 2020 election is dividing Christians more radically than any election in my lifetime. This puts pastors and churches in an intractable position, wherever they fall politically, especially if pastors want to give guidance about voting. So what should they do? I submit that they should first read David Platt’s new Before You Vote: a wise, refreshing guide in our partisan atmosphere.
In my childhood and even up to now, church “voting guides” have been mostly a joke, ranking candidates on one criteria: how “conservative” they are. Pastors would say “I’m not going to tell you who to vote for” and then give you one of these voting guides that makes it terribly obvious who the “Christian candidate” is. I’m not saying that they were necessarily wrong about who lines up with Christian beliefs, but I do know that for a large swath of people, the term “conservative” has changed to the point where it does not reflect Christian beliefs so unequivocally. I am a conservative, no qualms about it personally, but often I feel like I can’t even use the word with non-Christians anymore because of the new connotations it brings.
But I am here to assure you that David Platt’s Before You Vote is not one of those voter’s guides that indirectly tell you what to do. He stays far away from that. What it does help you do is think through what voting as a Christian means, what the Bible says about several issues, and what traps to avoid when thinking and speaking about politics as a Christian. Even if you’re thinking, “I already know what the Bible says and what that means for me politically”, I urge you to get this book because I pray that all Christians will come away with a large dose of empathy for other Christians who come to different political decisions.
The most important thing to Platt, as it should be to us, is not that you make the “right decision” on election day. God is on the throne either way, and he has already won. As a matter of fact, Platt writes:
This world is not a democracy. This world is a monarchy, and god is the King. Sure, we may use language about our rights, and we may even compose and ascribe to a “Bill of Rights”, but the reality is simple: God has all the rights, and we are subject to him.
So you must be subject to God, and that means how you steward your vote is important. The Bible gives no direct instruction on voting, but:
(We) are in a very different position today than the church in the first century. Followers of Jesus in the New Testament did not have a say in who led them and how they would be led. For that matter, neither do followers of Jesus in North Korea or many other nations in the world today. But we do. Consequently, as “governing” citizens we are accountable before God for the good of people affected by our government.
What Platt yearns for is a church full of people who refuse to be divided by politics and make their Biblical ties more important than their political ones. He gives many practical pieces of advice to Christians in order to achieve this goal. One important example is when we say “the Christian view on (fill in the issue) is…” or “the Christian candidate is…”. Why not? Because Christians base their beliefs on the Bible, and, as Platt argues:
(No) verse in the Bible endorses any particular candidate in a contemporary election. What’s more, like the rest of us, politicians are inherently flawed human beings. God the Father has only opened up the heavens in support of one person, saying “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16). His name is Jesus, and he is the only leader whose character and platform are completely endorsed by God.
So, should we not speak about how Christians should think about political issues at all? Of course not, because the Bible does give some guidance on many issues. The point is this:
When someone claims to have the Christian position on an issue, he or she is asserting that every Bible-believing, gospel-embracing follower of Jesus should agree with that position. As we have seen (Platt explores these issues in more detail earlier in the book), there is a place for such statements. We have listed biblical examples, including abortion, marriage, murder, paying taxes, and caring for the poor and the immigrant. But as soon as someone uses language about the Christian position and does not have clear, direct, language from God’s Word supporting that position, he or she has gone beyond the bounds of the Bible and is unbiblically dividing the church. Claiming to know the Christian position draws a line in the sand. There are those who are in and those who are out.
Applying our faith to politics, then, requires a high degree of responsibility to not say the Bible is clear on a contemporary political issue when it is not. The Bible is clear that abortion is the destruction of life. The Bible is clear that Christians should care for the poor and the immigrant. The Bible is clear that we should pay taxes. It is not clear, however, on what a nation’s tax policy should be. It is not clear, either, on how to weight these issues when we are voting. Those questions fall under “the Christian position according to our wisdom” a helpful but important distinction given by Platt. (He goes more into detail on the reasons a given Christian might weigh some of these issues as greater than others, but I have chosen not to relay that here.)
I feel that most of the political division in the American church recently comes from Christians on both sides of the aisle feeling that they have a monopoly on truth, or the correct decisions. More than that, many Christians feel that it is more important to be in the “right” intellectually than it is to keep the body of Christ from becoming divided. The answer is clear: God will not hold you or anyone else accountable for views on issues that are not given clear and direct language in Scripture. So rest easy. Rest in grace. Try to understand your brothers and sisters in Christ before trying to convince them that you are right.
If you’re thinking, “Politics isn’t an issue in my church. We all seem to have roughly the same beliefs”, you’re not alone. Platt writes:
One prominent study across a variety of churches found that very few people attend church services with other Bible-believing Christians who hold different political views than them. This is tragic, and I don’t use that term lightly. Followers of Jesus are dividing into different churches not based on what they believe about the Bible and the gospel, but based on what they believe about political candidates, parties, and positions. This should not be so.
Why should it not be so? Because, as Christians, we are consistently being identified more easily with political parties or candidates than we are our beliefs. I have several colleagues at my school who I have asked to come to church that have not come. Why? I think it mostly has to do with the political views they think they will encounter at my Baptist church. Does my church deserve that scrutiny? I don’t think so. But it points to a larger problem in the American church today, one that is hurting Christian witness to the outside world.
I had one moderately-sized problem with Before You Vote, and it is one that I would love to ask Platt about personally if I had the chance. He speaks often of the two major political parties, and he even mentions that some Christians may intentionally choose not to vote at all as a sort of protest to the available candidates or parties. But he never once mentions even the possibility of voting third-party. I believe this is a much more effective option than not voting at all because you can easily see it in the election results. So I am flummoxed as to why Platt wouldn’t mention the possibility, even as much as he talks about how issues and their biblical basis should determine our vote. What if a minor party’s platform represents, to us, the best possible choice among the candidates? I would have appreciated some wise guidance for Christians on this issue, especially as some high-profile Christians have announced their intention to vote third-party and have received immense backlash from other Christians.
Before You Vote should not be your only source of guidance on political issues, and that is by design. The Bible should be your first source. But Platt’s short book is a refreshing call to both take our responsibility seriously and not let political issues divide the church. Some reviews of this book have missed the point completely, sowing further division instead of hearing the simple message: there are a lot of things more important than politics, and loving your brothers and sisters in Christ is one of those. Don’t cause any further division based on political candidates. It’s not worth it. Think through what the Bible says, and vote your conscience. | https://medium.com/park-recommendations/a-non-partisan-voters-guide-for-christians-no-really-995aae7b5b4e | ['Jason Park'] | 2020-10-17 12:03:02.840000+00:00 | ['Religion And Spirituality', 'Books', 'Christianity', 'Reading', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Brand & Purpose: Nike & the Politics of Advertising | Fiverr Presents: The Art of Doing — The Future of the Creative Industry
Our Co-founder & Managing Partner, Michael Tennant, recently spoke at the Fiverr “The Art of Doing” — The Future of the Creative Industry, an NYC event moderated by Ann-Marie Alcantara, tech & e-commerce reporter for Adweek, sparking dialogue on the influence of technology on the advertising industry. The conversation quickly evolved into an in-depth discussion of brand integrity and responsibility handling issues concerning diversity, purpose, and authenticity.
The creative industry is rapidly evolving, “people are no longer willing to take a back seat and let things happen, said Zach Dioneda, director of brand marketing at Fiverr. If we diversify and democratize the way we do business, we can change the way people work together.” We at Curiosity Lab agree. But will go a step further to say that brands that remain complacent, will become yesterday’s conversation, as value-driven brands that are willing to stand for something and “do” something, will continue to hold or steal market share.
“Technology has given every critic a voice, says Ian Kovalik, partner, and creative director at Mekanism, Brands will not have to apologize if they ‘stick their chest out’ and ‘leave it all on the table.’” Finding the balance between pushing creative boundaries and working in a highly sensitive environment makes brand integrity, honesty, and accountability critical to consumers.
Brands like Nike have paved the path towards, and reaped the benefits of, brand polarization by publicly supporting Colin Kaepernick. If we dive deeper into the timeline of Colin Kaepernick’s activism and sponsorship with Nike, you’ll uncover that it took Nike almost two years to stand up for Kaepernick, at a time where his infamy as an activist might very well be greater than he ever had as a player. You have to ask, what “value” was Nike publicly expressing here… Standing up for what’s right? Or capitalizing on Colin’s Activism?
A recent report by the Center for Responsive Politics exposes Nike and its employees for overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidates in this 2018 election cycle. Which begs the question, should a brand’s employees’ political contributions sway consumer’s purchasing decision? We’d say, it’s up to the individual consumer to decide. In a time when everything is being politicized, perhaps the politics of a product are more important to the consumer than the product itself. Being in the spotlight isn’t easy, but neither is making $36.6 billion in sales for 2018 so far. As Nike faces investigation into their genuine stance as a company, it’s owners, and its employees, where to draw the line is yet to be seen,” says Michael Tennant. | https://medium.com/curiosity-lab/brand-purpose-nike-the-politics-of-advertising-20b23e6e50ae | ['Michael A. Tennant'] | 2018-10-23 15:08:41.807000+00:00 | ['Purpose', 'Advertising', 'Nike', 'Kaepernick', 'Marketing'] |
Fear. | Written by
I’m an award-winning comic artist, writer and graphic recorder. All words + images © Sarah Firth. Contact me www.sarahthefirth if you want to use them. | https://sarahthefirth.medium.com/fear-99cd5d7996e1 | ['Sarah Firth'] | 2020-03-15 09:11:10.484000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Personal', 'Transformation', 'Psychology', 'Healing'] |
To the Guy in the Navy I Met on an Airplane 20 Years Ago | To the Guy in the Navy I Met on an Airplane 20 Years Ago Shani Silver Follow Jul 7 · 5 min read
Christopher J. Hanson, if you’re out there, I’m sorry.
Photo by Kovah on Unsplash
This is for Christopher J. Hanson. If you remember me at all, it’ll be because we met on an airplane 20 years ago. I was a freshman in college, you were in the Navy, and before the flight ended, we agreed to write each other letters. I remember you seemed surprised that I’d say yes to such an arrangement, but come on, a Navy pen pal? I’m in. This was before the days of texting, thank heavens. I didn’t want to go my whole adult life without genuine correspondence from a gentleman and because of you I didn’t have to. I upheld my end of the agreement for a time, as did you, but in the summer of 2001 we abruptly lost touch and I have spent two decades wondering where the hell you are. Before you ask, yes, I tried looking on Facebook.
We met on a flight from Austin to Chicago in either the fall of the year 2000, or the spring of 2001. I can’t remember, I’ve slept and had quite a bit of wine since then. The name of the airline escapes me. I sat down on an airplane and a cute, male human being in my age bracket sat down next to me. It hadn’t happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. I am writing this now because for the last twenty years, on occasion, I get a little sad about how and why we stopped writing to each other. I’m worried it’s all my fault. If you’re out there, I’d like to apologize, and I hope whatever you’ve been up to, you’ve been happy.
Our encounter was not really a romantic one. I think we both knew that. Yes, there is something fun and flirtatious about the very nature of the situation, but it never had quite the weight of a sexually charged conversation. It was much sweeter than that. You were nice and there was an innocence about you, that’s what’s always stood out in my mind. You were also tall and blonde and you’d never been on an airplane before. I’d been on lots of airplanes and I gave you my window seat. The delight on the face of a grown man on an airplane for the first time isn’t something one forgets.
I remember being very disappointed that you were in the Navy but were traveling in normal clothes. I get that it was definitely the more comfortable option, but they totally would have let uniforms board first. You were going somewhere for training. I’m sure I was on my way to visit family. You weren’t the only one on the plane in the Navy, you were just the one with an assigned seat next to me. The rest of the guys in the Navy were your friends and were gently giving you shit for talking to a girl the entire time. When you got up to use the bathroom they had nothing but nice things to say. I remember thinking how cool it was that you’d all voluntarily agreed to leave your homes and families and be in the actual Navy, stationed heaven knows where for heaven knows how long. We were about the same age but that seemed like a thing to do that was much more grown up than me.
We wrote to each other back and forth a few times, I have extremely clear memories of receiving your letters and being absolutely ecstatic to read them. When you told me you read my letters to all of your friends because they didn’t get any mail I wanted to hunt down their loved ones and beat them over the head with a wet trout. I have no idea what I wrote to you about but sometimes I think it doesn’t matter. Getting a letter is just as important as what the letter says. Letters are an art becoming more and more lost to time, not unlike our friendship.
I don’t know who changed addresses first, but I think it was me. What I assume happened is that the letter I sent you with my new address didn’t reach you, either because it got lost in the mail, or because you moved before it could arrive. Perhaps we both wrote to each other of our new addresses at the exact same time and they got lost on the way to Mantua. I have no idea what happened but I am sad that we never had a way to connect again. That fall, 9/11 happened and I was unable to find you via the Navy’s website. Later searches were also just as fruitless. You have no idea how many goddamned Christopher J. Hanson’s there are in this country. At some point I just let it go, and trusted that the intent of our connection on this earth was nothing beyond one flight and a few letters, which was just fine, as I enjoyed them both very much.
I’ve often wondered why I never really let losing my pen pal go. You aren’t the only one I’ve had, just the only one I’ve missed. Is it the fact that we met on a plane? Wrote real letters? That you were a serviceman? We lived a movie plot for one brief moment, that must be why it’s stayed with me so long. Anyway, I’m 38 now, I’m a writer and I live in Brooklyn. I’ve preferred the aisle seat since the day we met.
Now, 20 years since our meeting, I don’t know why the thought occurred to me to put this previously untold story out into the world. I am under no delusions that you’ll actually read it. Maybe I just want other people to hear a nice story that had a bummer of an ending but is still a nice story in my mind. Maybe I want other people to know that things can end when we don’t want them to and everything will still be totally okay. I’m really sorry we lost each other, but I’m still really happy we met. I still have your letters. I’ve trashed every other piece of handwriting from men I’ve known much longer and much better over these 20 years, but yours I keep. They’re in a box along with other scraps of paper and photos and things almost as cool but somehow less special, as nothing else is on Navy stationery.
I wonder if you’re still a sailor, or if you changed careers eventually. I hope whatever you decided to do, you enjoy it. I hope you have family and friends and a Labrador. I feel like that’s the kind of dog you’d like. I hope you kept writing letters, you were good at it. And I hope wherever you ended up, you got the window seat on the way there.
____________________________________________________________
Shani Silver is a humor essayist and podcaster based in Brooklyn who writes on Medium, a lot. | https://medium.com/swlh/to-the-guy-in-the-navy-i-met-on-an-airplane-20-years-ago-ad6e61d0778d | ['Shani Silver'] | 2020-07-08 15:33:21.326000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Letters', 'Friendship', 'Writing', 'Relationships'] |
That Awesome Time Javascript Rescued Us | That Awesome Time Javascript Rescued Us
We need help!
Photo by Emile Perron on Unsplash
The Story
It was the Fall of 2019 and my fiancé and I were absolutely obsessed with going to hackathons. For those of you who may not know, a hackathon is an event where software developers collaborate together to build something in a specified amount of time. We had just finished one in Kent two weeks prior and got the crazy idea to go into another without any project idea. Normally, we figure out what our project will be prior to the hackathon. This gives us plenty of time to do research for the project which ultimately saves valuable minutes during the event. However, we decided to just go, have some fun, and figure out something when we got there.
The Project
After arriving, checking in, and picking up some swag from the sponsors, we found a nice place to sit and began brainstorming. Initially, I had wanted to create something that utilized machine learning. My fiancé wanted to do something related to one of the prize categories, Best Hack for Social Good. Eventually, we came up with the idea of creating a chatbot utilizing conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence). What we ultimately decided on was to create a chatbot that someone who is suffering from lack of energy, depression, suicidal thoughts, etc. and is not comfortable sharing their thoughts with another human, could talk freely to the bot. Essentially, the goal was for the user to feel comfortable and maybe even feel better after talking with the bot.
Hacking Time
When hacking began, we immediately started researching machine learning and Tensorflow. Eventually, we got a neural network written and a model created to train it on. Since we were running extremely low on time and didn’t have any experience in Javascript frameworks/libraries, we opted to use Flask. Flask is a Python micro-web framework. It works great if you want to do everything yourself and get something built quickly.
The main issue that we’ve run into in the past when using Flask is that Jinja doesn’t always play nicely with complex data objects. If you’re not familiar with iterating through objects with Jinja, it looks a little something like this:
<div>
{% for record in RecordsList %}
<p>{{ record.someData }}</p> {% endfor %} </div>
For those of you that use Angular, this pretty similar to “ngFor”. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have any Angular experience and not a whole lot of time either. In the past, we would normally pass the data object to the Flask template (basically, your HTML file) and start iterating through it. This time though, we decided to utilize Jinja differently. There is a filter you can use that will read the passed up object as JSON. Because of this, the object can be parsed and assigned to a Javascript variable. For example, we used:
var json = JSON.parse({{ Messages | tojson }});
This was very handy because instead of iterating with Jinja, we could now iterate through the object using Javascript.
Not only was it easier to iterate through the JSON object but at a point when the time was so critical, Javascript made it much easier to build a dynamic list of chat messages. This helped us to create the look that we were wanting for the project.
As you can see, we had a larger box that contained the user input textbox and the chat messages. The chat messages are just bootstrap cards with the blue cards being user messages and pink cards being bot messages. Utilizing Javascript’s createElement() function, we were able to dynamically create the message list. After breaking up the JSON object into two separate lists (sent, received), we were able to use the innerText property to assign the message to the created card.
function updateScroll()
{
var scrollBox = document.getElementById('box'); var elementHeight = scrollBox.scrollHeight; scrollBox.scrollTop = elementHeight;
}
The last thing that we had to do before hacking ended was to create a function that would automatically turn the message box into a scroll box and keep the same height.
Conclusion
All in all, I would say it was a very successful hackathon. We went into the event without any project idea. However, by the end of it, the project that we had built was something totally out of our comfort zone. With no prior experience of Javascript, it had come to our rescue when we were desperate for something that could easily build a dynamic list. Feel free to let me know in the comments if there was a time when Javascript had come to the rescue for you. Keep coding my friends. Cheers! | https://medium.com/swlh/that-awesome-time-javascript-rescued-us-86a883206e95 | ['Mike Wolfe'] | 2020-11-03 12:54:02.482000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'JavaScript', 'Hackathons', 'Software Development'] |
Zenome annual report | Dear holders and potential buyers of Zenome’s tokens.
About two weeks ago, the one year mark passed since the idea of the decentralized genomic Internet — Zenome arose.
Let me introduce to your attention Zenome’s first annual report.
Period: June 30, 2017 — June 30, 2018
Zenome’s token sale
We sell our tokens in several stages. This is similar to the stage of venture financing. We plan to do token sales in five stages.
So far we’ve raised:
● Public presale round — 100,000 USD
● First private sale round — 200,000 USD
● First public sale round — 362,000 USD
In early September 2018, we plan to start a second public round of the token sales.
The private round is from July 1 to September 1, 2018.
Total raised funds — 662,000 USD (at the exchange rate from February 2018)
At present, fluctuations in the exchange rate have resulted in a decrease in dollar fundraising amounts by an average of 20–30%
● The total amount of tokens: 35,000,000 ZNA
● Currently sold: 1,035,491 ZNA
● Tokens for bounty program participants: 87,499 ZNA
● Reserved for advisers: 87,500 ZNA
The main terms of the token sale are shown here: https://zenome.io/download/terms.pdf
Marketing Activities:
Social Media
Last year, starting with an initial group of 4 people, we managed to grow a community of more than 3,000 people from around the world.
Community size: Telegram — 570, Twitter — 674, Facebook — 1974
Conferences:
We actively attend various conferences, both on the topics of blockchain and genomics. Over the past year, we have spoken more than ten times about our project’s story in different countries and cities. | https://medium.com/zenome/zenome-annual-report-60a007595242 | ['Jeff Heizmann'] | 2018-07-10 11:07:34.769000+00:00 | ['Zenome', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Blockchain', 'Development', 'Genetics'] |
Stack Data Structure: Practical Applications & Operations | Stack Data Structure: Practical Applications & Operations
You wouldn’t be able to read this now if stacks didn’t exist. Stacks described from a practical perspective for engineers.
Stack is one of the most popular and widely known data structures in computer science, and one of the easiest to learn and understand. But often, maybe because of the way it is introduced or taught, it seems kind of useless and boring to learn.
Stacks are not one of those useless things that you need to learn just to pass your exams or to crack the coding interview, but they are actually used for a lot of things that you do daily on the computer.
Watch the video version if you prefer that :)
Practical Applications
They are the building blocks of function calls and recursive functions. Yes, this is a common application that you maybe aware of, but think about it — right now there are hundreds (if not thousands) of functions existing on your call stack in memory maintained by your OS. Every time a function is called, some memory is reserved (PUSH) for it on the call stack, and when it returns, the memory is deallocated (POP).
The undo/redo function that has become a part of your muscle memory now, uses the stack pattern. All your actions are pushed onto a stack, and whenever you ‘undo’ something, the most recent action is popped off. The number of undos you can do is determined by the size of this stack.
The stack pattern is also used to keep track of the ‘most recently used’ feature. I am sure you have come across the most recently seen files, items, tools etc.. across different applications. Your browser uses the stack pattern to maintain the recently closed tabs, and reopen them.
Your code editor uses a stack to check if you have closed all your parentheses properly, and even to prettify your code.
This ties to the more formally described use case of stacks — expression evaluation and syntax parsing. They are used to convert one notation of expression into another (like infix to postfix etc..), this is actually used in calculators. If you have prepared for coding interviews, you know the famous parentheses matching problem is solved using stack.
This ties to the more formally described use case of stacks — expression evaluation and syntax parsing. They are used to convert one notation of expression into another (like infix to postfix etc..), this is actually used in calculators. If you have prepared for coding interviews, you know the famous parentheses matching problem is solved using stack. They are used to implement back tracking algorithm, which is basically an algorithm with a goal, and if it takes a wrong path it simply ‘back tracks’ back to a previous state. These states are maintained using stacks. Simple games like tic-tac-toe can be solved using this approach.
A similar concept is used in the Depth First Search algorithm.
A similar concept is used in the Depth First Search algorithm. Increase efficiency of algorithms — Several algorithms make use of the stack data structure and its properties. Examples are Graham Scan — which is used to find the convex hull, and the problem of finding the nearest smaller or larger value in an array.
The Stack Pattern
So what makes stacks special ? Well, it is the Last In First Out property — the element that was added last to the stack is removed first. There is only one way to insert or remove an element from a stack — from the top.
Stacks are often compared to a stack of plates in restaurant kitchens, where adding a new plate or removing an existing one from the stack is only possible from the top.
In computer science, instead of plates we store objects in the stack. They could be anything from numbers, strings, memory addresses, entire functions or even other data structures.
There are three operations that can be performed on a stack data structure:
PUSH: adds an element to the stack
POP: removes an element from the stack
TOP/PEEK: returns the value of the current element on top of the stack, without actually removing it.
Now say you push 3 items into the stack, A, B and C in order. Now C is on the top. Popping off elements would give you C, B and A. So the LIFO pattern can be also used to reverse a set of ordered items.
Implementing Stacks
Most programming languages nowadays have an inbuilt library for implementing stacks. If you are interested, you can implement it yourself from scratch too. Here are common implementations of stacks in Python and C++, especially useful if you are preparing for coding interviews.
Python
In python, the list data structure can be used as a stack.
C++
The C++ STL (Standard Template Library) has a great implementation of stack. | https://medium.com/swlh/stack-data-structure-practical-applications-operations-e4e308008752 | ['Adarsh Menon'] | 2020-10-06 22:11:04.220000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Coding Interviews', 'Software Engineering', 'Stack', 'Data Structures'] |
That Other Light | with too many things in my head i write to sort it all till the sky is empty and there’s no poetry
Follow | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/that-other-light-ad5ce82aa269 | ['Priyanka Srivastava'] | 2020-11-14 16:08:45.458000+00:00 | ['Diwali', 'India', 'Writing', 'Spiritual Secrets', 'Poetry'] |
The Real Tastemakers Behind Artificial Flavors | During the early and mid-20th century, when refrigeration was commercially developed and rolled out into modern homes, convenience became an important selling point for processed, ready-to-eat, and frozen foods. However, the methods used to preserve foods against microbial decay for long-term refrigeration and freezing resulted in the deterioration of flavor. The result? Many of these processed foods ended up tasting bland.
The rise of organic chemistry during the mid-1800s also led to new organic compounds that could be readily and cheaply produced. Many of these compounds made processed foods taste similar to how they’d taste in their original form (prior to heat processing). Over time, it became clear that mixtures of compounds, each at varying concentrations, could be used to both mimic and impart new flavors to foods, preserving their taste. Chemical instruments and methods for analyzing the composition of food flavors became increasingly sophisticated, allowing food technologists to reconstruct the flavor profile of foods with greater precision and accuracy.
A human intermediary is always needed to bridge the gap between chemical analysis and subjective taste.
However, despite advancements in analytical methodology, the human element remains invaluable in flavor design. For example, while only a small handful of signature compounds can be said to “taste” like strawberry, a real strawberry may contain hundreds of compounds that, together, create a unique depth of flavor. These smaller components may only be present at parts per million or billion. They may barely make a blip on a chromatograph, but their impact on our senses is disproportionately large.
While the most sophisticated gas chromatograph has limits of detection of 10 parts per billion, human noses have been reported to smell some aromas at around 0.000000001 parts per billion. For this reason, a human intermediary is always needed to bridge the gap between chemical analysis and subjective taste.
That is where a flavorist comes in. | https://medium.com/s/story/on-flavors-and-flavorists-30affa646d6c | ['Bryan Quoc Le'] | 2018-11-29 07:26:50.938000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Science', 'Work', 'Careers', 'Technology'] |
PyTorchを用いたディープラーニング実装の学習方法 (Part 2) | An open source machine learning framework that accelerates the path from research prototyping to production deployment
Follow | https://medium.com/pytorch/pytorch%E3%82%92%E7%94%A8%E3%81%84%E3%81%9F%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%97%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%8B%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0%E5%AE%9F%E8%A3%85%E3%81%AE%E5%AD%A6%E7%BF%92%E6%96%B9%E6%B3%95-part-2-cd2920d01be4 | ['小川 雄太郎 電通国際情報サービスIsid'] | 2020-08-26 15:07:22.371000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Japanese', '日本語', 'Deep Learning', 'Pytorch'] |
4 Tips I Discovered to Deal With My Impostor Syndrome | Last week, I recorded with my co-host Mathieu, the 8th episode of the Naked Podcast, and the topic we initially chose was impostor syndrome. I have a personal connection with this syndrome because after reading about it, I noticed that I relate to it. I want to share my experience and the tools that I have developed that have enabled me to mitigate it.
70% of the population experience impostor syndrome.
Throughout my career, whether I changed jobs, companies, projects or teams, I truly believed that I only won these new positions on the basis of exceptional circumstances or luck, not on merit. I thought that what I had done was not good enough to deserve what I had accomplished. I didn’t believe in any of my achievements or doubting my skills. Therefore, I felt like a fraud.
I was afraid people around me would find out. At night, I had thoughts like “Why am I in these meetings?” “Why are they entrusting me with this project?” “Why are they putting me in charge of this team?” or “I cannot make this presentation in front of all the management of the company, I do not know enough about the subject!”. Like on the Suits TV show, when Mike knows that Jessica has learned the truth and walks into the office feeling everyone’s gaze on him.
At the time, I didn’t know what the problem was. I knew I had a self-esteem issue, but I didn’t know anything more.
Until a few years ago, I couldn’t put a name on it. While reading studies and developing an interest in the psychology of human behavior, I discovered and related to the 1978 research on impostor syndrome by Dr Pauline R. Clance and Dr Suzanne A. Imes in a study on high achieving women. Since then, many successful people have come forward to explain their relationship to this problem. One of the most famous is from Maya Angelou:
“I have written eleven books, but each time I think, uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.” — Maya Angelou
A study published in the Journal of Behavioral science also found that a mere 70% of the population felt it. And maybe you are suffering from it without knowing it!
Based on Clance’s article, here are the dimensions that can be distinguished for the impostor phenomenon:
The impostor cycle
The need to be unique or the best
Characteristics of Superman/Superwoman
Fear of failure
Denial of ability and discounting praise
Feeling fear and guilt about success
From other research, Valerie Young’s book “The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer From the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It” identified 5 groups that people fall into:
The perfectionist
The Superwoman/man
The natural genius
The soloist
The expert
Personally, I know I wanted to feel special. I had abilities to retain information and adaptation that helped me in school and many teachers recognized and praised them. I also didn’t identify with my peers at school because I didn’t spend as much time as they did try to understand the subjects. And maybe school or family is part of the root cause of it all.
What I do know is that today I try to alleviate that feeling by working harder than anyone. I worked hard on myself and became very picky about what I was able to do. I decided to take up the challenges that presented themselves to me, without saying no. I was relentless, I wanted to prove my worth. However, part of it can be self-harm and is fueling the syndrome itself. It was almost like a vicious cycle. I was embarking on a new job or role, feeling like a fraud again. And then I work my ass off until I gain enough confidence to continue. The problem was, I was tackling these new missions, and at the same time, I felt like I shouldn’t be there. And so, I was pushing myself even more. There was no end to it.
Begin the healing process.
The first encounter with the syndrome that I remember was when I worked as a consultant at Fujitsu Canada. At that point, I had changed roles because I wanted to work on the advisory side of the organization. I had done this in Paris during past experiences and wanted to go back to it. In my first project, I was part of the team whose objective was to build new operational processes based on ITIL and ISO best practices within a new organization. This project began with a merger between two departments within the same organization.
Our project consisted of 3 leading architects including myself and a team to develop the product to support the processes. The other two architects were senior certified and experts in ITIL. I felt that I had no place in the project. Even though I was not an expert, the project manager, who was an external consultant, chatted with me, he liked my energy and decided to put me in charge of my own workshop. As for them, I needed to organize and manage my part of the project accordingly.
In addition to building the new processes, we were product managers leading the development of an operational application.
Long story short, during the first workshop, I came into conflict with one of the main stakeholders. I did not read the situation correctly. A lot of emotion and personal interests were attached to this project for those involved. No one likes change, and for some people, this change had more ramifications than I thought.
This stakeholder was solely responsible for these processes in the previous organization, and he did not want to lose the control he had. It was personal to him.
My immaturity or lack of experience made me believe in a fairy tale in which everyone was in and supported the project. I was far from the truth. After the incident, I spoke to my colleague on the way back to Fujitsu, and he calmly explained to me, “Look, Phil, you’re pushing yourself out of the project.”
I was scared, I couldn’t fail… In the evening, I decided to call the project manager. I apologized and asked for his honest and direct feedback. He then explained to me that he was disappointed, that he expected more from me, and that if I don’t change my behavior, he will have to push me out of the project.
We chatted for a while, and he understood where I was coming from. He helped me clear things up in my head and told me what he expected, neither more nor less than my abilities. The next day we went to see the stakeholder together, I apologized and explained the situation, and from there we worked very closely so that he didn’t feel left out. He also helped to make this first major project and my experience a success.
This experience clarified so much for me. First, it changed my perception of leadership and mentoring. I must recognize the man behind this project: Patrick Bilodeau, and I know that I can never thank him enough for what he has done for me. He took me under his wing and it allowed me to thrive and do what I wanted. I could be myself. He was generous with what he learned, with sharing his experiences and his time. I learned from him how to master workshops, how to deal with dissident behavior, the importance of bringing chocolate to workshops, how to connect with anyone and the famous 5 min rules.
Find a good mentor.
Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash
You can’t do it alone! This is where I am fortunate enough to have been under this man. Patrick was an entrepreneur, and even though he was an outside consultant, and I was from Fujitsu, he didn’t care. He did what was right for him and for the project. I’m not sure people noticed the huge impact he had on this project or others. This project allowed me to learn the work structures that I still use today.
It is this type of encounter that can change you as a professional and change your career. Anyway, this one helped me with my impostor syndrome.
What was paradoxical was that I had successfully carried out this kind of project for over a year in France in the banking and insurance sector. And that’s where that feeling doesn’t make sense when you take a step back. Even though I had the skills and experience if I found myself in a new context, a new work environment, I felt helpless or a fraud. I know I’m putting this pressure on myself. The world around me doesn’t expect me to be perfect. The people I work with just expect me to give the best of myself according to my abilities.
This is the most significant impact of impostor syndrome. A kind of self-destruction that can get out of hand. It lowers my confidence, triggers my fears, and wanting to fight it for survival, and that’s where it all can fall apart!
Change perspective.
“People who don’t feel like impostors are no more intelligent or competent or capable than the rest of us,” Valerie Young expert in the impostor syndrome says. “It’s very good news because it means we just have to learn to think like non-impostors.”
I had this model in mind. I compared my skills, where I come from, the name of the company in the CV, my parents, my family, the name of the university, the diplomas or the position to those of others. I chose what I compared. And then the doubts begin.
As a friend put it so well, the problem was, I was comparing the worst version of myself to the best projection of others around me.
Photo by Joel Fulgencio on Unsplash
Today, after realizing this, I have developed abilities to stop this thinking process. I’m trying to stop my brain from leading me down a rabbit hole. I’m trying to change my perspective and start a healthier process of comparing myself to who I was, where I am, and thinking about what I want to be.
My growth and personal development came from a deep feeling that I have had since childhood. I wanted to prove that I was able to do more than my family believed. As a human being, we could do whatever we wanted, no matter what cards we were given at birth. I became ambitious, hungry, motivated and all of those feelings materialized into an ambition that got me to where I am today. I don’t know what the future is, but I always want more. However, I question myself less, I am still in this process or yet I know that I would be where I should be if I remained myself and if my thoughts, actions and feelings are in the right place.
So I started by putting aside all the misconceptions I had in my mind. I started to ask myself the right question “What if I am like this (XXX)?”. This question changed my state of mind and over time changed my perspective on something that seemed to be wrong on my mind. I was my own judge.
When you start to judge yourself, your brain works the same way. It uses models that have grown stronger over the years. So I needed to take a step back and change the habits in my head. I had to bring objectivity to the mix. I started a really beneficial and at the same time painful exercise. I took my accomplishments and wrote them down as a recruiter or headhunter who was selling me to a client. I wrote them down in the third person. I repeated this process until I was satisfied.
This exercise has nothing to do with arrogance or boosting your ego. It has to do with objectivity and pride. So it’s time to pump my chest and take note of my accomplishments. And that’s how I change the principles that have wired my brain.
Do the groundwork.
Going back to the basics and fundamentals can help move forward faster. My ninjutsu teacher used to say that compared to other martial arts and senseis, he decided to make us work on our foundations first and that no castle could be erected on swampy ground. So we worked on basic techniques (katas) and basic combinations until they became natural.
I had no choice but to lay the groundwork until I was able to feel at peace with myself and not put myself down. I believe everyone should be proud of themselves. Everyone is perfect as they are today. We look too far into the future without appreciating the present and celebrating small successes in the right way. We spend too much time on our failure, dwelling on it, analyzing what went wrong and keeping it in our mind. It blocks our growth as a person.
What is missing is reflecting on what we have accomplished, looking at it from someone else’s point of view. I forced myself to step back and look at a perspective that was neither mine nor those around me. This perspective helped me think about who I was and what I wanted. Also, I needed to rewire my brain so that I wouldn’t take any shortcuts and start having precise thoughts.
And here is the main problem, nobody takes the time to learn their identity in relation to their tribe, their society or their environment. No one looks at their strengths, their weaknesses, and is honest with what they do, what they are good at, and what they are not.
If in addition, impostor syndrome kicks in, quick guesses can turn into a destructive pattern. You cut corners and it’s easy to devalue yourself and your accomplishments.
“Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” — Dr Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
Be compassionate with yourself.
First and foremost, I still have this impostor syndrome, I have doubts, and sometimes I put myself down when I shouldn’t. However, I believe I have armed myself to fight and tame it.
The question now is: how will you begin your healing process? | https://medium.com/the-ascent/4-tips-i-discovered-to-deal-with-my-impostor-syndrome-438a396f2549 | ['Philippe Araujo'] | 2020-12-21 19:03:33.982000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Mindfulness', 'Personal Development', 'Wellbeing', 'Personal Growth'] |
Remove | Sometimes we put ourselves into a certain position from which seems difficult or at times impossible to get away from, almost forgetting that we were the ones that created it in the first place.
That’s what happened to me when I decided to keep writing everyday for 1 year after the conclusion of my 100 day project. It was was great, I was motivated, but suddenly felt trapped. I trapped myself into the commitment and the routine instead of the habit, and there is a difference between these, very subtle, the one that makes it bearable and attainable.
A commitment is about it getting it done no matter what, weather you like or not, easy or hard, it has to be completed.
A habit on the other hand, is about embedding it into our daily lives to the point that we don’t think about it and it becomes natural. We don’t question it, we just do it.
How to know the difference? Remove it. Stop doing it.
As my daily writing started to become a burden, and I started to question the real purpose and value of my decision, only two path became available. The first, just keep doing it, no questions asked, no dwelling, just sticking to plan. The second, hit pause for a couple of days and see how it goes, how I felt and what came to mind. I choose number 2.
For me, removing is always the best way to realise if something is really important and how much value it adds to my life, if any. Removing is the best to learn if you don’t need something, it’s also difficult, because it can makes us feel that we might be wasting time, that we are going backwards or nowhere at all; especially in the present days where everything is presented to us as urgent, everything is immediate, everyone needs it no matter what, the real question is, is it truly important?
In my case, yes, it is important, I learned through removing myself from the daily commitment of writing, that I like it, I enjoy it, and most importantly, that I missed it. I missed creating on daily basis, to have something tangible at the end of the day that I can related to and that over time, slowly and consistently, will become and important body of work.
I also learned that, I want to keep do it on regular basis, daily as a matter of fact; but that for this to happen, I need to do other things as well, organise, balance, and somedays, let go, or even remove something else if necessary. | https://medium.com/thoughts-on-the-go-journal/remove-ae4c60304022 | ['Joseph Emmi'] | 2018-08-08 08:05:27.737000+00:00 | ['Habits', 'Self Improvement', 'Journal', 'Commitment', 'Writing'] |
What Makes Cheese Taste Better when It’s Melted? | What Makes Cheese Taste Better when It’s Melted?
Melted cheese is without a doubt betterr than plain old block cheese, and here’s why
Photo by Klara Avsenik on Unsplash
It’s gooey, it’s savoury, and it’s oh-so-delicious. It’s on some of our favorite dishes, like pizza and nachos, and it can even make our least favorite foods taste better Yes, I’m talking about cheese. Or more specifically, melted cheese — because while cheese is delicious and all, a lot of people think the melted stuff is so much better.
That’s probably not a coincidence. There actually seems to be a scientific reason why people love melted cheese more than solid cheese. So the next time you’re reaching for those nachos — you can blame it on your biology. According to the research, a lot of this has to do with something called mouthfeel — a term used to describe… well, how food feels in your mouth.
It’s pretty straightforward. Studies suggest that mouthfeel plays a big role in how much we like a certain food and that something’s texture can even influence how much of it we eat.
Photo by Jennie Brown on Unsplash
Take a study published in 2014. In it, researchers ran five experiments where two groups of people ate foods with different textures. In one experiment, they had 83 university students eat either hard or soft brownies while watching advertisements. The scientists found that the soft brownie group naturally ate more. People don’t just have a soft spot for brownies, though.
Surveys have found that, when it comes to cheese, we also tend to like things on the softer side. Scientists think there are a couple of reasons why. One is that we tend to like foods that don’t take a lot of work to eat — which makes sense. It’s way easier to stuff your face with a bunch of soft, fudgy brownies than a bag of rock candy.
Photo by Fatima Akram on Unsplash
This isn’t the whole answer, though, because the amount of effort it takes to eat can also be influenced by things like your saliva. For example, some people dissolve starches faster than others because their saliva contains more of a protein called salivary amylase. So something that feels really thick to you might feel runnier to someone else. Another part of the answer, then, seems to be what the food is made of.
In general, people probably love the mouthfeel of fatty foods — specifically, ones that go from solid to semi-solid or liquid, like cheese or chocolate — because it signals that the food is higher in calories. Since calories are our source of energy, there’s an evolutionary advantage to loving foods with lots of them.
This probably also explains why fatty food is so good at activating the brain’s reward system. So really, your love of melty cheese might be your body’s way of trying to fuel itself. Between the calories and the fact that it’s just so easy to eat — what’s not to love? | https://medium.com/carre4/what-makes-cheese-taste-better-when-its-melted-3bad73866c8 | ['Travis Horan'] | 2020-12-24 00:01:53.246000+00:00 | ['Cheese', 'Taste', 'Science', 'Food'] |
Know Your Relationship | Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Know Your Relationship
Are you transactional, reciprocal, or personal?
At our little ice bath startup Morozko Forge, we’ve been thinking a great deal about what constitutes our company, and how we relate to all the myriad different people and organizations on which we rely to grow our venture. To help us sort it out, we created a way of thinking about our relationships as belonging to one of three categories: 1) transactional, 2) reciprocal, and 3) personal.
Transactional relationships are those in which the terms are made explicit, and there is little, if any, expectation of continuance. For example, when you are checking out at the grocery store cash register, the cashier might ask “How are you?”
But cashiers aren’t asking you because they have some deep, personal interest in your well-being. Your relationship is transactional, which is to say that you have an explicit understanding of what each of you is expecting from the other.
You are expected to hand over your credit card, and the cashier is expected to process your payment in the correct amount and help bag your groceries.
After that, you’re done with one another.
When we buy supplies, materials, parts, or components online, we typically engage in a transaction in the context of transactional relationship. We pay. They provide.
That’s it.
Communication in a transactional relationship is explicit. It focuses on quantitative answers to data-driven questions like: “How many? What size? What voltage? What length? What rate?” etc.
Free markets are perfect for transactional relationships. You don’t have to know a thing about the seller to buy the product. You only need to know the specifications of the product and the price.
Our company has lots of transactional relationships with our suppliers. These are characterized by searching for the lowest-price supplier who meets our minimum specifications.
We also have transactional relationships with our lenders.
No matter how much they talk about “relationship banking,” the fact is that we’ve never met anyone who has ever lent us money. Lending and borrowing all happens on the Internet, and it’s all driven by credit score algorithms, because that’s the way that transactional relationships work.
Reciprocal relationships rely on expectations that are not made explicit. The economic Theory of Reciprocity boils down to this:
In reciprocal relationships, people will reward kindness and punish selfishness.
Because the terms of reciprocal relationships are not made explicit, the parties must rely on contextual cues to interpret and communicate expectations. There may be strong cultural expectations, but these are norms, rather than rules. Without the explicit terms of a contract or transaction, reciprocal relationships require being aware of social and interpersonal cues, interpretation of those cues, the capacity to formulate responses to those cues that align with relationships goals (e.g., positive or negative), and the motivation to engage or carry out those responses.
Most of this happens so fast during a conversation that we’re unaware of how we process and respond in reciprocal relationships. Nonetheless, we sometimes misjudge the kindness (or selfishness) with which we have been treated, and thus misjudge our relationship. In those moments, we sometimes find ourselves regretting our commitments, or becoming more explicit (i.e., transactional) in our relationships.
Reciprocal relationships are based on shared expectations that serve self-interest, even when those expectations lack specificity. Because there is typically a time delay between offering a kindness and receiving one in return, reciprocity requires greater trust, or tolerance for risk of getting no return.
The best illustration of the difference between transactional and reciprocal relationships may be the opening scene from the original Godfather movie, back in 1972. It is a remarkable scene, in which the Godfather (Marlon Brando) he refuses a transactional relationship, to create an invitation for something more meaningful.
The opening scene from the 1972 movie, The Godfather, illustrates a preference for reciprocal over transactional relationships.
Notice how the undertaker makes a transactional appeal to the Godfather when he says, “How much should I pay you?”
The Godfather is offended by such a request. Instead, he guides the undertaker towards a reciprocal relationship. He points towards their existing familial ties, which suggests a social expectation of reciprocity. He makes clear his willingness to forgive the undertakers previous violations of these familial norms. And he explains what outcomes the undertaker can expect from a closer relationship.
However, to minimize the possibility of a misunderstanding, the Godfather explains the very nature of reciprocity:
“Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this gesture as a gift on my Daughter’s wedding day.”
While it is clear that the undertaker shall remain in the Godfather’s debt, there is no explicit quantitative measure of the debt, and no time table for its collection.
In reciprocal relationships, people “give” one another things in ways that may build a closer relationship. However, there is no enforcement of the reciprocity, outside the power each party has to create positive or negative consequences for the other. Should one party lose that power, they have little recourse and no appeal to contractual obligation.
Personal relationships extend one’s own sense of well-being to include others. That is, when you’re in a personal relationship, you include your partner’s well being in your consideration of your own.
We often like to believe that we form personal relationships with our closest friends and lovers. However, the test of a personal relationship is only found in the most troubled times.
Ask yourself, “What has my Lover been willing to risk in their own well-being, in the interest of mine?” and maybe the answer will surprise you.
When one party holds the expectation of a personal relationship, only to be treated as if they were in a reciprocal or transactional, the unmet expectation is likely to create feelings of betrayal.
The classic, “Frankly my Dear, I don’t give a damn,” from Gone With the Wind is a direct rejection of a personal relationship, because caring about the other’s well-being is what defines a personal relationship.
Know your relationship
Only by knowing your relationship can you avoid the pain of overestimating your expectations of others. Because a company is a group of companions, it is defined by relationships — so it behooves you to know what sort of relationships your company forms: with employees, partners, customers, and suppliers.
As human beings, we are hard-wired for sociability. At some limbic level, we seek the safety of mutual self-protection that can be found in reciprocal and personal relationships. Hundreds of thousands of human evolution have primed us to co-exist in close tribal relationships.
Nonetheless, the marketplace is predicated on transactional relationships. For example, we compete for talented labor in a marketplace. When employees are able to secure more rewarding employment elsewhere, market-based incentives would require them to incur real opportunity costs to working at Morozko Forge. Knowing that, we seek to pay above-market labor rates, in search of above average performance.
On the other hand, everything we know about human motivation suggests that working for an hourly wage is a demoralizing, dehumanizing, and unmotivating transaction — and that won’t achieve the level of creative energy required of a start up. So our President Jason Stauffer coined a mantra the “At Morozko Forge, we only extrinsically reward companions who are intrinsically motivated.”
Rather than give in to the temptation to create good feelings about the mutual caring that characterizes personal relationships, we reject cliches like “we’re a family” at Morozko Forge. While the implication of the familial metaphor is to create a sense of mutual caring and loyalty, the fact is that the cliche creates unwelcome inferences, misplaced expectations, and has a long history of being abused by those who would seek to exploit others.
Instead, we operate by invitation and audition. Although we eschew the transactional relationship with those people with whom we depend upon in the Production Studio, there can be no doubt that the relationship is dominated (at least in the beginning) by transactional considerations. For example, we audition new craftsmen to assess their skills and their market value. When we make an employment offer, it is based on our admittedly imperfect assessment of their productivity.
Then, we invest.
We train. We counsel. We educate.
For example, as a Professor of Engineering Business Practices at Arizona State University, I teach communication, teamwork, leadership, finance, and professional ethics. If you’re curious, you can find more information about my course at https://cee300.com/ and read most of my course materials here on Medium. In school, my students pay hefty tuition rates to take my class.
At Morozko Forge, we practice many of the same principals I teach, and in this sense, our companions recover more than a paycheck — they also acquire the much of the same knowledge that university students are paying for. The result is sometimes a transformation in the capabilities of the companion, making them more valuable to our company.
At which point, it behooves us to revise their compensation upwards, or risk losing them to a competing employer.
None of this is characteristic of a personal relationship, despite the fact that the first people we hired were close friends. A better way to think about it is to think of it as a reciprocal relationship — we invest in the professional development of the companion, and they reciprocate by investing their creative energy in growing our venture.
Nonetheless, with some of our companions we have developed a closer relationship. When a companion earns an equity stake, they become a partner. While their ownership in our venture binds them closer to us in a transactional way, it can’t help but also bring them closer in a personal way — because the mutual interdependence of partnership demands consideration of their well-being as part of our own.
What are you willing to risk to form the relationships you seek?
The difficulty with personal relationships is the exposure and vulnerability that they create. For example, when we migrate from a position of independence to interdependence, we may feel some loss of autonomy, of self-determination, or of control.
That can be threatening.
Including another’s well-being in our own requires that we put something about ourselves at risk. It does not require that we risk everything — only that we examine our values closely enough to understand what we value less than the relationship (and how much).
This comes up for us at Morozko Forge in two ways: 1) honoring our warranty, and 2) honoring our commitments to the companions employed in our company.
Warranties, and Guarantees
In the first case, we have invested extraordinary resources in traveling to our customers to ensure their Forge is in good working order. I once flew 4000 miles on two days notice to fix a leaky tub.
We offer an ecstatic guarantee: if our customers are not ecstatic about their purchase, they are entitled to a full refund of their purchase price.
We’ve issued only two refunds — both because our production lead times grew too stretched out as we struggled to achieve scale. Those former customers never had the chance to take delivery.
For everyone else with an issue, we’ve traveled to the site to fix the issue, whether that was in Knoxville, Oklahoma City, or Portsmouth.
We flew from Phoenix to Oregon to shore up a customer’s old wooden floor when our calculations showed that their Forge might overload the floor joists. We rented a crane to lift a Forge up onto a rooftop in southern California when it wouldn’t fit up the stairs. And we’ve built entire new Forge to replace units that didn’t stand up to the salt spray and humidity of outdoor seaside installations.
In each case, we learned more about how to improve our product and better serve our customers. Had we been stuck in the mentality of a transcational relationship with our customers, we might not have acted at our own expense to serve their needs. However, in these cases we valued the money we spent less than we valued the potential to create closer, more reciprocal relationship with a customer. In some cases, the unsolicited testimonials our customers have provided have made the risk more than worthwhile.
Commitments to Companions
While many of our readers no doubt understand the enlightened self-interest that is characteristic of a commitment to an ecstatic customer experience, the more difficult condition is a test of our commitment to a companion. For example, when a craftsmen fails to meet productivity expectations, it’s easy to say “Bad hire!” and fire the craftsman.
We have yet to do that, because subpar productivity is not what will sever a companion from our company. It’s not that we haven’t let people go, because we have… just not for a lack of productivity.
Productivity is one of the things we are willing to put at risk to create the possibility of a closer relationship. Those with whom we’ve severed our relationship have been for a lack of honesty, not for a lack of productivity.
Not that it’s been easy.
When you’re three months behind on delivery dates, and mistakes in production necessitate rework and repairs, it’s very tempting to scapegoat under-performing employees.
It might even work. For example, in his book No Rules Rules, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talks about the importance of “talent density,” and describes the boost in productivity his company experiences after a round of layoffs. The lesson Hastings drew from this experience is that Netflix could be improved by offering generous severance packages to under-producing employees, and instead hire others.
We’ve considered it.
But when our partners sat down around the kitchen table, what impressed me most was the fact that none of our partners would have been qualified for our current roles, had we adopted Hasting’s approach. I would not be CEO, Jason would not be President, and Adrienne would not be a Cold Coach. Because we had to figure out along the way how to do these difficult jobs that never existed before, each one of us might have been fired for lack of productivity.
We decided that, rather than sever our relationship with honest, motivated, under-performing companions, we would seek to experiment with new roles, redefined duties, and new auditions — for as long as the companion was motivated to earn their position within the company. We thought, “Are we such poor judges of character and capability that we made a bad hire? Or did we misjudge the role of this companion inside the company?”
What is the Role of this Relationship in Your Future?
As we consider what it means to be a company, and the commitments we must make to partners, companions, suppliers, and customers, we’ve found it’s helpful to discriminate between transactional, reciprocal, and personal relationships. When we reflect on the type of relationship we are working toward, we can align the investment of our expectations, risks, and resources accordingly.
Knowing our relationships sometimes helps us avoid the manipulations, misalignment, and disappointments associated with unmet expectations, misalignment of interests, and rejected reciprocity. | https://medium.com/storygarden/know-your-relationship-d80307534d26 | ['Thomas P Seager'] | 2020-12-11 22:30:03.894000+00:00 | ['Hiring', 'Leadership', 'Relationships', 'Startup', 'Personal Growth'] |
Meet A Member — Discovered | This months member is Mark, a seasoned professional in digital recruitment and current entrepreneur with his startup, Discovered! Mark along with his co-founder John have been members at AstroLabs since January and are busy building a recruitment firm that aims to recruit the best talent out there for the rising needs of the MENA tech ecosystem!
Company Background
Name: Discovered
Founders: Mark Carson & John Richardson
Founding Year: 2017
City: Dubai
Funding: Self-Funded
Team Size & Designations: 2
Site: http://discovered.ae/
Your startup in two lines, GO!
We are Discovered. A Digital | Tech | E-Commerce recruitment business based out of the heart of Dubai’s Tech start up scene, AstroLabs. We are a team of passionate digital recruitment experts, whose sole aim is to help both candidates and clients discover their potential.
About Discovered
What’s Your Background?
I’ve got around 9+ years Digital, Tech and E-commerce recruitment experience, helping both start ups and large companies attract the very best talent. I launched one of UK’s biggest digital recruitment agencies into Dubai from scratch and built up an excellent team, to become one of the leaders in the MENA region in under 2 years.
Why Did You Start Discovered?
I’m an entrepreneur at heart, I had a great opportunity to build a business for someone else from scratch in Dubai over 2.5 years and thought if I have done it once, I can do it myself again. However this time not alone, with a my business partner John, a school friend of mine in fact, that just happens to be a brilliant recruiter too.
Both of us wanted to get closer to both clients and candidates in the Tech start up and E-commerce space after having previously working at companies where service levels and transparency in recruitment is not where it needs to be.
Another key insight was learnt through the multitudes of conferences and networking events I have attended in the region over the past 3 years. There has been a common struggle in attracting Digital and Tech talent. Different businesses have varied reasons for finding talent so we truly understand that every business we work with is different. Our solution is a series of plans aimed at enhancing their experience. These include our Start-up, Agency, Big Business and Senior Search plans. These are different to the standard and outdated approach in the recruitment industry in the MENA region. By merging technology with some principles of executive search, these plans can ensure the best talent is attracted globally in the shortest possible time.
Finally the Tech Start up and Ecommerce sector is booming in Dubai! So by starting now, we will hopefully be at the forefront of this next growth phase.
Startups vs Big Business. Whose more aggressive in Talent Acquisition?
So we’re working with quite a lot of big businesses, at the moment because most of these are building up their Tech and Digital capabilities and are acting like startups in terms of growth. This is primarily because E-commerce is relatively new in the region in comparison to the rest of the developed world and they are racing to open new distribution channels for their products aside from the massive brick & mortar portfolios they operate. If you think of all the major brands that are available in the world, only a handful are available online in the UAE. Now a lot of the large retail groups / families are investing into digital transformation to get their products and services online as quickly as possible. Essentially what we’re finding is these big businesses are creating their own digital infrastructure and teams from scratch and that’s where we support their needs.
Startups are on the other hand can be split into two tiers; First are the ones that are relentlessly hiring due to recent funding and rapid growth where they need the employee’s like yesterday. There is nothing we like best when a startup says we need to scale up…fast. The companies that are the next tier down, look for help with more specific job roles within their business like a Digital Marketing Manager, Mobile Dev, a Full stack developer, Creative or Business Development Manager.
With all the recent investments and acquisitions that have happened, which one will you be watching closely?
I’m curious to see how the whole Emaar Malls 51% acquisition of Namshi plays out. They have a strong regional influence and the retail partnerships across their malls make them extremely capable of playing a big role partnered with the e-commerce capabilities of Namshi.com
Where do you see Discovered in 3 years?
We want to invest in technology and start experimenting on how we can optimise the talent equation for both clients and candidates. Areas like video, AI, chat bots and how they can improve the experience really intrigue us.
Over this period too, we want to see the many startups that we are currently working with, watch the talent we have secured for them directly contribute to a company success story, whether through growth, new funding and even acquisitions or exits, that will show us we have something right.
How about your team?
We will organically expand the team by adding consultants with the aim to be the go to recruitment business for all things, Digital, Tech and Ecommerce in Dubai.
What’s the biggest crisis you have faced in your startup till now, and what did you learn from it?
I think the biggest crisis any startup faces and we certainly do is cashflow and I’ve got a great example of how a great month can head into crisis mode.
One of our clients made a host of our candidates we placed redundant through no fault of the candidates. We had real difficulty in getting paid from the invoices owed to us. Luckily, we had watertight signed terms of business and through persistence and regular contact with the client, we managed to receive the majority of the payment in full.
So for any startup, getting your terms of business to high and legal standards is essential.
What’s your job now and how different is it to when you started?
Naturally as a team of two, we were a jack of all trades. From building our website to mocking up designs, writing all the content ourselves and even taking pictures across the city for it. Next was onto gathering all the documents and paperwork needed to establish the business in the UAE, which is a long and time consuming process.
Then the fun part, our website going live and taking our business to market! We initially started talking to a few select businesses first on how we could improve their Digital, Tech and E-commerce talent acquisition strategies.
Nowadays, the admin and operational elements are taken care of so it’s all about delivering a brilliant service to our clients. We are marketeers, business developers and account directors all rolled into one. We sit down with our clients regularly, advise on strategy, market conditions and provide in depth salary/benefits reviews to make sure they can attract the right talent. The majority of our time is personally spent headhunting locally and across the globe, using LinkedIn, Github, Skype, Whatsapp and Google hangouts to access candidates and acting as brand ambassadors for our amazing clients.
What’s the hardest part of your job?
Trying to respond to every candidate that approaches us for help or applies for a role. We make such an effort to try and respond to everyone we can, but there are only so many hours in the day. To give a personalised message to everyone is tough, but we try.
Any Parting Words?
For companies looking to hire, the single most important resource you have is time and recruitment is a full time job. Find an expert and have a chat with them on what would be the best way for you to find the candidates your looking for.
For candidates, explore your options! There is a wealth of opportunities out there right now that will offer you great incentives. Startups are competing aggressively with big businesses on pay and equity sharing while big businesses have started acting like startups in terms of culture and speed but with massive resources so security may be more guaranteed there. | https://medium.com/astrolabs/meet-a-member-discovered-5a4788a5e21d | ['Team Astrolabs'] | 2017-07-27 09:45:56.296000+00:00 | ['Recruitment', 'Ecommerce', 'Tech', 'Startup', 'Newsletter'] |
How climate change is threatening native Alaskan culture | Climate change can be felt all over the world, however its impact is not equally distributed across geographies. When looking at the United States, it might surprise many of us that the most impacted state is actually the one with the lowest population density in the nation — the most northern state of the US. Alaska.
When we are talking of the impact, climate change is having on the arctic, most of us may be thinking of vanishing glaciers or green fields which once were covered with snow, however we usually forget to acknowledge the fate of thousands of natives living there. Through the rapid change in temperature and the associated changes of the arctic environment, especially the indigenous community of Alaska, which directly depends on natural resources, is hit the hardest.
In this blog will be first taking a look at the changing environmental conditions of Alaska and then emphasize its impact on the natives living there.
RISING TEMPERATURES
Our Data Integration Engineer Eneli Toodu has analysed temperature data from ECMWF ERA5 dataset and discovered many interesting and at the same time worrying findings. Yearly average temperature in the state of Alaska hasn’t dropped below the long-time average (1979–2019) of -2.7 °C degrees for 7 years now. This means that 2012 was the last year that the average temperature was below -2.7 °C. At the same time, 2012 also marked one of the coldest years in 40 years history, where temperature was -4.5 °C on average. Only 1999 was colder with a recorded average temperature of -4.7 °C. How drastically climate change is affecting Alaska can be seen when looking at the average temperature in 2019, this being the first year average temperature levelled off above 0°C degrees.
Mean annual average temperature in Alaska from ECMWF ERA5
Above, we looked into average temperatures across the state of Alaska. To see temperature anomalies across Alaska, Eneli has created an infographic where yearly temperature anomalies can be seen for the different counties.
Average temperature anomalies calculated from ECMWF ERA5
In the animation minus degrees are resembled by blue tones while plus degrees are shown as red tones. Looking closer, we can see that temperatures in the last seven years have not fallen much below zero degrees celsius. Naturally it’s completely normal to have years that are warmer than usual, however seven consecutive years with such high numbers is exceptional, marking a turning point of Alaska’s climate.
If you are interested in finding out more about environmental changes in the Arctic and its corresponding impacts on industrial networks, we recommend reading this Post.
DECREASE IN SNOW COVER
As a consequence of the previously discussed warming weather in Alaska, Eneli also calculated snow cover percent from ERA5 snow depth variable to see how snow cover has changed over time. Snowfall, snow season length and snow cover has been decreasing steadily over the past years. Lesser and shorter snow cover brings unexpected problems to the people living in Alaska. For example, one of Alaska’s most popular means of transport, the snow mobile, is losing part of its utility. This forces the native alaskan community to adapt and change to quads or expensive bush-planes. In addition snow cover also plays a part in controlling the surface hydrology and underlying soil properties while also influencing near‐surface air temperature, which in turn can cause the thawing of permafrost described later in this post.
Mean annual snow cover in Alaska calculated from ECMWF ERA5
The data we have put together shows that snow cover has decreased rapidly over the last two decades. Alaskan long term mean (40 years, green line) snow cover percent is 68.4%, however this value hasn’t been exceeded for over 15 years. From the graph, we can see a deeply decreasing trend (green dotted line). This strong downward trend is verified when comparing the mean snow cover till 2000 (including) with the data from 2016. While annual snow cover used to be over 70 %, it was only at 60 % in 2016.
In order to analyse and compare climate and corresponding indicators such as precipitation, average, maximum and minimum temperature or snow cover in a global context, a data-based approach is necessary. With the Climatology feature, View2020 from Intertrust offers the necessary tools to analyse and compare climate indicators quickly and easily on a global level. To better understand our changing environment, casual observers as well as industry professionals can access View2020, which is built on the Planet OS Datahub, by clicking here.
IMPACT ON NATIVE POPULATION
The most impacted counties have been the North Slope, Northwest Arctic and Nome. All three are located in Northwest Alaska.
Although the consequences of climate change can be seen all over the world, the natives in Alaska are amongst those hit the hardest. While most of us are experiencing climate change only peripherally, Alaskan natives are living a life not defined by substance, but by a thriving culture empowered through a strong bond and dependence on their immediate environment. Through the disruptive change of their environment, the Alaskan native community is facing a loss of cultural identity while making them the first American climate refugees.
There are multiple problems that Alaskan natives have due to climate change.
EROSION AND FLOODS
Because of the steadily increasing temperature, drastic changes of the landscape are being experienced. Most notably, the Alaskan permafrost is thawing leading to erosion of the land. This erosion can particularly be seen on the western shore along the pacific or along the Ninglick River, making land uninhabitable for the natives.
Although the weather has always been extreme and unsettled, the permafrost, a thick subsurface layer of soil that remained frozen throughout the year, gives the ground the necessary stability to prevent it from being washed away from tides or the river. However due to the increase of temperature in Alaska , permafrost has thawed, causing the ground to soften, leading to extreme forms of erosion, floods and destruction of infrastructure.
On average, each year 70 ft of ground are lost to the sea. This slowly ongoing process has forced the Yupik people of Newtok to resettle to higher and firmer grounds in Mertarvik. While part of the village has already lost its fight against the inexorable surf, two thirds of the village are still inhabited. Although funding is a major problem, the relocation of Newtok should be finished by 2023, making it a forerunner for what many other villages are facing.
Maximum rate of historical erosion (feet per year) at or near community locations. Data was created by DGGS, USGS, and NPS using orthoimagery or topography through time.
Source: Overbeck, J.R., ed., 2018, Alaska coastal mapping gaps & priorities: Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys Information Circula
WILDFIRES
Another big threat fueled by record high temperatures is a longer and more severe wildfire season. Through climate change winter is ending sooner, letting the snow melt earlier in the season. This leaves plant material out to dry causing devastating fires. Additionally fires now tend to last longer due to delayed rain in late summer. The devastating effect rising temperatures have on wildfire seasons is shown by data recorded by the IARC.
The Data shows the amount of wildfire seasons, with the red bars highlighting wildfires with more than one million acres burned. It can be seen that those devastating wildfires have increased by 50 percent since 1990, compared to the previously recorded data.
The Alaskan wildfires are not only destroying the habitat and therefore the hunting grounds of the natives, but also pose a threat to their direct health. This is due to the particular matters emitted by the fires, which can have lethal effects on one’s bloodstream and respiratory system. More information about particulate matter, their origin and effects can be found on Planet OS View2020
With ever rising temperatures wildfire seasons are expected to stretch over even longer periods in the future. The problem Alaska is facing with fires can also be seen in other parts of the world, like previously in Australia. If you are interested in gaining a closer insight on this matter, we recommend you checking out Chase Walz’s Post covering the Australian Fires.
FOOD SUPPLY STRUGGLES
A majority of the Native Alaskan diet relies on fish, a food source that typically was available in abundance in the past. However warming waters, the oil industry and mining companies are putting natives’ food security at risk.
Bristol Bay in Alaska typically accounts for two-thirds of the state’s total salmon fishery value per year. This is possible because of the yearly migration of about 50 million salmon, however the number of salmon in Bristol bay has decreased radically last year. The main reason this has happened is due to an accumulation of warmer water in the region. In the future however a further increase in water temperature could result in a huge decline of salmon population, since warmer water makes the fish more susceptible to predators, parasites and disease.
Additionally expanded industrial activity is harming salmon’s key habitat by destroying salmon streams and important wetlands.
GOVERNMENTAL REFUSALS AND LOSS OF TRIBAL CULTURE
Although there have been sporadic initiatives mainly regarding resettlements by the US government, it has failed to help Alaskan native tribes adapt to climate change. While big businesses, which depend on Alaska’s natural resources, are taking control over the county, natives aren’t given a voice in most decision making procedures.
Due to the current climatic developments, the indigenous people are on the verge of losing their unique way of life. This results from the consequences of our actions, which ultimately push the indigenous society more and more into a western economic system, making them lose their cultural identity. In addition, the bureaucratic framework often makes it difficult to provide state aid to indigenous communities, as socially tangible consequences as a result of the generally slow rise in temperature are unprecedented.
Native alaskan culture is at a turning point. Its future is determined by whether we are able to reduce our carbon footprint, increase global environmental consciousness and therefore stop and partly reverse global warming. A culture that defines itself by the resources and the environment they have always lived with and in, will not be able to flourish in another setting.
We should therefore all take advantage of the digital revolution we are finding ourselves in and, in the context of our shared global responsibility, act on a personal and corporate level to counter climate change.
Many of the datasets made available through the Planet OS Datahub have been at the request of our users. For those who require a consolidated, easy to use, resource for accessing large and complex material that the Datahub does not already offer, please reach out to the team and we will work toward bringing it onboard. For more information check out the Planet OS Datahub. | https://medium.com/planet-os/how-climate-change-is-threatening-native-alaskan-culture-5b2f9e5ff214 | ['Arthur Kaspar'] | 2020-11-12 11:25:14.719000+00:00 | ['Alaska', 'Climate Change', 'Data Science', 'Weather', 'Climate'] |
Make your existing solution tastier with serverless salt: distributed system | This article is the third in a series on “serverless.”
by Pierrick Voulet, Bonitasoft Technical Evangelist
As this article is the third in a series on “serverless,” I recommend starting at the beginning of the series, as I introduce concepts incrementally.
The links to previous articles are included here:
Introduction
Feasibility
Distributed system
(more coming!)
If you have read the previous articles, you know how a serverless function can be synchronously requested from an application. In this article, I’ll better explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous modes and upgrade the example I gave to be asynchronous. The idea is to better integrate with distributed systems, but as you will see, it comes with some challenges.
Let me start with the definitions first
Synchronous mode : wait for a request to finish before moving on to another task
: wait for a request to finish before moving on to another task Asynchronous mode: move on to another task before the request is finished
There is no “better” option, it depends on what has to be executed and in what context.
Synchronous mode is often used for a simple implementation that dramatically reduces the use of the OS process resources (CPU, file system, memory, etc), but it keeps worker/connection resources open for an unpredictably long time
Asynchronous mode is more often used for more complex implementation (resiliency, design) that keeps worker/connection resources open for a short and predictable time
In my example of the Bonita platform and AWS Lambda, we can use both request modes.
When the asynchronous request mode is used, the AWS Lambda function needs to send a callback to the Bonita application when the execution is over. Technically speaking, this requires a few upgrades for the Bonita platform and AWS Lambda function:
Bonita Callback API: accept callback and trigger related event(s) internally
Bonita Connector: invoke request asynchronously with callback information
AWS Lambda function: callback Bonita at the end of the execution
With this advanced distribution of execution, things can go wrong at many levels: network latency anyone? This leads to yet another challenge — that is, to make sure the Bonita application and the AWS Lambda function are not only robust and flexible but also resilient.
Robustness: how much a system can take before failing
Flexibility: how much a system can be adapted live
Resiliency: how much disruption a system can take
To give you a better idea of what resiliency is: note that a typical design includes management of duplicated calls, retries, timeouts, events, circuit breakers, etc.
Now we have reviewed the basics, let me show you what I did to upgrade the application!
As in the previous article, you can follow along in detail with the development resources I shared as a single archive file named “level2–1.0.zip” in the release “level2–1.0” of a dedicated GitHub project. The “Serverless_Level2–1.0.bos” BOS file can be imported in any 7.7.4 or higher version of the Bonita Studio.
Bonita Callback API
There is no callback API by default in the version 7.7.4 of Bonita, so I can create a Bonita REST API Extension named “callback” to do the job:
Access: any logged Bonita user
Method: POST
URL: /bonita/API/extension/callback
Payload: JSON object with “id” as a mandatory attribute (unique callback ID)
Execution: search and execute any human task associated with the provided unique callback ID
A system of retries has been added for more resiliency. It addresses the corner case where the human task takes more time to be created than the callback request takes to be called. You can find the complete source in the “callback.zip” file of the ”level2–1.0.zip” archive file.
Once implemented, I deploy the “callback” REST API Extension on the Bonita runtime. You can find the compiled artifact “callback-1.0.0.zip” in the ”level2–1.0.zip” archive file.
Bonita Connector
The connector implementation itself does not change because it is flexible enough. It still uses the AWS Lambda Java SDK to instantiate a client, build and invoke the request based on connector inputs, and set the connector outputs with the response.
What really changes is the invocation itself:
Use “Event” (asynchronous) instead of default (synchronous) for the “Invocation Type” input
Generate the callback URL based on a unique callback ID and provide both in the “Payload” input
Another major change is the response. The normal status code is 302 instead of 200: it confirms that the request has been accepted by AWS Lambda but without any guarantee that it will be executed successfully. Only a callback can confirm the execution result.
All these design changes are taken into account in the upgraded version of the Bonita application as explained later in this article. If you want to check the implementation in detail, import the BOS file into Bonita Studio and check the “aws-lambda-impl” connector implementation.
AWS Lambda function
The necessary upgrade is to callback Bonita if there is callback information provided in the request payload right before the end of the function. The callback is a sequence of two calls:
Login programmatically with the dedicated Bonita user
Request the provided callback URL with the result in the payload and a valid token in the cookies (given in the login response)
Add some logs and it runs like a charm.
You can find the complete source in the “aws_lambda_example.zip” file, and the compiled JAR in the ”level2–1.0.zip” archive file. (Check the previous article if you need more information about how to deploy it on AWS Lambda — it is the exact same thing.)
For security purposes, the Bonita user credentials used to login should be encrypted. It is not the case here but this could be done with AWS Secret Manager for example.
Also, a fair amount of resilience would be nice to have, like:
Provide useful logs in the callback payload
Ensure a callback is done even in the case of a function execution failure
Retry if the Bonita service cannot be reached
Do not execute twice the same job even if multiple requests are received
Bonita Application
Generic callback process
I define a brand new process to introduce some resiliency (here I use a timeout, but it could be much more) while waiting for an expected callback to make it usable for any asynchronous request integration.
This process is not designed to be started by a human but rather only programmatically by other processes. It expects some input parameters to start a new instance
callbackId: the unique callback ID to wait for
callbackTimeout: how much time to wait before returning with an error
callbackAssigneeId: the ID of the user who can do the callback (likely a technical user used by an external service)
And it returns the callback result if any.
The wait is designed through a human task that is executed by the “callback” REST API Extension when a callback is received with the right callback ID. This task can only be executed by the given assignee (Lambda in our example) and requires a value for the “callbackResult” input.
Main process
It now contains more tasks
AWS Lambda Async Request: automatic task to make the asynchronous invocation of the AWS Lambda function using the connector with the right configuration
Wait Async Callback: instantiate the generic callback process with the callback parameters and store the result for further use
AWS Lambda Async Response: display a form with the stored result to the end-user
And parameters
aws_callbackUrl: the Bonita application URL
aws_timeout: callback timeout used for the generic callback process call
If you want to see more detail, import the BOS file into Bonita Studio and open the diagrams.
Make it run
A new instance of the main process, with valid parameters and the task, displays the asynchronous request payload as expected a few seconds after.
This demonstrates pretty well that it is not that complicated to integrate serverless function in an application. As is often the case with distributed systems, the pain comes with an enterprise-grade solution. Depending on the applications you build and libraries or platforms you use, it can be super simple or quite complex to achieve. On the Bonita side, the platform is evolving to integrate more and more features to make such integration as seamless as possible. A great example is the brand new REST API that comes with the 7.8 for this purpose.
The next article of this series will focus on abstracting the administration of a serverless function when integrated with an application, so check for updates!
I would appreciate your feedback in the comments: enhancements, new topics to cover, etc. If you like what you read, let us know and we will spread the word!
This article is the third in a series by Pierrick Voulet, originally published on the Bonitasoft Community blog. | https://bonitasoft.medium.com/make-your-existing-solution-tastier-with-serverless-salt-distributed-system-f80f40e56066 | [] | 2019-02-14 16:06:16.291000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Scalability', 'Architecture', 'Serverless', 'AWS Lambda'] |
The Most Important Thing Is to Run Your Own Race | The Life Chronicles
The Most Important Thing Is to Run Your Own Race
Someone will always have more money, a better job, a better car, or a better grade.
Aim your target. Rest falls in place. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
I confess I am sort of pissed to live a life dictated by what others do or achieve.
I want out- screamed my head a few months back.
More often than not, we judge our lives based on what others are doing. We get into a mental trap of idealizing life basis other’s lenses.
In a world that is open to constant scrutiny, it’s easier to fall prey and give in to the temptation of comparisons and evaluations.
After all, how would you know how far you’ve reached if you have no clue how many did you leave behind?
I have always measured my success through the parameters of comparisons. The thing is, you can never be happy and peaceful once you get into the comparison game.
Someone will always have more money, a better job, a better car, or a better grade.
Good luck finding better than everyone.
There have been recent studies citing the example of Facebook and its effect on our psyche.
It says that excessive use could increase feelings of jealousy, eventually leading to depression. It states a valid point, I’d say.
The social platforms have become the places to brag, and once you plunge into them, all you see are happy faces, big cars, palaces, and that uber-cool life.
I am not against bragging, but the thing is, it doesn’t show the complete picture. It’s a mixture of fake and real with lavish and extravagant in our face all the time, while we are oblivious to the struggle and credibility of the high life claims.
Every other day you get a pop up of someone who went on to vacay in the Maldives or bought a brand new car. This constant reminder of everybody doing exceptionally well with their lives while you are lying in your pajamas eating bloody stale popcorns is a painful reminder of how far you are left.
It’s easier to get engrossed in how less you are, compared to that guy who took a picture posing as the owner of some Porsche.
With the overdose of the beautiful and serene life of almost everyone on the internet, you tend to lose sight of what you aspire.
Eventually, the trickery leads you towards worrying about what others are doing, while your focus sways from yourself and the things you wanted.
An apt example would be sprint athletes and their dedication towards the finish line. The margin of error is in milliseconds, and once you even think of looking over your shoulder to check out the guy behind you, damn, you are finished.
For most of the races you view, look at how the lead sprinter finishes. They eye the finish line and not how far behind is the guy next to you. They run their own race.
Life is not “ You vs. Them”
We are all pitted against somebody. Right? That’s how we get conditioned since our childhood. Your teacher thrashes you, quoting some bright student doing so well while you are screwing it royally.
Similarly, the parents are at you for unable to exhibit brilliance like your neighborhood chap.
Where’s your life then? It living was all about imitating someone else, why evolve even?
Let’s imitate and play this, for your originality is not required. Keep your thoughts to yourself while following the herd.
The thing is, while we are all pitted against each other, you still have to run your own race. Life is always competitive, and the goal should be to better yourself and evolve your game rather than trying to beat others at theirs.
While writing this article, there would be thousands of other writers penning down the same thoughts. Does that mean I ought to compete with them? No.
I can either run my own race or end up living bothered by what someone else is about to put down.
Do I intend to claim the numero uno position? No.
The thought of changing someone’s mind, even if it’s a single person, is good enough for me. I don’t plan to eat your subscriber. I intend to make mine. If you write fifty words daily, write a hundred now.
If you plan on making it to the big league, there is no point following someone who writes thousands of words daily. Carve your path. Chances are you get overawed by things and end up doing nothing since the odds are heavily stacked against you.
Initially, when this all started, I thought writing is all about, well, writing. Gradually, articles after articles and sleepless nights, it became clear that people are way ahead on the ladder that I can probably ever climb.
It became an uphill task. As a result, I barely wrote. The race was lost in the head. There was no way to catch up while giving up seemed logical.
The thing being, I was racing against others. It’s like standing on the sidelines of a hundred-meter sprint and someone asking you to join the sprint past eight seconds into the race. You are bound to look shitty and lose.
The world rewards you for standing apart while accommodates you for following the herd. You decide.
Mind your own business- small or big
Tell me something better if not this. While we regularly seek this from others, we need it more than ever. It’s a simple principle of doing what you are doing and not worrying a bit about the world. The world may be making a device that could make you invisible, but can you?
Try keeping it simple and staying concerned about what you are doing and where you plan to reach. Put the blinders on both sides and march straight ahead with what you plan to do.
Is someone else going to change your life or run your race? The only person who can is you. You may be planning to reach among the top 500 while someone may be aiming for the top slot. These are two different races. Run yours.
You may have a target of living in peace with little while your friend may target to become a millionaire. Does that even compare? Are these races the same?
We are so engrossed with what others are up to that we never reach our true potentials. We are ignorant of our abilities due to the constant focus on what others can do. We loath ourselves by not measuring up against society’s standards.
It’s like Michael Jordan being jealous of Bill gates and left playing basketball as he wanted to start something like Microsoft.
Glad he didn’t, though, and the same goes for Bill.
Sanity prevails, the world wins.
Isn’t it original and fascinating to follow the path you decide best? Can there be anything more empowering than this?
Look around, and you see dull faces, dropped shoulders with stressed heads as everybody did precisely, as fed.
It appears that it didn’t work out for most.
Someone will always have more and better. Comparing yourself to people who have more and better will never help your cause. In hindsight, if you better yourself every day knowing your goal and destination, you’ll find peace and satisfaction.
We are unique in our ways, and running your own race is a great reminder and reinforcement to fulfill your destiny through the inherent uniqueness.
Remember that the race ends up being dead, and you might as well make it worth it.
Running your own race means taking care of your dreams and aspirations. Do not let anyone hinder your progress, and stop looking over your shoulder for who’s where.
You are here, and you’ll make it farther. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-most-important-thing-is-to-run-your-own-race-4a8f8d814004 | ['Rahul Anand'] | 2020-12-22 17:02:12.974000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Growth', 'Growth Mindset', 'Life Lessons', 'Motivation'] |
How to Run Productive 1-on-1 Meetings Remotely | How to Run Productive 1-on-1 Meetings Remotely
Snooze Slack and plan ahead
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
You can run meaningful 1-on-1 meetings with members of your team, even when you’re remote.
Remote meetings come with a ton of challenges, from technology, timing, digital distractions, and more. Mastering 1-on-1s with your direct reports is also key to being a great manager and leading productive teams.
Nothing beats being face-to-face with a team member, but even when remote there are many steps you can take to run better 1-on-1s. Here are five ways to make that happen. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-run-productive-1-on-1-meetings-remotely-8640c686c21e | ['William Anderson'] | 2020-05-18 11:03:11.255000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Leadership', 'Management', 'Work', 'Startup'] |
On Deja vu | Ever felt like you had been in this exact same situation before? Same people, same place, same conversation? I have! Wray Herbert explains | https://medium.com/notes-to-self/on-deja-vu-c06edc0b91ba | ['Mohit Thatte'] | 2016-11-08 05:12:50.387000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Vu', 'Light', 'Deja'] |
Pre-Dying Plea | A Poem Before Surgery
Image by skeeze from Pixabay
When I am dying, tell me the truth
I can take it
I got work to do
When I am dying, tell me stories
Break my heart
Don’t patronize me
When I am dying, tell me our history
I will say all the unsaid words
I got work to do
When I am dying, tell me about forgiveness
I have done people wrong
I shall make it better
When I am dying, tell me about gratefulness
I have people to acknowledge
I got work to do
When I am dying, tell me about leaving
I must say farewell
I want to touch them all
When I am dying, tell me I am dying
It is the Endgame
I got work to do
******
Another poem: Delicious Secret
My books are available on Amazon.
Join my Readers Group.
I can be reached at https://www.tonicrowewriter.com/ | https://medium.com/no-air/i-cant-die-i-got-work-to-do-3cb9344dc93e | ['Toni Crowe'] | 2019-08-18 18:50:48.035000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Work', 'Death', 'Poetry', 'Family'] |
Mindful Listening and Mental Health | Sometimes listening and saying little or nothing in response is the kindness we actually need. Certainly this is my preferred approach and also to be on the receiving end of. Sometimes a friend can become a huge burden when you can least cope with it. Knowing when these apply can help us all be mindfully aware and better friends to each other.
I have had complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for most of my life, as a result of a traumatic childhood. That is not my problem any more. That is largely resolved and I live a wonderful loving life with my family and the handful of closer friends who understand me, who have learned to understand me over a long time or, who have had similar experiences.
BUT occasionally the PTSD gets triggered once more and although I can manage it, these times can be extremely distressing. In this time I am terrified once more. My nervous system is shot to pieces one more, on maximum alert. My body muscles are all tensed against something unknown. I am not sleeping and if I do sleep I jerk awake again with a shocking sense of impending doom and alertness that is completely on guard against some unknown threat which my conscious mind knows full well is all nonsense.
My conscious mind knows this is all completely unnecessary, that there is no threat to me, that all is as well as it can be and there is nothing being done to me or needing me to do in that moment. My Amygdala does not know this though, and it gets in there first. It takes quite a long while to calm it down again and convince it everything is indeed alright after all, sometimes days and sometimes weeks. The amygdala is part of the limbic system of the brain and is damaged in development during an abusive early life so that the stress response networks are overdeveloped and the calm/ happy ones are under developed.
It is a matter of some self respect that for most of my life I am now in the calm zones, as a result of my long term mindfulness practice and adherence to the spiritual way of life. This path has literally given me a wonderful life.
Recently I got badly triggered and it floored me over a period of days. It was to do with a member of my family going into hospital and possibly not coming out again. That was not the problem in itself but it had all the echoes of when my own parents were at end of life and I attempted to reconnect with them both before it was too late. It was a disaster for me. After them both dying I was in a complete broken state for many years as all the emotional toxicity within my body discharged itself. Literally everything I had bottled up for decades was flying free all over the place and it brought me to a place of complete brokenness.
For those on a spiritual path, you will understand that this long six year dark night of the soul was also a period of transformation for me, cleansing me of all the falsities and brave faces and ‘people pleasing behaviour’ I had developed to try and hide my damage from others. I surrendered to the process because it was too huge to do anything else and my coping strategies had all been used up. I was a hollowed out shell for much of that time.
SO being triggered back into anything even slightly similar to that time is not a pleasant reminder or something I feel the need to go through again.
Before the triggering kicked in I made the mistake of mentioning to a few acquaintances that a relative was in hospital and it was touch and go, but that is life and death after all, no big deal, just something to face that is all. No one wants people to die but we all will, and we are a pragmatic family on that front.
But then the triggers from the past started to show themselves, I was feeling overly anxious and then wired and eventually full blown PTSD mode once more.
I asked those people to whom I had mentioned this news to leave me alone. Some did and some did not. Some took it upon themselves to enquire how the relative was doing, any news, how was I feeling etc. Each time that took me right back into the trauma when I was using distraction techniques to reign it in. I retreated to working in my garden, to my safe haven of nature in a private space where ‘no one can get me’. I asked them to stop. They ignored that request, and then it was to ‘meet up for coffee and talk about it’, followed by long spiels about their loved ones passing in previous years.
They were not listening to me or to my needs. They were gas lighting me by telling me how I should react and feel and denying my right to my own actual lived experience of how I felt. They were criticising me for my lack of response to them as they thought I should be responding. I get it. People do not understand PTSD, it is not depression though if I was depressed the same would apply.
I asked them once again to stop and they then reproached me for misunderstanding their friendship intentions and being angry and hostile. The victimhood and negative energy in the guise of sympathy that was pouring out of these people was overwhelming me and taking me further and further down — I could not meet their needs — I could not even meet my own needs fully but was doing everything I knew to do to keep myself on the right side of sane. They had marvelous relationships with their mother and were intent on telling me how much it hurt when their mother died but totally ignored that this was the complete opposite for me with my mother who was a psychopathic narcissist whose main goal in life seemed to be enjoying her bouts of cruelty and viciousness towards me. Not helping me all about them still and not listening to me at all. More echoes of mother. It was as if I did not even figure in the story any more.
I now felt I was being pursued, in much the same way as my mother pursued me through out her life, not able to let me live my life even when I went no contact. I felt like I was being gaslighted, made demands from and not listened to or respected by this acquaintance. From here on in I now went right down, shaking, screaming and heart thudding to near fainting levels if someone made me jump ( it happened) and even my husband whistled as he walked down the garden to let me know he was coming before he reached me. I was in a very very bad place and in the end was obliged to reach out for meds. I take valium for the immediate relief even though I dislike taking it, and high dose but slow release beta blockers to stop the nervous system over-reacting. I am almost sleeping ok now again though I am still very nervously over-reactive. It is going to take me sometime to recover from this. I estimate at least a month to return to normal. All the while we are still managing the situation with the elderly relative.
I am also necessarily completely withdrawn from all social contact at the moment, I just cannot take the risk with most people yet, because I am so sensitive that a slight hint of sympathy, pity oversharing/ relating and anything else would just take me right down again.
Which brings me to the point I want to make. Sometimes listening silently is the best thing we can do, to be with some one and put our own issues and needs and expectations completely to the side. To be a good friend sometimes we have to stop being ‘ the good friend’, to stop imposing our perceptions and expectations onto others when they are vulnerable.
I know this acquaintance will probably pursue me to show what a good and forgiving friend she really is and she will probably never understand how much additional damage she did to me. It will probably take my amygdala several months now to even cope with her in any way at all, for me to convince it that she and her psychological make up is not the threat. I can work on that over time as it is likely I will run into her fairly often. We have overlapping lives and that is how I made her acquaintance in the first place.
I do not judge or criticise this event, this occurrence, but instead take it as a warning to myself to withdraw and contain my energy more carefully. I am naturally a very open person and allow people in too easily perhaps. I love her and wish her well in her journey. I thank her for the lesson, the reminders for me, the variations in human emotional development and self awareness that occurs.
I am aware that I am far from ‘right’ in myself and thus must be more careful with myself and sharing any inside information about my life when it is not of immediate concern to others, no matter how well meaning they might mean to be, or how open I prefer to be. I have an enduring resilience kind of strength adn the ability to see the good in everything, not to hold onto anything and not to judge. That is my strength. But I must also be more careful with myself
One day perhaps my nervous system may be able to get past this kind of reaction, perhaps not ever. The literature on PTSD of this complex variety suggests there is no cure or fix, just life managements and coping skills.
Today I went sea-swimming again — with group of people who just go swimming together for safety reasons — it is cold in the water and we can get into trouble too easily alone. But I don’t talk much. just how high the waves are perhaps, what the water temperature is today (11C ). I just feel connected to my body by the water, the cold, the action of swimming. I feel safe in the water, safer that with other people. We swim alongside each other, but just swimming, not really chatting.
Which brings me back to my mindfulness and spiritual journey. Where would I be without it.
Today I am back grounded in love and compassion for self and others, and some hard lessons learned. This too will pass. | https://medium.com/mindfully-speaking/mindful-listening-and-mental-health-4307da646267 | ['Sylvia Clare Msc. Psychol'] | 2020-12-14 16:38:22.797000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Dark Night Of The Soul', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'Love'] |
How COVID-19 Is Impacting Blockchain and Cryptocurrency? | How COVID-19 Is Impacting Blockchain and Cryptocurrency?
Check out our new platform 👉 https://thecapital.io/
Coronavirus has been the biggest disrupter of the 21st century worldwide. It has drastically changed the lives of people in a short time and overhauled the functioning of economies. There has been a rapid shift towards online payments and Cryptocurrency development rose to the occasion as people fear that the virus may be transmitted via currency notes and coins.
Bitcoin, the leader of the cryptocurrency industry has surpassed the $18,500 mark which is its highest since December 2017. It also serves as an effective hedge against inflation and government intervention.
The vulnerabilities of the existing financial system were shown as they could not serve the unbanked and underbanked sections of the population due to the ongoing pandemic. Ripple has been a blessing in disguise as it uses blockchain technology to reduce the costs of cross-border fund transfers. Many companies like PayPal, Blockchain App Factory and Square are also betting big on the future of cryptocurrencies by investing in Cryptocurrency wallet development and accepting payments made in crypto as part of their business operations.
The supply chain system has been tremendously affected by the virus as goods are failing to move from one place to another due to the various lockdown phases and travel restrictions imposed by the various governments across the world.
Blockchain technology helps in ensuring a decentralized system and can distribute products by analyzing the needs of specific areas. Blockchain technology can be used in different sectors like financial services, food industry, supply chain management, and data storage.
The Direct Influence of Covid-19 on the adoption of Cryptocurrencies
Though cryptocurrencies can be labeled as a mainstream asset in some economies, it is yet to be fully institutionalized. It is one of the best investment avenues for portfolio diversification. The other traditional mode of investments like the stock markets and bond markets have crashed more than the cryptocurrency market.
With businesses focusing more on strengthening their digital infrastructure due to the work from home culture, remote financial services and Cryptocurrency payment gateway development have become more common now. Virtual currencies backed by Cryptocurrency development have stepped in at the right moment.
Bitcoin halving is also set to occur this year, and it may lead to a decrease in its price since there is a limited supply of 21 million coins. It omits the role of intermediaries and can be used for different purposes like payments, acquisitions, and settlements effectively.
Another factor that has led to a bullish run of cryptocurrencies in the market has been the massive fiscal stimulus packages announced by governments around the world to revive their economies from recession.
Central banks of different countries are also seriously contemplating to issue their own digital currencies. The performance of investment alternatives like Gold and the US Dollar has weakened. The number of active Bitcoin addresses has climbed to a record 1.2 million in 2020, showing a lot of organic growth.
According to Mike Belshe, the CEO of Bitgo, which is an institutional digital asset platform offering services like portfolio management, tax reporting, and wallet integration, there has been more interest in digital assets now. Covid-19 has accelerated the use of crypto in the whole world.
Economies around the world are battling high inflation as the fiscal policy of the governments has resulted in them printing more currency notes, reducing the value of the traditional fiat currency. Digital assets act as an effective store of value amidst this uncertainty. Bitcoin has become an important part of every investors’ portfolio.
The Repercussions of Coronavirus on the Usage of Blockchain Technology
Many commercial banks will be forced to come out with blockchain products. Italy’s banking sector, which comprises more than 100 banks, uses a blockchain network named Spunta for facilitating smooth interbank reconciliations.
With the usage of cash decreasing in many developed countries, banks are concentrating on shoring up their digital payment services by offering incentives for Cryptocurrency payment gateway development. The co-founder of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, who is the head of ConsenSys now, is working on a variety of central bank digital currency projects in nations like Hong Kong, France, Australia, and Thailand. They cover different areas like asset management, capital markets, decentralized finance, global trading, and Cryptocurrency wallet development.
Blockchain technology provides a lot of advantages as it can manage data in a trustworthy manner by storing it in immutable blocks. It eliminates unnecessary paperwork in different systems by digitizing all the processes. It prevents compliance violations by business firms. It helps in enabling complete automation without the need for any human involvement and can be used in identity management.
Blockchain-based tokenization of securities is being eyed as the next big thing in capital markets. It has different use cases like tracking high-value goods, making supply chains more secure, contact tracing, verifying data integrity on a real-time basis, and saving money on remittances. It can help in preventing fraud as it operates through a decentralized platform without requiring any central supervision.
Some of the leading companies that are pioneering the use of blockchain technology include Microsoft, Mastercard, Airbnb, Huawei Technologies, J.P Morgan, Walmart, IBM, and FedEx. The various industries that blockchain can disrupt are banking, instant messaging, education, cloud computing, entertainment, real estate, insurance, and healthcare.
Blockchain technology can be used in the fight against Covid-19 by identifying cases accurately, enabling tracking of patients, facilitating real-time data sharing, ensuring regulatory compliance, streamlining the communication between the different stakeholders, identifying the virus-free zones, and reducing the chances of information falsification.
The Future of COVID-19 & How it can Change Blockchain Technology & Cryptocurrency as a whole
With the coronavirus pandemic not going to end soon, business firms need to fastly adapt to the usage of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in their daily operations. New financial products will be developed in emerging economies. Cryptocurrencies have proved to be highly resilient amidst the severe economic crisis caused by Covid-19. There has been a vast interest in investing in digital assets among both institutional investors and the general public.
The urgent need for the industry is progressive regulatory measures and avoiding any sort of anarchy. Investments in cryptocurrencies depend on various aspects like demographics, markets, and economies. Many countries like Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Switzerland have voiced their interest in institutionalizing cryptocurrencies in the years to come. Countries like India and Pakistan have not banned the usage of cryptos. Positive regulations will create more jobs in the industry and also a greater tax revenue for the government.
Cryptocurrency exchanges need to lead the way by immediately flagging suspicious transactions by scrutinizing the fiat deposits and withdrawals made from bank accounts by their users. They need to work in tandem with regulators to remove any bad actors from the system and enhance their customer protection framework to provide more value to the users. | https://medium.com/the-capital/how-covid-19-is-impacting-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency-a87779c91d39 | ['Linda John'] | 2020-12-02 22:52:07.458000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Coronavirus', 'Blockchain', 'Covid 19'] |
Under-Appreciation Is the #1 Reason Men Are Likely to Cheat | HOW TO CHEAT
Under-Appreciation Is the #1 Reason Men Are Likely to Cheat
Like a dog, men need a pat on the head to feel worthwhile
Photo by Victor Grabarczyk on Unsplash
If men can clean a toilet and do household chores to keep their women from cheating, what can women do? Emotional appreciation.
That’s right; your man might step out if he feels under-appreciated emotionally. Relationship expert LiYana Silver, says,
“To appreciate him means recognizing the full worth he brings to the table and openly expressing gratitude to him for his efforts and contributions.”
Reading her work is interesting in that it points out that we all could use a little appreciation, and when we get it, we react positively. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? LiYana says that when men aren’t appreciated, their self-worth is affected, so they seek other partners who may appreciate them more.
Of course, she’s a relationship coach, so she mentions appreciation as a way women can focus on keeping their men happy. One assumes that a happy man is less likely to cheat, so there’s the advice. Keep him happy by puffing him up a bit and making him feel like less of a loser.
Start making regular deposits in his “emotional appreciation” bank account. Make a point of noticing and commenting on what your man does that’s good, right, delicious, fun, satisfying, pleasurable, humorous, or inspiring.
When men don’t hear these things, they are more likely to cheat because they look for someone else to appreciate them. I’m not going to go too deep here, but this sounds a lot like male fragility, which demands an ego stroke or boost to keep them in the game, and if they don’t get it, they go looking.
Enter the affair partner.
Cheating creates an artificial environment where time stops for a few hours so you can be someone else. She can be seductive, sultry, and wanton. He can be the take-charge man who knows exactly what he wants. In an affair, appreciation is a show with a mouth on a vulva or cock. It’s tangible and immediate. It feels good.
At home, appreciation is sometimes challenging to show when there’s been a lifetime of disappointments and things left undone. Those hurtful little jabs and other acts make it difficult to see past them and appreciate your spouse.
If hub isn’t feeling appreciated at home, he may go looking for it elsewhere. Or if you are hub, this may be why you went looking.
I am not a relationship coach, and if anything, I’d say I was an adultery consultant. I want people to be good at cheating, so it doesn’t ruin their lives. What that means is I’m not going to talk about how you fix this, but the link below has several useful resources you can check out.
From a cheating perspective, if you want to cover your tracks, you’ll become an appreciative spouse. You’ll thank him for what he does, ask for his advice, and praise him when he does housework. From a psychological point of view, when you increase your appreciation level, he will be less likely to suspect you’re cheating.
As crazy as it sounds, if you make your partner feel like they’re in a good relationship, they’ll be more trusting and less likely to ask questions.
And the fewer questions you get, the better!
PS — Is this what you were looking for Jeff Turner? I hope so! Merry Christmas ;) | https://medium.com/the-scarlett-letter/under-appreciation-is-the-1-reason-men-are-likely-to-cheat-77ae7f795c9f | ['Teresa J Conway'] | 2020-12-27 16:05:46.518000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Psychology', 'Relationships', 'Cheating', 'Adultery'] |
How to Never Run Out of Freelance Writing Jobs Again! Seriously | The term “feast and famine” comes around a lot in the freelance world (especially writers), but it doesn’t have to go to those extremes.
In fact, I will show you that you can make your next month’s goal (within reason) without having to send a prospecting email or make a phone call.
There are a few things that could hold you back, but not having enough work isn’t a problem, if you have a (several) fail-safes in place.
That’s what we’re going for here.
I have a list of several options that should keep you in the money. Some of them are fast, and some take some time to build up, but if you implement them during downtime, you shouldn’t be in the dumps for long.
Why is Work Not Consistent?
This is a good question, and I’m not sure I can answer it fully, but here goes. Here are least a few potential responses
Seasonality
It seems that most of my freelance friends are always slow in January. Typically, you will be if you have clients that don’t order regularly. I have customers who always order a month’s worth of blog posts, and that provides consistency, but other clients only come calling when they need new content.
January is the time where many businesses do taxes, reorganize, and evaluate things. Putting in a content order isn’t at the top of their priority list. | https://medium.com/the-lucky-freelancer/how-to-never-run-out-of-freelance-writing-jobs-again-seriously-a54d9650a4d6 | ['Josef Cruz'] | 2020-09-04 12:11:32.666000+00:00 | ['Freelance Writing', 'Freelance', 'Writing', 'Freelancers', 'Freelancing'] |
The Long Range Indicator. A Look at Trading Market Extremes. | Does Simplicity Still Work?
If you regularly follow my articles, you will find that many of the indicators I develop have a high hit ratio and on average are profitable. This is mostly due to the risk management method I use. But what about market randomness and the fact that many underperformers blaming Technical Analysis for their failure?
First of all, I constantly publish my trading logs on Twitter before initiation and after initiation to show the results. This ensures transparency. I also publish a track record on Twitter every 1–3 months. However, I never guarantee a return nor superior skill whatsoever. As for the indicators that I develop, I constantly use them in my personal trading. Hence, I have no motive to publish biased research. My goal is to share back what I have learnt in the online community.
Remember to always do your back-tests. Even though I supply the indicator’s function (as opposed to just bloat about it and say it is the holy grail and its function is a secret), you should always believe that other people are wrong. My indicators and style of trading works for me but maybe not for everybody. I rely on this rule:
The market price cannot be predicted or is very hard to be predicted more than 50% of the time. But market reactions can fairly be predicted.
What the above quote means is that we can form a small zone around an area and say with some degree of confidence that the market price will show a reaction around that area. But we cannot really say that it will go down 4% from there, then test it again, and breakout on the third attempt. The error term becomes exponentially higher because we are predicting over predictions.
While we are discussing this topic, I should point out a few things about my back-tests and articles:
The spread I use is based on institutional quotes of a small pip fraction. Generally, retail traders are given a whopping spread of 1–2 pips per trade. This is huge. I use 0.2 spread. However, most of the strategies that use the hourly time frame still work with 1 pip spread. For the ones that use M15 or M5 time frames, they cannot be profitable with a spread of 1 pip.
The holding period calculation I use is close to close in case there is no risk management process.
The risk management process I use is all about the Average True Range. I specifically mention that the technique I use is suboptimal because it forces a theoretical 0.25 risk-reward ratio meaning that I risk 4 monetary units to gain 1 monetary unit. The majority of the strategies I publish outperform this way. Some are still profitable.
Although I discourage trading based on just one indicator, the numbers do not lie. What I am presenting is what could have happened when taking into account a low spread.
Some of the back-tests I provide are losers and they are published either to demystify a trading myth or to present interesting functions to be coded by readers.
Finally, I am a firm believer of not spoon-feeding the learners. I have learnt by doing and not by copying. You should get the idea, the function, the intuition, the conditions of the strategy, and then elaborate (an even better) one yourself so that you back-test it and improve it before deciding to take it live or to eliminate it.
To sum up, are the strategies I provide realistic? Yes, but with optimizing the environment (robust algorithm, low costs, honest broker, risk management). Are the strategies provided for the sole use of trading? No, it is to stimulate brainstorming and getting more trading ideas as we are all sick of hearing about an oversold RSI as a reason to go short. | https://kaabar-sofien.medium.com/the-long-range-indicator-a-look-at-trading-market-extremes-79c5dc5ca615 | ['Sofien Kaabar'] | 2020-12-29 02:11:07.632000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Finance', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Change Requires a Leader, an Inspector, a Scientist, and a Human Relations Consultant | Change Requires a Leader, an Inspector, a Scientist, and a Human Relations Consultant
A leader serves multiple roles and shares responsibility
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
A leader is only as strong as the group she directs. She must inspire the organization and organize the people. Thus, the need to be a member of the team is essential. Only as a participant does the leader possess the ability to analyze the direction of movement, determine the skills individuals contribute, define the mission, identify the target and impact change. Therefore, a leader assumes three roles: inspector, scientist, and human relations consultant.
Basic human instinct instills a desire for us to collaborate. Sure, sometimes working alone provides advantages, and I attest, when not required to partnership in a committee, the speed of completion accelerates. I know the assignment is done right, my way. However, I also must admit without others’ input, the final product presents only one perspective, limited insight, and lacks originality. Look to nature for an example of how teamwork improves production.
Geese provide an example of a team that functions in unison to meet their goal. They model the importance of managing resources to attain the highest level of performance. When they fly in V-shape, the flock works together to reduce the drag as the goose in the front breaks the resistance making migration easier for the group. When the leader gets tired, he rotates to the back and a different bird takes his place. The birds all share a common goal and strive to achieve through support of each other.
From this example in nature, comes one very important takeaway, shared leadership expands possibilities.
Whether one person acts as the leader, or the responsibility is shared, the role requires multiple skills to produce successful outcomes and implement change.
The inspector gathers information.
By investigating the effective components of the system, the potency of the team is identified. First, an inventory of the stakeholders empowers a leader to evaluate the pulse of the individuals to govern future decisions. Input gathered from employees, clients, support personnel, the community — anybody connected with the institution provides valuable knowledge. If some stakeholders’ interests remain unconsidered, hasty decisions and impulsive actions create anxiety, thereby creating a weak link in the chain resulting in an interruption to the team’s effectiveness.
Second, a statement of resources provides the leader knowledge of how to distribute time, energy, products, and money. Following an accounting of provisions available, needed, beyond reach, as well as, excesses, an inspector increases their ability to proceed in a viable direction. Consider the mechanic attempting to repair a car. He must allow enough time to not only complete the job but leave time for a test drive to assure accuracy for safety. The required tools and parts provide a competent worker a path to success; without a lug wrench and a tire, the car remains crippled. Without needed resources, frustration develops.
The scientist builds long-term success.
The scientific method contains five steps: observe, ask a question, form a hypothesis, make a prediction and implementation. A leader applies these five steps in various ways but basically uses the process in much the same manner. With continuous improvement as the goal, a leader examines the environment, analyzes the data and implements best practices to accomplish the vision.
A scientific supervisor uses the process and input from the team to establish a vision. Teach for America’s vision statement reads, “One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.” Imagine how this process unfolded before arriving at this statement. In the beginning observations, hypotheses and questions generated a dialogue.
Who are we?
What is our goal?
What are we doing?
What needs to be done?
What is not being done?
Are we meeting our potential?
Who do we hope to impact?
What outcome is expected?
How are the terms defined?
With input from stakeholders, the director and team form a prediction; the prediction in business constitutes the vision. Just as a prediction guides the experimentation process for the scientist, the vision defines the purpose, guides the strategy, and communicates the goal. Without a clear vision, confusion impedes progress.
Because science research is generally funded by larger institutions, governments, or grants, they are responsible to establish concrete plans of action. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery believes, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Therefore, a leader guides the team to develop a detailed plan of action and is ready to modify or adapt as necessary during implementation. A plan lacking details and uncommunicated fosters false starts with limited forward progress.
“The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.” ― Denis Waitley, writer and motivational speaker
A human relations consultant fosters collaboration and support for the common vision.
The responsibilities of this role require communication and reflection. What one pays attention to gets done. And what one measure gets done well. A leader laboring as a member of the team models a desire to succeed; she provides inspiration and a willingness to influence the outcome, instead of expecting others to toil to accomplish her vision. In this role, the leader provides incentives to encourage and motivate. If all members feel a part of the team, they become invested in producing an internal desire to succeed. When individuals function as active participants with a common goal, the team shares responsibility for the outcome. Resistance occurs without a unified effort from all involved.
Model for Managing Complex Change
A leader who functions as an inspector, scientist, and human relations consultant implements sustainable change. Knoster presented the first version of the Knoster Change Model at a TASH (The Association of Persons with Severe Handicaps) conference in 1991. Since then it has evolved to address varying audiences with the same purpose, to manage change.
The first time I saw this chart, past experiences began to make sense. As I started reflecting, reasons for successes and failures became apparent. When applied to my job as a principal in a public school, I identified areas to improve. As a teacher, strategies to increase students’ success flashed in my mind. Even in my parenting role, I recognized how to be better.
Confusion
When I told my daughter to raise her math grade, I stated my expectation without providing support from change research to help her succeed. I only presented to her my vision. If I really desired change, so much more had to be provided.
False Starts
I noticed she started studying more which created a decrease in missing assignments and an increase in quiz scores, but then she returned to her old pattern of poor study habits. When we developed a plan of action, improvements became sustainable.
Each day after school Sue set aside one hour for homework.
We established a specific time, 3:30–4:30. This fits with our daily routine.
She completed homework at the office desk, downstairs.
The cell phone sat, turned off, in a different room.
Frustration
This plan established a routine but did not end all problems. Sometimes, Sue would forget the assignment, her book or something essential to complete the task, causing both of us frustration. Resources were missing, forgotten, or lost.
I discovered after a discussion with the teacher a copy of the book was accessible on-line, and she offered to provide one for use at home.
Sue started carrying a daily planner to record assignments, due dates, and test dates.
We learned teachers posted expectations on their websites.
We stocked our office with paper, pencils, a calculator, graph paper — everything needed for class.
Resistance
Nobody wants to work without positive feedback; it goes against human nature. For a teenager, incentives become even more necessary because they have trouble seeing the rewards of long-term goals. We created both internal and external incentives in the study process.
Study time started 30 minutes after arriving home from school, providing some time to unwind and relax.
Thirty minutes into studying, Sue chose one snack.
When Sue earned an appropriate grade (as defined by mutual agreement) on a test or quiz, she chose a weekend opportunity: sleepover, attend a school event, mall shopping, extra phone time, etc.
I made a conscious effort to offer sincere praise for work well done.
Anxiety
We quickly noticed the tension in our home decreased and grades improved. However, a problem persisted. Sue still struggled with math concepts, so we investigated how to build her skills to promote self-efficacy.
We discovered the school hosts a study club at school once a week during lunch.
The teacher changed the seating arrangement so that Sue sat beside a study buddy.
I researched and found several websites that provide guidance; Kahn Academy is exemplary.
A math tutor started coming to our home once a week.
Once we assembled all the necessary pieces to support our daughter, not only did her grades improve but she gained confidence and our home became a much more pleasant environment.
From my experience, change seldom happens in isolation and doesn’t occur accidentally. Change transpires with effort, thought, planning, and support under the watchful eye and patient hand of a leader. Life presents opportunities to lead, to make a difference, but unless we address these opportunities with the mind of an inspector, scientist, and human relations consultant while implementing the essential elements, change is not sustainable.
“Don’t just exist; do something meaningful with your life. Discover a problem and fix it.
Don’t just fit in; make it a point to brighten your corner. Decide to resolve your challenges.
Don’t just manage; go extra mile and win your race. Never give up the fight. You will win.
Don’t just be able; always make sure you are available. Be present to make a change.
Don’t just be alive; once you have arrived, find the reason why and make that reason accomplished.
Don’t just wish; be passionate about what you wish to see happen. Rise up and make it happen.
Don’t just create; create to change; change to improve; improve to increase. Aspire to inspire.
Don’t just be making a living; make a life and leave an indelible footstep wherever you step.
― Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You
If you found this informative, you might enjoy another. | https://medium.com/swlh/change-requires-a-leader-an-inspector-a-scientist-and-a-human-relations-consultant-393ff901c219 | ['Brenda Mahler'] | 2019-12-22 20:52:11.707000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Leadership Development', 'Leadership', 'Sustainability', 'Management And Leadership'] |
2020: A Year Full of Amazing AI Papers — A Review | 2020: A Year Full of Amazing AI Papers — A Review
A curated list of the latest breakthroughs in AI by release date with a clear video explanation, link to a more in-depth article, and code
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Even with everything that happened in the world this year, we still had the chance to see a lot of amazing research come out. Especially in the field of artificial intelligence. More, many important aspects were highlighted this year, like the ethical aspects, important biases, and much more. Artificial intelligence and our understanding of the human brain and its link to AI is constantly evolving, showing promising applications in the soon future.
Here are the most interesting research papers of the year, in case you missed any of them. In short, it is basically a curated list of the latest breakthroughs in AI and Data Science by release date with a clear video explanation, link to a more in-depth article, and code (if applicable). Enjoy the read, and let me know if I missed any important papers in the comments, or by contacting me directly on LinkedIn!
The complete reference to each paper is listed at the end of this article.
Access the complete list in a GitHub repository
Tag me on Twitter (@Whats_AI) or LinkedIn (Louis (What’s AI) Bouchard) if you share the article!
Watch a complete 2020 rewind in 15 minutes | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/2020-a-year-full-of-amazing-ai-papers-a-review-c42fa07aff4b | ['Louis', 'What S Ai'] | 2020-12-28 12:29:43.041000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Research'] |
How To Rewire Disillusionment and Monotony | How To Rewire Disillusionment and Monotony
Do things the make time fly.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
By Kathleen Reily
Once not long ago I had a conversation with a gentleman who was cusping that midlife period and there was so much about his mindset that found inspiring and wanted to learn from. He was so happy, resilient, and remained so positive in the midst of life’s pitfalls and challenges. I could tell immediately there was so much I could learn from him.
Since then we have had multiple conversations about life, what determines that experience of fulfillment for men, and what is the interior life like for a midlife family man, discussing the positives and the negatives. I was asking him questions in hopes of getting some insight into what ingredients he possessed that made him the person he was.
He responded to me with a story. Many years ago he discovered it was paramount that he feels driven on a daily basis, and in order for him to feel driven he had to be doing something that he loved. He emphasized that one doesn’t necessarily have to love what they are doing one hundred percent of the time, but one must lose track of time, one must experience their day racing by until suddenly it’s evening time. Once you realize that this particular thing you are doing speeds up time, then one must figure out how to do more of it. One thing this gentleman told me was that he was deathly afraid of monotony and stagnation, not moving toward a goal or attaining anything major in his life by way of challenging himself.
He then recommended that one figure out a way to do more of this thing that makes time fly. Because for him to live out his life barely feeling alive was the worst thing in the entire world. I ask you to find that one thing or those few things that make you feel alive and bring you so much joy that time begins to fly.
The more you live your life in this headspace, this mindset that doing this thing brings to you, the more you will reverse that experience of possible disillusionment with life, possible monotony. If these are experiences that you are currently having on a regular basis, I challenge you to sit down with a pen and paper and go back over your years to find that one thing that made time fly for you. | https://medium.com/change-becomes-you/how-to-rewire-disillusionment-and-monotony-ef449e6b9813 | ['The Good Men Project'] | 2020-12-28 21:48:31.489000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Change Your Life', 'Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Success'] |
An Argument Against First Principle Thinking | One the most celebrated traits of today’s most successful entrepreneurs is the ability to think differently than the vast majority of people. As my friend, Gijs — who is also participating in this daily story challenge — wrote, Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” is his ability to reason from first principles. But what does it mean to think for yourself? And why don’t more people do it?
Reasoning from first principles requires forgoing heuristic-based thinking in pursuit of more fundamental truths. A heuristic is defined as “any approach to problem solving that employs a method, not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but instead sufficient for reaching an immediate goal.” In other words it’s a mental shortcut.
In the 1980s most people assumed the market for computers was limited to businesses. Steve Jobs exploited this heuristic. More recently people assumed high-price luggage could only be sold in stores. Jen Rubio and Stephanie Korey exploited that heuristic when they founded Away and began selling luggage over the internet. Many of the most famous entrepreneurial stories are heuristic exploitation stories.
In our startup-obsessed society these stories have become mainstream folklore. Steve Jobs and Jen Rubio are fast becoming the new heroes in this shared mythology. Yet I don’t think that first principle thinking is anymore common today than it was 25 years ago. And that’s by design.
Generally speaking, evolutionary traits influence human behavior more than cultural norms. From an evolutionary perspective, questioning norms is inefficient. Which of these two humans do you think is more likely to survive? The one that questions the ethics of killing its prey or the one that hunts without second thought? It’s easy to forget that reason is a modern luxury.
Even from a more modern cultural perspective, first principle thinking has many disadvantages. Take ethics and law as one example. In a modern, specialized society it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to study ethical principles extensively. Instead legal systems codify ethical principles into a set of heuristics that everyone can follow. (This, of course, creates systemic injustice when the power is in the hands of one homogenous group).
One way of looking at our society is like a multi-armed bandit problem. For those unfamiliar with this idea, Josh Kauffman gives a great explanation in his blog post Explore / Exploit:
Imagine walking into a casino and deciding to play the slot machines. There’s a row of machines, each of which has a different probability of paying a reward when you pull the lever. Some machines pay more — some much more — than the other machines, but you’re not sure which machine has the highest return. If you knew the best machine in advance, you’d just pull that lever all day long, but you don’t have a clue, and no one is going to tell you. The only way to find out is to start pulling levers, pay close attention, keep track of what works and what doesn’t, and do the math. There’s a tradeoff to be made, however: when you choose to pull a lever you haven’t pulled before, you get new information about that option, and that information is valuable in finding the best overall machine. But pulling the less-tested lever has an opportunity cost: you’re not pulling the lever you currently think will give you the best return. There’s a risk that the lever you pull will return less than what you would’ve brought in pulling the current optimal lever, and that’s a very real cost. Information is valuable, but it comes at a price… The solution to the bandit problem is easy to understand: the optimal strategy is to start with a period of exploration, where you pull levers at random and gather information. When you have more information about what works and what doesn’t, you shift to spending the majority of your time pulling the best lever (exploitation), but you keep exploring the other options in case your current best option isn’t the very best that exists.
So here’s an idea: maybe society is a bandit problem where the goal is safety, wealth, and happiness. A small group of “misfits” like Musk, Jobs and Rubio explore new ways of progressing towards that goal and fail 9 times out of 10. But they gather new information and occasionally find new paths that the majority of people exploit (no negative connotation here). In this model, maybe we have just the right amount of explorers. | https://medium.com/swlh/an-argument-against-first-principle-thinking-7ef952a55298 | ['Michael Thomas'] | 2019-06-25 08:05:09.837000+00:00 | ['Startup'] |
7 Quick and Easy Ways to Combat Low Self Esteem | pexels- Khoa Vo
Suffering from low self esteem? You are not the only one. We all could do well to incorporate these seven transformational mind shifts. Let’s get right into it.
You are enough.
How many of us walk around feeling like we are not enough? Not good enough. Not pretty enough. Not smart enough. Enough! You are truly valuable. You are more than enough. You are a joy and a blessing. Tell yourself, I am enough. And then, drop it. Whenever you face negative self talk, remind yourself, I am enough.
2. You are worthy.
We all have inherent self worth. We are worthy of love and life and good things. We deserve goodness in our lives. We deserve to be happy. We are worthy of love. You are worthy of love.
3. You are beautiful.
You are so beautiful. We become even more beautiful when we accept ourselves fully and completely. It is then that we start to shine. You are without a doubt, beautiful.
I see your beauty. Do you?
4. You are so unique.
You are literally, one of a kind. Out of billions of people there is not another you. I don’t care if you are a twin. You are one of a kind. Really take hold of this truth. You are so special. Embrace yourself. Be more fully you. You bring to the table things that no one else can. Your joy. Your love. Your hope. Your blessings.
5. You are made of stardust.
We are literally made of stardust. We are also made of rivers and mountains and deserts and valleys. You are made of stone and water and iron and bone. You are incredible.
6. You have unlimited potential.
There are literally no limits to your growth and potential. You can recreate yourself daily. Don’t believe me? Pick up a book on a subject you are interested in. Read it. You have gained knowledge and increased in understanding. Take the role of the avid student. Learn a new language, a new skill, or pick up a new outlook. There are no limits as to what you can do or who you can be.
7. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
You are a magnificent creation. Created by an awesome Creator. Created in love and with love. No detail was rushed or made haphazardly. When you were created the Creator God declared you a masterpiece. His finest work. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. Embrace yourself. You are so special. You are so important.
I hope these seven mind shifts will help you on your journey to self love and acceptance. You deserve it. You really do. I wish you all the best. May we grow and learn to think of ourselves in positive and beautiful ways. You are beautiful. You are worth it. You are enough.
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/7-ways-to-combat-low-self-esteem-c99f795e1a4c | ['M.X. Christopher'] | 2020-12-27 16:03:01.979000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Self Esteem', 'Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Self'] |
Designing for accessibility, step 1: Color contrast | Designing for accessibility, step 1: Color contrast
The A11Y Project puts it best, and most bluntly: “Accessibility is hard.” If you’re feeling lost, start with color contrast.
A primer on accessibility
Accessibility has been a buzz word in the design community lately. What does it mean? “The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability” — Henry & McGee, W3C.
There are two de facto standards for accessibility: Section 508, which applies to the public sector, and WCAG 2.0, which applies to the private sector. These two standards are essentially checklists that are used to evaluate websites. Section 508 is a legal mandate, while WCAG 2.0 is not. So, unless you are a government employee or subcontractor, you are not legally required to make your website accessible. But, there are countless reasons to care about accessibility! Each of your users should be entitled to an equal experience.
Side note: Although all .gov websites have been legally required to comply with Section 508 since 1998, very few of them do, without consequence. This absurdity, along with several other unsettling findings, was the subject of my thesis at UC Berkeley.
What you can do, as a designer
Optimizing a website for accessibility is largely a developer’s task. For example, one WCAG 2.0 guideline requires websites to be keyboard-navigable, for the user who is unable to operate a mouse. This doesn’t pose a large burden on the designer; even animation-heavy and scroll-jacked sites can be keyboard-navigable.
However, there are a number of guidelines that a designer can directly address. These include reducing motion, limiting popups or unexpected flashes, and easiest of all, ensuring adequate color contrast.
Each guideline of WCAG 2.0 has three conformance levels: A (minimal), AA (mid-range), and AAA (highest). AA is widely considered the industry standard. The AA standard for color contrast is a 4.5:1 ratio between foreground (i.e. text, images) and background. For examples of what a 4.5:1 ratio looks like, check out Brent Jackson’s tool called Colorable.
Testing contrast
If you have an existing brand or UI palette, check the contrast ratios. I recommend using Lea Verou’s Contrast Ratio tool, simply for its ease of use. You may also like the EightShapes Contrast Grid for evaluating more extensive palettes. Neither the W3C (the foundation overseeing WCAG 2.0) nor the General Services Administration (the government body overseeing Section 508) provide testing tools, so you’ll have to rely on third-party tools by kind-hearted developers. The A11Y Project maintains a list of resources, as does Google.
Making adjustments
If your current contrast ratios are shy of 4.5:1, you’ll need to make some adjustments to meet the AA contrast standard. Keep in mind that adjacent colors aren’t held to the contrast standard. What really matters is contrast between foreground and background, so you won’t have to reskin your entire palette. With perhaps minor color adjustments, you can ensure good contrast while preserving your brand image. I know this is easier said than done, so let me reiterate my opening statement: Accessibility is hard. This is the easiest part.
Consider the following from Sebastien Gabriel, designer at Google Design:
“Accessibility has always been part of Chrome’s DNA… Admittedly on the visual side, our color scheme needed a new pass to make it both simpler and compliant to the WCAG 2.0 rules for good contrast. We made sure that all our typography as well as iconography reaches at least AA level or 4.5:1 contrast ratio.”
Google is not alone in meeting the AA standard. The Twitter UI update that rolled out last month includes an “Increase color contrast” feature. When this is toggled, most of the palette meets not just AA, but AAA compliance for contrast.
Feasibility
If you have doubts about feasibility, you’re not alone. Consider this excerpt from Yesenia Perez-Cruz and Sanette Tanaka at Vox Media:
“Vox Media has made strides in improving the accessibility of our sites since Curbed’s design language was initially defined… the link color from Curbed’s original style guide did not have enough contrast with the homepage background color to pass contrast tests as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We explored a few options, including changing Curbed’s color palette, but ultimately decided that drastic changes to the design language were out of scope for this project. We compromised by bolding our links. While still unaccessible, the links will hopefully benefit from having a second visual indicator that helps them stand out from body text.”
When I asked for additional information on why adequate contrast was out of scope, Tanaka explained that colors are an integral part of the brand’s larger design language, and that changing this design language is no small feat. While I’m glad that Vox Media is aware of their accessibility shortcomings, the excuse doesn’t sit well with me. It’s unfair to your users to prioritize the unity of your design language over accessibility. Accessibility deserves consideration, especially if rebranding efforts are already underway.
Remember that everyone deserves access to your website. Creating a fully accessible product can be a long journey, so color contrast is a great place to start.
❧
Neil Shankar is a designer on Creative Engineering at Google, embedded through Left Field Labs. Visit tallneil.io. | https://uxdesign.cc/the-easiest-part-about-designing-accessible-websites-76cd6b9a7ae4 | ['Neil Shankar'] | 2019-06-03 23:40:30.861000+00:00 | ['Design', 'UX', 'UI Design', 'Colors', 'Accessibility'] |
How to Write for Work Today | “Work Today” is a publication dedicated to studies, stories, and experiences surrounding work-life and the job market. The goal is clear: help people create better workplaces and provide advice for their professional journeys.
“Work Today” is created by Alice Greschkow, who is a writer and consultant in Berlin, Germany. Why? Work is one of the experiences the majority of the population cannot skip, yet there is no place on Medium which is mainly dedicated to that aspect of your life which determines your life standard, ambition, the amount of free time, and personal self-actualization.
If you want to contribute to “Work Today”, please read the following guide.
1. Topics
“Work Today” is a niche publication, which focuses on insights regarding work-life and the labor market. Possible topics are:
Personal experiences and learnings from work-life
and learnings from work-life Job hunt : Struggles & Insights
: Struggles & Insights Studies and insights on work, e.g. the effects of flat hierarchies on work
and insights on work, e.g. the effects of flat hierarchies on work Productivity : How to improve focus and outcomes
: How to improve focus and outcomes Inspirational books on work
on work How digital technologies change work-life
change work-life Hacks and tools to improve work-life
and to improve work-life How remote work changes work life
changes work life Challenges with remote teams
Experiences with professional failure
Analyses of the labor market
of the labor market Underemployment
Changing careers
Leadership advice for the workplace
for the workplace Political activities and decisions which affect workers
and decisions which affect workers Scientific insights on work, e.g. from behavioral psychology or business administration
2. Add benefit
IMPORTANT: Each story must provide a benefit to the reader, e.g. new information, insights, or emotional learnings from personal struggles.
Diary-type stories will not be accepted.
3. Grammar and spelling
Mistakes happen to all of us. Please make sure that your piece meets a high standard in terms of grammar and spelling. Check your texts with Grammarly or use the grammar and spelling check on in your writing program.
Minor mistakes shall be forgiven, but articles with severe grammatical errors will be rejected.
4. Credits
Please make sure that ALL images have proper credit. Articles with missing credits will be rejected.
If you cite people, stats, or articles, please add a link to those passages. By now, we’re all tired of fake news.
5. Formatting
Every story must have a cover image.
Please make sure you don’t send a plain, unformatted text.
Add section headings for each relevant section. Highlight quotes and use bullet points if necessary.
The reader will spend more time reading your story if your article looks more professional and visually appealing.
6. How to contribute
If you would like to contribute to “Work Today”, please comment below with “I want to contribute”.
You will be added as a writer within 5 days.
Then you can add a DRAFT to “Work Today”.
Credit: Screenshot by author: Medium submission
To do so, please click the three-dot button at the top, then “Edit Story” to enter the edit mode.
In the edit mode, click the three-dot button in the top-right corner of the page to open your story settings.
Select Add to the publication from the dropdown list.
Choose “Work Today” and click Save.
After submission, your story will be reviewed. You’ll receive a personal note to inform you if your piece will be published or not.
Please note: Before publishing, minor changes can be made by the editor (e.g. updating the format, removing undisclosed affiliate links, changing the subtitle)
7. Medium guidelines
All articles must be in alliance with the Medium rules. Please check the distribution guidelines too.
8. Have fun!
Medium is about the love for writing and learning from each other — enjoy the ride!
Looking forward to your stories!
Alice | https://medium.com/work-today/how-to-write-for-work-today-3bd5b87f0c62 | ['Alice Greschkow'] | 2020-12-06 16:59:30.833000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Work Life Balance', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Writing Tips'] |
What I Learned From 100 Hours of Live Streaming | What I Learned From 100 Hours of Live Streaming
Being live on camera for 100 hours is something I would do again, even though I didn’t earn a cent
Photo by AronPW on Unsplash
I’ll never forget the burning sensation.
My mouth was burning uncontrollably, and I wasn’t sure if I could drink the water. I felt like I had made a terrible mistake on my first trip to Mexico, all from taking a bite of habanero paste that I mistook for tomatillo salsa.
The tortilla chips were thick and had a flavor best described as cardboard, but I was starving. So, I eagerly took a giant scoop of the diced salsa and started chewing the leathery corn chip.
My mouth exploded like never before. The burn didn’t stop for over 30 minutes, and I had trouble feeling my lips for the rest of the afternoon. My mouth never really recovered, and now I love spicy food.
Let’s just say that when I try things, I like to try them all the way, and that’s the same approach I took to live streaming.
I started my live stream at the end of October by going live eight hours a day every weekday, so I streamed over 100 hours live in my very first month.
Along the way, I learned some important lessons about personal branding and how to succeed with video content online. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/what-i-learned-from-100-hours-of-live-streaming-1347608e27c3 | ['Dr. Derek Austin'] | 2020-12-17 20:56:17.978000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Live Streaming', 'Life Lessons', 'Technology', 'Marketing'] |
You Only Need These 5 Pages on Your Website to Generate More Leads | Many business owners struggle with what content they need to have on their website. It’s difficult to know which pages should be included. Sometimes it’s even more difficult to know what can be excluded.
If you’re a professional who provides services or consulting to other business owners, you only need the 5 main pages outlined below.
HOMEPAGE
Often your Homepage will be the first impression you give your visitors. It’s important to make it immediately clear what you do and who you help. There’s no need to be subtle with this. Near the top of the page include a clear and direct headline.
Here are a few examples:
“Your website should gather leads, not dust.
We create websites that attract new clients for professional service providers and consultants.”
(From my own website, rosypost.com)
“We Build and Optimize Ecommerce Sites.
We have years of ecommerce UX, conversion and AB testing experience.
We also have a dedicated team for Shopify site development.”
(From growthrock.co)
“Better Content. Better Customers.
Grow your audience, your email list, and customer-base with done-for-you content by Audience Ops.
(From audienceops.com)
Use your Homepage to display a quick overview of your expertise. Describe the problem you solve, and provide some immediate assistance. Showcase a few helpful pieces of content and provide a helpful lead magnet. Your lead magnet is a great call-to-action for visitors who may not be familiar with your work yet.
ABOUT PAGE
An About page isn’t only about you. Many business owners use this page as a biography of their accomplishments. But website visitors don’t really care about biographical information.
Your visitors want to know how you can help them. Use the About page to describe what you can do for your clients and what results they will receive by working with you.
The About page is the second most visited page on a website on average. People want to know if you’re the right person to help them. Your About page can be a more personal place to let them know you understand their needs.
CONTACT PAGE
Make it easy to get in touch with you. If a potential client has a question, give them several ways to contact you. Don’t bury your contact info in a place that’s hard to find.
SALES/SERVICES PAGE
Your Sales page (or Services page), is the perfect place to fully explain what you do. Cover the Who, What, Why, and How of your offering. I often see business websites that don’t go into detail about their services, which leaves their visitors guessing and unsure.
Draw people into the page by describing the problem you solve. Then transition into how they will feel after you provide your service. This helps your prospects visualize the problem and solution.
Provide as much detail as possible that will help your prospect make the decision to contact you. Try to answer their questions and overcome their objections.
Be sure to include a strong call-to-action. Make it easy to take the next step with you. This could be a sign up form, a phone number or email address. Give your prospect a clear and easy path to continue.
CONTENT AREA
The final section of your website is the Content area. This might be a blog, a collection of case studies, a podcast, a video series, or some other type of content.
The point of this section is to provide extra value to your website visitors. Help them start to solve their problem immediately. It will build trust in you as an expert. It gives you the opportunity to show off your knowledge on the subject.
Your content has the added benefit of helping with online marketing and SEO. It can be shared on social media, and found on search engines when people search for your service.
Continue to add content to this area over time. Your library of helpful and relevant content will grow and become even more effective at establishing you as an authority. | https://medium.com/multiplier-magazine/you-only-need-these-5-pages-on-your-website-to-generate-more-leads-cc7c930e57dd | ['Cassi Lowe'] | 2018-05-25 12:17:21.863000+00:00 | ['Web Design', 'B2B', 'B2b Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Marketing'] |
A Homeless Person is Camping in My Neighborhood. Why is This a Police Matter? | A Homeless Person is Camping in My Neighborhood. Why is This a Police Matter?
I held the phone, hesitating, wondering who to call
Photo by Michael Guite on Unsplash
My husband and I walk our dog on a riverside path every morning around the same time. We’re lucky to have this open space right next to our house. I had an early appointment, so we were out early one morning. My husband noticed a tent tucked under a large overgrown tree. It was well hidden in the undergrowth, but it’s bright yellow color was hard to hide.
He approached and found someone breaking camp and packing up. “You can’t camp there,” he shouted.
The person waved their hand and said, “Sorry, can’t hear you.” Then, they hustled to finish packing up.
Homeless people had camped in this spot before. It is a pretty choice spot. It is on state conservation and recreation land that runs along a middle-class neighborhood filled with single and dual family homes. There are few busy roads nearby, but after 9 pm, the neighborhood is quiet, settled in for the night. Under this big tree, there is a flat area surrounded by bushes. It is a perfect place to set up camp undetected get a good night’s sleep.
Young adults have crashed out there, probably sleeping off a bender. Once, someone stayed there undetected until we found their sleeping bag and a few items under the tree. It seemed like they’d been there for weeks. The spot has also served as a place for drug users and alcoholics. We never caught anyone in the middle of the act, but the trash and paraphernalia spoke for itself.
Our neighborhood is safe, and this activity was sporadic. It was more of a nuisance than a threat or a cause for concern. Still, my neighbors and I preferred it weren’t happening in our proverbial backyard. So, we’ve reported the activity through the police non-emergency line.
This time felt different.
The tent camper appeared at the intersection of great social upheaval across the country. Deaths due to the Coronavirus had surpassed 100,000 in the United States. More than 40 Million people had applied for unemployment. And protests over police brutality following the murder of George Floyd were spreading nationwide, including in my own state and city.
“I don’t think we should call the police,” my husband said. I agreed. It just felt wrong.
With calls to defund the police echoing in my head, a jumble of thoughts ran through my head. Why is homelessness a police matter? How will an armed officer help this person? Ticketing or arresting this person won’t improve this person’s life; it will make it worse. Even if the cops just asked them to leave, it might get this “problem” out of my sight, but it doesn’t improve their situation.
As I said, I had called the police in the past. That was the automatic, knee-jerk reaction to this situation. I would see a person camping under the tree and think, “That’s illegal.” And I’d call the police. I’d never dial 911 for something like this — I reserved that for “is someone going to die” emergencies. But I did call the non-emergency line nonetheless. My default response is born out of habit, out of never questioning IF or WHY this was a police matter.
What brought the camper?
Although others have camped in this spot, it is hardly a recreational camping location. It is, after all, a neighborhood.
I don’t know if camping in my neighborhood is illegal, but according to the report “No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities” by The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, “34% of cities have city-wide bans on camping. This represents a 60% increase in such laws since 2011.”
These kinds of laws are explicitly designed to criminalize homelessness. In other words, treating homelessness as a crime means cities are less interested in helping homeless people or preventing homelessness and more about ticketing, fining, and jailing homeless people. Or at the very least, the law and police enforcement is used as a tool for shooing the homeless off, so they are someone else’s problem.
The bright yellow tent looked like it was only lightly used. The camper quickly packed up their site, hoping to leave before the neighborhood was fully awake and bustling. The campsite was neat, and no litter was left behind. I can only assume the person quietly pitched their tent after dark to avoid detection.
Given the devastation the Coronavirus has done to the economy, I could think of a myriad of reasons the camper might be newly homeless. I thought about the day I drove by the local food pantry and saw cars lined up along the street waiting to get in. That scene prompted me to buy a bag full of pantry staples — pasta, mac-n-cheese, beans, rice, and tuna — each time I went shopping to donate to the neighborhood food pantry. The economic crisis exacerbated both housing insecurity and food insecurity no only for the poorest among us but across the middle class as well.
And the thought of calling the police on someone forced to secretly sleep in the bushes because a virus destroyed any economic security they might have had seemed heartless and cruel.
Furthermore, I thought about how an encounter with the police might not end well. Until now, I’ve intentionally been vague about the camper’s gender and race. I didn’t want seed any preconceived biases. But as I grappled with whether to call the police, I realized that as a black man, the camper was at a higher risk of having a deadly, harmful, or at the very least, intimidating interaction with the police.
While recent events partially influenced my concerns about police brutality, statistics confirm them. According to a 2016 study by Roland G. Fryer, Jr or the Harvard University Department of Economics, “In the raw data, blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn than whites, and the difference is statistically significant.”
Who ya gonna call?
I held my mobile phone in my hand and stared at it blankly, “If we don’t call the police, who do we call?”
I was dumbfounded. At first, I considered calling no one. The tent was packed up and gone. I figured if our camper’s goal was to remain undetected, the cover was blown, and he wouldn’t likely be back anytime soon.
To be honest, I didn’t want a homeless man pitching a tent in my neighborhood. Yeah, basically, I am saying, “Not in my backyard.” I didn’t want to criminalize him. I didn’t want him to return. But I also wanted my city to offer resources for homelessness. And if this man was seeking help, I wanted him to get it.
If I had called the police, would the officer have referred him to shelter? Would he have offered him a hot meal and a cup of coffee then given him information on local food pantries? Would he have asked what the city could do to help him through the economic crisis? Would he have asked if he needs help with alcoholism or substance abuse? Would he have offered to take him to a COVID test site since homeless people are at high risk for contracting and dying from the disease?
I posed these questions to a local police chief but hadn’t received any answers, so I only have my past observations to go on. The best-case scenario is that the officer tells the camper to leave and not come back. Escalating from there, he might ticket him, which only exacerbates the economic hardships facing the man and may require him to appear in court. If the encounter gets confrontational, it could result in an arrest, injuries, or at the extreme, death.
Yes, the most likely outcome is the camper is told to leave. But, even the smallest potential of an escalating deadly conflict in my backyard does not make me feel safe. And that scenario is only possible when an armed officer shows up.
I would much rather have a social worker reach out to this man and ask all those questions above. I would much rather let the camper have his dignity and leave with options for helping himself.
A common retort is to instead turn the camper into a menace by escalating the potential danger he posed. The argument goes that a social worker is not safe, and only an armed police officer can respond to this situation. A list of scary “what if” scenarios are used to justify the need for a uniformed, armed, authority to show up and intimidate the homeless.
“What if he is armed and dangerous?” “What if he is hopped up on drugs?” “What if he is mentally unstable?” “What if he is a serial murderer, rapist, kidnapper, terrorist, or something worse?” The dark parts of their mind conjure up the many ways approaching a man camping under a tree might destroy the fabric of society. Furthermore, the only thing standing between the peaceful neighborhood and certain destruction is an armed police officer.
I would have no idea if the man were any of those things. From my perspective, he wanted to pack up his tent and leave for the day. He might have also hoped to remain inconspicuous enough that he could revisit this choice camping spot undetected.
I may be naive, but it made no sense to have an armed police officer come. The man was already skedaddling, which is probably what the officer would have made him do anyway. So, calling enforced what was already happening and only could serve to escalate the moment.
So, who do I call?
I quickly googled “homeless shelter +mycity.” I didn’t come up with anything. I called the local community center. I hoped they might have a suggestion for a shelter or city office to call, but there was no answer. The shut down sent most of the staff home to work. I left a message asking for suggestions but didn’t hear back. Although they were collecting food and paper supplies to distribute to those in need, homelessness was not their mission.
I scrolled through the city’s website, looking for an office to call. I finally settled on the Office of Community Development. By now, the camper had packed up and disappeared, but I still wanted to find a resource. I wanted to know what my city offered to help someone in need rather than criminalize him.
The director kindly thanked me for not calling the police. She was glad I had chosen not to escalate the situation, but her office didn’t handle this kind of stuff.
“He’s gone, and I don’t think he will be back, at least for a while,” I told her. She asked me to call her back if he returned, and she would have an answer for me. I thanked her for the effort.
After I hung up, I looked at my city’s published budget. Then, I joined the local defund the police movement, so next time, I have someone to call who will ask a camper the right questions. | https://medium.com/illumination/a-homeless-person-is-camping-in-my-neighborhood-why-is-this-a-police-matter-766b2e33018e | ['Kimi Ceridon'] | 2020-06-30 22:49:11.079000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Personal Growth', 'Self-awareness', 'Current Events', 'Activism'] |
12 writing tips for professionals who hate to write | 12 writing tips for professionals who hate to write
The hard work is worth it
Jeffrey Denny
As a writer by trade, I’m asked — sometimes out of desperation — to help business and other professionals become better writers.
The request is flattering but daunting.
These are educated women and men. Many have advanced degrees and are experts in their fields. They don’t need remedial writing help. They know grammar, punctuation, syntax and sentence structure. Microsoft Word and other writing software highlights misspellings and clunky prose. Smart people can fix passive voice, jargon, wordiness, and other bad writing habits that dog us all (including me in this piece).
Yet many smart, successful professionals still struggle with writing. Why?
Professionals often underestimate the power, career boost and competitive advantage of writing well.
In fact, strong writing can be a core business, management and leadership tool — and success factor.
Investing the work in explaining a proposal, policy or plan in writing can drive better decisions. That’s because writing demands painstaking rigor and clarity in thought, purpose and expression.
Writing also can reveal — and help close — holes in thinking and logic.
Yet many professionals still prefer to assemble a stack of PowerPoint slides with cool visuals and bloviate through those.
This is like illustrating a book before you write it and randomly explaining the pictures leading nowhere. Often there’s no point and no power.
Also, how many times have we walked out of a PowerPoint presentation with everyone in the room believing there’s common understanding and agreement about the goals, strategy and plan? But when it’s all spelled out in writing, say, for a memo to the board or public announcement, and circulated for review, eyebrows fly up and conflict ensues?
A written document circulated for review and comment helps to flesh out — and flush out — what colleagues really think, and makes them commit their thoughts in writing. The document-driven process yields invaluable input, calls out differences, and drives consensus toward better, faster decisions and actions.
The power of writing is my #1 takeaway from 30+ years in strategic, executive, policy, business and crisis communications.
Working with CEOs of Fortune 50 companies, U.S. government leaders, and heads of major nonprofit organizations, often at the white-hot center of headline-making, market-moving situations, I’ve seen first-hand how strong writing makes a critical difference.
Great leaders know this, and demand writing prowess of themselves and their teams.
So … why aren’t more accomplished professionals better writers?
Here’s what I’ve seen and heard from people in my writing seminars:
Many don’t know where to start — they have a jumble of thoughts to express.
Many don’t like to write — it’s grinding, grueling, time-consuming work.
Many don’t feel confident in writing — they’re intimidated by the blank screen, try in vain to write the perfect opening paragraph, and invariably dislike what they see, leaving them dead in the water.
Many have learned the worst of business, legal or “official” writing — they believe sharp, lively, plainspoken prose doesn’t sound “professional”.
Talking is much easier than writing — and bonus! — often there’s no record of what you said. So you can’t be held as accountable.
How can professionals be better writers?
Start with 12 simple tips I’ve learned the hard way by getting slammed by better writers and editors and even people who can’t or won’t write:
1. Goal matters
Think before writing: What am I really trying to accomplish? Sounds obvious, but often professionals start writing with only a vague sense of why. Is it to inform? To explain? To convince? To inspire? To prompt action? All of these?
Knowing the goal — and writing focused on that goal — helps to separate the wheat from the chaff (and lose the chaff).
2. Audience matters
Another question many forget before writing: Who are my readers? What do I want them to know, think, feel or do? What do they want to know? How much do they want to know? At what level of depth or detail?
When writing, imagine you’re the reader who has no patience or attention span and wants to know why spend invaluable time reading your thing with so much else to read.
3. Structure matters
In writing seminars, I ask for a show of hands: How many outline before they write?
Surprisingly few take that first step we learned in grade school.
But like heading on a road trip, the writer first needs to map the route.
Outlining organizes thoughts, creates “buckets” to throw in material you want to cover, and provides a logical flow. Also, since readers often merely scan documents, the outline captured in subheads provides a quick road map and key takeaways.
4. Facts matter
Today’s political divisions often arise from disputes over selected facts, i.e., my data can beat up your data.
In professional writing, well-vetted, tied-down, solid and facts everyone agrees upon remain powerful.
Sometimes the facts are not so favorable. Maybe your chief financial officer has buried a billion-dollar problem with the forecast. Don’t “spin” or dance around bad facts —deal with them straight on and how you’re going to make better facts.
Most of all, know the most important facts, and use the facts even better than the drunken man in the old joke uses lampposts: For support and illumination.
5. Context matters
I’ve always wondered why some accomplished professionals don’t have a complete grasp of their organization’s big picture.
They know their cog but not the context. Even though the big picture typically is available in public filings, company and organization websites, earnings and Congressional reports, industry press and management’s internal updates to employees.
Professionals need to know how they fit into and drive the machine, and how the whole machine works. Owning the context enriches the writing.
6. Tone matters
Professionals face friction every day with colleagues, competitors, stakeholders, customers, regulators, the public, and of course, the media.
It’s tempting when roused to throw shade, a bit of self-indulgent snark. Sometimes intentionally, but too often out of poor choice of words and sense of how your words might be received.
Let the attitude go. As one HR consultant put it, “Don’t let your amygdala hijack your neo-cortex.” Take the high road until it runs out. Use fighting words only strategically, with intent. Needless snark fuels the fight, and makes the fight about the fight rather than the substance of it.
7. Argument matters
Much of professional writing, even if informing or explaining, is about making a convincing case.
Like an attorney writing a brief, set forth a clear and simple premise, and then write to prove and persuade.
Try this simplistic outline: 1) state your case briefly; 2) make three supporting points; 3) explain and illustrate each point with the best facts or examples available; and, 4) conclude with a summary wrap and punch it home with a quip, quote or quick anecdote.
8. Speed matters
In today’s nonstop internet and global whirlwind, writers don’t have the luxury to over-think, over-write, track down every last fact and craft perfect prose the very first time.
Perfectionism can be the enemy of progress. Get a 1.0 version down quickly and edit edit edit edit edit as time allows.
9. Brevity matters
Few readers, unless they’re curling up in a wing chair next to a roaring fire with a book, lap cat, and brandy snifter, will suffer our trenchant insights and lengthy proof of how much we know.
Internet writing — for better or worse — reflects that readers today have short attention spans.
(Yes, this piece already is too long. We’re almost done.)
10. Simplicity matters
Microsoft Office and other readability analyzer software can gauge whether your writing is simple enough for the average reader at the grade-school level.
That’s not an insult — professional writing demands ease in reading. Too much writing by professionals suffers from the writer trying to sound smart, insider-y, or rakishly cool from business school.
My advice: Talk on the page — start writing as you would speak normally to human beings. Then edit edit edit edit.
And of course, lose the jargon. Every industry and subject area has it.
One government client staffer from the Silicon Valley world liked to throw around terms like “data wrangling,” “dogfooding,” “agile methodologies” and “viral loops” that the public audience we were trying to reach would never understand. A CFO client once thumbed a cryptic email outline for a major investor address that cited “the Marimekko” (it’s a kind of financial chart that looks like a Marimekko fabric design).
Jargon is arrogance that insults audience. Unless you’re trying to be funny. Then feel free.
11. Narrative matters
Aside from #7 (argument matters), another effective approach is to structure your document as a story, with a beginning, middle and end that brings the reader back home, enlightened. Like The Odyssey and many if not most of the greatest novels do.
Points should flow from one to the next with seamless transitions that take the reader along. It’s amazing how many professionals grind the gears like in a 1953 Nash Rambler as they’re shifting from one point to the next.
Start by telling readers where you’re taking them, and then take them, giving them mile markers (say, subheads) along the way. Transitions should be like how eight-speed automatic transmissions shift— smooth, even barely noticed. Readers are more likely to go along with you.
12. Ego is the enemy
Confound the critics — give your writing brutally tough love before others can hate it.
My favorite writer on writing, Bird By Bird author Anne Lamott, advises, “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing yourself, getting some work done, then un-hypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.”
Get that first draft down, then get to work editing, editing, editing, editing.
Before you’re done and send it off, here’s a weird trick: Forward your draft to another device — your phone or tablet — and read it there. Something about the change in screen helps you see what you wrote fresh and objectively, as a reader would.
***
The hard work — the process — of writing well matters as much as the product.
It’s like going to the gym: The more you sweat, struggle and suffer, the easier it gets. Next thing you know, you have new muscle memory.
I hope these writing tips help. Your comments and critique, however harsh, are more than welcomed — you’ll help me and my writing so perhaps I can better help anyone who asks for my help.
Most of all, thanks for reading.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer | https://jeffreydenny77.medium.com/writing-tips-for-professionals-who-hate-writing-dc4f442e71d5 | ['Jeffrey Denny'] | 2018-08-24 19:06:11.554000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Professional Development', 'Writing', 'Leadership Coaching', 'Writing Tips'] |
A simple tool for poaching eggs. | I’ve since heard from other chefs that poached eggs are challenging. And I agree. I’ve made them, and they’re challenging.
They’re also healthy and versatile. They’re good on the aforementioned biscuits and gravy, but they are also good on things like pasta dishes, grain and veggie bowls. And, of course, Eggs Benedict, which they are the star of even though the hollandaise usually gets the praise.
(Since I’m a terrible millennial, I’m also required to inform you that they’re also très bon on avocado toast. 🤩)
There is a classic way to poach an egg. According to incredibleegg.org, it is:
1. HEAT 2 to 3 inches of water in large saucepan or deep skillet to boiling. ADJUST HEAT to keep liquid simmering gently. 2. BREAK eggs, 1 at a time, into custard cup or saucer. Holding dish close to surface, SLIP egg into water. 3. COOK eggs until whites are completely set and yolks begin to thicken but are not hard, 3 to 5 minutes. Do not stir. LIFT eggs from water with slotted spoon. DRAIN in spoon or on paper towels. TRIM any rough edges, if desired. SPRINKLE with salt and pepper. SERVE immediately.
I’ve done it the classic way. It’s not that hard (like, I wouldn’t yell at a waitress or refuse a customer over it, but to be fair, I also would not own a restaurant 🤷🏻♀️) but simply following the instructions above gave me some failed attempts. Subsequent google searches revealed tricks like making a whirlpool with a spoon before dropping the egg in and adding white vinegar to the water to help harden the egg whites.
Both tips proved to be useful (and the whirlpool creates a pretty neat visual effect when you drop the egg in), but there are certainly easier ways to do it. For me, I knew that investing in an easier way would mean I’d poach eggs more, which would mean consuming healthily-prepared, versatile eggs more often. Which in my view is a win.
So, I bought these silicone cups. I got a pair for $9 (+some change). They work by trapping the egg in a little cage so it can poach in the hot water. No chef-made whirlpool necesary.
Some observations: | https://medium.com/middle-well/a-simple-tool-for-poaching-eggs-ca685f691c82 | ['Lauren Harkawik'] | 2019-08-19 17:15:08.080000+00:00 | ['Recipes', 'Cooking Tools', 'Eggs', 'Wellness', 'Food'] |
Building Restful APIs With Flask and SQLAlchemy (Part 1) | Getting Started
Microframework
Flask is a microframework for web development (back end) in Python. Even though it’s a microframework, we can build a complex application that scales well with Flask.
So what does microframework mean? It means it doesn’t force anything on us — we can decide to use one tool instead of another. This article will walk you through how to build restful APIs with Flask. If you’re new to Flask and would like to get an overview on how to set up a Flask application, you can read my article on that.
API
Before we start building our API in Flask, let’s start by defining what an API is and determining how our API will be. API stands for application programming interface and is like a connection/intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other — say, server and a client.
The server is the back end (in this case, Flask), but the client might not necessarily be a web browser — it can be a mobile app or a single-page application (SPA). This is one reason why an API is important. This article goes deeper into what an API is.
Now that we have an understanding of what APIs are, let’s go deeper by talking about Restful APIs. RESTful APIs allow us to use HTTP requests ( GET , POST , PUT , DELETE , PATCH , etc.). There are rules to be followed when building Restful APIs — I’ll list them below.
Client — Server: The client and server are independent of each other. Stateless: The request sent by the client must contain all necessary information; the server must not store any state about the client. Cache: The server can label the response as either cacheable or not. Uniform resource: Clients must use a uniform, well-defined, and standardized protocol to access the server. The commonly used protocol in most RESTful APIs is the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. Layered system: Proxy servers can be inserted between clients and servers to increase performance. Clients can optionally download code from the server. Most APIs respond with JSON, but some uses XML (not common). Allow the filtering of data.
HTTP verbs
I mentioned HTTP verbs above, but what are they?
HTTP verbs are just methods that we use to tell the endpoint what we want to do. Although some of the HTTP verbs can be used in place of others, this isn’t a good practice. Use the most appropriate verb to make or process a request. There are a lot of HTTP verbs — some of them are GET , POST , PUT , PATCH , DELETE , HEAD , etc. I’ll be explaining the four most common ones.
GET : The GET method is used to get a resource from the server. It fetches data from the server based on the resource path, which may include query parameters used to filter what we want to return. The status code to be returned from a resource path that uses this method should be 200 meaning OK. POST : The POST method is used to create a new resource to the server. The status code to be returned from a resource path that uses this method should be 201 meaning CREATED. This resource should not return any value. PUT : The PUT method is used to update a resource in the server. The status code to be returned from a resource path that uses this method should be 200 meaning OK or 204 meaning No Content. DELETE : The DELETE method is used to delete a resource on the server. The status code to be returned from a resource path that uses this method should be 200 meaning OK or 204 meaning No Content.
Structuring our API
Now that we’ve spent some time understanding what APIs are, let’s think about what and how our API will be structured. I can decide to get an array of all of the users from the server or an individual user. I can also create a user or update user details. All of this has its respective HTTP request.
GET users/ : Retrieve all of the users
: Retrieve all of the users GET users/id/ : Retrieve a single user
: Retrieve a single user POST users/ : Create a new user
: Create a new user PUT users/id/ : Update an existing user
: Update an existing user DELETE users/id/ : Delete an existing user
: Delete an existing user GET todos/ : Retrieve all to-dos
: Retrieve all to-dos Get todos/id/ : Retrieve a single to-do
: Retrieve a single to-do POST todos/ : Create a new to-do
: Create a new to-do PUT todos/id/ : Update an existing to-do
: Update an existing to-do DELETE todos/id/ : Delete an existing to-do
SQLAlchemy
Now let’s talk about SQLAlchemy.
What really is SQLAlchemy? SQLAlchemy is an object-relational mapper (ORM). What this means is that with SQLAlchemy we don’t have to write raw SQL commands. All we need to do is create models in the form of classes (objects), and SQLAlchemy will do the work of converting them to SQL (relational database) — hence the name object-relational mapper.
We can do a lot of things with an ORM — from doing our normal queries to inserting, updating, and deleting to doing advance things like joins, merges, etc. SQLAlchemy’s official website has more information here. But in this article, we’ll be using the Flask wrapper for SQLAlchemy, which is Flask-SQLAlchemy.
Creating our API
Let’s start creating our API. We’ll start by installing dependencies. We need just two: Flask and Flask-SQLAlchemy.
Let’s set up our Flask app, I’ll be using Postman to test my API — if you don’t know what that is, you can check it out here.
Let me briefly say a few things about Postman and how easy it is to use. Postman is an interactive and automatic tool for verifying the APIs of your project. Postman is a Google Chrome desktop app (it used to be a Chrome extension) for interacting with HTTP APIs. It also supports GraphQL. It presents you with a friendly GUI for constructing requests and reading responses.
You can always use any HTTP library to test the API if you prefer that.
Let’s test the application. Run the server with flask run , and send a request to localhost:5000/ .
We can see that when we sent a request to the endpoint / , we got what we want, which means everything is working fine.
It’s time we build our user and to-do model so we can define endpoints for the user model. These two models will have a one-to-many relationship — i.e., one user can have many to-dos, and one to-do needs to have a user.
A lot is going on here! Let’s go through it in detail.
Firstly, we imported SQLAlchemy from Flask-SQLAlchemy, and we connected it to our app.
Next, we added two config variables to our app. The first is the secret key, which is a secret variable used to secure our app. It’s used by some middleware (extensions) that have to do with security (for now we have none — when we get to the authentication part, we’ll be using it). Second is the SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI , which is the database curl for our app. Here I’m using SQLite, but you can use any SQL database of your choice (e.g., MySQL). Then the value will be mysql://username:password@server/db . You can check their official docs for more details and a list of other config variables.
We then defined our user model, which extends from the db.Model class.
Lastly, we defined the columns. The db.Column is used to create a column. The first column we defined is the id , which will be automatically created by SQL. The second column is the name and email field, which have to be a string. Additionally, the email field is unique.
I also added a public_id field, which is what I want to use as route parameters since SQL gives id as an integer, and I’d like to have something like a UUID value similar to what we get from a Mongo ID.
I also added an is_admin field/column, which we’ll be using for authorization.
And lastly, we added a todos field, which is what we use to connect to the to-do model, as the name implies (relationship). This part takes three values: The first is similar to others, which is the type of field it is. The second is backref , which is the field (variable) we use to reference the user model in the to-do model. And the last argument is lazy , which is how the data is loaded.
The to-do model is similar to the user model. It has the id , name , is_completed , and user_id fields, the last of which is a foreign key — i.e., a key that’s used to reference another model. With this user_id field, I can get the user ID of a to-do app, and with the owner field (from the backref ), I can get the user that created the to-do.
Now, even though the database exists, the models themselves haven’t been created. To create these, you can open your database driver. But if you’re using SQLite and you don’t have a database driver, you can open your terminal and run db.create_all() after importing the db variable. This creates the database and all of the models defined with it. Another useful method is db.drop_all() , which does the exact opposite.
Open a Flask shell, and let’s test our models.
As you can see, trying to query from the user model gave an error because I haven’t created the database.
There’s a Flask extension that works as a middleman between us and SQLAlchemy (and Flask SQLAlchemy): flask-migrate. It gives us a command that helps us to create and manage our models. It uses Alembic to achieve this. The advantage of doing this is if we’ll be updating our model in the future, all we need to do is run some commands, and the database will be updated. If we don’t use this extension, we’ll have to handle this ourselves.
After running db.create_all() , these models have been created, and we can query them.
The db.Model object exposes our models to a query method that we use to query them. There are a lot of queries we can do — we’ve seen all , which returns an array of all of the rows; first , which returns the first row in the query; filter and filter_by for filtering our query; get takes in an ID and returns the row with that ID; and first_or_404 and get_or_404 returns a 404 if the query itself ( get or first ) returns None .
Let’s insert some rows into the database.
From the image, I used the uuid module for the public ID so as to make it unique. I created an instance of the object and stored it in a variable but actually haven’t created the row. I confirmed that by getting the value of babs.id , which gave None.
The function db.session.add adds a variable to the database temporarily. The second function, db.session.commit , saves it permanently. Other functions include db.session.add_all , which takes an array of objects to be added to the database, and db.session.delete , which deletes an object.
The way the database objects are represented in the terminal is done using the __repr__ method in the class definition. The todo method is also similar. but the moment we add a new todo to the database, the object will have a new attribute owner, which we used as the backref to the user model. The todo object gets stored in the user.todos object also.
Endpoints
Now let’s start creating endpoints.
Let’s create the endpoint for getting all users and for getting a single user.
The endpoints for these two functions are given in the app.route decorator. If we’re returning a dictionary, Flask automatically converts it to JSON, which is why we aren’t using the jsonify function in the second function.
In the get_users function, we return an array of users. Instead of returning the id , we returned the public_id , which is what is used as the route parameter. The default status code is 200, so we don’t need to pass it here. Let’s test these endpoints now.
Next is for us to create endpoints for creating, updating, and deleting users.
The decorator for this function takes another parameter, method , which by default is [‘GET’] . We specify it to be a POST method here.
The create_user function POST receives a bit of JSON data. It first verifies the name and email was given and that the length is at least four characters (there will be some validation in the front end also). We could also use a regex to do some more advanced validation, but it isn’t in the scope of this article.
We finally created the row and saved it to the database. We return JSON data of the user and a status code of 201 for CREATED.
The update_user function has a PUT HTTP verb registered to it. It also has JSON data for what we want to update — in this case, it has to be the name .
We did some validation before updating the database. We first got the user with the public ID in the route parameter. Then, we updated the field and called db.session.commit() . We finally returned the updated user data with a status code of 200 (default). Similarly, the delete_user function uses the ID in the route parameter to get the user and finally deletes it.
These two functions use the first_or_404 function in filtering the data — that way a 404 error will be returned if no user has that public ID in the URL. Let’s head over to Postman to test these endpoints.
Yaay! we’re done with the user endpoints. Let’s now start with the todo endpoints. Firstly, a todo needs to have a user attached to it. We can use the public_id or email to get the user object since these two fields are unique. I think I’d go for email since that’s easy to remember. So when creating a new todo , we need to pass the email of the creator also.
The endpoints are similar to what we’ve seen before. Let’s head over to Postman to test these endpoints. | https://medium.com/better-programming/building-restful-apis-with-flask-and-sqlalchemy-part-1-b192c5846ddd | ['Babatunde Koiki'] | 2020-12-14 20:14:52.392000+00:00 | ['Python', 'API', 'Sql', 'Flask', 'Programming'] |
Finding | Finding
a sonnet of heart’s treasures
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
I find that somewhere in the very heart
Of suddenly revealed tomorrows lie
The little things that lingered, whole and part
And dark and light, that I had lost. They die —
Heart’s treasures — so I thought; they disappear
Forever in the shades that wrap our lives
From start to finish, left to moulder near
The shrouds of our own souls that could not thrive
Past birth and hatred. Well, but I was wrong!
The hatred gone, the treasures find their place,
The sudden sunlight gleams upon their throng
That’s gathered waiting in the dust. Erase
The theft of joys and bring to bright rebirth
The life so nearly lost in years of dearth. | https://medium.com/sonnetry/finding-53df416961ae | ['A. Christine Myers'] | 2020-01-07 04:07:28.812000+00:00 | ['Sonnet', 'Life Lessons', 'Poetry', 'Mental Health', 'Poem'] |
UX 文章列表 & 學習資源導覽 | We share digital product design experiences & help designers find their purpose and passion. Follow our Medium Publication ↑ and Facebook http://fb.me/aapd.tw
Follow | https://medium.com/as-a-product-designer/ux-%E6%96%87%E7%AB%A0%E5%88%97%E8%A1%A8-%E5%AD%B8%E7%BF%92%E8%B3%87%E6%BA%90%E5%B0%8E%E8%A6%BD-274b4a09834e | ['Aapd', 'As A Product Designer'] | 2018-07-09 05:36:24.041000+00:00 | ['Aapd', 'Design', 'UX', 'User Experience', 'Resources'] |
Space Ecosystems: India with Narayan Prasad | If you’d like to get in touch with Narayan, you can find him at the following:
If you’re keen to hear on the go, it’s also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Stitcher Radio under Clayming Space.
Enjoy! And please like, share and subscribe, so we know the types of content you want us to produce. | https://medium.com/clayming-space/space-ecosystems-india-with-narayan-prasad-29b29dcb9717 | [] | 2019-09-08 02:44:32.156000+00:00 | ['Space', 'Policy', 'India', 'Space Exploration', 'Startup'] |
The C-Files: Art & Interfaces | Building a Free-Draw interface in React with React Konva
I recently built a React app that features canvas. For any reader who is not familiar, a “canvas” is a type of HTML element that is extremely useful for rendering graphics and animations. Its corresponding API makes it possible for users to create a wide variety of images, and there are many existing libraries out there that simplify and build features on top of the core API.
In this tutorial, I will be focusing on one particular library, React-Konva, which is part of the larger Konva Framework.
React-Konva allows you to interact with a canvas element in a way that is cleaner and more intuitive to developers who are used to using React. I for one was struggling to design an interface with the vanilla canvas API that would allow the sort of flexibility that I was looking for, and this ended up being a fantastic tool for my case. The really awesome thing about using Konva, is that the components you can import from their library can take props, which will allow a degree of customization with much less than code than with other canvas libraries.
Before we get started building, I’ll go over the components you need in order to setup for free-drawing. First, we’ll need to create a react app in a fresh directory, then we need to install the library by using this command.
npm install react-konva konva — save
We’ll need to import the following from ‘react-konva’ in our App.js file.
Stage Layer Rect Line
So now our basic setup will look something like this…
But what is the use of each of these and how do they interact with the Canvas API?
A Stage is Konva’s abstraction of an HTML canvas element. It is in effect, the canvas that we will be working with, and it functions in a similar way to the base Canvas API.
A Layer is what functions as a “rendering context” for the stage. All canvas elements require a rendering context in order for a specific event to actually trigger visible changes on the canvas itself.
A Rect is a graphic that is a 2d rectangle. In our case, it used to setup a white backdrop in order for us to see changes against a different colored background style.
A Line is the component that makes a free-drawing app possible. Line’s in Konva require an array of points that are registered like
[x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3…]
…and lines require an attribute called tension, which controls how curvy the connection between points looks. The value will be between zero and one; a value closer to one results in a more curvy look, and a value closer to zero results in a more discrete look. Between two sets of coordinates, these changes will not be visible, but when plotting many tens or hundreds points in sequence, you will begin to see what a difference.
We are also going to utilize the useRef hook so that we can toggle drawing based on mouse events. We do not want to be using the useState hook for toggling here, because unlike the values for the state hook, the values that we store as refs will not change or be set to default across renders. AND when we change the value assigned to a useRef hook, it will not cause a page re-render. This is very important because drawing on the Stage is controlled by refs changing on mouse events. You probably should not use the state hook for this purpose because it will cause more re-renders than is necessary and we want to minimize this for performance.
Ok, so now that we have the let’s get started!
In order to get setup, we need to need make sure our components are rendered in the following order, before we start adding other features. The way Konva Stage and Layer components work is by wrapping other components. So the Stage will wrap a Layer (the canvas will grab its rendering context) and Layer will wrap the Rect and all of the Lines (the rendering context renders the canvas objects). Our stage will work like a regular canvas element, in that we need to give it width and height attributes. Since we are working against a darker backdrop, we are going to import and use a Rect component inside the layer that will fill close to the same dimensions as the canvas. This all happening inside the render portion of the App component. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-c-files-art-interfaces-59ed14e6882 | ['Sean Donohue'] | 2020-12-14 06:51:43.118000+00:00 | ['Interfaces', 'React', 'Html5 Canvas', 'HTML', 'Whiteboarding'] |
Fear | Fear
A Basic Instinct
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash
I can recall when we were afraid of monsters,
hiding under our beds;
gathering our body___ in the shape of a ball;
fearing that if a leg got astray,
and hung across the edge of the bed;
the monster might have a nibble and then
we are done for____
but there has to be a point, that we cannot recall;
where we stuck out unwillingly, or forgetfully,
and the moment those feet landed;
nothing happened except the thump of our impact.
There must be a point when we decided to lean enough,
to have a peek down,
staring into the abyss____ that gathered itself in a small corner,
like a small family of four;
the truth is; we never deliberately tried to outgrow those fears,
we never wanted to rise above them_____to confront the absurdity,
that blanketed our fears;
or to burden our feeble souls with the austerity of freedom;
it just happened when we got tired,
or when we had more things to worry about
or more fears to harbor | https://medium.com/illumination/fear-b12938af806b | ['Awab Hussain'] | 2020-12-21 04:38:28.198000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Fear', 'Literature', 'Writing'] |
Savannah the Peg Queen | Savannah the Peg Queen
What’s good for the goose wasn’t good for the gander
Unsplash _ Dom Hill
She called herself Savannah. But that wasn’t her real name. In fact, I didn’t know her real name even though I was her best friend (according to Savannah) and we had sex a couple of dozen times. I know this doesn’t make any sense — until I tell you that Savannah was an escort who ran her ads to attract customers through my advertising agency. Prostitutes don’t like people to know their real names. It can lead to blackmail. And nobody — pro or amateur — wants that!
When I first met Savannah, she was scrounging around working for a variety of second rate escort agencies, and not making very much money. The person who introduced us was a third rate madam who had just hired Savannah. After photographing the girl for her new employer, I went drinking with the two girls. The madam got way too drunk, showed her true colors, and Savannah quit on the spot.
Contrite the next day at her display, the sobered-up madam forked over the girl’s phone number, which I called to convince Savannah to run her own ads through me.
Savannah was hesitant. But when I countered with “how about we do a session and I’ll run your ad free-of-charge?” she changed her tune.
Soon afterward, Savannah came over and we had fun for an hour. And when her ad ran, the phone rang off the hook. By 2 PM of Savannah’s very first day as an independent, she called to exclaim “oh my God! I’ve already made $2000 from that ad. You’re my hero.”
From there, Savannah was off and running, banking $10,000 a week routinely. I submitted her ads earning maybe $150 in commissions while she hauled off truckloads of cash. No small wonder I was her best friend.
Not every independent girl who advertised through me minted money like Savannah. Some struggled. Most made a couple of thousand a week. And some really made out. There are all sorts of factors that can make a girl a big earner. Good service and attitude helps. And of course, magnificent body parts are almost always paramount. Savannah’s appeal was more intangible.
She wasn’t that pretty…had some skin problems which necessitated Savannah wearing too much make-up…wasn’t especially busty…and displayed teeth that were a little cockeyed when she smiled. But Savannah had a magnificent round booty, and a valley girl personality. She billed herself as “the ebony princess” and/or “chocolate goddess.” And I think it was the ghetto booty coupled with her valley girl personality that were the two ingredients which made her so successful.
Savannah was incidentally a gym rat who boasted a very tight and fit body. In fact, she had guns (biceps) which Savannah used to flex after our sex play and my release as if to say “I just slew the dragon. I am woman, hear me roar.” Understanding how she felt, I thought it was a cute display of female empowerment and would always assure her she had indeed overpowered the beast.
(I should mention that Savannah had absolutely no romantic feelings for me. On the occasions we had sex, she would often recount the events of the day as if she had just come home to her BFF roomy. Such is the reality of having sex with a professional who views you as a best friend and not her love interest.)
But I digress. Back to Savannah’s gym rat ethos. Because her body was so muscular and defined, and she wore so much makeup, Savannah almost looked like a she male. New York had a division of transsexual escorts at the time who were very popular. Often guys would “see” a tranny on Tuesday, a woman on Thursday, and the wife on Saturday. It was like that!
Some men with gay tendencies — and a desire to be penetrated anally — didn’t want to admit to themselves their sexual reality. That or they were afraid of disease if they got with a she male. So what was the next best thing? Bingo! Savannah.
As a result, Savannah became the peg queen of the female escort set. She didn’t really understand why or how this all came about. But I did.
One week, her ad was placed right next to the she males in a local paper. I don’t have to tell you the rest. The peg queen was born. And she ran with it.
I’m not a guy who wants anything up his ass. In fact, I dread visits to the urologist. I’d rather have a root canal than a prostate exam. But there are those of the male gender who love prostate play. I’m (again) just not one of them. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t curious about the MO of Savannah’s sexual relationships with these “straight” men.
What I found most interesting was Savannah’s attitude about these clients’ masculinity. “So do you do switch sessions with these guys?” I asked (meaning did she fuck them in the ass with a strap-on and then lie on her back and let him do her).
“Hell no!” she exploded. “Once I fuck you, you can’t fuck me!” And she was dead serious. Savannah acted as if she couldn’t understand why I would even ask that question.
Maybe some women enjoy “switching” with the mates they peg. I don’t really know. But I do know an escort who was clearly not one of them. Savannah was not about to 180 into bottom mode once she’d topped a pegging recipient. For whatever reason, once pegged, nobody was going to reverse the roles. | https://medium.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-escorts-but/savannah-the-peg-queen-ae942f8c583b | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-09-28 18:54:06.917000+00:00 | ['Pegging', 'Culture', 'Sex', 'Escorts', 'Psychology'] |
The Migration that Made America’s Fanatical Individualism | The Migration that Made America’s Fanatical Individualism
Some cultural roots of the American Right
Borderer reivers raiding for cattle: Wikipedia
American individualism is ingrained and goes way back. Social media are just an amplifier.
The Emigrants
Once there was a planet with people on it. It was on the verge of that stage where kingdoms would disappear, so that any tyrants remaining would need an ideology to get and hold their power.
But, in these turbulent times, there was a land where the rulers of North and South fought again and again. The people who lived on the lowlands between these two kingdoms (call them the Borderers) were accustomed to being tormented and slaughtered by the contending armies, and so developed a habit of deep suspicion of outsiders and an utter distrust of any authority beyond their families or clans.
We are talking generations of oppression and hardship here. Borderers lacked their own nobility to fight for them. They never had the resources of the Kings’ armies, so their independence was only of the spirit; not political. They rarely owned their own land, even though, as history rolled on, a middle class was emerging in the kingdoms. In fact, the Borderers were enough trouble that one of the Kings moved a bunch of them to the far tip of a neighboring country, using the Borderers to control a people with whom they had common ancestry, but a different religion.
But during all of this time, the planet’s burgeoning civilization was pouring itself into an entirely new continent. Settlers were needed, and passage to the new place could be obtained with a life savings, or perhaps a pledge to toil for years for some rich person. Over a period of decades, some 250,000 Borderers went to the New Place.
Life was hard on the frontier, but a lark compared to back home. If they left the coastal agricultural and commercial areas, land was free for the taking. All they had to do was fight the natives for it. History shows that the Borderers moved into the uplands, a long chain of mountains between the natives and the “civilized” colonists on the coast. Already self-reliant, the Borderers became self-sufficient. They were viciously tough and eye-for-an-eye vengeful. They were good with weapons and fierce enough to prevail over the natives.
As the New Place developed into a country of its own, the Borderers maintained their fractious ways. The new country’s love of self-governing independence from the kingdoms was transmuted by the Borderers into love of personal independence. The main culture took advantage of this attitude by marginalizing many of the Borderers, both socially and economically. And why not: the Borderers were crude, uncivilized, and well … scary. Once in a while, though, a Borderer descendant would gain high office in the new country.
This was a paradox because Borderers hated any kind of government. But, they would line up behind a charismatic leader who had real fight in him, even if that leader only paid lip service to their interests.
Revenge for the Borderers was how their cultural beliefs expanded beyond the ethnic group that came from the old country. Way beyond — to the bulk of working class people and, beyond that, to many who had ascended from that class. The core belief was that personal freedom to care for “me and mine” was the highest good, and any other stance was, well, just evil. As time went on, one of the new country’s political parties cultivated these “freedomists” into a solid base of support.
Combative Immigrants
Which brings us to here and now.
During the 2016 election season, The WaPo and The Atlantic both ran stories about a historical hypothesis that explained the peculiar culture of the eventual winner’s voting base. The culture’s origin was described in a 1989 book by Brandeis historian, David Hackett Fischer.
Albion’s Seed says that early British settlers of North America came from four strongly different cultural groups in Britain. He argued that each culture took root and sustained their distinct character while they became enduring factions in the developing politics and folkways of the United States.
One of these groups was the so-called “borderers”, from northern England, the southern lowlands of Scotland, and later, the northern part of Ireland called Ulster. A quarter-million of them emigrated to the American colony from 1717 to 1775 “in search of material betterment.”
“King, peers and gentry all grew richer, while a landless tenantry sank deeper into the slough of poverty and degradation.” — Albion’s Seed
Before they could find their own land, some borderer immigrants had to labor for the big planters, evoking a memory of tenant farming misery back in Britain. They settled wherever they could find land for the taking, which turned out to be the “back country” Appalachian highlands from Pennsylvania down to the Carolinas. This was land that was hard to farm, and so it was unclaimed by other settlers.
settling the backcountry: Virginia Tech
There was another reason to move into the mountains: their abrasiveness rankled other early colonists.
“The formidable attempts of Satan and his Sons to Unsettle us.” “The most God-provoking democrats on this side of Hell.” — Contemporary criticism of early colonial Scotch-Irish
Back in Britain, the borderers had been clannish. Armed gangs called reivers raided cattle from other clans. They claimed allegiance to one king or another only as the moment dictated. Feuds lasted for generations. This practical ferocity followed them to America.
There they became known as “Scotch-Irish”, retaining for generations their fiery temperament, speech patterns, political attitudes, and a host of cultural traits from family life, to music, and religion. They were used to being shunned, but in America they had the liberty to live as they wished, resorting to force when they felt abused. And “abuse” included anyone telling them what to do.
Historians and social theorists argue about what is cause and what is effect in the borderer culture. Most say that social class oppression causes the behaviors of the group. There is indeed a progression of exploitation all the way back: by Scottish and English Kings, militias, landlords, and outlaws; by colonial aristocrats and authorities; and in more modern times, mine and factory owners.
But others argue that habitual borderer behaviors contribute to their continued poverty and isolation. Among these is J.D. Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer who grew up poor and Scotch-Irish in Ohio and Kentucky.
His 2016 book about his rise from poverty, Hillbilly Elegy, was a big seller. The stories of his relatives’ violent exploits are a lot like the eye-popping (indeed, eye-gouging) tales of the early borderer immigrants in the Appalachian uplands, as collected in Albion’s Seed.
Vance succeeded in reporting the continued existence of the cultural pattern whose roots Albion’s Seed traced so far back. The pattern is still correlated with poverty. But the meme of preferential isolation, fondness for guns and violence, and hatred of authority and outsiders also persists in people who have a decent living and are able to afford newer pickup trucks, big TVs, and collections of pricey guns.
The borderers’ cultural ethos is attractive enough that it has spread beyond those of Scotch-Irish descent and into many other kinds of people who are now working class or came from it. It’s a large group, having a strong overlap with those who voted for the new president in 2016.
Expansion of the Cultural Pattern
“So the Borderers all went to Appalachia and established their own little rural clans there and nothing at all went wrong except for the entire rest of American history.“ — Scott Alexander “Elevate those guns a little lower.” — General Andrew Jackson
The borderer ethos has contributed many players on the stage of American politics. The first borderer president of many was Andrew Jackson. Their ethos was both fuel for, and reinforced by, multiple “Isms”: isolationism, exceptionalism, nationalism, capitalism, libertarianism, and sometimes overt racism.
All across the USA today are people (no longer just the “Scotch-Irish”) captured by a cultural pattern that started centuries before emigration to America. They feel their values to be under siege in a bigger, more crowded world.
Many must secretly understand that, in order to survive, this world needs collective action that current capitalist practices cannot provide. This just increases the cognitive dissonance with their values. Evidence contrary to their values is ignored, twisted, and transformed to support their belief system.
Self-righteous to a fault, they are therefore enraged by rampant self-righteousness on the left. The more volatile among them are taking up arms against the rest of us, with a few berserkers even advocating civil war. Most of them worship a sociopathic narcissist as their clan leader.
Borderer reivers ride to the Apocalyse?
“Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc. … Yes, questions.” — the character Roy Batty in Blade Runner, 1982
In this case, there are two questions: one easy, one portentous. (1) Does the historical origin story have legs? And, (2) What does knowing this story do for us citizens of the New Place?
Question One. The conditions in the relevant regions of Britain, the massive (for the time) migration to America, and the settling in Appalachian highlands are well-established using historical evidence. The distinct cultural separation of backwoods people from the rest of early America is likewise pretty clear.
So the real question is whether that early start with a particular ethnic and geographic group necessarily led to a core belief set that today is shared by anti-government anarchists, cowboys, working-class conservatives, button-down scholars, redneck hippies, unrepentant civil war confederates, “don’t tread on me” firebrands, and bunker recluses.
Might the borderer story be overstated? After all, many different oppressed groups have come to America. Many of the borderer character traits are just common ones in human beings. And it seems like every culture has its conservative side. The counter-argument is that the core focus on fanatical defense of personal liberty is recognized worldwide as an Americanism. Something unique happened here, and the borderer origin story is a tight fit.
Question two. Can knowing that story help solve any of our corrosive internal conflicts?
“They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends and devoted to their country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers”. — Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Volume 1
Perhaps Roosevelt was right about the borderers back in the day. Today, though, we are reaping the whirlwind of “conquering” nature. At the same time, the narrow pursuit of corporate profits has given a lot of latter-day borderers an economic kick in the teeth. But conservative messaging tying capitalism to personal liberty falls on fertile ground that was first plowed in the eighteenth-century borderlands of Britain.
There are some humongous environmental and social problems that need collective action beyond what can be organized by a profit motive. For today’s “borderers” to join in they will need to see how collective action specifically improves their lives and the prospects of their descendants, while also preserving their thin-skinned dignity. The current culture wars can’t and won’t have this effect.
Malevolent media manipulators have gotten borderers to believe some absurd lies and conspiratorial ideas. And their leader parrots these after hearing them on TV. The response from the other side has been to ridicule the ideas and the credulity of those who believe in them. Hardly any person responds well to ridicule.
Some few people might change their overt behavior to avoid future mockery. But attack a borderer’s dignity, and you only stiffen their position. A single word, like “deplorable”, can start one of those endless feuds, in this case with their fellow citizens.
However, it might be too late for reconciliation and fixing big stuff. The politicians locked in a sticky embrace with the borderer faction are hinting darkly about civil war, coming soon to a country near you. We need a peacemaker more than anything else. Consider that when you vote. | https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-borderer-phenomenon-51d77e9ecbbf | ['Ted Wade'] | 2020-11-14 22:23:01.877000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Libertarianism', 'History', 'Politics'] |
Behind Your Brain, Understanding The Complex Psychology of Break Ups | Want to move on? Fed up of ending up in bed together after you both promised it would never happen again? Here’s a quick and handy guide to the revolving door of bad relationship breakups.
Let’s do some arty visualisation first. Then we’ll drill into the Psychology.
Take a deep breath. Imagine yourself standing on a stony beach. No… although it might be tempting if you’ve just broken up with someone, don’t walk out to sea. Things aren’t that bad.
Instead, imagine you’ve picked up a stone. I bet you want to throw it out to sea? That’s what almost everyone does if you give them this scenario.
Human beings toss stones into water. They like the splash.
It’s a futile exercise that serves no purpose. What it shows is that humans have a propensity to interact with their environment. We have an internal reward system that operates when we show competence.
In short, we get a little happiness kick when we cause an effect on the world. If you’ve ever wondered why humans love skimming stones, popping bubble wrap or why children kick at pigeons to make them take off. You’re welcome. All human beings (big and small) like to see the effect they’re having on the world.
When there is evidence that they have caused a change and received feedback from the universe they feel good. Why do you think children’s toys have big colourful buttons and make loud noises? It might be the bane of your life as a parent but it’s very addictive to the brain of your offspring. As we get older we get similar positive feedback when we learn new things.
Musical instruments, complicated games, even writing an article and watching your stats go up. This positive feedback loop forms an integral part of our motivational system. It’s necessary for learning and it’s necessary for life.
But back to our stone. The splash is important. That’s how the effect registers in your brain. Stone selection, throwing technique and arm strength are assets in the process, the splash itself is what registers.
Do it too many times and the reward will wear off. The little high you experience becomes less and less effective. This is the nature of brain chemistry and to maintain the same level of reward, you alter the game.
You opt for a bigger splash. Or skimming and making multiple splashes. These splashes are bigger or more complex, they help maintain that feeling of achievement. | https://medium.com/recycled/behind-your-brain-understanding-the-complex-psychology-of-break-ups-719704507277 | ['Argumentative Penguin'] | 2019-11-06 23:35:20.582000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Psychology', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Breakups'] |
Dealing with Data Variety | Why the third “V,” variety, of Big Data is driving huge investment in 2019 and unlocking access to external data.
The Big Data framework is comprised of 4 V’s: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity.
Here at ThinkData, we pride ourselves on solving the “variety” issue associated with accessing external data. It’s truly the problem we built our company around solving.
Big Data by Gartner
For those of you familiar with Gartner’s infamous “3 V’s of Big Data”, you will know that back in 2001, Gartner initially defined big data as high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety.
The years following led to an explosion in activity focused on adopting the proper tools, techniques, and processes needed to get a handle on Big Data. Companies needed to start properly collecting and organizing their own data in order to start mining it for new insight and opportunity. Once caught up on the ability to store massive amounts of data, these organizations needed to learn how to manage the firehose of new data that was being pushed into their newly created lake of usable information.
Ultimately, the “Volume” and “Velocity” side of Big Data took the major focus of an organizations’ Big Data efforts — and rightfully so. Organizations were taking stock of their inventory and learning how to better manage their newly discovered information supply chain.
Challenge of Data Variety
As we fast forward to 2019, we’re seeing focus shift from how to handle the size and speed of data, to how to deal with the seemingly endless variety of data created from both internal and external sources. A lot of this focus has been driven by the unavoidable value associated with leveraging external data that, in principle, comes in a variety of structures and formats.
We’re not the only ones seeing this trend. Dealing with “Variety” of Big Data was highlighted in Tableau’s White Paper on the “Top 10 Big Data Trends for 2017”:
In Tableau’s words, data formats are multiplying and connectors [pulling in multiple data sets in varying formats] are becoming crucial. This truly is one of the largest barriers facing those who are trying to get the most out of Big Data, and the problem is only amplified when you start looking outside of your environment to access third party or publicly available external data.
Open Data’s Impact
Since the introduction of open data to the marketplace, there have been numerous predictions made regarding its social, economic, and political impact.
Back in 2011 The European Commission projected that by opening up data the EU stood to have €40-billion per year injected into their economy. Two years later, McKinsey published a frequently referenced paper that valued open data at $3-trillion per year.
More recently, Gartner estimated that within two years 80% of organizations would be consuming open data.
Although varying in conclusion, each of these firms’ predictions share similar characteristics.
Firstly, they all recognize that open data represents a hugely untapped and incredibly valuable resource. Secondly, and more importantly, the predictions are based on the underlying assumption that once open data is made publicly available, it simply also becomes accessible.
Available ≠ Accessible
Varying formats, structures, access requirements, release schedules, and a general lack of standards in even the most basic cases (“Variety”) makes available external data wholly inaccessible.
In order to unlock the value of external data, it is necessary to adopt a solution that can standardize and normalize any source of external data and present it in a way that matches an organizations’ own internal standards.
A Big Data Solution
So, how do we deal with the issue?
At ThinkData, we believe that to manage external data and all of its variety, organizations will have to adopt a new data processing framework . This framework will need to manage several functions, among them:
FIND — A systematic approach to finding the right sources of external data, possibly thousands.
ORGANIZE — Record, maintain, and update the data. Verify and track metadata.
NORMALIZE — Standardize raw data feeds and generate common formatting.
TRANSFORM — Define ideal output. Transform the data to internal specifications before transported into the organization.
SHARE — Manage access enterprise-wide to unlock data value to the fullest extent.
This system is not intended to displace traditional data infrastructure, but to integrate with it and keep it efficient.
A solution such as this moves data processing tasks outside of an organization’s core internal infrastructure, eliminating the need to waste storage, slow down performance, or spend resources on processing tasks that can take place outside of an organizations’ environment. It will also help businesses avoid the inevitable scenario of bombarding their data lake with external data that is not yet ready to be leveraged, creating big messes that are not easily cleaned up — think oil spill.
Variety is inevitable when dealing with external data. But rather than tacking the problem onto existing Big Data infrastructure, take advantage of new technologies that will allow you to standardize data outside your existing infrastructure. This keeps your internal environment clean and organized, eliminating a lot of stress on data systems, scientists, and engineers.
Through a solution like the one outlined above, any external data can be identified, transformed, and constantly monitored, made ready for access whenever your organization needs it. This is how the complex issue of variety in external data is boiled down to a manageable process.
Now is the time to solve the data variety issue and finally unlock the true value external data poses for your organization. | https://medium.com/thinkdata/dealing-with-data-variety-b72758d8fc96 | ['Thinkdata Works'] | 2019-08-07 18:11:16.071000+00:00 | ['Data Preparation', 'Big Data', 'Big Data Analytics', 'Gartner', 'External Data'] |
Jupyter is the new Excel (but not for your boss) | When you can’t escape from Jupyter
While the export options above just about allow you to obtain the crux of your notebook in a standalone file format, sometimes (especially where widgets feature heavily in your notebook) you need to find a way to stick with your existing Jupyter format.
But you need to find a way to share it with your non-developers such that it:
makes sense to them
is easy to access
is secure so sensitive data cannot be seen outside your organisation
is safe so that non-developers can’t break anything or destroy any data
The rest of this article uncovers some possible approaches to this.
Jupyter’s own projects
The Project Jupyter organisation has some auxiliary projects that might be considered if you need to share notebooks frequently enough that it’s worth investing in some infrastructure.
The Two Hubs
JupyterHub is a way to centralise the creation of Jupyter workspaces on shared resources, so at least other users will not need to run their own Jupyter servers. Unless you have a small organisation that can run JupyterHub on an internal network, you will need to consider how to add authentication for the appropriate users. There are some suggestions here as to how you might share notebooks within different users’ workspaces.
Logo on the JupyterHub homepage
BinderHub really extends JupyterHub by allowing a user to launch a Jupyter workspace based on a specific computing environment (Python packages etc) which is defined within a git repository along with the data files and notebooks relevant to the project. The user can launch the workspace by accessing a single URL directly. This allows a much more formalised and easy-to-access showcase for your work. To see an example on the public instance of BinderHub known as mybinder.org, check out the ‘Launch Binder’ link on the Readme page of my nb2xls repo on GitHub.
In practice, both of these projects aren’t suitable for our task out-of-the-box— the management team don’t want to have to shift-enter their way through a notebook! And storing work in a git repo or workspace, such that it makes sense to a non-developer, is a lot of administrative overhead.
nbviewer
nbviewer is a much more suitable and lightweight service for easy hosting of notebooks through a single URL. Think of it as a hosted web-page version of the HTML export option discussed above: Javascript can work, but there is no live kernel behind it so really the user can only see the results of your work as output in your last notebook run.
As with Binder, there is a free hosted version of nbviewer for you to try out. Typically, you provide the URL to a notebook on GitHub, but it can also work with a Dropbox link. For example, ‘Copy Dropbox Link’ on an ipynb file in Dropbox, then paste the URL into the box on https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/. You can share the resulting viewer page’s URL with your colleagues, but of course note that this is not secure.
nbviewer.jupyter.org homepage
Sharing a URL is more likely to feel natural than emailing an HTML file to your management team, but really you’re not going to get much from nbviewer that you couldn’t achieve with the HTML export.
So none of the major Project Jupyter initiatives appear to help us much so far…
There it is!
A recent development from Project Jupyter might be just what we’re looking for: voilà allows you to host a notebook with a live kernel without any shift-entering required. By default, code cells are hidden. And by default execute requests from the front-end are disallowed, so the user can’t break anything even if they tried!
The Jupyter blog post announcing voilà does a great job of describing the problem they’re trying to solve (which is exactly the one we’re discussing!) and explains some of the features.
voilà logo
This could become a fantastic way to share your notebooks in the situations we’re discussing, but it still needs a lot of work. At the time of writing, you can only share a single-user link to the notebook-application, and multiple users could clash if their independent actions manage to confuse the flow of data in your notebook.
Plans are already in place to integrate voilà with JupyterHub (mentioned above) which should allow multiuser access to your voilà-hosted notebooks. Of course you would still need to be sure the voilà server is running whenever your colleagues choose to look at your notebook, so this isn’t something you would typically keep running on your local machine.
Looking Further Afield
Kyso is a third-party service allowing you to ‘blog your data science’. There are public notebooks (as well as articles, links, datasets, and charts) listed on their homepage that should give you some idea how notebooks can be shared On the paid plan you can restrict collaboration to within your team. Code input cells are hidden by default!
It should be possible to include live Jupyter widgets although right now I run into problems due to the fact that JupyterLab isn’t fully stable and many Jupyter widgets aren’t yet adapted for JupyterLab. Kyso seems to be fixed on JupyterLab 0.35 at the moment.
Please reach out to their sales team for more details on functionality if you think a third-party service like this could work for you.
Kyso homepage showing some public notebooks
Another service, Saturn Cloud is a full cloud hosting environment for your data science, as an alternative to Google Cloud or AWS etc, with ‘publish’ functionality built in. While your colleagues could easily launch your notebooks, it doesn’t appear that fully-private publication is possible.
I’m sure there are others. Please let us know in the comments if you’ve used a third-party service to solve this problem. | https://towardsdatascience.com/jupyter-is-the-new-excel-but-not-for-your-boss-d24340ebf314 | ['Dan Lester'] | 2019-07-04 08:50:41.977000+00:00 | ['Jupyter Notebook', 'Excel', 'Data Science', 'Jupyter'] |
6 Ways to Speed Up Your Vue.js Application | 1. Update Only What’s Needed
One of the nastiest issues you can run into with VueJS is rendering the same elements or list of elements more times than needed. To understand why or how this can happen we have to understand reactivity in Vue.
This example is from the official Vue.js documentation and it shows which properties are reactive and which are not. There are many reactive elements in Vue: properties assigned to the data object, computed properties, or methods that rely on reactive properties.
But a plain JavaScript code, such as {{ 'value' }} or {{ new Date() }} , is not tracked by Vue as a reactive property.
So what does reactivity have to do with duplicate rendering?
Let’s say you have an array of objects like this in your data object:
values: [{id: 1, t: 'a'}, {id: 2, t: 'b'}]
And you’re rendering it using v-for :
<div v-for="value in values" :key="value.id">{{ value.t }}</div>
When a new element is added to the list Vue will re-render the whole list. Not convinced? Try writing it like this:
<div v-for="value in values" :key="value.id">
{{ value.t }}
{{ new Date() }}
</div>
The JavaScript Date object is not reactive so it doesn’t affect rendering. It will only be called if the element has to be rendered again. What you will see in this example, is that every time a value is added or removed from values a new Date will pop up on all rendered elements.
What should you expect in a more optimized page? You should expect only the new or changed elements to show a new Date , while the others should not be rendered at all.
So, what does key do and why are we passing it? The key property helps Vue understand which element is which. If the order of the array changes, key helps Vue shuffle the elements into place, rather than going through them one-by-one again.
Specifying a key is important, but it’s not enough. In order to make sure you’re getting the best performance, you need to create Child components. That’s right — the solution is pretty simple. You just have to divide your Vue app into small, lightweight components.
<item :itemValue="value" v-for="item in items" :key="item.id"></item>
This item component will only update if the specific item has a reactive change (for example with Vue.set)
The performance gain of using components to render lists is tremendous. If an element is added or removed from the array, Vue won’t render all the components one-by-one again. If the array is sorted, Vue just shuffles the elements by relying on the provided key . | https://medium.com/better-programming/6-ways-to-speed-up-your-vue-js-application-2673a6f1cde4 | ['Aris Pattakos'] | 2020-09-26 09:18:52.915000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Vue', 'Vuejs', 'Programming'] |
Is Social Media the Answer to Mental Health Problems? Do Masks Play a Role? | Is Social Media the Answer to Mental Health Problems? Do Masks Play a Role?
Always available with hundreds or thousands of listening ears and scanning eyes, social media has taken over communications, but has it always provided a benefit?
Photo by camilo jimenez
Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage. — Amy Jo Martin
Agreeing with Dickens when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…” we look for hope in a time of darkness. Where can we find it as we wait? Technology may hold some hope.
As we mask up, researchers have a field day because of the plethora of factors to investigate. What about masks? Do they provide a means to hide our emotions on Facetime, create a new acceptance of people, or cause furtherance of backing off?
If we’re using social media and showing a portion of our faces, aren’t most of our faces and expressions covered by a mask? All good questions and researchers are probably on it.
Masks do affect how we perceive someone and what kind of interaction we will have. A mask removes our ability to perceive the entire face with all its characteristics — features we depend on to make our assessment of them. And masks cause problems not solely for us but for AI’s famed facial recognition algorithms.
Facial recognition software is particularly bad at recognizing African Americans and other ethnic minorities, women, and young people, often misidentifying or failing to identify them, disparately impacting certain groups. That’s when masks aren’t even in the equation. Add masks and it become more difficult.
Photo by Zach Vessels
Prior research on facial expressions and perception has depended on mouth curvature and similar facial movements, all hidden by masks. Our understanding of others, their intentions, and our communication are all affected by masks — and that can make us uncomfortable, anxious, or depressed; perhaps all three.
Most existing emotion-recognition systems analyze an individual’s facial expression...For example, if the corners of a person’s mouth are raised, the machine might rule that the person is in a good mood, whereas a wrinkled nose suggests anger or disgust.
One study did look at the effect of masks and made an assumption that waits to be tested.
Importantly, the inclusion of masks also led to a qualitative change in the way masked faces are perceived. In particular, holistic processing, the hallmark of face perception, was disrupted for faces with masks, as suggested by a reduced inversion effect.
The researchers believe that “…we provide novel evidence for quantitative and qualitative alterations in the processing of masked faces that could have significant effects on daily activities and social interactions.”
They didn’t pose an interesting question: how will being seen without a mask affect our newer social media relationships? Will it have any effect at all?
The Social Media Effect and Our Emotions
Every day, masks or not, the number of social media users increases. Every second, 11 people use social media for the first time.
In total, in North America, we spend an average of two hours, six minutes each day on social media, but this is an average, and many people may exceed that number of hours and minutes in their need to be rid of FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO, in fact, is often a highly depression-evoking feeling.
The World Health Organization has proffered that the average global lifespan is 73.4 years. Based on that number of years and the amount of time we spend on social media, some estimate that we will spend six years and eight months using social media for whatever interests or ails us.
What’s the estimated world wide use of social media? “In 2020, there are an estimated 3.8 billion social media users worldwide, representing half the global population.”
But does social media affect us in positive or negative ways, or should we forget this entirely? We know it’s being used as therapist substitutes. So, there’s one potential benefit. If there aren’t therapists in an area, bots may be able to pick up the slack. Bots to the rescue, as it were.
Photo by Prateek Katyal
Social Media Platform Use
Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users. But those stats apply to 2018. What will it be in 2021?
Are there some solid reasons to use social media to help maintain your mental health, especially during trying times? It seems there are a number of them.
A study by a research team at Harvard University looked at the effects both positive and negative of social media and determined two things were important, the frequency and duration of use, and the number of contacts.
Social media, they found, was integrated into social and emotional connections, and there were three outcomes which they found salient; social well-being, positive mental health, and self-rated health. As a result of this research, their conclusion was that routine use of emotional connection with social media could have positive outcomes.
Social well-being was especially connected to three factors of age, education, and income. However, there was one intriguing finding. Social well-being and social media decrease with age.
…the study joins the few prior studies that have shown that beyond frequency and duration of use, (and) other aspects of use, such as type of use, should be considered in characterizing the link between social media use and health.
Photo by Florian Glawogger
The Benefits and Potential Harm Need Further Exploration
There are benefits to being able to maintain contact to dispel loneliness, to play games to enhance skills and relieve boredom and to reach out for immediately help in a mental health crisis, that’s clear now to everyone or nearly everyone.
Social media allows anyone to join a group, engage in open communication on topics of interest, disseminate medical information, provide details on healthy lifestyles, recruit subjects for research, build communities, work for social change, and learn any subjects at any time of the day or night. It’s enormity is incredible.
But there are harms, too, and we need to balance both the positive and the negative and maintain some balance and recognize the problems.
We also know that social media can be used for not spreading truth but dangerous faux information, aka lies. This is how the virtual mask of social media plays into the hands of those with nefarious aims. A technology that was intended to connect the world and allow knowledge to be free for all, has proven to have a darker side.
Social media is a really awesome tool that can be used in so many positive ways. But, people NEED to consider the negative aspects to it as well. People should think about the consequences of the things they post or read on social media. Most importantly, we need to talk about these issues.
Don’t people hide behind the “masks” that social media provides? Do people really think it is without dire consequences if they publish highly personal information about themselves and others? We’ve received wake-up calls but not everyone is hearing them and the young and naive are vulnerable.
At this point, it would be premature to view the benefits of social media as outweighing the possible harms, when it is clear from the studies…that social media use can have negative effects on mental health symptoms, can potentially expose individuals to hurtful content and hostile interactions, and can result in serious consequences for daily life, including threats to employment and personal relationships. The harm and the benefits are real and we must accept both.
The question of age and gender, too, in addition to older adults, needs further exploration as noted in one study of 10–15 boys and girls.
High levels of social media interaction in early adolescence have implications for well-being in later adolescence, particularly for females. The lack of an association among males suggests other factors might be associated with their reduction in well-being with age. And this relationship in gender requires further exploration in order to address the factors involved in girls and well-being.
Social media is a great benefit, but it’s a “friend” we must carefully evaluate to parse out the good with the not-so-good. Use it, but beware not to let it abuse you as you do. | https://drpatfarrell.medium.com/is-social-media-the-answer-to-mental-health-problems-do-masks-play-a-role-f3cd95b9bc3a | ['Dr. Patricia Farrell'] | 2020-12-28 23:51:26.654000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Anxiety', 'Social Media', 'Mental Health'] |
3 to read: Making journalism crowd funding work | Jan. 26, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co
How The Correspondent became the largest journalism crowdfunding project in history — without 1 story on its site: News sites are increasingly turning to readers to be their financial saviors. But it’s not easy. So here’s a fascinating look at how The Correspondent patiently and carefully laid the groundwork for raising $2.6 million from more than 45,000 supporters. For people interested in starting their own crowd-funded news sites, this is a primer on how to do it well. Great story by Emily Goligoski and Aron Pilhofer for MembershipPuzzle.org.
How many paying subscribers do you need to keep a money-losing magazine afloat? A regional mag finds out: The digital age has not been kind to regional magazine, which at one point were fat, happy money-makers. Now they’re hanging on by their fingertips. So when Arkansas Magazine announced it would shut down if it didn’t get enough paid subscribers, the staff jumped in, pushing hard on social media. Here’s what happened. By Laura Hazard Owens for Nieman Lab.
What Jill Abramson gets wrong about the digital journalism: Abramson, the first female executive editor of the NYT, has written a book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” It’s a take on four big media players — the NYT, WaPo, Vice, and BuzzFeed, where media is headed, and her own bitter falling-out with the NYT. But apparently she had trouble wrangling the truth down about Vice and BuzzFeed. An angry war of tweets has erupted over what reporters at Vice and BuzzFeed claim are errors in the book. As Josephine Livingstone chronicles for The New Republic, it’s not a pretty. But it makes an interesting read. | https://medium.com/3-to-read/3-to-read-making-journalism-crowd-funding-work-finding-subscribers-what-abramson-got-wrong-1f53620dfbf5 | ['Matt Carroll'] | 2019-01-26 12:21:00.811000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Media Criticism', 'Journalism Criticism', 'Media', 'Jill Abramson'] |
The Amazing Power of a Good Hike | The Amazing Power of a Good Hike
Stressed? Exhausted? Depressed? Here’s a surefire way to clear your head and improve your health.
Photo: massimo colombo/Getty Images
When anxiety sends my heart climbing into my throat, when motivation evaporates, when life makes no sense, I have a proven pick-me-up. I head to the nearest trail for a quick hike or, when time allows, drive to the mountains for a good, long trek. Without fail, the exercise, fresh air, and curative effects of nature itself combine to boost my mental mood and invigorate my body.
It’s not just me. There’s serious science to all this, and the positive effects build over time with repeated outings. Importantly, you’re never too old to begin accruing the physical and mental health benefits.
A mountain of research proves that simply walking at a brisk pace is a great way to improve well-being, lowering the risk of everything from depression to heart problems and upping the odds of a longer, healthier life. Hiking offers the added benefit of some uneven terrain that strengthens numerous small muscles in your legs and core that improve balance while forcing your mind to focus on each step rather than cogitating on life’s stressors.
If an incline gets you huffing and puffing, all the better. Specifically, hiking has been shown to lower blood pressure, bolster the immune system, lower stress, increase attention levels, and support well-being more broadly. Science also finds that just being in nature — whether or not you hike — can boost your mood and reduce your odds of dying prematurely. The combo of hiking in nature can boost creativity and problem-solving abilities, too.
But isn’t hiking hard? That’s up to you. Perhaps there’s a nearby city park with flat, winding paths or maybe a popular trailhead that starts out modestly, where you can simply turn around if the hike gets too challenging.
I’m fortunate to have a trail near my home in Arizona that gets me into nature quickly. I cherish it. I mix short hikes with even shorter walks around the neighborhood on other days and some mountain biking, too. But my mind struggles to let go of the fact that work and the news and the rest of life are just, well, a short hike away. That compels me to explore farther afield so that even if there’s something that needs doing, I can’t do it.
Here’s where I elected to have lunch on Election Day 2020. Photo courtesy of the author.
You may not live near a spot like this, but don’t let that stop you from getting out — you never know what you’ll find on a trail until you explore. No major trails nearby? Find some nature in a local park, walk to the river, or ride the subway to the beach on a winter day and hike in the sand.
Not in shape? Start modestly. Take a small step, as it were, and see where things go. Science promises you’ll feel better. | https://elemental.medium.com/the-amazing-power-of-a-good-hike-ee40166e81 | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-11-23 06:33:14.169000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Hiking', 'Fitness', 'Exercise', 'Stress'] |
The Principles of Dark UI Design | Dark UI designs are seen far and wide, from mobile screens to massive TVs. A dark theme can express power, luxury, sophistication, and elegance. However, designing for dark UIs presents multiple challenges and won’t meet expectations if implemented poorly. Before diving into the “dark side,” designers should look before they leap.
Physicists say black isn’t really a color; it is the absence of light. In his experiments shining sunlight through prisms, Sir Isaac Newton didn’t even include it on the spectrum of colors.
In color psychology, most colors represent different things for different people. In Western cultures, black is often associated with death, mystery, and evil. Green is often associated with growth because of nature. Blue is almost universally calming because it’s associated with sky and water. Color is emotional.
Other effects are cultural. Purple, for example, is still associated with luxury because in many ancient cultures, purple dye was expensive and rare-only royalty could afford it. It was a significant part of the cultural zeitgeist for long enough to become a part of the human psyche.
Digital products with dark UIs- associated with power, elegance, and mystery-are a formidable trend. While it’s often said that dark mode can reduce eye strain, there is no evidence that this is true. Under certain circumstances, it’s also supposed to save battery life. Still, more often than not, dark themes are an aesthetic choice.
Dark UI designs use shades of gray similar to analogous color palettes.
Dark UI vs. Light UI
Not all interfaces are suitable for a dark theme. Designers should look at brand fit, cultural suitability, and color psychology and consider the emotional impact before choosing to go with one. It’s a tricky balancing act.
Whereas a financial app targeting millennials may achieve the cool factor with a dark theme, it may be inappropriate for a big bank’s website aimed at the general population. Too rich, too dark, and too stylish may become more frustrating when all people want to do is check their balances and pay a bill.
B2B SaaS application dark UIs are notoriously difficult to design. Standard web UI components such as data tables, widgets, forms, and dropdowns can look odd on a dark UI. Because many color schemes don’t work well with dark UIs, certain brands and products—depending on type, context, and environmental factors—are not a good fit and may prove an insurmountable challenge.
Designers who have not worked with dark UI design before and decide to jump in with both feet might find themselves in rough, uncharted waters. In the oceans of dark UIs, norms are bent, rules are changed, and pitfalls are aplenty.
That said, there are many good reasons for using dark UIs:
When the design is sparse and minimalist with only a few content types
When it is appropriate for the context and use, such as nighttime entertainment apps
To create a striking, dramatic look
And, there are scenarios when it’s not recommended:
When there is a large amount of text (reading on a dark background is difficult)
When there is a lot of mixed content types
When the design calls for a wide range of colors
Desktop app dashboard in dark mode. (by Ramotion)
Contrast in Dark UI Design
A dark theme is not a black theme. It would best be thought of as a “low-light” theme. One of the main concerns with dark UIs is achieving enough contrast so visual elements have separation and text is legible. Most designers would think using black would be optimal to achieve strong contrast. However, it’s best not to use true black (#000000) for backgrounds or surface colors. Black is best reserved for other UI elements and used sparingly. For example, true black can be used for small UI elements or a surrounding bezel.
Google’s Material Design dark theme recommends using dark gray (#121212) as a dark theme surface color “to express elevation and space in an environment with a wider range of depth.” In addition, many designers recommend adding a subtle dark blue tint to dark grays when defining the color scheme. It tends to create a better dark tone for digital screens and a more pleasing dark UI color palette.
Brittany Chiang’s website blends dark grays with blue tints for a pleasing dark UI color palette.
An advantage of using a range of grays is that it gives designers latitude because a broader range of colors can be expressed. A gray palette also helps create depth because drop shadows can be more easily seen against gray vs. black.
Particular attention needs to be paid to text contrast in dark UIs.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) call for “the visual presentation of text to have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1,” except for large-scale text, which should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1. Therefore, designers need to ensure that content remains comfortably legible in dark mode.
It’s also a good idea to test for proper contrast between other UI elements, such as cards, buttons, fields, and icons on various displays and devices. If there is an imperceptible separation between UI elements, the design blends too much and risks becoming dull.
There isn’t enough contrast between the text and the background in the dark UI design on the left.
Focusing Attention: Color
Color stands out in dark UIs. It’s best to use schemes with lighter, unsaturated accent colors. Avoid using saturated colors in dark UIs, as they can visually vibrate against dark surfaces. What’s more, as a best practice, colors need to pass the WCAG’s AA standard of at least 4.5:1 when used with text.
When defining a color scheme for a dark UI, Google recommends a limited number of color accents to keep most of the space available for dark surfaces. Using split complementary colors can help. The scheme has one dominant color and two colors adjacent to the dominant color’s complement. Doing this provides the needed contrast without the tension of the complementary color scheme.
The Jabra Sound+ app restricts its dark UI color palette to just two accent colors.
The right color scheme can help create good contrast. Colorable is a helpful tool for selecting accessibility-compliant color combinations of text and background colors.
Text and essential elements, such as buttons and icons, should meet legibility standards when appearing on dark backgrounds. As seen in the Jabra Sound+ app above, colors other than white can be used for text and icons.
Google’s Material Design site has a useful color palette generator (under “Tools for picking colors”) with which designers can create and apply color palettes to a UI. The accessibility level of color combinations can also be measured with a companion Color Tool.
“Use strongly contrasting colors to improve readability. Many factors affect the perception of color, including font size and weight, color brightness, screen resolution, and lighting conditions.” –Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Observing dark UI design best practices: the best dark mode apps use a limited number of color accents.
Less is More: Leveraging Negative Space
One of the fundamental elements of successful dark UI design is the adroit use of negative space. If designed poorly, dark UIs can make digital products appear heavy and overbearing. To counterbalance, designers can make dark UIs more lightweight by taking advantage of negative space within sparse, minimalist designs. Minimalist design is just as much about what isn’t there as what is. When used skillfully, negative space will make a dark UI more scannable and allow people to absorb information more easily.
The French composer Claude Debussy once said, “ Music is the space between the notes.” The same sentiment is true for scannability-negative space between elements is what makes a layout work. A liberal amount of negative space around UI elements is what gives them definition. It emphasizes important content and provides the necessary breathing space to ensure the design doesn’t feel dense and cluttered. Without breathing space, the human brain is less likely to scan points of interest and more likely to wander.
Interfaces crammed with too many elements and text are the bane of high-quality dark UI design. By carefully considering the visual hierarchy in dark UIs, designers can make their creations more easily scannable, thus elevating the user experience.
Minimalist dark UI web design. (by Denys Tyrynskyi)
Styling Words: Typography
Every piece of text in dark UIs requires scrutiny. The concern is twofold: legibility and contrast. First, it’s about size. Text needs to be large enough for good legibility (small text on dark backgrounds is harder to read). Second, there needs to be enough contrast between the text and the background.
The availability of thousands of digital fonts makes it easy to display messages with impact for headers and hero messages. Designers can mitigate readability issues by increasing the contrast and adjusting the font size, character spacing, and line-height for smaller text.
The W3C AAA recommendation for regular-sized text (less than 18 point if not bold) is to have a contrast ratio of at least 7:1. This also applies to other UI elements: icons, images of text, and text labels, such as button labels. It’s incumbent on designers to ensure that all digital products are accessible to everyone. It not only improves usability, and therefore UX, it’s the law in most countries.
There are countless options available for designers to source excellent typefaces that work well in dark UIs. Google Fonts, Font Library, and Adobe Typekit are a few that offer easy app or site integration and a wide range of choices.
The AirPods Pro page on Apple’s site uses an oversized font and strong contrast for maximum impact.
Communicating Depth: Elevation
A dark theme doesn’t mean flat. With light themes, illumination, shading, and shadows create a sense of depth. With dark UIs, it is more challenging because they contain predominantly dark surfaces with sparse color accents. Still, designers can use three or four levels of elevation with corresponding color schemes for text to convey depth.
Why depth? Most modern design systems use a system of elevation levels to communicate depth. A sense of depth corresponds with the natural world. Our vision has depth perception, and we live in a 3D world. Depth helps to emphasize the visual hierarchy of an interface. Elements in the foreground, for example, draw attention to themselves, such as a warning dialog.
The surfaces are illuminated differently to signify different elevation levels. The higher a surface’s position in the elevation stack (closer to an implied light source), the lighter the surface. A brighter surface makes it easier to distinguish elevation between components, and it helps to see shadows, making the edges of each surface more apparent.
Depth in dark UIs can be depicted by making surfaces lighter as they get closer to an implied light source. (by Material Design)
Devising each level’s surface color requires care. It’s best not to have more than four or five levels. Designers need to account for text contrast as surfaces go higher in the stack and get lighter. If the background color is not dark enough to meet a contrast level of at least 15.8:1 between white text and the surface, text at the highest (and lightest) elevated surface won’t pass the 4.5:1 standard. In some instances, it might be best to specify an element’s text color as true black (#000000) in the design system to achieve good contrast on a light gray background.
Dark UI Design Inspiration
Reflecting on the principles outlined above, here are some excellent examples of dark UI design:
The Atom Finance website.
Atom Finance leverages a dark theme for a sophisticated look and limits its accent colors to three. The layout uses negative space and a sparse, minimalist design for a complex financial website. The site uses subtle shading well to indicate different component elevations in the UI.
Dark theme eCommerce website by Daniel Klopper.
Dark theme eCommerce website by Darion Mitchell.
Both of these minimalist dark theme websites use bold typography. Careful shading with a single accent color is used in alignment with dark UI design best practices.
Dashboard by Ruben Fernandez for IBM.
Despite the challenges of working with dark themes for SaaS applications, this data visualization dashboard for IBM is exemplary. The number of accent colors is kept to a minimum, and the site uses subtle shading to show different UI elevations.
Mobile apps that do dark UI design right: Wego, Spotify, and Apple (Android and iOS).
These mobile apps observe dark UI design best practices by using true black for bezels only, proper shading of elements for different elevation levels, and a limited number of accent colors.
Summary
The decision to use a dark UI design over a traditional one needs to be approached with discretion. It shouldn’t be chosen for the wrong reasons-to be hip, different, or mimic someone else’s design. Designers should have a strong rationale for their choice and consider the content, context of use, and the device on which the design will appear.
Dark themes are suitable for some digital products but a real struggle to implement for others. Simplicity is key. They’re great for presenting minimalist content, data visualizations, media sites, and entertainment platforms. They’re a poor fit for complex, data-heavy B2B platforms, text-heavy pages, and lots of varied content.
For courageous designers ready to cross new stylistic frontiers and explore dark UIs through an emotional and aesthetical lens, they offer an exciting playground of infinite possibilities-on the “dark side.” | https://medium.com/swlh/the-principles-of-dark-ui-design-2d0e6c98487e | ['Miklos Philips'] | 2020-12-16 08:48:32.330000+00:00 | ['UI', 'UI Design', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'UX'] |
The Blindfold | Looking for perfect friends
Looking for a perfect companion
Looking for the perfect place
Looking for the perfect time
We need not look for perfection
We need to stop looking
And start seeing
And start feeling
We are playing a game
Pretending everything is difficult
Pretending we are powerless
Making everything into a challenge
It is a game gods play blindfolded
To help develop their imagination
When you can create anything
You first learn what you do not want to create
To find perfection
We must find it everywhere
Even in the darkest places
We can imagine
An artist plays with colors
And sound and smell and taste and texture
Creating new ways to see and feel
Beauty and perfection
Life is the Creator gods’ blank canvas
We paint blindly by default
Practicing for when
The blindfold is finally removed | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/the-blindfold-5d3ed64b3c37 | ['White Feather'] | 2020-12-11 18:58:44.905000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Spirituality', 'Consciousness', 'Imagination', 'Self-awareness'] |
Submit your guide, article, or story to SoftwareSupp | -> Link to submitting your story to SoftwareSup
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Wish you all the best in writing for SoftwareSupp and looking forward to seeing more companies grow sales and save time with the right software setup! | https://medium.com/softwaresupp/submit-your-guide-article-or-story-to-picksaas-have-your-content-promoted-and-get-more-leads-for-8dfa008a6182 | ['Matt Pliszka'] | 2020-10-12 16:45:14.620000+00:00 | ['CRM', 'Salesforce', 'Sales', 'Crm Software', 'Marketing'] |
How to prevent your SSH session from disconnect while being idle? | Recently I found a really annoying thing. My SSH sessions to remote servers were being disconnected while I was not actively using them for a certain period of time (even a couple of minutes).
Fortunately, I have found a solution. Very simple solution.
Send keep-alive messages
In order to prevent it, you have to add entry yo your .ssh/config file
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 60
That’s it!
Now your SSH remote sessions will not be disconnected even if you’re not actively using them for a certain amount of time.
Voila! :) | https://medium.com/darek1024/how-to-prevent-your-ssh-session-from-disconnect-while-being-idle-ff676b8aadfb | ['Dariusz Mydlarz'] | 2020-11-26 14:31:37.958000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Linux', 'Mac', 'Terminal'] |
The Apple Car is Coming — kinda. New reports show Apple might take Tesla… | Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash
The Apple Car is Coming — kinda
New reports show Apple might take Tesla on from a new angle
Digitimes, a Taiwanese tech publication, recently leaked that Apple is working with the chip TMZ (who makes Apple Silicon) to create a chip for cars. Before we dive into what this means, it should be disclosed that Digitimes has a record of around 65% accuracy at the time of writing this. So take everything with a grain of salt.
This isn’t the first time rumors have suggested that Apple has been reaching into Tesla’s lane (sorry). We’ve been hearing rumors around “Project Titan” for many years. Apple apparently at one time even tried to buy Tesla in 2013 for $230 a share. That’s about what it was worth in 2019. Apple was obviously trying really hard to get their hands around the budding car company.
Our current rumors point towards Apple not working on a new car, but rather self-driving silicon chips. These chips would be available to other manufactures to put into their own cars.
Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash
Why This Is a Big Deal
Tesla has, until this point, been really the only real innovator in the self-driving car game. Yes, there are plenty of other company startups that are trying to build autonomous taxi services and other likes, but Tesla is miles ahead.
Unlike other companies, Tesla is in the real world. And not just the streets of one carefully mapped out city but literally worldwide in the hands of any consumer who buys one. And that means Tesla has data. Lots and lots of data.
Apple’s “Project Titan” is the first real competition for Tesla, not because of data, but because it’s one of the world’s biggest companies. And now it turns out Apple probably isn’t working on an actual car. Just chips to go in other cars.
If true, this is bad news for Tesla. Other car manufactures will be able to now add Apple’s self-driving capabilities into their own vehicles, instantly making them on par with Tesla.
As for data, Tesla is still a relatively small car company. Yet, if Apple’s chips could be collecting data from cars produced by a bunch of manufacturers. With the whole team of models that will get Apple’s treatment, they can easily start collecting much more data than Tesla.
Photo by Tamara Chemij from Burst
This is Really Unlike the Apple We Know
Apple usually targets consumers. It’s odd that they’re making a part that goes into a different product they have no control over. Apple has historically never licensed out their operating systems or hardware (usually).
It’s interesting that Apple is choosing to make a part now. I wouldn’t be surprised that if Apple forces car manufacturers to go through a rigorous process before they have the ability to add the chip. This would be pretty much Apple’s only defense to making sure their products only appear in the top of the line cars. Apple is very worried about its image is and giving up these rains is… different.
Photo by Charlie Deets on Unsplash
Is This Going to Kill Tesla?
Let’s, first of all, remember this is only a rumor. From there keep in mind that just because Apple is developing something doesn’t mean it will actually come out. But let’s say Apple does develop this and does in fact release it to the world. Would Tesla be in trouble?
No, probably not. But it would defiantly give them some competition.
Tesla, to this point, has had basically no competition at the same level as them. They’ve been able to rule the world and get all of the spotlights in the techy-car world. This chip would not only be a new competitor but a really big threat.
Apple has a strong relationship with companies like TMZ and with many other production line companies. Tesla, on the other hand, is relatively young and still making relationships with other companies.
This will definitely be interesting to keep an eye on. I look forward to seeing what comes to fruition. | https://medium.com/macoclock/the-apple-car-is-coming-kinda-22ea8777dba9 | ['Henry Gruett'] | 2020-12-16 07:40:40.517000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Tech', 'Apple', 'Tesla', 'Cars'] |
My Robot Vacuum is Surprisingly Wise | One of my best middle-of-the-night purchases was a robot vacuum.
I had been contemplating purchasing one for a while, so it wasn’t exactly spur-of-the-moment, but looking at the dog hair on the carpet late one night convinced me that it was worth a try.
If you haven’t seen them, the robot vacuum is a handy little self-propelled machine the size of large pizza that cleans your floors.
It’s no muss, not fuss — all you have to do is program it and periodically empty the tray. The robot vacuum is fully programmable — it starts, stops and recharges automatically. If it gets stuck or the tray is full it will give you helpful warning beeps but otherwise it just does its thing.
Because I have an innate need to anthropomorphize things, I named the robot vacuum Reggie. Reggie the Robot. I know, I’m super creative.
At first, she acted like I was crazy, but I have even got my roommate calling it Reggie now. “Where’s Reggie?” she will ask if she doesn’t see him wandering around cleaning. The other night she came out of the bathroom and I heard her say, “Oh hi Reggie.”
Reggie may be a machine, but he exemplifies some important life lessons for all of us. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/my-robot-vacuum-is-surprisingly-wise-757f91fa3cc | ['Rose Bak'] | 2020-10-25 20:35:11.176000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Home', 'Inspiration', 'Life'] |
Before EOS and Ethereum: How much has Proof-of-Stake evolved since PPCoin? | Where,
coin is a UtxO that has been around for timeweight(coin) (to limit the power of very old coins, it was bounded by 90 days), and whose value is value(coin). Multiplied, we get the coin’s coin age.
is a UtxO that has been around for timeweight(coin) (to limit the power of very old coins, it was bounded by 90 days), and whose value is value(coin). Multiplied, we get the coin’s coin age. time_in_seconds is simply the current time, in precision of seconds. PPCoin, as Bitcoin, relies on the assumption that honest nodes have synchronized clocks (with minor deviations). A node should reject a block whose timestamp is later than its current time, or earlier than that of the block it extends.
is simply the current time, in precision of seconds. PPCoin, as Bitcoin, relies on the assumption that honest nodes have synchronized clocks (with minor deviations). A node should reject a block whose timestamp is later than its current time, or earlier than that of the block it extends. d is a tunable difficulty parameter whose goal is to have stakeholders find PoS blocks once every 10 minutes on average.
is a tunable difficulty parameter whose goal is to have stakeholders find PoS blocks once every 10 minutes on average. prev_blocks_data is the most interesting parameter in the formula and also the trickiest one. Its job is to make sure the coins that satisfy the formula (and are thus eligible for PoS blocks) aren’t known in advance and their choice is non-manipulable. This parameter accounts for the system’s fairness, or the process in which stakeholders are chosen to produce blocks (we sometime refer to this process as leader election — a stakeholder should be chosen with probability proportional to the total coin age she owns, and without knowing in advance when will she be chosen). We’ll check several alternatives for prev_blocks_data and see that they are all problematic.
If the formula is satisfied, the owner of coin can build a block, include in it a coinstake transaction that spends coin for a new transaction output, whose value is slightly larger than value(coin) (by 1/100 for each year of coin age consumed, equivalent to a 1% yearly inflation rate).
The main difference between a PoS block and a PoW block is the nonce field. In a PoS block, each coin in the blockchain has one attempt per second to be elected (i.e., satisfy the formula). If the attempt succeeds, the stakeholder in control of the coin can publish a block. Otherwise, she would have to wait one second and only then try again. This is a good place to emphasize two differences relative to Proof-of-Work mining:
In PoW, miners’ coins don’t play a role in the process of finding valid blocks.
More importantly, in PoW, miners get as many attempts per second as their hardware allows to find a valid block. We saw in the last post that as of June 2018, the Bitcoin network made ~35 million tera hashes per second — much more than the one attempt per second (per coin) in PPCoin.
Fair Leader Election
This all seems very promising until now. Let’s examine the system more deeply by looking at prev_blocks_data. Here are three possible alternatives:
prev_blocks_data = null. If we have no prev_blocks_data in the formula, anyone looking at the blockchain would be able to “see into the future” and find out which coin would be eligible to publish a PoS block at what time. This completely eliminates the unpredictability of the block creation process. However, the problem doesn’t end there — a clever stakeholder would be able to tweak its UtxOs such that she would be eligible to propose a new block in the near future. PPCoin would then become a fancy PoW system, in which the work is manifested through an expensive process of looking for “good” coins.
prev_blocks_data = previous block’s hash. Here, the problem of “seeing into the future” is much less severe as prev_blocks_data changes every block. The problem however, is that the proposer of a block can choose its block such that a specific coin would be eligible for a PoS block in the near future. This makes the leader election process highly manipulable. Worse, a relatively strong stakeholder could build (with only minimal cost) a rather long hidden chain if she splits her coins correctly. She could then double-spend using the hidden chain. Tweaking blocks in order to manipulate the leader election process is generally referred to a grinding attack.
prev_blocks_data = previous PoW block’s hash. Naturally, this choice mitigates the problem of grinding attacks as miners are unlikely to relinquish valid PoW blocks they found (in PoW, selfish mining can be seen as a form of grinding, which is rather limited). This choice also limits “seeing into the future” — now, it would only be possible to “see” as many seconds as it takes for the next PoW block to be found. The problem with PoS though remains. A simple analysis shows that a stakeholder with ¼ of the stake would be eligible to generate six sequential PoS blocks once every 4⁶=4096 blocks in average (if her coins were split correctly). This is of course true also for PoW blocks, the difference is that a potential attacker would know in advance whether she obtains a long sequence of PoS blocks and plan her attack accordingly. Building a hidden PoW chain (for a miner with < ½ of the hash rate) bares a great risk and thus miners are strongly disincentivized to try such an attack. In PPCoin though, if for instance the PoW block rate is set to sixhours, then if a stakeholder is to find out she has a six-long sequence of blocks in the near future she could use it to execute a six-long reorg. That would be a hidden chain attack without cost. Additionally, it would be very hard to keep PoW miners around if the block rate is so slow. If we make it faster, our PoS system is no longer very “Proof-of-Stakey”.
The analysis above should have convinced you that having a fair stakeholder election process isn’t easy to design. However, this is not the only problem with PPCoin. Another interesting problem is that of rational forks.
Rational Forks
To understand this problem, let’s rethink PoW for a second — a miner in a PoW-based chain that knows a single tip constructs a block on top of it and checks its validity. She immediately gets a response. If the block is valid, she publishes it. Otherwise, she increments the nonce and tries again. The point is that at any point in time her compute resources are fully utilized. Thus, if our miner was introduced with an alternative tip she would have to decide how to split her resources. Her best strategy is to devote her resources where it’s most likely that the network would include her block, if indeed she were lucky to find one, as a part of the canonical chain.
Now, let’s consider what happens in PPCoin. Similarly to PoW, a stakeholder tries to extend the tip she knows and immediately gets a response. If her block is valid, she publishes it. Otherwise, she must wait one whole second before her next attempt. During this second her compute resources are unused. Thus, as she waits, she has nothing to lose (and little to gain) by pointing her resources where potential blocks are less likely to become part of the canonical chain. Specifically, if a stakeholder is presented with two competing tips (at the same height), she is unlikely to tie her hands behind her back and try to extend only one of them. She is more likely to opt to gain more (expected) rewards by keeping both forked chains.
If such a strategy is enforced by all stakeholders the chain would suffer frequent reorgs and the system would be much less stable. This problem deteriorates as the block interval decreases and thus a PoS system in the spirit of PPCoin wouldn’t enable scaling or lower confirmation times.
“Nothing-at-Stake”
Another way to think of the above problem is what’s known as nothing-at-stake. Stakeholders may attempt attacking the main chain by building alternative (secret) chains. They would try to extend recent blocks all the time until at some point they find a sequence of blocks. Since these attempts are practically free, they have nothing to lose. If they see the main chain becomes much longer than their hidden fork they would simply abandon it and try again from scratch with a more recent block. It is important to mention that while the attack takes place they could try to extend the main chain as well to make sure they don’t suffer any reward losses. Conducting such an attack would eventually succeed, but worse, it would bare no cost to the attacker.
The main reason for the nothing-at-stake problem in PoS systems is the fact that blocks are “cheap” to produce and don’t require “work”. In PPCoin, this problem is directly related to the way leaders are elected to produce blocks. We’ll try to separate the two problems in the next posts and discuss ways to mitigate each one. But first, how did the PPCoin developers mitigate these problems in their system.
The analysis above relies on this paper (section 2) by Iddo Bentov et al.
Compromising on Decentralization? Fairness and Incentives
To make sure stakeholders don’t manipulate the election process of future coins for PoS blocks, a rather complicated function was chosen for prev_blocks_data (look here for more details). PPCoin developers designed prev_blocks_data to reduce the influence a stakeholder has by choosing her block this way or the other. However, it is difficult to assess to what extent this is actually achieved. In the next post, we will discuss “low-influence functions” which are another option to achieve this.
Additionally, the PPCoin developers addressed the problem of rational forks (and hidden chain attacks) via a checkpoint mechanism. Checkpoints disincentivize any attempts to build hidden chains — any long reorg would simply be ignored by the checkpoint mechanism that de facto determines the “true” chain.
Of course, the problem with developers checkpoints is that they serve as a point of centralization that the system is dependent on for stability. In addition, it seems the leader election process is vulnerable to manipulation by the stakeholders.
As we’ll see in the next few posts, these were indeed the problems PoS system designers came to solve: 1) generating unpredictable and non manipulable randomness for leader election and 2) coping with the cheap production of blocks (both for short-range attacks like chain convergence or hidden chain attacks, and for long-range attacks like syncing new nodes).
Another issue we need to relate to is that in PoS systems, at least the one offered by PPCoin, stakeholders gain very little rewards and are thus less motivated to actively engage with the block production process. Participation level might then become a problem as many stakeholders may stay offline for long periods of times.
Towards the next posts
At this point, I’d like to mention that there were three major evolution steps in PoS design. First attempts tried to mimic Bitcoin’s PoW quite naively and were prone to many vulnerabilities. These attempts include PPCoin (and its descendants Nxt and BlackCoin) and Iddo Bentov’s Proof-of-Activity and Chains-of-Activity.
Later attempts incorporated a Byzantine fault tolerance layer (BFT) over the native chain selection rule. In a sense, the longest chain selection rule was replaced for more secure alternatives based on a thirty-year-old body of research into BFT consensus algorithms such as PBFT. BFT algorithms typically satisfy mathematical properties, but rely on specific assumptions that don’t have to be met in a real-world implementation. Particularly, BFT chain selection rules can reduce the need for synchronous communication to guarantee consistency (which enables a significant speedup in the block rate), but assume that only a super-minority of the participants don’t follow the protocol honestly.
We will discuss this point in detail in the following posts, but I’ll say now that incentivizing correct participation has great importance in PoS design. First attempts at repurposing BFT algorithms for PoS were made by Tendermint and Algorand.
Both in traditional BFT algorithms and in modern PoS suggestions, the role of proposing blocks and validating them is played by the same entities. A third generation of PoS systems, led by Casper FFG, separates block production from block validation. One service continuously spits blocks, forming a tree-like data structure through hash chaining. A separate validation service determines an ever-growing finalized branch within the tree through a BFT protocol driven by PoS.
This approach reduces some of the difficulties in implementing PoS-based blockchains by relying on a PoW-based block production service. It enables a gradual migration to PoS by incorporating the PoS service atop a functioning PoW chain. This is exactly what Ethereum is planning with Casper FFG, with the intention of replacing the PoW block production service for one that relies on PoS at a later time. | https://medium.com/orbs-network/forget-eos-and-ethereum-how-much-has-proof-of-stake-evolved-since-ppcoin-93a56d734884 | ['David Yakira'] | 2019-03-11 19:20:42.461000+00:00 | ['Proof Of Stake', 'Identity', 'Development', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Morning routine? Yes, please! | Sure, they are great, and we often read manuals or guides how to develop a morning routine that will help us. In most of them we can read something like this.
Do something active (jog, walk, quick workout), read news or book, have healthy breakfast and tea or coffee and, yeah, don’t forget to meditate.
Sounds familiar?
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of routines. They can be very helpful, once done right. What do I mean by that? Well, my routine is this:
Wake up around 7 a.m. (depending on the day, sometimes I wake up at 5, sometimes later, but never after 7)
Read one article still in bed
Breakfast and coffee
Watch one episode of TV series I currently watch
Walk my dog
And then I do what I need to do, whether it is doing work for my company or writing. I can say with clear conscience that this routine works for me the best so far.
I did try to copy routines of some of the most powerful and influential people, but I couldn’t make it work, something was missing in there. While I was trying those routines, I kept thinking that if they make it work, I have to make it work as well. I mean I don’t have so much responsibilities and duties as they have, so there shouldn’t be a problem. Oh boy, was I wrong.
I couldn’t make it work and I tried for so long. It didn’t feel like a routine, it felt like a punishment. It felt like I need to talk myself into doing it every single morning and I certainly don’t want to start my day with that kind of mind set. After months of trying, I quit.
But I didn’t give up, I believed the science behind it, I just thought that I am missing something that will make it work for me. For a student, who has company, teaches English language and wants to write full time. Then I realized that I know where the problem is.
I tried to implement someone else’s routine into my life. Let that sink in.
Someone else’s routine into my world.
Does it sound crazy? No? Okay, try this. Imagine that you are letting someone else decide for you on every single day for couple hours, or even just one hour. If you are asking why you would do this, then read the quote again. Why do you even want someone else’s routine?
They are not tailored for your mornings, for your needs. Maybe you don’t like to eat breakfast, or you hate coffee, or you don’t have a dog. I know that when I wake up at 5 in the morning there is absolutely no chance that I will eat breakfast because I am way too much sleepy and I need to wake up before eating. Coffee? Sure, that I can do. But nothing else.
How I got to my routine then?
Well, at first, I had no idea how to actually build one. I started simple. I wrote down three things that I do every morning, with the exceptions when I wake up sooner than 7 o’clock. I had this written down:
Walk my dog
One episode
Breakfast and coffee
And that was my base, I knew that if I want to be a bit more productive, I have to build around it, not replace it. Even if I tried, and I did, I wasn’t able to make it without watching that one episode or being nervous about something, being grumpy, fidgety etc. This way, I got what I wanted and later on I could actually focus on what I needed to do without this one distraction.
I know that you might find this a bit peculiar, but it works for me and some other people. Not the same routine but having that one distraction is like blowing off steam for me. I although had to work hard and still sometimes have to fight the urge to watch another episode, but after some time I hope I will get to that place where only one episode will be enough.
In order to, however, feel a bit better I had to add reading an article every morning, to develop at least some kind of reading habit. Now, I have to stop myself from reading another article, because then I know that I will get stuck on that and my day will be a bit off balance.
How do I build my routine?
I can’t tell you what you should do in your routine but try to watch yourself and mark down some activities you do every morning for some time in different conditions. Do you wake up every day at the same time? Are you a breakfast person or no? Coffee, tea, water? Do you want distraction?
And then try to stick to it and if you manage to stick to it, build around it what you want to have in your morning routine. But don’t you dare to cut from your base. That base is untouchable, and nothing should change in it.
That’s the only thing I can tell you. You have to build your own routine tailored just for you. Not for your sister, brother, Barack Obama or Gates or whoever. You. You are important in this story and you should be aware of it.
If you want to meditate, add that to your base. If you want to stare at white wall, add it. The morning routine is about starting your day right, but RIGHT FOR YOU, not anybody else.
Thank You for reading! | https://medium.com/share-it/morning-routine-yes-please-a262b3087bc3 | ['Klára Kőszeghyová'] | 2019-07-10 08:53:10.664000+00:00 | ['Routine', 'Productivity', 'Self', 'Change', 'Work'] |
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